Okay, so firstly, they start talking about “Western media”, and then only talk about US media.

It’s characterisation of the media as state media is simplistic and misses the headline - the outside influence the media has on the state. Rupert Murdoch explicitly said that he got involved with the media in the US and UK in order to influence politics. There are any number of examples of something being featured on Fox News and Trump talking about it the next day.

Here in the UK the Labour government just announced their new immigration policy. Its biggest aim is to stop people crossing the channel in small boats. The biggest opposition party, Reform’s entire platform is based around stopping small boats. The previous government’s immigration policy for more than a decade was based around stopping small boats.

Illegal immigration is a tiny fraction of immigration. People entering the country in small boats is a tiny fraction of illegal immigration. And illegal immigration itself is overcounted because there are currently no legal routes into the country for asylum seekers, making all asylum seekers illegal immigrants by definition.

So, why have politicians been forming their policy around this one inconsequential issue rather than trying to form more meaningful and effective policy? Because the front pages of the daily newspapers have had small boat stories for years. It’s deliberately been turned into an issue by the press, which has forced politicians to look like they are “doing something”.

The traffic between media and politics isn’t just one way, of course, but it’s a lot more reciprocal and complex than this empty ideological rant would have you believe. And it’s probably fair to say that the press has more influence over the state than the state has over the press, at least in the UK.

Tony Blair, for example, purposefully spent time wooing Murdoch because he knew he couldn’t get elected as Prime Minister without The Sun on side.

It’s ironic that this piece about the lies of the media is itself rather devoid of accurate reporting and is instead knowingly or unknowingly full of falsehoods in order to ideologically persuade its readers.

The law used to arrest protesters, section 13 of Britain’s Terrorism Act 2000, makes it a crime to wear, carry or display an object in circumstances that “arouse reasonable suspicion” that someone is a member or supporter of a proscribed organization, and can be punished with up to six months in prison.

This is bot highlighted enough. What’s the crime? Is it bring a member of a terrorist organisation? No. Is it being a supporter of a terrorist organisation? No. It is a crime to be suspected of being a supporter of a terrorist organisation.

That’s what’s illegal. Having a police officer look at you and think you might be up to something. Whether or not you actually are is irrelevant. Someone else’s suspicion of you means that you have committed a crime. A crime which could see you spend 6 months in prison.

Leaving everything else aside, I’m sure there’s no way this could lead to discrimination on the basis of race or religion.

This is something the government should be repealing, not applying to grannies holding signs.

The promise of passkeys when i first grad about them was that it would be quick and easy - that you wouldn’t need to enter a username or use 2fa. The reality appears to be that this is that it’s used ** as** 2fa

Yeah, that took a turn

Okay, if you prefer to frame the flaws in your reasoning like that, then I’m happy to do so. That doesn’t make the conclusion less flawed. The conversation isn’t about the hows and whyfores of formal logic, it’s about whether the conclusion is likely to be true.

None of what you’ve said ameliorates the faulty logic I highlighted. You have instead just added more assumptions.

There’s a few wild leaps in logic, here.

Firstly, we know of life evolving once. Just one planet. In the entire universe. We can postulate that with such a vast universe (and possibly multiverse) that it’s probable that other life exists elsewhere, but we don’t know that. It could be a unique event or an incredibly rare event. We can’t say, because 1 is way too small a sample size to extrapolate from.

But you’re not even extrapolating from 1 datapoint. You’re extrapolating from something that you think might be true at some point in the future.

If we’re in a simulation then we’d have no idea what’s outside that simulation, so we’d have no idea what an easter egg would look like.

But it’s not my job to find evidence to prove other people’s claims. It’s their job to provide evidence for those claims. That’s true regardless of whether the claim is that we live in a simulation, that we’re ruled over by a benevolent omnipotent god, or whether there’s a teapot orbiting between Mars and the sun.

I mean, simulation theory is kind of a joke itself. It’s a fun thought experiment, but ultimately it’s just solipsism repackaged.

In reality there’s no more evidence for it than there is for you being a butterfly dreaming it’s a man. And it seems to me that the only reason people take it at all seriously in the modern age is because Elon Musk said he believed it back when he had a good enough PR team that people thought he was worth listening to.

Worth pointing out that that “Target figured out a girl was pregnant before her father did” story is almost certainly untrue: https://www.predictiveanalyticsworld.com/machinelearningtimes/target-really-predict-teens-pregnancy-inside-story/3566/

I agree with the article that getting ads on a device you’ve already paid for with no hint that there would be ads is intrusive and a sad sign of how tech is going (in the same week that it was announced that Apple are going to be adding ads to Maps, too). But I also can’t help but wonder - who the fuck wants a smart fridge? Like, legitimately, what is the advantage over a normal fridge?