Media Tricks Exposed ✨

Still sometimes laugh about the time the media tried to sell the story of a pregnant nurse stealing a bike from six black teens

🔗 Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_):
Two weeks ago, in Virginia, an illegal alien from Venezuela was arrested & charged with sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl in Campbell County, VA. He had crossed illegally into El Paso, TX, in September 2023 and was released into the U.S. by the federal government.
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🔗 Greg Price (@greg\_price11):
Jen Psaki, Joy Reid, and Rachel Maddow are laughing on MSNBC at the fact that voters in Virginia care about immigration:

Maddow: “Well, Virginia does have a border with West Virginia.”
https://t.co/MDyjJuUkzn
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In this 2016 BBC Newsnight did a documentary on Syrian 'Refugees' in Newcastle.

They sympathetically portrayed Omar Badreddin as being the victim of a young white girl who made up accusations against him as a 'racist' after a case against him saw a not guilty verdict.

He also said it was 'against his religion' to do such things to young girls.

Omar Badreddin has just been jailed for 18 years on 5 counts of rape of a 12 year old girl in Newcastle after grooming them.

Feels like a good time to repost this gem

To summarise my rambling yesterday; in an environment where the signal to noise ratio is already dire, accessible generative AI tools are augmenting the ability of shit things to mimic value in the extreme.

Beauty and symmetry will cease to be proxies of truth and value, and a new strange form of ugliness will emerge as optimised hyperreal visuals are routinely used to represent unoptimised bad ideas.

As the mass consciousness wrestles with what is ahead, which will be more tragic? Being dumb enough to think something fake is real and beautiful, or being gripped so tightly by paranoia you think something real and beautiful is fake?

I think we're entering an explosion of mimicry that will parallel the emergence and evolutionary success of the trait as an adaptation in nature. What if we are on the cusp of an evolutionary trap that grips the human mind as tightly and deterministically as simple bugs to a venus fly trap?

I was reading an article recently about Etsy, how it was formerly rather niche and full of largely hand crafted items, and how it has since been flooded with automated print-to-order AI-generated crap like t-shirts, mugs, etc. all with incoherent product names that exploit search engine algorithms to show up first in the results (known as SEO in e-commerce) — whatever the name of this process, it seems to be happening everywhere. Genuine things replaced by facsimiles just convincing enough to fool the middle of the bell curve. The organic nature of things being crudely stripped out as they're quickly outcompeted by algorithm-exploiting AI crap.

Photoshop and video editing require a modicum of skill, these generative AI tools are great but highly accessible. To our collective detriment, their mass adoption will completely decouple the relationship between skill/intelligence and quality output.

TODAY IN HISTORY: February 17th, 1600

On his way to be burned at the stake for “heresy” at Campo de Fiori in Rome, the philosopher and cosmologist Giordano Bruno has a wooden vise put on his tongue to prevent him from continuing to speak.

Washington Post headline: "How tens of thousands of Black U.S. doctors simply vanished."

Paragraph 25: They didn't vanish I just made it up, lol.