• 6 Posts
  • 379 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • Whose propaganda did you suck down blindly?

    Chill out a bit, my comment could not have possibly given you the impression that I’m a supporter of capitalism if you had read it carefully. I began my comment by putting forward the capitalist argument for copyright - a steel-man argument - and ended it by debunking it.

    Copyright is meant to foster and improve the commons and public domain

    You said yourself that copyright establishes art as private property (or “intellectual property” if we’re being more precise). That does the opposite of fostering and improving the commons and public domain.

    If copyright was not tradeable or transferable

    Then it wouldn’t be copyright. Copyright is a capitalist construct, not a public good corrupted by capital.



  • At the root of this cognitive dissonance is who benefits and who doesn’t. Copyright law is selectively applied in a way that protects the powerful and exploits the powerless. In a capitalist economy copyright is meant to protect people’s livelihoods by ensuring they are compensated for their labor, but due to the power imbalance inherent to capitalism it is instead used only to protect the interests of capital. The fact that AI companies are granted full impunity to violate the copyright of millions is evidence that copyright law is ineffective at the task for which it was purportedly created.


  • It’s because this isn’t about privacy at all, it’s about a popular social media platform being outside the control of domestic intelligence agencies. The US is unable to control the narrative on TikTok the way they do on American social media, which allowed pro-palestinian sentiment to spread there unhindered. It had a huge effect on the politics of the younger generation (IMO a positive one) by showing them news and first hand accounts they wouldn’t have seen otherwise.

    Edit: And yes, China is able to control the narrative on TikTok and that is a potential problem, but so far they’ve had a fairly hands-off approach to US TikTok aside from basic language censorship. I figure the way China sees it is that an unmoderated free-for-all will do more to sow divisions in the US than a carefully controlled (and therefore obvious) pro-China narrative ever could.


  • But why? That’s a very hard sell and a very inefficient use of your time. At best you could convince some anarchists of the harm reduction argument, but you could never convince anarchists to be enthusiastic about voting for Kamala, which is what those very absurd memes seem to be trying to do.

    Edit: And very ineffectively I might add. I still can’t make heads or tails of what those memes are trying to say.








  • Alright, I’ll play along.

    Claim:

    The document titled hamas human shields released by NATO Strategic Communications is propaganda.

    Argument:

    Merriam-Webster defines propaganda as-

    the spreading of ideas, information, or rumor for the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause, or a person

    Let’s break that down. To determine whether the NATO StratCom document hamas human shields meets the criteria for propaganda we need to answer the following:

    Q: Does the item in question contain ideas, information, or rumor?

    A: Without having to verify any claims you can still confidently state that the document contains at least one if not all of these. Statements of opinion can be classified as ideas, and statement of fact can be considered either information or rumor depending upon the amount and veracity of supporting evidence.

    Q: Was the item in question spread for the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause, or a person?

    A: By posting the document on a public forum for the purpose of defending NATO’s actions, you yourself fulfilled this criteria. Prior to that, NATO StratCom also fulfilled it, as they have an implicit interest in defending the actions of NATO (which this document serves to do)

    For example: I can point to evidence that Tasnim News is propaganda.

    I don’t dispute this.