Kulturkampf

[benji]

"Shut down, no, but censored into oblivion, yes, and we are seeing it happen right now while tons of liberals and leftists cheer"

She forgets she wrote this:

How the Biden administration let right-wing attacks derail its disinformation efforts
A ‘pause’ of the Department of Homeland Security’s newly created board comes after its head, Nina Jankowicz, was the victim of coordinated online attacks as the administration struggled to respond

...

But within hours of news of her appointment, Jankowicz was thrust into the spotlight by the very forces she dedicated her career to combating. The board itself and DHS received criticism for both its somewhat ominous name and scant details of specific mission (Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said it “could have done a better job of communicating what it is and what it isn’t”), but Jankowicz was on the receiving end of the harshest attacks, with her role mischaracterized as she became a primary target on the right-wing Internet. She has been subject to an unrelenting barrage of harassment and abuse while unchecked misrepresentations of her work continue to go viral.

...

Jankowicz’s experience is a prime example of how the right-wing Internet apparatus operates, where far-right influencers attempt to identify a target, present a narrative and then repeat mischaracterizations across social media and websites with the aim of discrediting and attacking anyone who seeks to challenge them. It also shows what happens when institutions, when confronted with these attacks, don’t respond effectively.

Those familiar with the board’s inner workings, including DHS employees and Capitol Hill staffers, along with experts on disinformation, say Jankowicz was set up to fail by an administration that was unsure of its messaging and unprepared to counteract a coordinated online campaign against her.


...

A forceful defense of Jankowicz was noticeably absent online, where the attacks against her were concentrated. White House press secretary Jen Psaki debunked false claims about the board during two news briefings and touted Jankowicz as “an expert on online disinformation,” but it had little effect on the growing campaign against her.

“These smears leveled by bad-faith, right-wing actors against a deeply qualified expert and against efforts to better combat human smuggling and domestic terrorism are disgusting,” deputy White House press secretary Andrew Bates told The Post on Tuesday.

[HaughtyFrank]

a statue that represents a dream? is that legal?

There has been a bit of a trend of "average statues" because idealization is bad i guess

[HeavenIsAPlaceOnEarth]

a statue that represents a dream? is that legal?

There has been a bit of a trend of "average statues" because idealization is bad i guess

"Make it look like she doesn't give a shit about anything, including the way she dresses".

[Potato]

Well done The Guardian. Blame the woman for starting the culture war for the crime of staring in an ad with a clever pun.

[Potato]

Did this whinging cow ever stop to consider if HE also might have chosen the bear over listening to her complain constantly?

[benji]

"then I said that it wasn't about the bear, but rather our perception of men"

He knows, that's what his two questions were about. He mistakenly assumed you were bringing it up honestly, as you subsequently proved not to be.

[Alpacx]

Some random Harry Potter Codenames stuff I found on Blue sky

The Dice Tower is the biggest board game YouTube channel. Run by a guy who's a quiverfull

[HeavenIsAPlaceOnEarth]

"then I said that it wasn't about the bear, but rather our perception of men"

He knows, that's what his two questions were about. He mistakenly assumed you were bringing it up honestly, as you subsequently proved not to be.

I guess that's one way to find out your boyfriend is autistic.

[HeavenIsAPlaceOnEarth]

How can people like things I don't like!?

Don't they know that's literal genocide!?

[benji]

Got me to notice there were two replies, so I clicked through:


Can't believe someone would like one of the most popular and influential franchises of the last three decades, hopefully this is just a rumor.

[benji]

[Mask]

a statue that represents a dream? is that legal?

There has been a bit of a trend of "average statues" because idealization is bad i guess

That statue and others like it remind me of that "Aunt Jemina" syrup logo...

[Alpacx]

a statue that represents a dream? is that legal?

There has been a bit of a trend of "average statues" because idealization is bad i guess

That statue and others like it remind me of that "Aunt Jemina" syrup logo...

Dats racist 

[simiansmarts]

Texans have been calling Greg Abbott “governor hot wheels” for YEARS. This is nothing.

[Alpacx]

[Nintex]

[simiansmarts]

none of these influencers are serious or real people, they're literally trampling over each other to get their epic owns in. two gay retards fighting etc, etc.
 

[Alpacx]

none of these influencers are serious or real people, they're literally trampling over each other to get their epic owns in. two gay retards fighting etc, etc.
 

In the interests of bipartisanship (I laugh at a lot of left-wing idiots): Let them fight.


Edit:

https://bsky.app/profile/iklepink.bsky.social/post/3lvoxlql4wc2t

[malfoyking]

These people would really completely erase it from existence if they could. That type of hate for a fictional property that they can just ignore is something else. You'd think the IP itself personally murdered someone they love. 

They spend too much time getting riled up about it.

[DavidCroquet]

Coffee Mate®️ is next against the wall!

[Nintex]

I'm quite fond of the MAGA hoes.

What even is the platform, fuck if anyone knew  



Who knows the big man might chip in. It has come to my attention that the "ladies" ...

[Potato]

Imagine how broken they're going to be when the TV show premieres and the merchandising really kicks into gear. 

Shit is going to be fucking WILD!

[simiansmarts]

Imagine how broken they're going to be when the TV show premieres and the merchandising really kicks into gear. 

Shit is going to be fucking WILD!

God forbid the HBO show is a megahit just like Hogwarts Legacy and reignites the whole franchise. 
 

[HaughtyFrank]

Struggle session but woke

[Uncle]

I don't know where to post this, Australia bans youtube, lol

https://www.techdirt.com/2025/08/06/australia-completely-loses-the-plot-plans-to-ban-kids-from-watching-youtube/

Last fall, heavily influenced by Jonathan Haidt’s extremely problematic book, Australia announced that it was banning social media for everyone under the age of 16. This was already a horrifically stupid idea—the kind of policy that sounds reasonable in a tabloid headline but crumbles under any serious scrutiny. Over and over again studies have found that social media is neither good nor bad for most teens. It’s also good for some—especially those who are in need of finding community or like-minded individuals. It is, also, not so great for a small group of kids, though the evidence there suggests that it’s worst for those dealing with untreated mental health issues, which causes them to use social media as an alternative to help.

There remains little to no actual evidence that an outright ban will be helpful, and plenty to suggest it will be actively harmful to many.

But now Australia has decided to double down on the stupid, announcing that YouTube will be included in the ban. This escalation reveals just how disconnected from reality this entire policy framework has become. We’ve gone from “maybe we should protect kids from social media” to “let’s ban children from accessing one of the world’s largest repositories of educational content.”

Australia said on Wednesday it will add YouTube to sites covered by its world-first ban on social media for teenagers, reversing an earlier decision to exempt the Alphabet-owned video-sharing site and potentially setting up a legal challenge.

The decision came after the internet regulator urged the government last week to overturn the YouTube carve-out, citing a survey that found 37% of minors reported harmful content on the site.

This is painfully stupid and ignorant. The claim that 37% of minors reported seeing harmful content is also… meaningless without a lot more context and details. What counts as “harmful”? A swear word? Political content their parents disagree with? A video explaining evolution? What was the impact? Is this entirely self-reported? What controls were there? Just saying 37% is kind of meaningless without the details.

This is vibes-based policymaking dressed up in statistics. You could probably get 37% of kids to report “harmful content” on PBS Kids if you asked them vaguely enough. The fact that Australia’s internet regulator is using this kind of methodological garbage to reshape internet policy tells you everything you need to know about how seriously they’ve thought this through.

But also, YouTube is not just effectively the equivalent of television for teens today—it’s often far superior to traditional television because it’s not gatekept by media conglomerates with their own agendas. The idea that you should need to be 16 years old to watch some YouTube programs is beyond laughable, especially given the amount of useful educational content on YouTube. These days there are things like Complexly, Khan Academy, Mark Rober, and plenty of other educational content that kids love and which lives on YouTube. Kids are learning calculus from 3Blue1Brown, exploring history through Crash Course, and getting better science education from YouTube creators than from most traditional textbooks. This isn’t just entertainment—it’s democratized education that bypasses the gatekeeping of traditional media entirely.

This isn’t just unworkable—it’s the construction of a massive censorship infrastructure that will inevitably be used for purposes far beyond “protecting children.” Once you’ve built the system to block kids from YouTube, you’ve built the system to block anyone from anything. And that system will be irresistible to future governments with different ideas about what content people need to be “protected” from.

And the Australian government already knows that age verification tech is a privacy and security nightmare. They admitted as much two years ago.

Of course, kids will figure out ways around it anyway. VPNs exist. Older friends exist. Parents who aren’t idiots exist—and they’ll help their kids break this law. The only thing this accomplishes is teaching an entire generation that their government’s laws are arbitrary, unenforceable, and fundamentally disconnected from reality. It’s teaching kids to have less respect for government.

This isn’t happening in a vacuum, either. Australia is part of a broader global trend of governments using “protect the children” rhetoric as cover for internet control. The UK’s porn age verification disaster, the US Kids Online Safety Act, similar proposals across Europe—they all follow the same playbook. Identify a genuine concern (kids sometimes see stuff online that isn’t great for them), propose a solution that sounds reasonable in a headline (age limits!), then implement it through surveillance and censorship infrastructure that can be repurposed for whatever moral panic comes next.

The end result will be that Australia has basically taught a generation of teenagers not to trust the government, that their internet regulators are completely out of touch, and that laws are stupid. But it goes deeper than that. This kind of blatantly unworkable policy doesn’t just breed contempt for specific laws—it undermines the entire concept of legitimate governance. When laws are this obviously disconnected from technological and social reality, it signals that the people making them either don’t understand what they’re regulating or don’t care about whether their policies actually work. It’s difficult to see how that benefits anyone at all.

[Uncle]

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/clanker-cogsucker-robot-ai-slurs-viral-1235401262/

How ‘Clanker’ Became the Internet’s New Favorite Slur

New derogatory phrases are popping up online, thanks to a cultural pushback against AI

By CT Jones

August 6, 2025

Clanker. Wireback. Cogsucker. People are feeling the inescapable inevitability of AI developments, the encroaching of the digital into everything from entertainment to work. And their answer? Slurs.

AI is everywhere — on Google summarizing search results and siphoning web traffic from digital publishers, on social media platforms like Instagram, X, and Facebook, adding misleading context to viral posts, or even powering Nazi chatbots. Generative AI and large language models (LLM) — AI trained on huge datasets — are being used as therapists, consulted for medical advice, fueling spiritual psychosis, directing self-driving cars, and churning out everything from college essays to cover letters to breakup messages.

Alongside this deluge is a growing sense of discontent from people fearful of artificial intelligence stealing their jobs, and worried what effect it may have on future generations — losing important skills like media literacy, problem solving, and cognitive function. This is the world where the popularity of AI and robot slurs has skyrocketed, being thrown at everything from ChatGPT servers to delivery drones to automated customer service representatives. Rolling Stone spoke with two language experts who say the rise in robot and AI slurs does come from a kind of cultural pushback against AI development, but what’s most interesting about the trend is that it uses one of the only tools AI can’t create: slang.

“Slang is moving so fast now that an LLM trained on everything that happened before it is not going to have immediate access to how people are using a particular word now,” says Nicole Holliday, associate professor of linguistics at UC Berkeley. “Humans [on] Urban Dictionary are always going to win.”

Clanker, the most popular of the current AI slurs, was first used in the 2005 Star Wars first-person shooter video game Republic Commando, according to Know Your Meme. But it was introduced to most audiences in a 2008 episode of the animated series Star Wars: The Clone Wars as a retort from a Jedi fighting a horde of battle droids. “OK, clankers,” the Jedi said. “Eat lasers.” According to Adam Aleksic, the creator of the TikTok page Etymology Nerd and author of the 2025 book Algospeak, the meme first gained popularity on the r/Prequelmemes subreddit, a Star Wars fan community. Star Wars isn’t the only science-fiction offering that had its characters say derogatory things to their robot counterparts. In Battlestar Galactica, people referred to the sentient robots, Cylons, as “toasters” or “chrome jobs.” Both Aleksic and Holliday note that the way slurs work — in these stories and in real life — is by carrying an assumed power structure along with them.

“Slurs are othering. Usually, the things that we end up considering to be slurs or epithets are from a majority group with power against a minority group,” says Holliday. “So when people use these terms, they’re in some ways doing so as a self-protective measure, and we tolerate that more because humans are [perceived as] the minority group. And punching up is always more socially acceptable than punching down.”

But there’s also a problem with using slurs as a way to fight back against AI encroachment, these experts say, as the words can actually reinforce the belief that AI is becoming more human. “It’s drawing on historical ways that slurs have dehumanized others,” Aleksic tells Rolling Stone. “Something requires a degree of anthropomorphization, of personification, for a slur to work.”

The easiest place to see the humanization and dehumanization of slurs is in POV videos that imagine situations where robot slurs like clanker, wireback, and tin-skinned aren’t used to cheekily fight back against chatbots, but against AI individuals that have some kind of place in a fictional future society — a Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner for the robot age. Many creators post skits where the robot slurs are spoken while a robot is applying for a job, or meeting their human partner’s parents for a holiday.

As robot slurs continue to have their viral moment, there’s been a rise in concerned internet users who feel like the trend is just a convoluted way for people to get close to saying real-life slurs. They’re not wrong — it’s how they got started on the Star Wars subreddit. “The way clanker was used was a clear analogy to the n-word,” Aleksic says. “There’d be a photo of a droid giving you the c-word pass or one captioned ‘What’s up my Clanka?’ with an ‘a.’” Aleksic thinks many of the robot slurs are popular because they inspire such mixed reactions. Algorithms reward strong feelings, and clanker content has the added benefit of grabbing people who don’t like AI, people who want to be edgy online, and people who are afraid of being the “woke” friend all at the same time. Unfortunately, even if the robot-slur trend died tomorrow, whatever took its place would most likely be equally rooted in shocking and controversial language.

While it’s hard to tell how much longevity these slurs will have, or how much of the trend’s popularity comes from anti-AI sentiment or the algorithmic appeal of buzzwords, the linguists who spoke to Rolling Stone say this fits into the natural way human language evolves. People adapt words because of how using them makes them feel — and words change based on the context of other words being used around them. “In the case of clanker, it’s seen as funny or cool to be counter-cultural to AI. African American English spread into the mainstream because it was perceived as cool from the outside. It was sociologically prestigious,” Aleksic says. “But if you look at how algorithms change these words, it’s kind of an exaggerated picture of what humans are doing with this medium.”

Though AI platforms have begun to recognize clanker as a slur, Holliday noted that both ChatGPT and Google AI did not recognize “wireback,” instead saying the word wasn’t recognized or possibly misspelled. For Holliday, this is one of the fundamental reasons why she believes changes in language and slang will remain the place where AI is always a step behind.

“Large language models, AI, it’s a flattening of meaning. Because we as humans co-create the meaning of a particular utterance in a context,” she says. “So AI has got a lot of context that it’s trained on, but it can’t tell you what this person meant in that conversation, because it doesn’t have the information that you have about previous interactions with that person, about the way that the word has changed in the last two weeks. That’s where humans will always have the edge.”

  
   

astroturfed and now legitimized by breathless articles

stop trying to make "fetch" happen

[Potato]

This YouTube ban is what happens when the nominally centre right party completely implodes because it decided to put a fucking super conservative idiot up for PM after years of pushing moderate voices out of the parliament.

We're left with a moron leftist PM in charge of a huge parliamentary majority and no opposition to speak of. 

Nothing will change any time soon because the Liberals are a fucking joke and the Nationals continue head first into kookytown.

[HardcoreRetro]

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/clanker-cogsucker-robot-ai-slurs-viral-1235401262/

  
   

astroturfed and now legitimized by breathless articles

stop trying to make "fetch" happen

[simiansmarts]

[DavidCroquet]

clanker lol…Australia is unfortunately correct. Ban the internet and kill anyone who has ever used it, including me.