This includes local police as well as anyone claiming to be “ICE.”

Or anyone ever claiming to be an authority. Call 911, make it a state/city issue to untangle. Say “I have strange men with guns at my house claiming to be law enforcement/ice but they won’t show their ID’s or a warrant, I am scared for my life!”

Also, even if you think it’s totally fine and you’re not in trouble, do not let cops into your house or car. Don’t let them search, if they ask if they can come inside or search your car you are in your rights to say “No” without giving explanation. Shut the fuck up, say NOTHING, admit NOTHING, if you get arrested ask for a lawyer before giving ANY statements, even if you’ve done nothing wrong. Don’t believe their lies when they say shit like “You know, asking for a lawyer makes you look guilty” they are liars by profession.

As an aside, it’s estimated cops kill over 10,000 pet dogs a year. If your dog annoys a cop, barks at them, looks menacing, etc. that cop is LIKELY to just execute your dog on the spot and go on like nothing happened. THIS HAPPENS EVERY DAY. I want to reinforce this point and I want others to spread this information, because as sad as it is, people broadly care more about pets than people and this is far more likely to increase outrage and efforts to defund police.

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I’m sure this time they’ll win, they just have to crack down much harder, driving the value of drugs up even MORE, no way that will have consequences.

2016 AND 2020 Liberals on social media were like “could you PLEASE stop fear-mongering, none of us are happy about this administration but there’s no point in making up this kind of nonsense and riling people up for no reason. They won’t take away abortion, medical care, porn, video games or pot, what political leader would do something so dumb as to make the people mad at them?”

I also have my issues with the cited “study.”

I’m not saying Americans aren’t dumb, but I take this kind of data with a sack of salt. How was the study phrased? What does the company stand to gain by expressing the results of the study in this way? Why not tell us exactly how the study was performed and what questions were on it?

There’s a big difference between “Hey, what are Lay’s chips made of?” and “Do you know what exact ingredients are in your bag of chips?”

My gut tells me this is all fairly performative framing so they can just cozy up to a political administration for favor and head-pets while also trying a new marketing campaign that should be universally acceptable to consumers, one that reframes their products as “healthy” in some way.

China does not want to own nor invade our chaotic political and social hellhole, nor do they want to destroy us.

They want us knocked down a few pegs so that they have economic advantages and so that the US doesn’t have as much international leverage.

That’s the extent of how super-powers view each other in a massively interconnected world. There is probably only a fraction of the population who really understand how incredibly huge and complicated our supply chains are, and how fragile it is, and what the consequences are of disrupting this beating pulse that keeps the world fed.

The danger is from rogue nations who are desperately trying to cling to or achieve “super power” status so they have that leverage themselves or maintain it even as it’s slipping away. Such as Russia right now, a nation so mismanaged that they genuinely saw gambling with a forever war as their best alternative for growth. The USA is going to be like that in about a generation or two as we continue to let oligarchy gut us.

Some little girl a few grades below him did that once and that’s probably why we’re here looking at him now.

He’s trying SO very hard to be the next Trumpian “fist pounding dictator” who will lead Trump’s base after his inevitable and likely relatively imminent passing.

It’s wild how nobody seems to get what hooks Trump’s political base, his fervent mob of ride-or-die, armed loyalists with the combined brainpower of an entire kindergarten.

It’s not Miller that’s for sure. He had zero power before he was able to impress Trump, and his pathetic whining and stereotypical “stringy nerd” aesthetics are going to push him back to obscurity the moment Trump breaths his last. He also talks too much, he tries too hard to sound like a criminal mastermind, when Trump’s base is calling for a huge Orc to spit in their faces and choke them out while telling them everything is gonna be great and they’re very good boys.

The guy is being elevated to sainthood by the right, he was likely the leading contender for upcoming republican presidential elections. It’s very worth making and distributing memes making fun of his “legacy.” If you ignore people you don’t like, they tend to end up with a lot of power and taking away your rights.

My only complaint is it’s being posted on Lemmy, which is preaching to the choir. It should be “platformed” on much larger social media sites.

The problem has never been the words, but how they’re directed.

The right broadly has no concept of “punching down” and just see anyone different than themselves as threats that need to punched. But they do love to twist our words against us, to use our kindness and empathy to get us to reconsider our language, leaving us spinning in circles worried that the actual effective ammunition we have against them might hurt the wrong people.

Meanwhile they will carpet bomb entire populations with hateful policies and rhetoric without second thought. This is their strength, it’s why they are gaining numbers and have won so much ground.

I don’t think we should make a “movement” to be “allowed” to use slurs, but we definitely have to stop caring about and policing those who have no qualms about directing painful language upwards.

The issue is he would take all of that as a compliment.

I need to start giving TED talks about how conservatives think and what their weaknesses actually are.

Yes, yes body shaming is bad, we get that. We all get that. But they do it because it’s literally all they understand. These are the most superficial of our species, these are the people who are racist and demonic because they’re bothered by how people look or talk different than themselves. They are far, far shallower than we can even imagine, but we project all this sinister, machiavellian intention on everything they do. No, they’re just insecure about their height, their hair, and if they’re sexually desirable. Every last one of 'em. This has been a motivating factor for fascism for centuries.

But they do love the villain aesthetics, they are the people who saw the dark, evil characters in WWE and said “I wish I was scary and badass like HIM” and thought it was real.

The alien parasite that usually controls his brain faltered for a moment and the normal human inside was like “How the fuck did I get here?? SOMEONE HELP”

Search for Alex Honnald and he’s done TED talks and other interviews talking about it, but most interestingly, i found a 360-degree youtube vid of some of the climb to really get that pucker-up sensation. (You can grab and pan the camera view in all directions)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRGF77fBAeM

I found a user-repost of an old article in newsnowfinland.fi, no idea the reputability of the site or its politics but I tend to believe it based on the fact that the “proposal” never really went anywhere nor had any momentum in Europe. I tend to be very cynical about these stories because I’ve had enough CEO’s who said similar sentiments and never made any effort to actually do the thing, because largely, liberal democracy haaaaates the idea of giving people any actual hints of socialism and social care, and tend to just serve the softer arm of capital.

How Finland’s fake four-day week became a ‘fact’ in Europe’s media

We take a look at how media outlets in the UK - and in Europe, Asia, Australia and USA - were all caught out by a Finland story that was just too good to be true. Because it wasn’t.

Have you heard the news? Prime Minister Sanna Marin (SDP) is doing something radical.

“Finland’s new prime minister, 34-year-old Sanna Marin, has announced plans to introduce a four-day week” says the Guardian, underneath the statement that Marin has “promised” a short working week.

“Finland’s new prime minister calls for four-day working week” says the Independent.

Britain’s commercial television channel ITV writes that “Finland PM calls for four-day working week and six-hour days.”

“Four-day working week and six-hour shifts to be introduced in Finland” trumpets Metro.

Meanwhile in the Daily Mail, with millions of readers every day, the headline is “Finland to introduce a four-day working week and SIX-HOUR days under plans drawn up by 34-year-old prime minister Sanna Marin.”

The story is not just confined to UK media outlets either: over the course of 12 hours on Monday it’s been repeated in a Belgian media website; and been the topic of a call-in during an Irish radio programme. It’s been published in Australia, India and the USA as well.

And it’s not true.

Not only are these proposals not included in the Finnish government’s policy programme, multiple government sources told News Now Finland on Monday evening that it’s not even on the horizon. SDP politicians and party activists gather at 120th anniversary event Turku, 19th August 2019 / Credit: Jukka-Pekka Flander, SDP

Charting the origins of the story

So how did this fake news story begin, and how did the misinformation spread so quickly?

Back in August 2019 some senior Social Democrat politicians and party activists gathered in Turku on Finland’s southwest coast, for an event to mark the organisation’s 120th anniversary.

The weather was warm, the drinks were flowing, and the Turku Workers’ Association brass band – resplendent in their scarlet blazers – played traditional tunes while the guests sang along.

After then-PM Antti Rinne had made a speech, it was time for a panel discussion.

The participants included Sanna Marin – at the time Minister of Transport; Tytti Tuppurainen, Minister for European Affairs; Ville Skinnari, Minister of Development and Trade; and Antti Rönnholm, the SDP’s Party Secretary.

They sat under a canopy on a small raised stage, with a potted ficus and some SDP banners for decoration.

A moderator posed questions and kept everything moving along, but the whole event that day was about a celebration of the party’s history rather than formulating policy – which had anyway already been enshrined in Rinne’s government programme just two months before.

At one point during the discussion Sanna Marin floated the idea that Finland’s productivity could benefit from either a four-day working week, or a six-hour working day (she never suggested both).

Marin also tweeted about it at the time, noting plainly that it was an SDP party goal to reduce working hours – but to be clear, again, this was never official government policy.

The comment got some modest media attention in Finland but the news cycle soon moved on. Composite picture showing some of the misinformation about PM Sanna Marin

Tracking the spread of the fake news story

Four months after the Turku event, on 16th December 2019, Austrian news outlet Kontrast picked up the story.

Journalist Patricia Huber quoted Marin as saying that day: “A 4-day week and a 6-hour work day. Why shouldn’t that be our next step? Are eight hours really the last truth? I think people deserve to spend more time with their family, loved ones, hobbies and other aspects of their lives – like culture. That could be the next step in our working life.”

It’s the key quote to follow here, and it matches almost exactly to what Finnish media quoted Marin as saying at the time. So in that sense it’s accurate.

The next time the story crops up is 2nd January 2020, when Brussels-based newspaper New Europe published an article by journalist Zoi Didili whose headline was “Finnish PM Marin calls for 4-day-week and 6-hours working day in the country.”

It gives the impression that this is an initiative announced after Marin became PM with the opening paragraph “Sanna Marin, Finland’s new Prime Minister since early December has called for the introduction of a flexible working schedule in the country that would foresee a 4-day-week and 6-hours working day.”

It gets several things wrong in that one sentence, and while it does reference the SDP’s Turku event, it doesn’t actually quote Marin saying there should be a four-day week, or six-hour days, and frames the whole context as if it’s a new initiative since Marin became PM.

It’s this article which seems to have sparked other stories especially in the British press, who quote Marin’s comments about people deserving to spend more time with their families, but offer no context or timeline for the original information. File image of computer, cyber / Credit: iStock

How should the government respond to fake news?

This is not the most damaging piece of fake news, but the way it’s been picked up, adapted, and crucially not fact-checked by so many otherwise credible media outlets is worrying in an era where people are quick to spread information without verifying its veracity.

“If the misinformation is harmful then you should really attempt to address it as soon as possible. But always consider that the misinformation is likely to travel faster than the truth, so you are looking more at damage limitation rather than anything more effective” says Fergus Bell, CEO of Fathm, a consultancy for the news industry with a specific focus on countering misinformation in media.

“It is useful to have a communications team that know how to spot stories that might be surfacing – this is going to be the quickest way to put out a correction as quickly as possible” he advises.

It’s sound advice, and may have been hindered in Finland by Monday’s public holiday with civil servants and politicians trying to enjoy a day off. But Bell says that countering misinformation might anyway have a limited impact.

“Because of the way misinformation can spread a rebuttal might only fan the flames of the misinformation and give it life. Drawing additional attention to it isn’t going to make it go away any faster.

I mean, if we all collectively, as a species decided we wanted a post-scarcity society where everyone is guaranteed whatever they need to live including food, shelter and healthcare, we could do it with relative ease. We have the infrastructure and technology to reduce work for everyone by a drastic degree, and many people would be freed up to study, develop science and make the system even more efficient.

But we’re not even at the point of a 4-day workweek being acceptable broadly, we’re not that unified species, we’re FAR from it. Baby steps my friend. Baby steps.

I love how it’s always former politicians and officials who come out to advocate for better things in the world.

Like, you had power when you were in office, you could have at least made the effort to broach this with the people so the next elected official with power can keep the cause alive so we eventually get better outcomes. The endorsement of people without political capital has barely a shred of power in the real world chessboard of political give-and-take.

Edit: Did some research, found what I expected, that it never even made it to government and was just “some shit she said” at an event and made a tweet about.

I’m sure all the people on fucking LEMMY are going to see this meme and say “HMNN MAYBE I SHOULD LOOK INTO WHAT THIS KIRK GUY WAS ALL ABOUT” jfc

“Platforming” the way the left uses it generally means “I don’t want to see anything that worries or upsets me so I can stay in this safe-space ideological bubble, and it gives me something to form an intellectual argument about and feel like I’m doing something for our side even if it’s just pointlessly policing what people say or post.”

While I fully agree, I can’t even say that in Lemmy, it’s the “word of peak performatism” that leftists cling to to paint people as “bad” like many other pointless, cringe social battles that don’t lead to outcomes of any kind, much less good outcomes.

We have to stop policing language, we have to stop policing people who have bad attitudes or dumb-pseudo-racism that we all know can be turned around with 10 minutes of conversation if we made the effort. We have to realign our priorities to the life-threatening, existential threats to our lives and futures, like wealth inequality, oligarchy, wage theft and unemployment, education and social safety nets and preparing for climate change. These are not areas that the right has a leg to stand on, nor a real desire to fight broadly, we just get turned off by the small minority who are loudest. We have to stop butting heads with people who do not care about the things we do, thinking if we just “frame the perfect argument” they will suddenly care about other humans. We CAN change people though if we make the effort, if we have a shred of emotional intelligence we’re still a thousand times smarter than them, so it’s wild so many on this side are so afraid to engage. We don’t make the effort to talk to them because too many sensitive tulips on the left perceive insults and schoolyard taunts as “oppression” and use that as an excuse to hide, to stay in safe spaces like this one. (Of course real oppression exists, but we have to get better at identifying what hurts us and what just hurts our feelings, the lack of nuance on both sides is killing us.)

Too many on this side are exactly the same as the right, in that they want vindication and vengeance instead of a better world. They want to see the people they hate suffer, and still are the side who point out “hypocrisy” as a rhetorical weapon. They don’t want to organize coordinated narratives and storylines for dumb people to connect with, they want to police other leftists for using specific words or not being gentle enough with their audiences or pets.

We’re going to end up the most morally superior refugees being herded into the camps by robots.

As the general level of educated/informed people decreases or morphs into whatever the fuck people are becoming now, with attention spans of gnats and more cynicism than wits, we are going to have to embrace this fact of life harder than ever. We have to consolidate messaging, stick to key ideas that average, nihilistic idiots can connect with like class-war/wealth-disparity, and we need to FLOOD online spaces with these kinds of shorts, memes and clips to make points.

There is a joke going around. “How do you know it wasn’t a real leftist who shot Charlie Kirk? Easy, he would have needed several thousand rounds to write his messages on.”

We have to make our messages less wordy and preachy. Nobody cares.

Let me reiterate that. The thing you care about? NOBODY CARES. At least not nearly enough people for it have momentum. If we want people to care, we have to use short, succinct and biting memes and short-form media to spark an emotion, to ignite the briefest glimmer of empathy, sympathy or rage directed at the proper people and forces.

We have to stop sharing our tired, self-indulgent memes, we have to stop trying to “point out hypocrisy” or make people aware of how the product or media they love is “problematic.” Start making fun of Stephen Miller’s height. Start calling them “weird” again. Start making fun of how they look. Start using terms and attacks you find distasteful and disrespectful. Show AI pics of cute children and animals looking sad and abandoned because of Trump’s policies.

Our care and compassion and avoidance of confrontation about these issues, as well as our fear of offending our allies is being used against us, and as a result we will lose everything.