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Cake day: February 2nd, 2024

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  • We used to have laws that decentralized control of media. An entity could only own a certain number of newspapers, tv stations, or radio stations. There were incentives for smaller news companies to insure that there was competition in each market. Congress kept chipping away at those laws letting larger companies buy up more and more of the market, allowing mergers that restricted competition. Now radio is nearly a monopoly, TV and newspapers are oligarchies. The Internet fell into an oligarchy disturbingly quickly.

    The only way to get the media serving the people again is to break up the big companies and restore the guardrails that protected and supported small local companies.




  • Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, did not have wmd’s, and was the only major Sunni power in the region. Saddam Hussain was not a good guy by any means but he actively worked against Iranian influence and was a stabilizing presence on the middle east after the first Gulf War. Pre-invasion Iraq was good for US policy. The invasion led to the growth of Iranian influence in the region and the rise of the Islamic State terrorist organization. We should not have attacked Iraq.

    I was in support of attacking Afghanistan at the time and still think military action to go after Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Ladin was warranted. The diversion of resources from that conflict is another reason we shouldn’t have attacked Iraq. We probably should have extended that conflict into northern Pakistan where we knew Al-Qaeda’s leadership and the bulk of their fighters were hiding.

    We definitely should have invaded Saudi Arabia. They provided training, equipment, travel, and money to enable the 9/11 attacks. 9/11 would not have been possible without Saudi Arabia’s support. Saudi Arabia was(is) in the curious position of publicly allying with us while plotting terrorism against us. Curious because by siding with us publicly they gave up Iran’s advantage of attacks against them potentially leading to conflict with Russia. Iran had some part in 9/11 but between their having a lesser role and the risk of Russia coming to their defense it would not have been worth it to attack Iran. Saudi Arabia had our backing instead of Russia’s. When they used proxies to attack us we should have leveled their royal palace. So far we haven’t even pulled our support.


  • Lemmeenym@lemm.eetoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.worldDrink up
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    1 month ago

    I’ve never been much of a social media user outside of reddit and lemmy and I’ve never had an Instagram account so maybe it’s my lack of familiarity but does that page list some really unimpressive stats? The original post had “more than 3,000 likes in less than three years” and for the second Instagram post it says"Within seven months, the post gained over 4,000 likes." Do Instagram posts continue active participation for years? I felt pretty good the few times I’ve posted something that got thousands of likes but it’s more personal achievement 'than this is going to be bigger than two broken arms".