#2641
lies half the time
Post rating: +

cars posted:

I realize some people here may not know what Axios is, the people behind the story that Twitter's fake "trend" manufactured out of a bunch of people using the word "censorship" on Twitter to describe any number of unrelated events, as people do every day.

The short version is that Axios is a fed cut-out, literally headquartered in Arlington, that writes super-short "articles" to disseminate Red-Scare and pro-U.S. disinformation.

The long / "open-source" propaganda version is:



What the above doesn't mention is that Mike Allen, co-founder of Axios and its executive editor, is the son of Gary Allen, an infamous John Bircher, antisemite and unhinged Red-Scare propagandist, the sort of garrulous semi-cretin that passes for an aristocrat among the U.S. far right. Gary's son Mike is an obvious asset of the United States federal government. He was hand-picked as the court stenographer to accompany George W. Bush on a "secret" trip to Iraq and puff up that story. Soon after, he weaseled his way into the good graces of the Obama White House as a surprising bipartisan darling among the Washington cocktail set. Allen was also hired to write a recurring feature for Politico, the spooky self-whitewashing product of (also Arlington-based) Allbritton Communications / Capitol News Company, which started off as a southern-fried owner of local TV stations that was cozy with KKK-friendly talk radio and the sort of people who'd always rubbed elbows with Mike Allen's Jew-hating neo-Nazi family.

Politico, you've probably heard of, though maybe not Mike Allen. So you also may not have heard that Allen, future co-founder of Axios and the man behind Politico's "Playbook", was outed by other journalists for running a pay-for-play scheme out of Politico's office, trading favorable coverage of mega-corporations (and their K-Street lobbies) in direct exchange for big money from the advertising departments of the groups Allen "reported" on. Allen and Politico faced zero consequences when this scheme was made public, though it all but destroyed Politico's credibility in the eyes of its peers for a couple years (not that most of Politico's competitors in the U.S. "news" industry cared about peddled influence so much as they did Politico's and Allen's inability to hide the dirty laundry from the eyes of the public, and, eventually, Politico would buy their way out of their fairly-earned bad reputation.)

Axios executive editor Mike Allen remains mysteriously well-connected in Washington, even though he's now all but a pariah in his own (supposed) line of work, journalism. He's actively despised by his peers as a notable slime-ball even for the Washington press, though I'm sure it's in part out of sheer envy. Allen famously lands top-dollar interviews by getting full approval for everything he'll ask from his subjects' publicists beforehand. If the P. R. flacks object, he changes his script to please them, simple as that. This included a sit-down with Bill and Hillary's spawn that produced explicit proof in the form of a written exchange between Chelsea's top office lackey and Allen, emails all about how Allen would be sure to make Chelsea Clinton look good and not surprise her with any real questions.

Again, getting caught red-handed in blatant, high-profile pay-for-play was not allowed to affect Allen's career by the powers that be in Washington, even though managing to be exposed for doing what's Allen done is still considered extremely poor form in their dog-and-pony show. Instead, Allen's career just kept going up, up and up. Whatever Mike Allen has shielding him from harm, it's protected him from embarrassments that would have dumped many of his peers out into the I'm-so-sorry book circuit for a while and replaced them with any one of the gaggle of eager boot-licking lemmings always waiting to assume the position. Gary Allen's kid's uninterrupted good time in Washington serves a peculiar purpose for parties outside the national-press clique, that's what seems likely to me.

A good summation of Mike Allen's suspicious career is the way even the most flattering pre-scandal piece on Allen from the Obama years (the awkwardly-titled "The Man the White House Wakes Up To", from the New York Times' airy-fairy Sunday supplement) still couldn't help but paint Allen as a creepy weirdo. The NYT article's writer was surprised to discover that most of Mike Allen's "friends" had no idea where Allen lived, and, of the few who did, almost none had ever set foot inside his home, which is usually just shy of a mortal sin in the wine-and-cheese pecking order of the Washington news press. The one source who did supposedly visit Allen at home described a rent-to-own-furnished hole in the wall, one that sounds more like "the place Mike Allen took people who wanted to know where he lived" than the primary domicile of a man who was already recognized as among the world's most well-connected and well-paid of faux-journalist courtiers.

Around a decade ago, stories on Allen evinced no obvious close-knit social network to explain how the heir of a famed frothing far-right paranoid became one of the most pseudo-respected professionals among his peers, mostly a bunch of image-conscious, bourgeois-to-petit-bourgeois Democrat "moderates" or their just-as-fastidious Bush-era Republican counterparts. In fact, none of those peers⁠—in a town where who you know is everything⁠—seemed to know much of anything about Mike Allen, beyond that he was already incredibly big-time in Washington for reasons they couldn't explain. But a few years after that Times piece was published, Mike Allen would be revealed as a shameless and mercenary peddler of influence, such an egregious pay-for-play crook that even his fellow Washington-cocktail-party journalists denounced and disowned him. Yet, like outed CIA mouthpiece Ken Dilanian, Allen's tarnished star has just kept on rising in that shitty, slave-built town.

So now Mike Allen, literal offspring of the upper-crust KKK, sits atop his co-creation Axios—a 300-word-"article" autocannon for DoD/CIA/U.S. State propaganda⁠—while Twitter⁠—a de facto public-private bourgeois partnership named in the Congressional record as a necessary tool for destabilizing Washington's rivals abroad—uses its entirely fake "Trending" story promotion to pimp out the most faked-up, fakey-fake propaganda "story" imaginable from Axios.

A writer for Axios China, an explicitly anti-China propaganda outfit, rings up a writer for Fox News, an explicitly anti-China propaganda outfit, and complains about being "censored" by the Red Chinese by way of... Chinese government bureau LinkedIn(??)... That is, the Axios "journalist" was dinged for a personal page on LinkedIn's China-facing mirror site, which, uh, must have been due to trickery by the Chinese government instead of user complaints... because no doubt that reporter and Axios China are otherwise in great demand for further work among the many Chinese people who enjoy Washington-backed attempts to overthrow their government. Then, Twitter invents a "trend" of imaginary people talking about this loser's whine for the purpose of cheap-and-easy China bashing. The propaganda value is obvious, but I suppose these crazy kids also had to "clap back", as they do, at the true mortal sin among the U.S. news press: blocking line-of-sight to a colleague's bullshit resume for even a microsecond.

Wow and whoa, because all these boojy dregs with supposedly ruined careers have hit their second wind as part of an interconnected CIA / bourgeois propaganda machine projected out through Twitter. Amazing! What A Trend!




axios reports that rick scott is now on the case asking microsoft why they are obeying laws in a country they operate in

#2642
Post rating: ~
front page that post
#2643
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: ~

cars was probated until (Oct. 15, 2021 03:52:11) for this post!

#2644
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: ~
Trending in United States
#2645
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: +
so Facebook's shown us what will happen whenever a whistleblower starts telling the truth about one of these companies: they will shut down all operations temporarily and lock their employees not just out of their own email and business-app accounts, but out of the offices where they work, to give their internal security teams time to scrub all their databases before they're sent letters directing them not to destroy information pertaining to new cases against them, to review all accounts and access for potential deletion or lockout, to delay their legal obligation to inform every employee to preserve emails under their existing retention policy, etc. I do not really expect them to face consequences for that, i expect that to be "debunked" as a "theory" in the mainstream press with as much swiftness as their political allies can muster, but who knows.
#2646
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: +
Probably the defining moment of the "social media" era was when it came out years ago that Facebook was conducting mass-scale private experiments in social psychology, that it planned and carried out direct attempts to harm its own users just to see if it could, and nobody in power even tried to exploit that for cynical political gain by demanding Facebook reveal the identities of everyone to whom they were now liable. There was too much money in letting them do whatever they want, and I'm sure the U.S. intelligence and security agencies were given access to their findings and every reason to preserve their use of the general population as a laboratory for experiments on unwitting human beings.

This latest whistleblower has done something important, though, by directly confirming that those experiments have only expanded over the years. I doubt that any of these public-private partnerships have resisted adding human experiments to their surveillance functions, including Twitter. They wouldn't leave the money on the table.
#2647
Post rating: ~

cars posted:

Probably the defining moment of the "social media" era was when it came out years ago that Facebook was conducting mass-scale private experiments in social psychology, that it planned and carried out direct attempts to harm its own users just to see if it could, and nobody in power even tried to exploit that for cynical political gain by demanding Facebook reveal the identities of everyone to whom they were now liable. There was too much money in letting them do whatever they want, and I'm sure the U.S. intelligence and security agencies were given access to their findings and every reason to preserve their use of the general population as a laboratory for experiments on unwitting human beings.

This latest whistleblower has done something important, though, by directly confirming that those experiments have only expanded over the years. I doubt that any of these public-private partnerships have resisted adding human experiments to their surveillance functions, including Twitter. They wouldn't leave the money on the table.


trending
Brain ‘pacemaker’ could eliminate severe depression in seconds

#2648
Post rating: ~

tears posted:

trending Brain ‘pacemaker’ could eliminate severe depression in seconds


weirdly cynical and coordinated campaign to rebrand ect as 'brain pacemaker' doing 'deep brain stimulation'... i guess we can look forward to signing up for personalized/ai/buzzword bsaas app subscription soon enough.

#2649
Post rating: +


Here’s the document:



#2650
Post rating: ~

dimashq posted:

Here’s the document:





The best part of this is:

“What documents or certificates do you have certifying that you were in our illegal party organization?

answer: history of the party - document”

#2651
Post rating: ~
I love Lenin's dry sense of humour. He's just like me.

gay_swimmer was probated until (Oct. 15, 2021 03:51:20) for this post!

#2652
Post rating: ~

cars posted:

so Facebook's shown us what will happen whenever a whistleblower starts telling the truth about one of these companies: they will shut down all operations temporarily and lock their employees not just out of their own email and business-app accounts, but out of the offices where they work, to give their internal security teams time to scrub all their databases before they're sent letters directing them not to destroy information pertaining to new cases against them, to review all accounts and access for potential deletion or lockout, to delay their legal obligation to inform every employee to preserve emails under their existing retention policy, etc. I do not really expect them to face consequences for that, i expect that to be "debunked" as a "theory" in the mainstream press with as much swiftness as their political allies can muster, but who knows.



the Grayzone seems to think that she's a spook and this whole thing was carefully prepared.

#2653
Post rating: ~

Synergy posted:

the Grayzone seems to think that she's a spook and this whole thing was carefully prepared.


I saw that and while I've gone to bat for them here in the past... from first impressions it seems extremely spurious and don't I really have the time to watch a 2 hour video just to find out if the pressure finally got to them and they've lost their minds. can you summarize the argument/evidence?

#2654
lies half the time
Post rating: +
without weighing in on whether or not they've gone off the rails, theyre p much making the case that her testimony is extremely convenient for the cia. espec the bit where she says the way that facebook has chronically understaffed its own counter-espionage division threatens national security. and also makes teenagers feel bad about their bodies
#2655
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The only interview I've seen so far with this whistleblower was making the argument that facebook needs to monitor political content more closely, extending the measures they took during the 2020 american president election permanently. I didn't engage with the story any more after that cause I figured it was just more of the same, but if it touches on the mass human experimentation that facebook already admitted to, I'm interested. Ever since I heard about it, I've been suspicious because I used facebook a lot as a teenager and so did a lot of people in my cohort, and practically everyone in my age group was severely depressed. I always wonder how much of that was just from life itself and how much was intentionally manipulated.
#2656
Poronto
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Facebook made me nothing but miserable so concur
#2657
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zhaoyao posted:

the bit where she says the way that facebook has chronically understaffed its own counter-espionage division threatens national security


lol

#2658
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today in “twitter is dumb news”, a dude made an interesting point about the fact that scabs are so readily available due to the sheer number of people capitalism marginalized and a bunch of white liberals who call themselves socialists for aesthetics called him a fed and seized upon his incorrect etymology for the word “scab” without addressing his main point at all.

it has now escalated to people saying that if we shouldn’t blame scabs because they’re just taking the work capital provides them then surely we shouldn’t blame landlords or cops for the same reason. it’s a shame i don’t drink anymore

SookieIlychStackhouse was probated until (Oct. 16, 2021 15:36:29) for this post!

#2659
lies half the time
Post rating: ~
what's up w that probation though. how do u even probate ppl. graciously yours, noob admin
#2660
Post rating: ~

zhaoyao posted:

what's up w that probation though. how do u even probate ppl. graciously yours, noob admin


thread monitors can probate, mods can only ifap, or assign thread monitors, just as the CPSU-B intended.

edit: they can also force logout, which is a funny "you need to logoff" function

#2661
lies half the time
Post rating: ~
yes i remember when you logged me out when you became a mod
#2662
Post rating: ~
#2663
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probation is a cowards tool
#2664
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I'd forgotten probation even existed, fun fact: the full suite of admin powers does not include probation. I'd have to make myself monitor for the respective thread first I guess.

iirc at some point someone suggested a custom feature that would automatically and indiscriminately probate anyone for posting in the twitter thread, but the obvious workaround of breaching containment shuttered the idea
#2665
lies half the time
Post rating: ~
i made myself a monitor in some thread back in my natural domain.. or tried to i don't know if it took, probate still ain't on the menu



ps for real, imagine if you will a webforum where ifapped users retain threadmonitor power. i anticipate that the frequency of probations will return to their historical low from this point forward . apologies to the three posters who were probated prior to this discovery

Edited by zhaoyao ()

#2666
Post rating: +
Probate, coward, you are only delaying my posts
#2667
Post rating: ~

zhaoyao posted:

i made myself a monitor in some thread back in my natural domain.. or tried to i don't know if it took, probate still ain't on the menu



ps for real, imagine if you will a webforum where ifapped users retain threadmonitor power. i anticipate that the frequency of probations will return to their historical low from this point forward . apologies to the three posters who were probated prior to this discovery



lmao wouldn’t be an offsite without some kind of rickety custom system.

#2668
lies half the time
Post rating: +
for the sake of clarity i would like to emphasize that i did not sprinkle my fairy dust on the server to correct this threadmonitor mechanism, i just removed threadmonitor power from an ifapped user. so this problem is practically guaranteed to occur a second time as farce
#2669
Post rating: +

shriekingviolet posted:

Synergy posted:

the Grayzone seems to think that she's a spook and this whole thing was carefully prepared.

I saw that and while I've gone to bat for them here in the past... from first impressions it seems extremely spurious and don't I really have the time to watch a 2 hour video just to find out if the pressure finally got to them and they've lost their minds. can you summarize the argument/evidence?



Brian Berletic did a shorter piece on it here:



basically, she's connected to the Whistleblower Aid organization which is staffed by former members of Radio Free Asia, NSA, DOD, CIA, etc.

#2670
Post rating: ~

Synergy posted:

Brian Berletic did a shorter piece on it here:




basically, she's connected to the Whistleblower Aid organization which is staffed by former members of Radio Free Asia, NSA, DOD, CIA, etc.


thanks! the trajectory there makes sense, piggybacking security theater propaganda and the normalization of surveillance on to very real concerns of actual harm/misconduct by facebook, a classic play. tbf she could be entirely sincere and it would go the exact same way, ideological reverence for the security apparatus and a little coaching goes a long way, her own authenticity becomes barely relevant. Good stuff.

#2671
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edit: lmaooo

Edited by SookieIlychStackhouse ()

#2672
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this was my prompt to log out of twitter for a few days while i finish state and revolution



cnn is the far left! grayzone not even on the map!
#2673
[account deactivated]
#2674
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liceo posted:

the prompt to log out of twiter is because it makes everyone a stupid dumb idiot baby who can't do anything but look at the stupid dumb idiot baby making website



eh sometimes there’s fun memes and cool pictures from north korea

#2675
[account deactivated]
#2676
Post rating: +
let me tell you the story of the internet: it's basically Genesis chapters 1-3, but with a blue bird instead of a serpent
#2677
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liceo posted:

if you go on twitter dot com you are guaranteed to die instantly



#2678
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then i am posting from beyond the graaaaaaaaaave

boo

time to ban me for being a spook i guess?
#2679
lies half the time
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ban? no we don't want this place to be a ghost town
#2680
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there is something deeply disturbed in my brain i keep returning to that hell app