Signal is moderation.

Generating signal is moderating noise. The first moderator of any message is the person converting ideas into language. Understanding the interplay of how messages get moderated by the various layers they pass through is what media literacy is.

I holding my finger over the button as long as possible in the hope that the button that the “spotless prosecutorial record” will suddenly add the “stop abetting a genocide” portion we’ve been asking for since before they changed out the previous button, but I guess I’ll be going for the option that isn’t currently telling me how my existence is threatening to them and hope that they’ll follow through on valuing human life this time around.

I miss when signal-to-noise ratio was common parlance of the Internet.

Making usable spaces is tough work, but having worthwhile content drowned in an ocean of noise is seemingly the default of corporate controlled media anymore, so much have they abandoned paying attention to what they publish. That you don’t know who is editorializing and moderating the places you frequent and have opinions on the job they’re doing says to me that you’re not doing the work that being media literate requires, which is all the more important when so much of it is generated content with no consideration given to reality.

If you look back at panel 2, there’s a potential third one to research

Then you must be quite frustrated that Israel disagrees.

Netanyahu says Israel will cut Gaza off from Egypt, taking control of Palestinian enclave’s remaining border

Israel seized control of the Rafah border crossing. The impact could be devastating

And Egypt’s borders were not completely open. In part, because they did were not aiding Israel doing a forced displacement of Palestinian citizens. As a reminder, the forcible removal of a people, in whole or in part, is one of the kinds of genocide. Perhaps you might want to consider why you’re advocating for the forced displacement of an entire people. Why Egypt has not fully opened its Gaza border for fleeing Palestinians

You know who look like whales? Problem spenders who spend far beyond their means, and are preyed upon by predatory business practices that use psychological manipulation to encourage people to spend as much as as they can. Like, I’ve literally watched video game developer conference talks where a dev explains in great detail and depth on how to hijack human psychology to milk every last dollar they can. Whales stopped being “those who can afford to spend” a long time ago.

Palestine’s border crossings are controlled by Israel. Early on, Israel stopped allowing border crossing. To the point that a major international concern was the inability for any aid trucks to enter. Additionally, movement within the West Bank has been heavily restricted by Israel’s checkpoints. And Israel has for a very long time actively denied Palestinian refugees the right to return to their homes if they do leave. If it is difficult to understand why this sort of forced movement and controlled borders is an issue, I encourage you to read up on the Trail of Tears and South African Apartheid.

Movement and Access in the West Bank | August 2023 West Bank movement restrictions make life harder for residents and aid organisations

You mean the ones they bombed the following day? They followed evacuation orders. An Israeli airstrike killed them the next day.

Okay? And by the end of the following year, the UAW had struck and used their explicit statement that they were not yet committed to endorsing a candidate for president that Biden came down to the picket lines himself to picket in support of the UAW, which helped them get landmark contract deals.

UAW says they might not endorse Biden Biden goes to the picket line UAW gets historic deals

Turns out when the rich and powerful set out to hamstring the ability of people to organize in the workplace, and spend a lot of time covertly policing political orgs they don’t agree with, well, people fall out of practice in being part of a community and organizing that community. If you then make every place that someone might want to build communities with other a place to extract money from, it’s real hard to build it all from scratch.

The UAW struck after the railroad strike. And got Biden to personally come down to ask the what he could do to secure their vote. Both happened while Biden was in office. What are you even saying about why the railroad strike failed?

Who else is looking forward to–regardless of the outcome of this election–being told throughout 2025 that it is of vital importance that we get in line with the Democratic party above all else so that we can ensure that the Republican candidate does not win the 2030 election?

“We’re in the shit now” - the shit, noun, bad

Not so much on the fence between Harris and Trump, but on the bench, because apparently a significant demographic in my state is apparently not all that important to winning the swing state, and have been being iced out since before Harris was on the top of the ticket. Perhaps it is a failing of character to be unable to look past the continuing apologetics and support for a genocide and the emphasis on courting the “good” Republicans over the Progressives, but I can’t just set that aside and pour my energy into cheerleading the presidential race. I don’t have an option that I want, I have a choice between the status quo (which we know is leading us into bad places) and actively making things worse.

If you can’t see daylight between the parties, and hold that they are identical rather than one being markedly less awful than the other (note: less awful, they still have are awful in their way), then you are as annoying as the people who were screaming back in 2021 that anyone who wasn’t voting Biden in 2024 is a monster (please, tell me again how criticizing Biden is the worst thing I can do to keep Trump out of office). Y’all are catastrophizing so hard that you’ve forgotten how to build political power, and are relying on big orgs to do it for you.

Eh, First Past the Post is party suppression, tbh. When the math pushes us towards two parties, a third party is always at the cost of some other party that is nominally “on the same side”.

I’m not sure how “tens of billions of dollars of military aid” counts as not intervening in a foreign conflict.

It is a bit galling to be told endlessly that we must shut up and choose when the choice is “genocide or more genocide”, even when the reason Harris is on the top of the ballot at all is as a result of speaking up about the issues with Biden. I’m not all that comfortable merely accepting that, to escape the chopping block myself, I must remain silent about my family members. I’m sorry that Harris is so tied to Israel’s expansionist agenda that my inability to stomach rampant slaughter is threatening her and the Democratic party’s chances against Trump and the Republican party, but I can’t let some tens of thousands of killing go.

Perhaps they should have left Western style Manifest Destiny in the past.

Not my point. You absolutely can point to homophobic passages of the Bible. You can also point to passages of the Bible that are not talking about homosexuality in specific, but that are commonly interpreted as such. My point is that expecting even Christians to agree with other Christians about what texta constitute the Bible let alone what those specific texts actually say is an exercise in futility.

This is the why of the existence of all the various sects and denominations of Christianity. There are theologians who have done lots of academic work to show how the Bible does not need to be homophobic. There are others who have worked just as hard to justify doing grievous harm to homosexuals. Trying to explain both of those with the One True Reading of the Bible is committing the same error they do.

For my queer ass, if Christians all spontaneously decided to follow the theology of Rev. Fred Rodgers tomorrow, I’m gonna breathe a sigh of relief and leave them alone to be just the nicest people and hope they stay that way.