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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • This pollster may have swayed the outcome of an election with knowingly false statements

    I don’t think that could be proved beyond a reasonable doubt.

    Also, you could make an argument that, like, some diner near a polling place doing a special swayed the outcome of an election because it made the area look busy and potential voters decided they didn’t have time.

    I see the point about needing time for real journalists to blow it open

    Actually my point was more about needing more journalists and editors and newsroom support staff so that someone could have looked into this sooner and more aggressively

    What happens when the poll with fake data is released only hours before the election?

    Probably only a few people see it and it doesn’t have much impact

    But what we are talking about was intentionally false.

    I appreciate the idea of limiting ourselves to people who make intentionally false statements, but when I intentionally say something like “race is a social construct” or “the president is a criminal” the average Republican thinks it’s a false statement.

    What these people did was super shitty, but I don’t see a way to criminalize it without handing fascists a giant weapon to beat loud mouth leftists like me over the head with. I think the best remedy here is we get the names of everyone involved in this and then for the rest of their lives whenever they say anything of consequence we’ll be able to say “Oh you’re one of those liars who lied to all of us one time, I don’t think I believe what you’re claiming now.”


  • I’m pretty sure fraud laws all require demonstrable financial harm or unjust enrichment (which this might end up being when more info comes out but that hasn’t been proven yet).

    If cops and prosecutors cpuld just call every statement they don’t like fraud everybody who ever wrote an article on, like, flock cameras or gender affirming care would end up in prison. Misinformation/disinformation is a problem that deeply pisses me off, but if we try to imprison our way out of it those laws are 100% going to be used on people saying true things conservatives don’t like hearing.


  • I really don’t think criminalizing speech is a great idea given the kind of shit bags we have running our criminal punishment systems. Also, this one is pretty clear, but hypothetically I could imagine polls where it’s a lot more ambiguous whether they’re faked or not (e.g. if they only get like 40 respondents because they’re lazy/cheap, is that fake? If they ask misleading questions is that fake? etc.)

    What’s needed here is a better media ecosystem with more journalists who have more time to follow up on suspicious seeming things and get accurate information out there in a more effective manner

    Also, the names of everyone involved with the Median Strateg6 uncovered and published, otherwise they will try to do this Mass deception again





  • Michele Johnson, a DNC member from Louisiana who proposed the measure to abolish ICE, said it’s time for Democrats to take a stand and pointed to the dissolution of ICE’s predecessor agency, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, as a precedent.

    “I think one of the reasons why people are not trusting the party is because we sound so academic,” she said. “We sound focus group tested, we sound poll tested because we’re worried about saying the wrong thing or doing the wrong thing and not just like, just stand on business, like take a position.”

    I think the idea is to bring back the thing we had before 2003, INS, which definitely had its problems, but was a lot more like a bunch of IRS agents checking paperwork instead of the heavily armed and violent thing we’ve got with ICE










  • Since October 7, 2023, the already precarious state of cancer care in the occupied Palestinian territories has deteriorated dramatically, reaching catastrophic levels, particularly in Gaza. The pre-existing systemic challenges have been severely exacerbated, creating an unprecedented humanitarian and health crisis.

    In Gaza, the landscape of cancer care has been largely obliterated. The Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital, which was the sole specialized cancer treatment facility, has been extensively damaged by Israeli airstrikes and was forced to close due to a lack of fuel and medical supplies. Reports indicate it was eventually blown up, leaving thousands of cancer patients with nowhere to go for treatment. The Palestinian Ministry of Health has stated that intravenous chemotherapy services and medical follow-up for cancer patients have completely ceased in Gaza. This means that an estimated 10,000 cancer patients in Gaza are now deprived of life-saving chemotherapy, radiotherapy (which was already unavailable in Gaza pre-war), and other critical treatments, leading to preventable deaths and immense suffering.

    https://oncodaily.com/societies/gaza (arc)