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PsychMike

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Everything posted by PsychMike

  1. My gosh, I've seen some beautiful play designs and execution by the Bearkats. #ColorMeJealous
  2. I love your rationale, but it does have one significant flaw: the selection committee members are old and have poor vision and the only name they could make out on the jersey was SEC, given its huge prominence in juxtaposition to the school name in tiny font. That would've been an open and shut case. Had to be something else.
  3. I don't care about this game, but Duke's Mayo is the shiznit.
  4. Man, the lot of them. So deplorable. And what's going on with the old codger staring at the camera like Blake Gideon at Denny's?
  5. Love to see it https://twitter.com/LonghornNetwork/status/1339245918013427712?s=20
  6. Inside Social Network Parler, Where Free Speech And Hate Speech Co-mingle With conservatives and conspiracy theorists finding their voices stifled online, the events of the 2020 election has turned thousands onto a new social network where you can 'read news and speak free’. In May, Twitter flagged a message from President Donald Trump regarding mail-in ballots with a fact check for the first time. Facebook also began fact checking COVID-19 posts in April. Many users had been requesting stronger fact checking policies on social media platforms. Misinformation had been spreading rapidly and successfully, often due to bad faith perpetrators such as spammers and troll farms. Many far-right users felt this was censorship that stifled free speech and ironically validated many popular conspiracies of corporate interference. As Fox News began to report Trump losses in the election, large sections of their viewership sought out more fringe news sources, such as One America News Network (OAN). Similarly, slighted social media users sought out new niche free speech networks, such as Parler, MeWe, and Rumble. Where Tik Tok exists for Gen-Z and LinkedIn exists for nerds, Parler exists for right-wing conspiracy theorists. Parler (pronounced ‘Pahr – lay’ for the French ‘to speak’) is a social media service that touts itself as a ‘unbiased’ and ‘free speech’ platform. Users from all walks of life may join the platform and espouse their views openly without fear of account suspension or deletion. Users who routinely find themselves in trouble on mainstream social media services are attracted by the lack of censorship. Parler offers a way to avoid ‘Twitter jail’ and ‘getting Zucced,’ colloquial terms for suspensions on Twitter and Facebook respectively. John Matze, Jared Thomson, and Rebekah Mercer first founded Parler in 2018, but the popularity of the service has skyrocketed in the recent months leading up to the 2020 American Presidential Election. The Parler mobile app was the most downloaded free app in the Apple App store following the early November election results. While Mewe generally resembles Facebook and Rumble functions like Youtube, Parler most closely mirrors Twitter. Profiles are followed instead of friends requested. Tweets are called Parleys. Retweets are called echoes. Likes are replaced with upvotes and downvotes. MeWe and Rumble have very strong right-wing presences while also housing more general content. However, Parler blatantly exists for the far-right. Despite being touted as a ‘free-speech’ platform, users support Donald Trump unanimously and repeatedly. A welcome message from @TeamTrump goes to new users, requesting donations to Make America Great again. Everyone knows that Black Lives Matter and Antifa are terrorist organisations. Everyone knows that COVID-19 is a hoax but also that masks are ineffective against it. The more exotic conspiracies, such as 5G towers and QAnon, take a backseat to the political ones. Most popularly, everyone knows the 2020 election was stolen. The engagement algorithms in sites like Facebook and Youtube drive users to find more content that meets their interests. Mostly, that means a Taylor Swift fan might also see a Selena Gomez video, but it also meant that flat-Earthers might see proof that the New World Order is run by lizard people. Users can be drawn down a rabbit hole of related content, until their suggestions are filled with gradually more radicalized content. Watch one cooking video and you’ll be binging Gordon Ramsay clips by the end of the week. Far-right rhetoric and conspiracies thrived in the dark corners of mainstream social media. Except for adult content and extreme violence, users provided valuable content to each other and drove this engagement. Controversial posts are good for business – a share is a share regardless of love or hate. Their numbers have grown enough in the mainstream networks that they can now be viable as they splinter off. Parler serves as a perfect echo chamber for these conspiracies to take hold. Sure, it’s great you’re your crazy uncle stopped posting nonsense, so that we can all go back to recipes and pictures of babies, but now left on their own, these concepts and their followers can metastasize into something new and probably worse.
  7. A smokin' hot British actress/model who used to be summoned on the $9.95 Board back when Texas Recruiting was fun?
  8. Hey everyone, FYI, here's the link to the FDA Briefing document for the upcoming Advisory Committee meeting on the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine. This will be the deepest look at the data available for awhile. (I haven't read it yet but wanted everyone to know it's available) https://www.fda.gov/media/144245/download
  9. Yes! Well, at least that's what I was told at the time, though it may have been Urban Legend (aw shit, prolly shouldn't use the term on this thread). Pretty sure they had a maximum limit of 2 per person. I can vouch for how potent they were.
  10. Yeah, it was surreal reading something from him that didn't contain, "I am told." He hasn't been told shit. This is so on brand for 2020.
  11. Gotta get this to 1000 pages by UMSD.
  12. "You're an All-American and our Captain. Act like it." "I believe I am."
  13. Meidas Touch added a UT student to its staff? Ok, cool.
  14. Hey that's great, I'm really happy for you. Oh wait, I thought she was bludgeoned to death by a guy with a prosthetic arm.
  15. PSA: seeing the Blackstone 36" for $283.99 ON Amazon. (15 minutes remains on the timer)
  16. Funny that you mention that, because yesterday when I heard about him going there, I did exactly that, and came up with this on the spot: The Devil went down to Georgia He was looking for an election to steal He was in a bind because he was way behind And he was known for making deals. Well, that's as far as I went with it. Wife enjoyed it, then we proceeded with the tree trimming.
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