#smear tactics

[bumblebeeappletree]

You shouldn't believe everything you see on the internet. Particularly when it comes to renewable energy. We started debunking some of the biggest myths about wind and solar energy – and ended up in a world of shady lobby groups and secret money streams. Come follow us down the rabbit hole.

Credits

Reporter: Malte Rohwer-Kahlmann

Video Editor: Markus Mörtz

Supervising Editor: Joanna Gottschalk, Michael Trobridge, Kiyo Dörrer

Factcheck: Kirsten Funck

Thumbnail: Em Chabridon

We're destroying our environment at an alarming rate. But it doesn't need to be this way. Our new channel Planet A explores the shift towards an eco-friendly world — and challenges our ideas about what dealing with climate change means. We look at the big and the small: What we can do and how the system needs to change. Every Friday we'll take a truly global look at how to get us out of this mess.

#PlanetA #RenewableEnergy #Disinformation

Read more:

NREL's life cycle assessment of electricity generation technologies:

https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy21osti/80...

University of Texas snowstorm report: https://energy.utexas.edu/sites/defau...

Hidden resilience and adaptive dynamics of the global online hate ecology:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s4158...

Obstructing action: foundation funding and US climate change counter-movement organizations: https://cssn.org/wp-content/uploads/2...

The Debunking Handbook: https://www.climatechangecommunicatio...

Chapters:

00:00 Intro

00:51 What we did

01:58 Emission myths

03:55 Texas snowstorm fiasco

06:11 The misinformation cooking pot

08:34 Cui bono?

[all-doggirls-go-to-heaven-2]

It is wild seeing people that were VERY VERY quiet when I got publicly raked over the coals for defending trans women in a callout post in a very public server for trans women who NOW go out of their way to defend other women they dont know accused of the exact same. Not as easy when you have to confront your friends abt it, right? It would be much easier to choose to coddle the one doing the accusing instead of me. Like you did! Remember when you did that?I still remember who shot me a msg of support during those times and you were not among them, honey. Just because it was slightly before it became a faux pas.

Stop acting like you're the bravest tranny warrior in the world. You couldnt help people that were by your side.

[ms-boogie-man]

Umm…

… I think at this point, you are either a criminal, a patriot, or a stooge

Enough evidence has been shown and proven by we constitutionalists. You are either going to use the brains God gave you, or you are going to remain deluded and in denial of truth. Over the last 23 years, 85% of America has awakened to at least some of the truth re: how criminals in our government are trying to deceive us and destroy our constitutional republic. The 15% or so who wish to avoid truth are operating on ego. Every war or other variety of dispute you have ever heard of was started by, funded by, and profited from by global banking cartels. These same cartels own 97% of our government, and President Donald John Trump is not one whom they own … and I will leave it there yo

Angie/Maddie🦇❥✝︎🇺🇸

[anthroxlove]

[eclipsecrowned]

FINDING A POST THAT SO SUCCINCTLY SUMMARIZES A DRAMA VORTEX I GOT SUCKED INTO SEVERAL WEEKS AGO --

[skaruresonic]

Twitter: "these people are mentally ill and dangerous. they'll excommunicate you if you don't exactly parrot their views"

my friends: actually some of the most caring and chill people I've ever met, who are extremely hard on themselves and passionate about their work and who have largely withdrawn from Sonic in order to move on from the drama

maybe I'm biased but

[rat-rosemary]

Thought of this because I was thinking up silly political stuff for the stickers, but reminder that there is no Other for you to point all your issues to and if anyone, and I mean anyone, tries to convince you otherwise they're probably extreme right wing sewing discourse

[unwelcome-ozian]

[raccoonb0y]

I forgot about a happy Halloween post

But yippee costume

[cypher2]

I am conveniently ignoring the news of sonnett to the reign for as long as humanly possible and that’s that

[sophsweet]

Chemtrails - More Corporate Deflection onto Climate Science?

This could be a revelation. What about if fact checkers are to censor, silence or shadow ban speculation about hidden agendas and corporate activity, which we end up believing is about climate research?

Since the clear blue skies during lockdown, I’ve seen many people posting a “tippex sky” (Sonia Poulton) of aeroplane trails criss-crossing the skies. In my mind, any true story creates a complete picture with its components fitting together like a puzzle. How do we gather information? It becomes difficult when facts are drowned out by the din of everyone’s opinions. These tended to be stated…

[immaculatasknight]

Jackboot on journalism

[palant1r]

not proshipper not anti but a secret third thing (person who has a career in the media and, through covering legislative politics, has watched "associating with problematic fiction or entertainment is an indicator of moral degeneracy" rapidly become a mainstream GOP position that they are encoding in legislation to target the queer community under the guise of protecting children, thus coming to the conclusion that positioning the "can people enjoy things that would be immoral IRL in their fiction" debate as a proship v anti fandom debate is akin to pretending that "should we have the death penalty" is a discussion that only matters in Death Note discourse — the extent and manner to which fiction affects reality is an issue that is immediately relevant to today's US politics, and to summarize my opinions on the matter in fandom terms would be to diminish the ways this debate is affecting america Right The Fuck Now. and i have stopped taking "this person is bad for shipping the wrong anime thing and being horny about it" in any sort of good faith ever since I saw it literally used as part of a GOP smear campaign against a transgender state legislator in an attempt to defend the right from backlash after they used their supermajority in the Montana house to prevent her from speaking on the floor. Anyway I think everyone on this site, especially Americans, could benefit from ceasing to think in proship v anti vocabulary and instead developing coherent political positions on the nature of fiction that do not directly align with current fascist political tactics)

[furiousgoldfish]

That is insane, the implications!

It would have to go like this: "I don't care if I'm hurting my entire family with my behaviour, I don't care if everyone around me is begging me to stop and get help, I am going to go online and find a tiny niche community of blogs that dare to say narcissistic abuse is real, and then, I'm not going to get any help. Because I gotta stick it to the anonymous victims of narcissistic abuse on the internet for speaking up. This proves I'm a great person somehow!"

I went to see your reply, it was great, you realized exactly what they were getting at. And you're completely right, narcissists will not ask for help in order to protect others from their own abuse, but they will go to therapy in order to manipulate therapists and portray themselves as the victim, and smear their actual victims. Once they get a therapist on their side, they'll have more power over the victims and will have an easier time convincing the victims they're the insane ones, which is absolutely devastating for the victims.

I also got this message about the same topic:

They were forced to acknowledge that yes, some percent of the narcissistic abusers will be unsafe for traumatized and vulnerable people, but so what? Does that mean we shouldn't let these narcissists access the traumatized people? There are other dangerous individuals out there too! Traumatized people are not going to be safe anyway! That doesn't mean they're allowed to build boundaries based on what's safe for them! That doesn't mean they're allowed to speak it out loud or try to protect themselves from the potential predators! Then they're making the potential predators feel bad!

So instead of attempting to warn victims and enable them a safer community, we should instead attack the victim's boundaries and convince them that safety doesn't exist so we shouldn't be depriving potential predators of our company. It might make the potential abusers feel bad and go out to get revenge. We just need to accept that the victims will be abused again, and again, and there's nothing to be done, and if victims attempt to shield themselves from predators, well then those are some evil victims who are doing this because they're bad people. Hurting the abusers just by wanting safety and protection from abuse. Insane.

We don't owe our presence, company, attention or energy to anyone, least of all people who are trying to shut us down because our reality is making them look bad. We were already ostracized from society by their abuse, and now we're accused of ostracizing them, while all we do is anonymously discuss our abuse and how to stay safe from future abuse, calling nobody by name, identifying the abuse by red flags and behaviours, and not even trying to hurt anyone back, but just to withdraw to safety. Just trying to survive with what's left of our life and potentially warn others so they don't end up in the same horrible situation.

Meanwhile they're comfortable smear-campaigning traumatized bloggers, inventing wild bullshit and lying their ass off in order to stop the abuse resources from spreading. Harassing victims and making them feel like they're evil and wrong for creating a community and sharing knowledge about abuse. Trying to cancel people for having survived abuse and speaking about it. And we're supposed to pretend we're so dumb that if they change this context to 'uhh no you're the one hurting me' we'll believe that they're right to do it.

Note of acknowledgment to all of you still following me and reading but scared to interact because of the smear campaign and anonymous attacks that can happen if you interact with my blog. I know you're all here and I appreciate you. I'm glad you're still reading.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Amazon illegally interferes with an historic UK warehouse election

I'm in to TARTU, ESTONIA! Overcoming the Enshittocene (Monday, May 8, 6PM, Prima Vista Literary Festival keynote, University of Tartu Library, Struwe 1). AI, copyright and creative workers' labor rights (May 10, 8AM: Science Fiction Research Association talk, Institute of Foreign Languages and Cultures building, Lossi 3, lobby). A talk for hackers on seizing the means of computation (May 10, 3PM, University of Tartu Delta Centre, Narva 18, room 1037).

Amazon is very good at everything it does, including being very bad at the things it doesn't want to do. Take signing up for Prime: nothing could be simpler. The company has built a greased slide from Prime-curiosity to Prime-confirmed that is the envy of every UX designer.

But unsubscribing from Prime? That's a fucking nightmare. Somehow the company that can easily figure out how to sign up for a service is totally baffled when it comes to making it just as easy to leave. Now, there's two possibilities here: either Amazon's UX competence is a kind of erratic freak tide that sweeps in at unpredictable intervals and hits these unbelievable high-water marks, or the company just doesn't want to let you leave.

To investigate this question, let's consider a parallel: Black Flag's Roach Motel. This is an icon of American design, a little brown cardboard box that is saturated in irresistibly delicious (to cockroaches, at least) pheromones. These powerful scents make it admirably easy for all the roaches in your home to locate your Roach Motel and enter it.

But the interior of the Roach Motel is also coated in a sticky glue. Once roaches enter the motel, their legs and bodies brush up against this glue and become hopeless mired in it. A roach can't leave – not without tearing off its own legs.

It's possible that Black Flag made a mistake here. Maybe they wanted to make it just as easy for a roach to leave as it is to enter. If that seems improbable to you, well, you're right. We don't even have to speculate, we can just refer to Black Flag's slogan for Roach Motel: "Roaches check in, but they don't check out."

It's intentional, and we know that because they told us so.

Back to Amazon and Prime. Was it some oversight that cause the company make it so marvelously painless to sign up for Prime, but such a titanic pain in the ass to leave? Again, no speculation is required, because Amazon's executives exchanged a mountain of internal memos in which this is identified as a deliberate strategy, by which they deliberately chose to trick people into signing up for Prime and then hid the means of leaving Prime. Prime is a Roach Motel: users check in, but they don't check out:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/03/big-tech-cant-stop-telling-on-itself/

When it benefits Amazon, they are obsessive – "relentless" (Bezos's original for the company) – about user friendliness. They value ease of use so highly that they even patented "one click checkout" – the incredibly obvious idea that a company that stores your shipping address and credit card could let you buy something with a single click:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-Click#Patent

But when it benefits Amazon to place obstacles in our way, they are even more relentless in inventing new forms of fuckery, spiteful little landmines they strew in our path. Just look at how Amazon deals with unionization efforts in its warehouses.

Amazon's relentless union-busting spans a wide diversity of tactics. On the one hand, they cook up media narratives to smear organizers, invoking racist dog-whistles to discredit workers who want a better deal:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/apr/02/amazon-chris-smalls-smart-articulate-leaked-memo

On the other hand, they collude with federal agencies to make workers afraid that their secret ballots will be visible to their bosses, exposing them to retaliation:

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/amazon-violated-labor-law-alabama-union-election-labor-official-finds-rcna1582

They hold Cultural Revolution-style forced indoctrination meetings where they illegally threaten workers with punishment for voting in favor of their union:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/31/business/economy/amazon-union-staten-island-nlrb.html

And they fire Amazon tech workers who express solidarity with warehouse workers:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-fires-tech-employees-workers-criticism-warehouse-climate-policies/

But all this is high-touch, labor-intensive fuckery. Amazon, as we know, loves automation, and so it automates much of its union-busting: for example, it created an employee chat app that refused to deliver any message containing words like "fairness" or "grievance":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/05/doubleplusrelentless/#quackspeak

Amazon also invents implausible corporate fictions that allow it to terminate entire sections of its workforce for trying to unionize, by maintaining the tormented pretense that these workers, who wear Amazon uniforms, drive Amazon trucks, deliver Amazon packages, and are tracked by Amazon down to the movements of their eyeballs, are, in fact, not Amazon employees:

https://www.wired.com/story/his-drivers-unionized-then-amazon-tried-to-terminate-his-contract/

These workers have plenty of cause to want to unionize. Amazon warehouses are sources of grueling torment. Take "megacycling," a ten-hour shift that runs from 1:20AM to 11:50AM that workers are plunged into without warning or the right to refuse. This isn't just a night shift – it's a night shift that makes it impossible to care for your children or maintain any kind of normal life.

Then there's Jeff Bezos's war on his workers' kidneys. Amazon warehouse workers and drivers notoriously have to pee in bottles, because they are monitored by algorithms that dock their pay for taking bathroom breaks. The road to Amazon's warehouse in Coventry, England is littered with sealed bottles of driver piss, defenestrated by drivers before they reach the depot inspection site.

There's so much piss on the side of the Coventry road that the prankster Oobah Butler was able to collect it, decant it into bottles, and market it on Amazon as an energy beverage called "Bitter Lemon Release Energy," where it briefly became Amazon's bestselling energy drink:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/20/release-energy/#the-bitterest-lemon

(Butler promises that he didn't actually ship any bottled piss to people who weren't in on the gag – but let's just pause here and note how weird it is that a guy who hates our kidneys as much as Jeff Bezos built and flies a penis-shaped rocket.)

Butler also secretly joined the surge of 1,000 workers that Amazon hired for the Coventry warehouse in advance of a union vote, with the hope of diluting the yes side of that vote and forestall the union. Amazon displayed more of its famously selective competence here, spotting Butler and firing him in short order, while totally failing to notice that he was marketing bottles of driver piss as a bitter lemon drink on Amazon's retail platform.

After a long fight, Amazon's Coventry workers are finally getting their union vote, thanks to the GMB union's hard fought battle at the Central Arbitration Committee:

https://www.foxglove.org.uk/2024/04/26/amazon-warehouse-workers-in-coventry-will-vote-on-trade-union-recognition/

And right on schedule, Amazon has once again discovered its incredible facility for ease-of-use. The company has blanketed its shop floor with radioactively illegal "one click to quit the union" QR codes. When a worker aims their phones at the code and clicks the link, the system auto-generates a letter resigning the worker from their union.

As noted, this is totally illegal. English law bans employers from "making an offer to an employee for the sole or main purpose of inducing workers not to be members of an independent trade union, take part in its activities, or make use of its services."

Now, legal or not, this may strike you as a benign intervention on Amazon's part. Why shouldn't it be easy for workers to choose how they are represented in their workplaces? But the one-click system is only half of Amazon's illegal union-busting: the other half is delivered by its managers, who have cornered workers on the shop floor and ordered them to quit their union, threatening them with workplace retaliation if they don't.

This is in addition to more forced "captive audience" meetings where workers are bombarded with lies about what life in an union shop is like.

Again, the contrast couldn't be more stark. If you want to quit a union, Amazon makes this as easy as joining Prime. But if you want to join a union, Amazon makes that even harder than quitting Prime. Amazon has the same attitude to its workers and its customers: they see us all as a resource to be extracted, and have no qualms about tricking or even intimidating us into doing what's best for Amazon, at the expense of our own interests.

The campaigning law-firm Foxglove is representing five of Amazon's Coventry workers. They're doing the lord's work:

https://www.foxglove.org.uk/2024/05/02/legal-challenge-to-amazon-uks-new-one-click-to-quit-the-union-tool/

All this highlights the increasing divergence between the UK and the US when it comes to labor rights. Under the Biden Administration, @NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo has promulgated a rule that grants a union automatic recognition if the boss does anything to interfere with a union election:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/06/goons-ginks-and-company-finks/#if-blood-be-the-price-of-your-cursed-wealth

In other words, if Amazon tries these tactics in the USA now, their union will be immediately recognized. Abruzzo has installed an ultra-sensitive tilt-sensor in America's union elections, and if Bezos or his class allies so much as sneeze in the direction of their workers' democratic rights, they automatically lose.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/06/one-click-to-quit-the-union/#foxglove

Image: Isabela.Zanella (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ballot-box-2.jpg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

[akajustmerry]

I don't like Blake Lively and was openly critical of how inappropriate her handling of Domestic Violence as a topic was in interviews ie using it as way to promote her lifestyle brands. But I don't have to like someone to believe them when they present a shit tonne of evidence that they're victims of sexual/workplace harrassment and an intense smear campaign. The NYT's exposè on Justin Baldon's PR campaign (link with paywall removed) against Lively, and the evidence she's submitted in her subsequent harrassment suit is eye-opening. Baldoni used the same PR team and tactics Johnny Depp used to smear Amber Heard. Regardless, whether or not someone is likeable is immaterial to the person's right to be safe and unharmed, but these PR firms really play on the masses synomysing likeability and innocence. Once again, the cruel and violently misogynistic legacy of Johnny Depp's DARVO-ing of Amber Heard rears its ugly head.