Wait, wait, wait... The average middle-class voter who is struggling to get by is starting to turn away from the Tories and their leader's suggestion is to reduce taxes on the wealthiest people? Not to improve services or perhaps address the issues that drove former conservative party voters to Labour. No. Cutting the taxes of the elite, further reducing funding for services that the majority of voters use or rely on is the obvious answer.

For a while, I kept seeing memes like these and thinking, "Who actually says/believes these things about [m/b]illionaires?"

Then it unlocked an old memory from grade school where we were given a list of, like, ten things millionaires do with dumb shit like, "Get up early in the morning," "Have a daily schedule," and, "Keep a journal."

I also noticed that both here on Lemmy and over on Reddit that there's been a push of pro-Russian talking points and a huge push towards Islamaphobia for the past few days, starting just before the attacks this weekend.

I understand there's going to be some natural anger over the attack, but the amount of accounts I've seen, especially noticeable here on Lemmy because we just don't have as many users, who are saying things like, "This is just what Muslims are like," and, "Western countries accept these kinds of people, so expect them to do the same there," and other racist bullshit talking points. They've also been painting the ongoing conflict as unquestionably one-sided in Israel's favor.

It's depressing but kind of to be expected that there's a psyops campaign going on trying to get people outraged at not just Hamas, not just Palestine, but all of Islam right now while simultaneously trying to paint Ukrainian surrender and pro-Russian propaganda. This horrible act of terror was either in part planned by Russia or at the very least is seen as an easy opportunity to try and weaken Western support of repelling their invasion of Ukraine. Just spending a little time in the wrong circles on social media should make that obvious.

One of the things that made me really like Sanders when he was first campaigning for president was when I looked up his record on American war and he had a voting record that tended to follow a quote from him that amounted to something like (paraphrasing), "War should be the last resort, but if a war is started, we need to see it fully see it through."

It's not like siding with Ukraine and getting into that conflict is supporting warfare. It's seeking to prevent warmongers from profiting off a senseless war. The idea that abandoning Ukraine to just be invaded and allowing Russia to get whatever they want by force is an, "Anti-war," stance is fucking absurd.

Not just young people. I've seen this kind of behavior in surprisingly old people such as Gen X and even Baby Boomers, but I've seen it in a LOT of millennials, the youngest of whom are now in their early thirties and the oldest are in their forties.

Sadly, with recent events, all I can think about with this is how Linus Sebastion would go on the WAN Show and say things like, "You don't need a union unless you have bad management, and I never want my employees to need a union."

If you think horoscopes don't make any sense, you're really going to be boggled by its sister, numerology.

She didn't just think she was a witch, which I was mostly OK with because religions are weird and stuff, so I thought as long as it doesn't reach the realm of life-affecting problems, it's a non-issue.

She also believed she had friends who were werewolves, she could do magic, the date of your birth determined your personality, because a planet was in retrograde good things were about to happen, vampires started the Red Cross so they could always have access to blood, and, oh yeah, along with her two mortal parents she also had an incubus second father and that she was half-demon and that's why she liked sex when she wasn't supposed to.

That... That girl needed some serious help, but claimed that she was well-adjusted and fit to help other people instead. Because, of course, she was also an empath...

Edit: I want to make something clear that it suddenly struck me I haven't; with all this craziness that she believed, that young woman had her life a hell of a lot more together than I did or do. She graduated university while I flunked out, she found a job while I'm being rejected every time that I apply, she found a low-rent apartment to live in while I'm still living with my folks. Don't get me wrong, girl had some trauma and had some problems. But she was contributing to society while I'm fucking around on the internet because I can't seem to make anything of myself.

Basic summary which will miss a lot of context because it looks like this is all really a few years coming:

(For ease of flow, I will be using quotation marks in much of this comment, but these are paraphrasing, not direct quotes.)

A YouTube channel called Gamer's Nexus (GN) put out a video talking about Linus Tech Tips (LTT/LMG) and how they have, through incompetence, negligence, or malice, been putting out bunk data and doing really bad hardware reviews at least in the past year, and some guessing of why it happened. In that video, GN also addressed a controversy over Billet Labs, a relatively new company that is trying to build water blocks for custom water loops. LTT did a video with their prototype some time back, in which they lost the 3090Ti that was sent with the block, Linus decided to instead use it on the 4090 someone grabbed by accident, complained that the water block didn't work, and went on to say it's an overly expensive gimmick that didn't work and no one should ever buy it despite not testing it on the hardware that it was made for. At the time, Linus was called out for this and dismissed criticism saying, "Even if the block had done better on the proper hardware, it was impossible it could have improved," and, "None of it changes the conclusion that no one should ever buy it." Billet Labs asked for their prototype (and GPU) back, and LMG said they would send it back. They asked for it back again, were told it would be shipped soon. Then LMG auctioned the block off to the public at the Linus Tech Expo (LTX).

In response to the GN video, Linus Sebastion, owner, founder, and Chief Visionary Officer of LMG, posted on the LTT forums several things such as, "The Gamer's Nexus video was journalistic dishonest because they didn't contact us before releasing the video. If they had, they would have gotten important context such as how we didn't sell the water block, we auctioned it off for charity. And we've already come to an agreement with Billet Labs to reimburse them for the block." The rest of the post went on to deflect blame and never really address the crux of GN's video which was mostly about the bad data LMG has been putting out in their videos, seemingly caused by an untenable release schedule. GN responded in their weekly news video calling out Linus' response for gaslighting, lying, and more. He also contacted Billet Labs and found out that they had not come to an agreement for reimbursement, and in fact that since the water block had been auctioned off that they only heard back from LMG about two hours AFTER GN's first video had been released.

After that, people on Reddit, Twitter, Lemmy, and other social media started looking back at previous accusations against LTT, LMG, Linus Sebastion, and other related entities and saw a long pattern of bad behavior that had mostly been dismissed in the past. A former employee, Madison Reeve, posted a long series of posts on X (Twitter) detailing a toxic work environment mostly consisting of toxic management treating employees like they should be happy to work there when they have a nearly impossible task of getting a tremendous amount of content out at an accelerated rate for a barely livable wage for the city that they're in. But on top of that experience that she said was shared with many other employees, she as a woman also faced a lot of misogyny and even some sexual harassment, eventually culminating in her self-harming quite seriously simply in the hopes that she wouldn't get in trouble for taking a day off.

Since Madison's allegations, LTT made an apology video which did not really address the sexual harassment allegations or even the toxic workplace stuff. What it did have, however, were a couple of humorous seques to their sponsors, some bloopers, LTT merch, a reminder to visit the LTT store, and Linus again trying to deflect the blame away from himself. In my opinion, the apology comes off worse than tone deaf, it comes off as downright insulting even if you pretend that they didn't know about the Madison Reeves accusations before making it. Now, finally, they have gotten Linus to potentially shut the fuck up like he probably should have from the start and the recently-hired new CEO is stepping in to say, "I'm appalled at these accusations, we're going to not only conduct our own review but also hire someone to review us." Keep in mind, however, this was someone who, when it was announced that they'd hired him, Linus said on the WAN Show that he'd been a shadow-CEO working at the company for six months to make sure that he fit with the corporate culture and got along with management. Meaning that he knew about their toxic management before he formally accepted the job.

So its interesting that these issues are coming out near the same time.

I don't think it's that unusual, really. LTT and Linus specifically have had people accuse him before of being unprofessional or creating a toxic work environment or bolstering a toxic fanbase or putting out bad content or all those things. Things I didn't know about because I just started getting into his stuff a couple of months ago. But all those things are being reexamined now because he lost favor for a second. The Gamer's Nexus video opened him up to be criticized where normally he'd have a loyal fanbase that would rush to his defense. But even then, it wasn't until he made that first bad response and Gamer's Nexus responded to the response and called out his gaslighting on the topic that a lot of the controversy blew open.

People who had long been ignored or felt like they weren't safe to speak out against the harm they felt LMG or Sebastion had done to them saw an opportunity to let their voice be heard. And people who had been ignored in the past are being looked at again in new context and by more people. This is a common thing. People often feel frightened to speak out about something because they feel they'll be dismissed or punished for it. Everything from people simply telling them to suck it up because that's just life to people threatening violence to people getting you blacklisted. This is why after just a couple of sexual abuse allegations started coming out, an entire flood of them suddenly were made public and #MeToo happened. That was a case where speaking out against producers, writers, directors, actors, or anyone else big in the motion picture industry would usually be an end to your career, so most people weren't willing to do it. And most of the ones who had spoken out in the past were made fun of, actually laughed at, before being blacklisted and relatively forgotten by the wider audience. An individual victim had no power to do anything, but once a few did, some of the others joined, and then it became a movement.

The LTT scandal won't be anywhere near the same size as that, of course. It's one relatively small company. But my point is that it's the same phenomenon at a different scale. The group and specifically Linus have a fan base that has been absolutely brutal to dissenters before. Sebastion on the WAN show and in previous replies to criticism always dismisses it as invalid and that emboldens his fanbase to hit back at people who are, "Just hating," or, "Don't understand what they're talking about!" The Gamer's Nexus videos started to form a little wedge between Sebastion and his fans as they showed how he wasn't being fair to them either. That created an opening.

They can ask, and even sue, for the property back but it’s not a guarantee that they’ll win.

They're guaranteed to win if the person they're suing can't afford to live for years embroiled in litigation.

The U.S. Space Command confirmed with almost near certainty, 99.999%, that the material came from another solar system.

Yeah, but... Lots of things come to us from other solar systems given enough time. Just naturally. Is it alien? Yes! But that's nothing special. Is it technology? I mean. Probably not. This is almost certainly a non-story. If the headline read something like, "Harvard professor studying extra-solar fragments," it would be just as interesting to anyone who actually cares. But that group is very niche. As it is, the headline we get is eye-catching but stupid and malicious.