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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • That’s roughly the total COVID death toll for that period. The term “excess deaths” is used to refer to the deaths which occurred above the typical yearly mortality rate. In other words, the deaths which are roughly attributable to COVID.

    I don’t know if that’s what you meant, but it would be easy to read your comment, given the context, as saying that Trump caused 522,368 deaths in 2020.

    If you want to quantify the deaths caused by Trump’s mismanagement, you’d need to compare COVID deaths relative to population. I actually managed to find that (to my surprise)

    https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deaths-worldwide-per-million-inhabitants/

    If you sort by deaths per million (total), the US is 16th from the bottom right above Brazil, Slovenia, and Lithuania. And right below Latvia, Chile, and Poland.

    You could also download that data set there, find the global average, sum up the difference between that and the US, and roughly say that number is the death toll for Trump’s mismanagement.











  • I think it’s more about being able to play as the oppressed, and whip up their base. There have been many platforms where they could post their hate. Censoring speech just fuels outrage and invites the Streisand effect.

    But in this case I don’t think Zuck really cares about enabling these right-wing messages. It’s about saving money by cutting a bunch of expensive fact checkers, and displaying friendliness toward the new president; either because they don’t want to be singled out for punishment, or they hope to be rewarded with some largess.


  • I really don’t think so. If the process was so simple as writing false or hurtful things, and then your political opponents are blocked from power, then why doesn’t the left just become a bunch of shitposters and kick all the fascists out?

    I think a more plausible explanation for why the left has been excluded from power is simply that American politics runs on donor money, capitalists have lots of money, and they have a class interest in excluding the left. You can certainly get deeper than that, but that’s sort of the heart of the issue.

    Note here that Zuck and Meta are capitalists, and were never going censor the narrative contrary to their interests.


  • I still think this whole idea that we were going to get big tech (or anyone really), as owners of the modern mediums of communication, to act as the arbiters of truth and harmful messages was always a ridiculous notion. It’s both not in their interests and not in their power.

    The mainstream of the liberals and the left seem to have become so obsessed with policing speech that they’ve nearly completely given up on meaningfully improving the material conditions of people’s lives. You win the narrative by delivering real results that people can see and feel, not by trying to ban charlatans from spinning bullshit.

    Change the world, and the narrative will follow. Not the other way around.









  • The media keeps talking about how they’ve learned their lesson about how to report on Trump; that they’re not going to get spun up about all the noise he makes; that they’re not going to let him switch the story every week; that they’re going to focus on the real, material things that are going on.

    Well here we are again, writing deeply concerned pieces about a handful of tweets (or whatever they’re called in Trump land). And here Lemmy is upvoting them.

    Trump is a troll. Don’t feed the trolls.