CSotD: Odds and Ends, mostly odd
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Xitter has been kicked out of Brazil, as Joy of Tech notes without mourning.
It seems Musk got in a quarrel with them over his right to spread misinformation, and so they blocked reception of his platform, though the NYTimes also reports that he’s encouraging people there to log on via Starlink, which could get them in legal trouble but the whole thing is too tedious to waste a second story-share on.
Apparently a whole lot of Brazilians are switching over to BlueSky, where Kiwi cartoonist Guy Body welcomes them but lets the rest of us know that if we see people posting KKK, that’s how Brazilians say LOL.
Assuming either we read Portuguese or they’re posting in English.
While back where people who post KKK mean KKK, Clay Jones has a lovely rant about how Mark Zuckerberg keeps kicking him off Meta sites for attacking dangerous misinformation and hate groups because it interferes with his profitable tolerance of hate groups and dangerous misinformation. Jones uses some nasty language in his discussion, but probably nothing you’ve never read before, possibly on Facebook.
Zuckerberg is currently upset with the Biden government, claiming they tried to censor him when in fact all they did was ask him to take down some lies and misinformation about covid because it could kill people.
You might think Zuckerberg would not want to kill his customers, but you have to remember that the people who use Facebook aren’t his customers. It’s the people who advertise on Facebook who are his customers.
This explains why when crooks post ads for counterfeit postage stamps, which the US Postal Service has indicated is an illegal scam, you can file a report with Facebook and they will respond that the ad doesn’t violate their terms of service.
But Jones gets kicked off repeatedly, and I have also served a few terms in Facebook Jail, for sarcasm. (Update: And my personal account was just suspended. No explanation.)
If you post hate there, it has to be sincere, dammit. I think they have specific algorithms set up to assure compliance with that rule.
In France, as Patrick Chappatte points out, the CEO of Telegram was busted, because apparently they don’t like people providing a platform for misinformation and crime. 404 explains what the French explained:
According to a press release from the Tribunal Judiciaire De Paris, Durov was arrested following a preliminary investigation that started on July 8 and authorities are looking into charges of enabling illegal transactions, failure to provide documents to authorities, complicity in possessing child sexual abuse material and in distributing CSAM, complicity in the distribution of drugs, complicity in organized fraud, and money laundering.
They’re such grumpy people over there! The 404 article does a nice job of summing up how upset everyone is over this, or, at least, how upset everyone in the business of hosting misinformation is.
Meanwhile, Newsguard reports that, of the misinformation about the Russia/Ukraine war they’ve traced, nearly half of it came from Telegram.
As long as we’re on the topic of Who Is Screwing Everything Up, here’s a cartoon from Cartoon Movement by Turkish cartoonist Halit Kurtulmus Aytoslu which I really like, though I’m still waiting for the Flood of God’s Wrath to wipe out artificial intelligence.
What I’m seeing instead is that a lot of people are not only aware that AI is not handcrafted art but they don’t much care and they don’t really see any distinction between Leonardo painting some lady and them asking AI to make a picture of a lady with dark hair smiling just a little.
Except that theirs is better because they did it!
And it was easier than gluing macaroni and cotton balls to a piece of construction paper, which I expect will start turning up as “artisanal artistry” at local art fairs in the near future, in the booth next to the decoupage.
Update: The folks at NaNoWriMo have declared it’s okay to use AI to write your novel and ableist to say otherwise. Bring your own macaroni and construction paper.
There are also big artistic changes at Wheel of Fortune, but I don’t have a cartoon about that.
However, here’s a pair of cartoons on another topic:
Juxtaposition of the Suckers
I don’t know why Australian cartoonists decided that sports gambling was going to prove to be a horrific ripoff of vulnerable people that would profit the government.
Though that has most definitely been the impact in the United States, which is okay because we’re raising a lot of money for the gummint by taking it away from people who need it themselves.
There’s no way we possibly could have predicted this tragic outcome, except for the fact that it was screamingly obvious.
I was one of about a kabillion people who began calling the lottery a “tax on stupidity” nearly 40 years ago, and we were right. And we still are.
Sports gambling, however, is far more predatory than the lottery. The difference is that, first of all, there is a deceptively false element of skill involved, which means people who think they’re smart get sucked into it.
Second, you don’t have to go to the store to lose. You can sit in your livingroom placing bets all day, piling up your folly by “chasing losses” where the more you lose the more you waste trying to win it back, in another self-destructive fallacy.
Meanwhile, the people at the state capital who are happily raking in all the government’s vigorish are the same ones who vote against giving any of it back to feed children or pay people’s medical bills when the suckers have hit rock bottom.
If you try to raise taxes on plutocrats, they get all nasty and make life hard on you. But if you sponsor lotteries and allow sports gambling, the people you’re taxing are eager to pay in.
Best of all, they’ll vote down school budgets to make sure future generations don’t wise up to the scam.
Juxtaposition of the Day, the Musical
We need some amusing news about now, and Margulies and Milbrath point out that the Trump/Vance campaign has been repeatedly dinged by musical artists for unauthorized use of copyrighted material at their rallies.
The Foo Fighters even pledge to donate their royalties from Trump’s illegal use to the Harris/Walz campaign, though we all know Trump’s record for billpaying.
This song is actually about adultery, not theft, but that shoe also fits …
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