Barx [none/use name]

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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: May 20th, 2024

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  • This article is about one study, by CCDH, who did not publish much of anything about their methodology. CCDH’s CEO was an anti-Corbynite that fed into the false accusations of antisemitism against the left for having solidarity with Palestinians and CCDH continues to prominently focus on antisemitism and trying to blur the line between antisemitism and antizionism. The faction that he supported is currently in power in Labour and are supporters of Israel during this genocide.

    I would not trust them to make good calls on what is an accurate community note vs. not. Community notes are all over the place but on average depict a bazinga liberal position, which is not actually the most accurate one. Having looked at their “study” paper, their first and most promindnt criterion for accuracy was whether community note aligned with fact-checking websites. Fact-checking websites are, to put it bluntly, bullshit, and really just reflect the author’s opinion.

    For example, one of the things they claim is election misinformation is the claim that voting systems are unreliable. They are saying this is an inaccurate or misleading claim. In the US, it is accurate to say that it’s voting systems are unreliable. They are frequently run using voting machines from private companies, black boxes with no real way to verify their results that are actually implemented in most places, and polling stations often only gave 1 or 2, so when they break people are disenfranchised. Every computer security expert audit says you should not trust these systems and should use paper ballots with manual observable recounts. The allegation of misinformation is really about what is perceived to be voter suppression, of people feeling like they shouldn’t vote because it won’t count anyways. This is not actually misinformation, though: the voting machines are unreliable, that is the actual problem in this situation, not the use of repeating a fact in your favor.

    It is salient that at no point do they highlight the naked propaganda for Zionism that has been rampant on social media, including about elections. This was presumably filtered out early on by their selection of what counts as a topic of interest for their analysis.

    Finally, the clear purpose of CCDH is to lobby for having more oversight on social media, including large, centralized moderation teams that have historically been cozy with liberal governments.






  • Barx [none/use name]@hexbear.nettoScience Memes@mander.xyzMandibles
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    7 days ago

    Ohhh. Well the big parts that grab stuff are mandibles. They aren’t legs but they originate, evolutinarily speaking, from legs. Same with antennae! The parts closer to the head do the eating but sometimes mandibles help with that.

    For venomous arthropods sometimes it’s the mandibles that have the venom (like spiders, where they are called Chelicerae), for some it’s saliva and they use various mouthparts (the water bug uses a proboscus), for some it’s their tail end (like ants), etc etc.






  • Harris has more or less the same solutions for black America, as this article lays out. Both parties offer false promises while supporting the material bases of oppression. Both parties are the parties of mass incarceration, criminal injustice, gentrification, school defunding, and ultimately, widespread material deprivation of the working class, the poor, the unhoused. We’ve had a Trump presidency. It was, despite liberals’ panic at rude statements, more or less, the typical status quo right up until the pandemic hit.

    This is not because Trump was good, it was because he did the same basic things as his predecessors and successor. Liberals temporarily cared about kids in cages under Trump and suddenly lost all interest under Biden, now pretending that it simply stopped because they aren’t hearing about it even as the Biden admin has ramped up imprisonment and deportations. Very little changed, materially. The same applies to the lives of black people. If anything, conditions have gotten worse under Biden through policies increasing unemployment, the normalization of the pandemic and ending of economic support during it, and the massive funds for cops, increasing criminalization of poverty, and decreases in universal funding, leaving communities subjected to the legacies of red lining and discrimination to self-fund. Fewer jobs, worse pay, less support, more observation and racially discriminatory criminalization.

    Expect this to continue until we actually organize to build real leverage and address the actual root causes of these issues and why neither party identifies them.


  • First, don’t vote for genociders. I think if that isn’t the limit, you don’t have one and might as well admit to being a supporter of genocide.

    Cool headline, but ultimately just another call to have people throw their votes to a third-party candidate in protest

    Those who organize to vote third party do a better job at building leverage for their interests than sheepdogs that try to convince people to Vite Blue No Matter Who. Which one is throwing a vote away? You don’t even register on Dems’ radar as anything other than a “likely Dem voter” to maybe send a volunteer out to remind you to vote.

    …which could just lead to Trump’s victory, which the article itself acknowledges would be the worst possible outcome.

    The article does not say that. It is very clear on its line that neither party is the one to fight for black people. I have to assume you simply didn’t read it.

    The time to fight the Democratic leadership is unfortunately past

    The time to fight oppressive genociders never passes. Please stop telling other people to give up their fight for justice. I’m getting white moderate vibes from your comment.

    PS Harris has never won a single state in a Democratic primary. What in earth do you think was the right time and right method of opposition and building if leverage? The party just dictated all of this at you and now you carry water for it.

    and the only way forward to being able to win going forward is to vote for Harris.

    To win what? The thesis of this article is that black people don’t win regardless of which party has the presidency. Who are you talking to and do they understand what you mean by “win”?

    Voting for Trump (or casting a third-party candidate, essentially the same thing) is guaranteed to make things much worse.

    Voting for a third party is not the same as voting for Trump. Get that nonsense out if here.





  • You need oxidants to live. Issues stemming from oxidants are about levels of free radicals getting too high in the wrong places for too long.

    Getting good sleep, eating a balanced diet, reducing stress, and getting enough exercise are the best ways to reduce the chances of such a scenario. Realistically, these things are also just a way to maximize wellness and health overall and it is probably not very useful for most people to think of this in terms of oxidation.




  • When we and other known organisms take energy from food we are actually taking molecules with higher-energy electrons, converting them into the high-energy molecules our cellular processes can use to do make cell things happen, and producing very similar molecules with lower-energy electrons. Rather than infinitely accumulating these molecules, our cells dump low-energy electrons onto another molecule that is amenable and thereby convert into a molecule ready to accept high-energy molecules from food (with a bunch of steps in between).

    For us, as aerobes, the electron acceptor at the end of respiration is oxygen.

    Oxygen as an electron receptor is newer than several others. Anaerobes came first. It was only after photosynthesis had produced a ton of atmospheric oxygen that it became a viable option, really. But it O2 is a comparatively good electron acceptor because the process in which it accepts those electrons allows cells to grab quite a bit of energy from that last step. It is fairly “electron needy” compared to earlier electron acceptors.

    So, basically, aerobes get more energy per food unit (sugar molecule) than the vast majority of other creatures. You need it to live because it is an essential part of how your cells get food, namely, how it can recycle molecules at the last step of the respiration cycle.


  • Barx [none/use name]@hexbear.nettoScience Memes@mander.xyzOxygen
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    2 months ago

    The dietary antioxidant fad is mostly BS. They’re supposedly meant to counteract oxidative stress and specifically free radicals. Both of those things are part of a healthy life and you would die without them. So any real impact is not so simple as “just counteract those bad things”. Dietary antioxidants don’t always lead to higher intracellular antioxidant levels, either.

    Some dietary antioxidants so lead to higher intracellular levels and may help buffer oxidative stress (like from exercise) but there isn’t much evidence that it doesn’t just boil down to “eating your vegetables is good for you”.