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[kg200212]

Louis Gossett Jr. has passed away at the age of 87.

He is known for his performances in ‘ROOTS’ and ‘AN OFFICER AND A GENTLEMAN,’ for which he became the first Black actor to win the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.

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Russia is already spreading disinformation in advance of the 2024 election, using fake online accounts and bots to damage President Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats, according to former U.S. officials and cyber experts.  The dissemination of attacks on Biden is part of a continuing effort by Moscow to undercut American military aid to Ukraine and U.S. support for and solidarity with NATO, experts said. [....] The type of pro-Russia online propaganda campaigns that thrived on Twitter and Facebook ahead of the 2016 U.S. presidential election is now routine on every major social media platform, though it’s rare for individual accounts to go as viral now as they once did.

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Happiness Will Come To You.

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When a bartender becomes a father

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As an immigrant from an authoritarian country who cannot vote in the US either, thank you for your posts encouraging those who can to vote. Thank you.

I do think that a lot of the "voting is useless and stupid and you shouldn't do it!!" comes from the fact that the Online Leftists have generally grown up in an environment when voting is both always possible and can make a real difference in your government, so they take it for granted and/or actively disparage it. They think that the Correct Ideology will magically manifest in any geopolitical, social, or cultural setting if they just think it hard enough, tools like voting are "dirty" and counterproductive to making things get bad enough that the people are all in for The Revolution, and aren't really fond of flawed and slow democracy anyway, which goes backward and sideways as often as (or more than) it goes forward. They want a benevolent dictator to instantly implement everything, regardless of the fact that "benevolent dictator" is a contradiction in terms, and just like the right-wing nutcases, don't want the people to have a say in anything if there's a chance they'll reject it or force them to settle for a compromise or anything less than absolute power.

This is why American Online Leftists (and frankly, those from other countries who want Cool Lefty Points and/or are steeped in tankie ideology) spend all their time attacking the establishment political party that is overall closest to their beliefs, rather than the nakedly authoritarian and fascist one, which they either ignore, discount, treat as trivial, or actively root to win in order to "teach the Democrats/the country a lesson." While there's nothing the Democrats could ever do that would actually satisfy them, they like to post BIDEN GENOCIDAL FASCIST AMERICA IMPERIAL DICTATORSHIP screeds because they know that unlike in an actual genocidal fascist dictatorship, where such social media posts would get them promptly persecuted, arrested, disappeared, or thrown into the gulag, nothing will happen to them at all as a result. Because they have no conception of actually living in an authoritarian society (although that will change in a hurry if Trump gets elected again, God forbid), they are able to tell people not to vote, to complain about Oppression, and otherwise do things they would not actually ever be able to do if they hadn't grown up in a western democracy, however flawed and bedeviled. So yes, they absolutely do insist that voting is meaningless because they have never lived and grown up in a place where it is either restricted, just for show, or not available at all, and they refuse to listen to anyone who tells them differently, because they secretly think the "right" kind of dictatorship would be fine.

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I frankly sometimes feel like social media has ultimately given a lot of people the illusion of power, while also causing them to become corrupted in a similar way to traditional forms of power, only without any actual power that goes with it. The similarities in their behavior to the latter is disturbing as hell, ESPECIALLY given the horrid behavior of online types the past few months.

I really can't emphasize enough how much of a constructed and artificial environment social media is, especially these days, and especially the Social Media Platform Formerly Known as Twitter, which is still the main avenue by which a lot of people attempt to "do" social justice. Once upon a time, Twitter was a moderately beneficial public communication service because everyone and God was on it and you could therefore get communiques directly from the source, there was a blue-check verification service that actually helped you understand who was real and who was not, and while there were serious and ongoing flaws such as there is when useful public discourse is sacrificed on the Great Altar of Profit, there was at least some attempt to monitor or ban Nazis, white supremacists, bad actors, and eventually Trump himself. All of that changed and/or was directly destroyed when Apartheid Clyde took over and turned it into a revenue-generating service for Russian propaganda, alt-right cranks, bots, and the rest of the Elon Fanclub willing to pay $8 for a meaningless blue checkmark, while trashing the site's guardrails and any other useful features. It basically exists for Elon to fanboy Putin, Trump, white supremacy, his 4chan trolls, and anything else that makes his money (while Mr. Free Speech Absolutist arbitrarily bans anyone who hurts his man-child fee-fees). This is not an unbiased, neutral, or constructive environment to start with. You don't have any certainty about who you're interacting with or who is amplifying your messages, and only a hardcore-radicalized (of whatever persuasion) of human users remain, while a lot of casual users have left.

As such, if you're basing anything (hypothesis, claim, source, evidence, opinion) on "what everyone on Twitter thinks," that is fatally flawed data to start with. Even at the peak of its popularity, something like 24% of all American adults regularly used Twitter. That still means 76% of the country who doesn't (and the number is larger now as Chucklefuck McGee has continued driving it into the ground). If you're forming your ideas or looking for "what America thinks" just by quoting or relying on the tweets of people who already agree with you, you've done basically nothing and you certainly haven't proved it, you've stunted your own critical thinking skills, and you are selecting from a data source that is already fatally poisoned and limited in any number of ways. Adding to the echo chamber of similar opinions on Twitter is not going to actually influence public policy or make lasting change. Yes, the interns and/or public relations staff of the public figures still on there will probably check the feed every so often and make note of things that come up, but couching it as mindless vitriolic abuse and/or demonstrably nonsensical things is not going to get back to their boss. It will just be ignored and/or given less weight in the limited space available for things that are deemed important enough to actually follow up on/make policy around.

Also, a lot of people saw Trump tweeting insane things at 3am for four years, and somehow decided that was actually how US/American presidential and governmental policy was made, rather than that he was a fucking narcissistic-personality-disorder psychopathic lunatic. But uh, and it should go without saying, it didn't work. Just because Trump posted something absolutely unhinged and announced it was now policy, that doesn't mean it was. Half the time he didn't even do so much as issue an executive order, those can and regularly are challenged in courts, and so forth, because despite all its flaws, America is not an absolute monarchy where the king can rule by fiat and have it totally done, no questions, the end. That's also why Trump's second term would be even more dangerous than his first. In his first, he was flailing around and yelling on Twitter and not really paying attention to anything. In his second, the administration will be staffed top to bottom with dedicated fascists like the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 people, who have spent the last four years brooding on revenge and drawing up detailed plans to actually co-opt and suborn all the levers, checks, balances, controls, and functions of government directly to Trump's personal will (and/or the outrageously evil people pulling strings behind the scenes, because Trump is now basically a gibbering orange vegetable and the media is still far too beholden to the Biden Old!!! narrative to accurately report this).

In short, another Trump term (God fucking forbid) would be run by the kind of methodical and careful evildoers who know that policy isn't made by tweet, and would act accordingly. That would be much, much harder to remove, counteract, or fix, it would almost certainly lead to the end of American democracy at least for most of our lifetimes, and the repercussions of that would be absolutely terrible. But because we still have people who act like Trump is somehow a preferable option, who think that it's bad that Biden is trying to work through established and long-term channels to make sustainable policy and not just get short-term chuckles from an internet dopamine approval rush, that is the risk we are running from now until November 2024. After that, either way, we'll know for sure: we'll finally have a measure of safety, or we will be comprehensively fucked for generations. We all have the power to influence which of those outcomes come to pass. I suggest we use it.

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Rogers Hood in What If...? 2x08 - What If the Avengers Assembled in 1602?

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Watch Echo. Please. Please.

I cannot stress enough how important it is to see this kind of representation, this kind of investment from a company like Marvel, in telling indigenous peoples' stories. They consulted with the Choctaw nation, they DUBBED THE ENTIRE SERIES IN CHOCTAW. Choctaw is an endangered language! Fewer than 500 people remain that speak it fluently! And here it is, preserved in a Marvel Show about a Native Super Hero!!!!

I know you have MCU fatigue, I get it. I understand that some of the disney+ Marvel shows have been underwhelming. But I am BEGGING YOU. Just watch Echo. Just give it a chance, give Her a chance. The world is a better place with stories like this in it, and the only way we will get more of them is if we show companies like Marvel that their investment isn't a waste.

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Quinta Brunson just became the second Black actress in Emmys history to win Lead in the Comedy category, 42 years after Isabel Sanford won for The Jefferson.

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ETERNALS (2021) dir. Chloe Zhao

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Echo 1x05 "Maya"

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