bl4ckcatsec.bsky.social
A void. Security guy. Tech guy. Identity security is my dealio. Vermont is home.
357 posts
116 followers
128 following
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The increased flying of the Gadsden flag pre-Trump was replaced pretty much entirely by Trump flags. I don’t see anywhere near the amount of Gadsden flags now after Trump was elected.
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Like am I misremembering attacks on Sikhs post-9/11 by the same racists that gave us Trump? Or the “support our troops” yellow ribbons that adorned cars instead of red hats and Trump flags?
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Either way, we’re here now. And I don’t think any posturing towards our representatives is going to stop the train we’ve been on for a decade. Like everything else we’ve experienced, I suppose buckle up and try to weather the storm.
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War was inevitable under a Trump presidency. This much should have been known to everyone since 2016. Not only because he is a failure at leadership, but because the conservative right in the U.S. considers attacking Iran part of a holy war.
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Elections matter. While we cannot say for certain what a Clinton or Harris presidency would have looked like, I can only assume that diplomacy would have been continued, even if challenging. We also wouldn’t have turned our back on our word, which would have kept its strength.
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The next question is how to handle their desire to pursue them. We tried diplomatically, but the American public very clearly decided that they did not want diplomacy with Iran by electing Trump twice to office.
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On one hand, they are a sovereign nation in a world of sovereign nations with nuclear powers. Often not able to have a seat at the power table because they don’t have nuclear weapons. But on the other hand, their desire and proclivity to using them offensively is pretty elevated.
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To be fair, I did NOT believe that Iraq was pursuing weapons during our invasion. I do, however, firmly believe that Iran wants them. And so it’s to determine whether you think they should or not.
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By the way. The only ones that win during chaos are the agents of chaos. There will be no socialist/communist revolution in the US if our democracy fails.
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Invasion/war was always going to be the inevitable outcome of that situation.
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Elections have consequences far beyond our borders. The United States electorate, everyone included, is responsible for Iran working to build nukes.
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Why are we amplifying them?
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We place a tremendous amount of outsized weight and responsibility on the President—and not our legislature. When handling split legislation, we look to the President to build the coalition to support it. We look to the President to represent us to foreign diplomats and leaders.
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The fact that we tend to do this, across government systems, leads conservatives to believe, for example, that we all *want* to be ruled over and *they* want to do the ruling. To be fair, they’re honestly probably not far from the truth.
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A VAST majority of the country believes the President is effectively a king. Or very close to it. It’s why Trump gets away with what he’s allowed to get away with, and why people blame Presidents for oil prices. We place a tremendous amount of weight on a singular figure. Political affiliation aside
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“How did so many people vote for the Democrat Rep and not for the president?!” Man you are truly underestimating how much power people personally vest into the President and their racist and sexist opinions. Even though it should be obvious.
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To be fair to UTD, they’re actually going out and doing the legwork as well. I don’t want to discount the hard work they do beyond just headlines. But there’s still a lot of headline posting as well.
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If it takes grifters. Personalities. People with questionable ethics to reach the vast pool of individuals who only briefly pay attention, then so be it. If Gen Z is only going to listen to Gen Z folks, so be it. We need *anything* to combat 50 years of disinformation.
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Are all of those folks going to get everything they want out of Trump? Not really. But does it matter if they succeeded in shifting the Overton window to the right and gutted our country in the process?
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We don’t have a resistance leader. We don’t have resistance Jesus. We don’t have Luke Skywalker. And the fascists found theirs in Trump. We’ve lost the information war to the billionaires and millionaires who have been at this for 50 years.
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It cracks me the fuck up because the reality is if the administration were competent or more bold we’ve all already lost. Because we’re too busy arguing whether altnps is a grift while Trump sends masked agents to kidnap people. For realsies.
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The purist nature of the argument because some person or group doing something you don’t like misses the complete point of how to build support to fight the barely touch of fascism tens of millions of people in this country support.
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I think from what I’ve read on this thread and others. Is that people have way too much of a limited, almost fantastical view of what a resistance is supposed to be, or is, or what it needs to win. We’re fucking lucky the people in the Trump admin are incompetent as fuck.
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We’re up against this wall because we are too unwilling to play dirty. Or too focused on being purists about this shit. Arguing whether altNPS is a grift rather than fighting the creeping fascism in our country that’s been here at least a few decades.
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We are in an information war. And we are up against a wall in this information war. Meidas Touch, Parnas, Under the Desk news, and many others are extremely valuable assets against that information war for which we have been losing for DECADES.
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It’s like saying we don’t need personalities like Neal Degrasse Tyson because we have thousands of astronomers and scientists and researchers. Sure. We do. But nobody’s going to listen to autistic special interest nerds preach about space science and our planet.
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If we have to have a few grifters to get the *correct* news out there, so be it. If that *works* to convince people, so be it. I wish people were smarter or better than that. But they’re not. So I’m fine with it.
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Besides, have you *seen* the types of people that do otherwise? Have you seen the insane right wing slant of YouTubers like Kurt Caz, Best Ever Food Reviews, Andrew Callaghan (Channel 5), Peter Santanello? And other “on the ground” folks? Shit. Give me Parnas all day IMO. Or altNPS.
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altNPS, Aaron Parnas, Under the Desk News, and others have reach. And that capacity to generate that reach with their personality is an okay thing to profit from IMO. And it’s a valuable part of news distillation.
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And while this has taken a different form on social media. Is a little bit messy. Has a little bit of grifting sprinkled in. Is it really that bad if we’re getting accurate information? In a way that is distilled down that people can see it?
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In fact, Reuters and the AP and other organizations explicitly license their content to be regurgitated by other media outlets. While the “actual journalists” are on the ground, some talking head in the U.S. sits on prime time local news in a suit repeating it. Why is this bad?
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I question why people consider this sort of profiting to be a problem. After all, the argument I heard on Parnas is that he’s just regurgitating headlines. But there’s something to be said about the *news personality*. Literally almost all newscasters regurgitate headlines and stories.
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Here’s the deal. And it’s something I’ve done a great deal of thinking on as a result of a similar claim levied against Aaron Parnas over on TikTok. Ultimately they’re a reasonably decent source of information that’s going on even if they’re trying to profit off of it in the background.
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Fuck this made me lol. Probably thinks Big Bang Theory is great too
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