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#conservatives kill Americans
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queerism1969 · 9 months
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anghraine · 1 year
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It's always weird and frustrating when people are like "oh, you only hold X opinion because you're from a blue state and don't understand life in rural, conservative areas."
Because it's like:
a) People who go on about this tend to have about as much consideration for the lived experiences of people living in blue states as they assume all the coastal elites etc have for them.
b) In fact, many of us who are queer blue state progressives are very familiar with conservative rural areas even without leaving our own states, because those areas exist here, too! The whole "I went from NYC to a diner in West Virginia to connect with conservatives Real America" thing is stupid as fuck for many reasons, but one of them is because you'll get the same response just by going to a different part of New York State. I spent years living in Trump country less than 30 mi from (sapphire blue) Portland, OR.
Yes, living in a conservative rural area of a blue state is different (esp when the governor is backed by legislative support) from those areas in red states. But they aren't completely different by any means, and a lot of us who have strong preference for places like Portland do so because of our experiences in GOP-dominated regions of our states, sometimes specifically because we are from those areas, not because we don't know anything about living in them.
c) I know it's hard to imagine, but sometimes people who disagree with you are ... not from the USA.
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athena5898 · 4 months
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I swear to god, I understand now why various political ideologies get sick and tired of "leftist" now.
If I see one more person call neo liberalism "leftist" I'm going to scream.
I beg of some of you to please do some research, especially on intersectionality!
I'm happy that a lot of you want better policies but "minimum wage should increase and healthcare should be free" is some pretty milquetoast shit tbh. Yall are going to keep getting taken advantage of, including people "on the left" if you don't figure some shit out, kill the cop/oppressor in your head, and disentangle yourself from empires.
Let these events radicalize you, but don't let yourself become ignorant.
Just please at least look into intersectionality and kyriarchy.
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rotzaprachim · 1 year
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a wild flavor of tumblr user is a certain kind of white American self id’d leftist or commie who reblogs and posts things about I just think all liberals and centrists should DIE (*guillotine* meme) and then posts things needing to be nicer to demographics that vote 80% Republican and are very systemically involved in the structural and practical oppression of people of color and the whole US hegemony like brooo I get having a seriously messy relationship with your own cultural background but who are you talking about? Guillotining everyone at mawmaw’s thanksgiving?
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Spn fans stop missing the point challenge (Very hard)(Impossible)
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captainderyn · 1 year
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Little mini grumbling because this has been all over several different social media websites but…people know that once something has a content warning/rating it’s their responsibility to either engage with it or not right??
Like..the world isn’t just gonna scrub itself of something you don’t like or want to see?? Is that a new concept now?
It’s so easy to just look at something, go, “nah not for me” and move on. Just because you don’t want to engage with it doesn’t make it a degenerate piece of media/literature/whatever that needs to never exist ever.
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cinnabargirl · 6 months
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Its crazy how much the adage "a lot of you would have gone crazy about WMDs un 2003" holds up time and time again
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pricklypear1997 · 1 year
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Fuck Andrew Tate. Someone should just rip off his dick already. Sex trafficker, pimp, woman beater piece of shit, who goes to the Balkans to traffic women. And fuck the people who are supporting him or blabbering about “due process” and “his day in court”. None of y’all gave a shit when epsteinshit was accused, but nah, you agree with Tateshit’s wife beater mentality, because y’all are stupid misogynistic hypocrites. Stupid “libertarians” more like “libretardians” “muh guns, “muh rights” blah blah blah. Shut the fuck up. The double standards are stupid as fuck. Stupid fucking neckbeards and shit.
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whereserpentswalk · 24 days
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The nazis that you see in movies are as much a historical fantasy as vikings with horned helmets and samurai cutting people in half.
The nazis were not some vague evil that wanted to hurt people for the sake of hurting them. They had specific goals which furthered a far right agenda, and they wanted to do harm to very specific groups, (largely slavs, jews, Romani, queer people, communists/leftists, and disabled people.)
The nazis didn't use soldiers in creepy gas masks as their main imagery that they sold to the german people, they used blond haired blue eyed families. Nor did they stand up on podiums saying that would wage an endless and brutal war, they gave speeches about protecting white Christian society from degenerates just like how conservatives do today.
Nazis weren't atheists or pagans. They were deeply Christian and Christianity was part of their ideology just like it is for modern conservatives. They spoke at lengths about defending their Christian nation from godless leftism. The ones who hated the catholic church hated it for protestant reasons. Nazi occultism was fringe within the party and never expected to become mainstream, and those occultists were still Christian, none of them ever claimed to be Satanists or Asatru.
Nazis were also not queer or disabled. They killed those groups, before they had a chance to kill almost anyone else actually. Despite the amount of disabled nazis or queer/queer coded nazis you'll see in movies and on TV, in reality they were very cishet and very able bodied. There was one high ranking nazi early on who was gay and the other nazis killed him for that. Saying the nazis were gay or disabled makes about as much sense as saying they were Jewish.
The nazis weren't mentally ill. As previously mentioned they hated disabled people, and this unquestionably included anyone neurodivergent. When the surviving nazi war criminals were given psychological tests after the war, they were shown to be some of the most neurotypical people out there.
The nazis weren't socialists. Full stop. They hated socialists. They got elected on hating socialists. They killed socialists. Hating all forms of lefitsm was a big part of their ideology, and especially a big part of how they sold themselves.
The nazis were not the supervillians you see on screen, not because they didn't do horrible things in real life, they most certainly did, but because they weren't that vague apolitical evil that exists for white American action heros to fight. They did horrible things because they had a right wing authoritarian political ideology, an ideology that is fundamentally the same as what most of the modern right wing believes.
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boy-girl-ism · 2 months
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i can’t stop thinking about nex benedict
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bli-o · 2 months
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ha ha americans are so [symptom of poor standard of living] we’re so much more [quality only made widely accessible by well-funded public services] in [Western European country]
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donnedulac · 4 months
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Wrote an entire rant on how frustrating I find ayahuasca discourse by Americans as a Brazilian (since we, you know, actually take daime quite frequently for religious/ generally spiritual reasons). Thought no one needed to read that in the notes of a random post tho, so took a deep breath and serenely deleted all ‘a that shit
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snekdood · 6 months
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idk who needs to hear this but its okay to hate ppl. its ok to distrust ppl. no, obviously, you shouldn't do anything stupid and hurt someone. no, obviously, you shouldn't lock yourself away forever. but I don't think most ppl who feel these kinds of ways actually want to do that and are more or less just frustrated and trying to express that emotion. I think suppressing it is worse.
dont let tumblr people make you feel like a shitty person just because you want to feel your emotions.
#mood#reminder#hey you- you asshole who tells ppl they're bad for this- how about instead of being like#omigosh that totally means u want to kill ppl and#genocide ppl and im gonna make a million jumps to say it means u wanna kill minorities specifically#consider: how about you actually ponder#*why* someone might say something like that- or more accurately- feel like that.#because i can bet that it's not because they really really hate minorities.#most of the people i see who say “i hate people” are fucking emo n goth kids ok i really dont think they're thinking about specific#minorities you fuck im p sure theyre just frustrated w people around them.#wow tumblr fucked up these tags a lot#why cant this website decide if its gonna let me use quotation marks in the tags or not fuck#when im venting saying 'i hate the world and everyone blehhh' im not also thinking in my mind 'ah yes and also i am specifically targeting#native americans when i say this' like dfhjvsvdfghv#considering i live in missouri and theres unfortunately barely any native people around here im p sure they're not the first fuckin ppl#my mind jumps to. probably goes to idk. people who've abused or traumatized me? authority figures? ppl who make shit rly inconvenient?#bullies? conservatives? people who make life worse as their job??? like#p sure its not about you or whatever group of ppl you gotta pretend i hate so badly#if YOU feel attacked then hey maybe stop treating me like shit lmao and i wont feel this way#bc i only ever feel this way when im bein treated like shit 🤷
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placedupon · 10 months
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I think a lot of people don't realize that when they are reblogging or making posts about how "evil" China is, they are helping to manufacture consent for the US to go to war with China.
many people already have sinophobic beliefs that they didn't have 5-10 years ago, because here in the US (and the west in general) we are constantly inundated with propaganda about how china is aggressing the US and other countries, how they're spying on us, how oppressive the Chinese gov is. Every single western newspaper, news channel, many of our books and movies are sinophobic. And it's not just conservatives that believe this, it is also leftists and liberals.
I notice many so called leftists on this website reblogging the most ridiculously sinophobic posts with no sources. I think they justify it because many of these posts are made by diaspora asians-- but that doesn't actually make individual people reliable or neutral sources. It is well known in the Asian american community that many of us are very conservative, hold anti-communist and anti-Black beliefs because we too are surrounded by white supremacy. Many diaspora Asians in america came here because their families were wealthy or collaborated with Japanese, American or British colonizers. I'm not saying that every asian person who posts negative things about China is like this-- but obviously, this is a very complicated issue, and the "answers" isn't as simple as finding one asian person or asian organization to explain these issues to you. It's unlearning decades of anti-communist and racist propaganda.
Remember, this pattern has happened before. The US has flooded it's people with propaganda about how evil Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, and many other countries are. As US americans, it truly doesn't matter your individual purposes-- when you post negative things about China, you are adding to the thousands of sources telling the west that it is ok to hate an entire country. And the consequences for this are incredibly dire-- just talk to Chinese people who remember the civil war, who remember the west pumping opium into our communities and selling bombs to the ROC to kill its own people. Read books like Assata Shakurs auto-biography, Mobo Gao, Han Suyin, and Frantz Fanon. The US wants you to hate China and Chinese people to justify it's own imperialist project.
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“Brand safety” killed Jezebel
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I'll be at the Studio City branch of the LA Public Library this Monday, November 13 at 1830hPT to launch my new novel, The Lost Cause. There'll be a reading, a talk, a surprise guest (!!) and a signing, with books on sale. Tell your friends! Come on down!
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Progressives: if you want to lose to conservatives, all you need to do is reflexively praise and support everything conservatives turn into a culture-war issue, without considering whether they might be right. Because sometimes…they're right.
Remember early in the Trump presidency, when conservatives all woke up and discovered that America's spy agencies – excuse me, "the intelligence community" – were dirty-tricking psychos who run amok, lawlessly sabotaging democracy? Progressives have been shouting this ever since Hoover's FBI tried to blackmail MLK into killing himself:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI%E2%80%93King_suicide_letter
But millions of progressives forgot about COINTELPRO, CIA dirty tricks and CIA mass spying when this "intelligence community" temporarily set out to wrong-foot Trump. Remember James Comey votive candles?
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/08/30/james-comey-fbi-memo-leaks-trump-inspector-general-report-column/2157705001/
Anthropologists have a name for this phenomenon, in which one side reverses its positions because their sworn enemies have done so. It's called schizmogenesis, and it goes like this: "If they hate it, we love it":
https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/18/schizmogenesis/
Schizmogenesis is an equal-opportunity delusion. Within living memory, white evangelicals supported abortion, because their sworn enemies – Catholics – opposed it. Some of those white Boomer women who voted Trump because abortion was literally the only issue they cared about held the opposite position on abortion not so long ago – and completely forgot about it:
https://text.npr.org/734303135
The main purpose of the culture war isn't immiserating marginalized people – that's its effect, but its purpose is to distract low-information turkeys (working people) so they'll vote for Christmas (the ongoing seizure of power by American oligarchs). For the funders of conservative movement politics, the cruelty isn't the point, it's merely the tactic. The point is power:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/09/turkeys-voting-for-christmas/#culture-wars
Which brings me to "woke capitalism." Conservative string-pullers have whipped up their base about the threat of companies embracing social causes. They (erroneously) claim that corporations have progressive values, and that big business is thumbing the scales for causes they despise. The purpose here isn't to sow distrust of capitalism per se. Rather, it's to stampede talk-radio-addled supporters into backing the oligarchy's agenda. Remember when culture war leaders told their base to support being gouged on credit-card junk fees "to own the libs?"
https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/04/owning-the-libs/#swiper-no-swiping
That's schizmogenesis working against the conservative rank-and-file, tricking them into taking the side of a cartel of wildly profitable payment processors who are making billions by picking their pockets (credit card fees are up 40% since the covid lockdowns), because (checks notes), Target pays these profiteers a lot to process its payments, and Target sells Pride merch (no, really):
https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/04/owning-the-libs/#swiper-no-swiping
It's easy to point and laugh at conservative dopes when they're tricked into shooting themselves in the balls to own the libs. This is not a hypothetical example:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/28/holographic-nano-layer-catalyser/#musketfuckers
But progressives do it, too, particularly when they embrace monopolies as a force for positive social change. Remember 2019, when people got excited about playing loud pop music at Nazi rallies in the hopes that the monopoly video platforms' copyright filters would make any video from that rally impossible to post?
https://memex.craphound.com/2019/07/23/clever-hack-that-will-end-badly-playing-copyrighted-music-during-nazis-rallies-so-they-cant-be-posted-to-youtube/
I warned then that if this tactic worked, it would be used by cops to prevent you from recording them when they're macing you or splitting your skull with a billyclub, and yup, within a couple years, cops were blaring Taylor Swift music in hopes of preventing the public from posting videos of their illegal conduct:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/07/moral-hazard-of-filternets/#dmas
Conservatives are (partially) right about woke capitalism. It is a threat to democracy. Concentrating the power to decide who gets to speak and what they get to say into the hands of five or six corporations, mostly run by mediocre billionaires, is bad for society. The moderation decisions of giant platforms are a form of (commercial) censorship, even these don't violate the First Amendment:
https://locusmag.com/2020/01/cory-doctorow-inaction-is-a-form-of-action/
(The progressive delusion that censorship only occurs when the First Amendment is violated is a wild own-goal, one that excuses, for example, the decision by school book-fair monopolist Scholastic to remove books about queers and Black and brown people from its offerings as a purely private matter without consequences for free speech):
https://www.themarysue.com/scholastic-response-to-authors-and-illustrators-on-diverse-books/
Conservatives are only partially right about woke capitalism, though. Here's what they're wrong about: corporations don't have values. Target isn't selling Pride tees because they support progressive causes, they're selling them because it seems like a good way to increase returns to their shareholders. Individuals – even top executives – at Target might endorse the cause, but the company will only durably support the cause if that endorsement is profitable, which means that when it stops being profitable, the company will stop supporting the cause:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/23/business/target-lgbtq-merchandise/index.html
The idea that corporations have values isn't merely stupid, it's very dangerous. The Hobby Lobby decision – which allows corporations to deny basic health-care expenses for women on the basis that a Bronze Age mystic wouldn't approve of an IUD – rests on the ideological foundation that corporate personhood includes corporate values:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burwell_v._Hobby_Lobby_Stores,_Inc.
Citizens United – the idea that corporations should be allowed to funnel unlimited funds to politicians who'll sell out the public good in favor of investor profits – also depends on a form of corporate personhood that includes values:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC
There are undeniably instances in which corporate monopoly power benefits progressive causes, but these are side-effects of corporate power's main purpose, namely: taking money and power away from working people and giving it to rich people. That is what monopoly power is for.
Which brings me to ad-tech, "brand safety," and the demise of Jezebel, the 16 year old feminist website whose shuttering was just announced by its latest owner, G/O Media:
https://www.metafilter.com/201349/This-is-the-end-of-Jezebel-and-that-feels-really-really-bad
Jezebel's demise is the direct result of monopoly power. Jezebel writes about current affairs – sex, politics, abortion, and other important issues of great moment and significance. When we talk about journalism as a public good, necessary for a healthy civic life, this is what we mean. But unfortunately for Jezebel – and any other news outlet covering current events – there are vast, invisible forces that exist solely to starve this kind of coverage of advertising revenue.
Writing for the independent news site 404 Media, reporter Emanuel Maiberg and former Motherboard editor-in-chief Jason Koebler go deep on the "brand safety" industry, whose mission is to assist corporations in blocking their ads from showing up alongside real news:
https://www.404media.co/advertisers-dont-want-sites-like-jezebel-to-exist/
Maiberg and Koebler explain how industry associations like the World Federation of Marketers' Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) promulgate "frameworks" to help advertisers automatically detect and exclude real news from consideration when their ads are placed:
https://www.peer39.com/blog/garm-standards
This boycott makes use of scammy "AI" technology like "sentiment and emotional analysis" to determine whether an article is suitable for monetization. These parameters are then fed to the ad-tech duopoly's ad auction system, so Google and Meta (who control the vast majority of online advertising) can ensure that real news is starved of cash.
But reality is not brand-safe, and high quality, reputable journalistic outlets are concerned with reality, which means that the "brand safe" outlets that attract the most revenue are garbage websites that haven't yet been blacklisted by the ad-safety cartel, leading to major brands' ads showing up alongside notorious internet gross-out images like "goatse":
https://www.404media.co/sqword-game-dev-sneaks-goatse-onto-a-dozen-sites-that-stole-his-game/
More than a fifth of "brand safe" ad placements end up on "made for advertising" sites, which 404 Media describe as "trash websites that plagiarize content, are literally spam, pay for fake traffic, or are autogenerated websites that serve no other purpose than capturing ad dollars":
https://www.ana.net/miccontent/show/id/rr-2023-06-ana-programmatic-transparency-first-look
Despite all this, many progressives have become cheerleaders for "brand safety," as a countervailing force to the drawdown of trust and safety at online platforms, which led to the re-platforming of Nazis, QAnon conspiratorialists, TERFs, and other overt elements of the reactionary movement's vanguard on Twitter and Facebook. Articles about ads for major brands showing up alongside Nazi content on Twitter are now a staple of progressive reporting, presented as evidence of Elon Musk's lack of business acumen. The message of these stories is "Musk is bad at business because he's allowing Nazis on his platform, which will send advertisers bolting for the exits to avoid brand-safety crises."
This isn't wrong. Musk is a bad businessman (he's a good scam artist, though). Twitter is hemorrhaging advertisers, notwithstanding the desperate (and easily debunked) stats-juking its "CEO," Linda Yaccarino, floats onstage at tech conferences:
https://www.techdirt.com/2023/10/11/math-problem-for-linda-yaccarino-if-90-of-the-top-advertisers-have-come-back-but-are-only-spending-10-of-what-they-used-to-how-screwed-are-you/
But progressives are out of their minds if they think the primary effect of the brand safety industry is punishing Elon Musk for secretly loving Nazis. The primary effect of brand safety is killing reality-based coverage of the news of the day, and since reality has a well-known anti-conservative bias, anything that works against the reality-based community is ultimately good for oligarchy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community
We can't afford to let schizmogenesis stampede us into loving things just because conservative culture warriors have been momentarily tricked into hating them as part of oligarchs' turkeys-voting-for-Christmas project. "Swivel-eyed loons hate it, so it must be good," is a worse-than-useless heuristic for navigating complex issues:
https://locusmag.com/2023/05/commentary-cory-doctorow-the-swivel-eyed-loons-have-a-point/
A much better rule of thumb is "If oligarchs love something, it's probably bad." Almost without exception, things that are good for oligarchs are bad for the rest of us. I mean, this whole shuttering of Jezebel starts with an oligarch imposing his will on millions of other people. Jezebel began life as a Gawker Media site, beloved of millions of readers, destroyed when FBI informant Peter Thiel secretly funded Hulk Hogan's lawsuit against the publisher in a successful bid to put them out of business to retaliate for their unfavorable coverage of Thiel:
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/02/hogan-thiel-gawker-trial/554132/
This, in turn, put Jezebel under the ownership of G/O Media, who are unwilling to pay for a human salesforce that would – for example – sell advertising space on Jezebel to sex-toy companies or pro-abortion groups. G/O has been on a killing spree, shuttering beloved news outlets like Deadspin:
https://deadspin.com/this-is-how-things-work-now-at-g-o-media-1836908201
G/O's top exec, an oligarch named Jim Spanfeller who answers to the private equity looters at Great Hill Partners, is bent on ending reality-based coverage in favor of "letting robots shit out brand safe AI-assisted articles about generic topics":
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/ai-articles-disinformation-future-g-o-media-rcna95944
Three quarters of a century ago, Orwell coined a term to describe this kind of news: duckspeak,
It was not the man’s brain that was speaking it was his larynx. The stuff that was coming out of him consisted of words but it was not speech in true sense: it was a noise uttered in unconsciousness like the quacking of a duck.
When investors and analysts speak of "content" (rather than, say, "journalism"), this is what they mean – a warm slurry of platitudes, purged of any jagged-edged fragments to render it a perfectly suitable carrier for commercial messages targeted based on surveillance data about the "consumer" whose eyeballs are upon it.
This aversion to reality has been present among corporate decisionmakers since the earliest days, but the consolidation of power among large firms – ad-tech firms, online platforms, and "brands" themselves – makes corporate realityphobia much easier to turn into, well, reality, giving advertisers the fine-grained power to put Jezebel and every site like it out of business.
As Koebler and Maiberg's headliine so aptly puts it, "Advertisers Don’t Want Sites Like Jezebel to Exist."
The reason to deplore Nazis on Twitter is because they are Nazis, not because their content isn't brand-safe. The short-term wins progressives gain by legitimizing a corporate veto over what we see online are vastly overshadowed by the most important consequence of brand safety: the mass extinction of reality-based reporting. Reality isn't brand safe. If you're in the reality based community, brand safety should be your sworn enemy, even if they help you temporarily get a couple of Nazis kicked off Twitter.
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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/2023/11/11/ad-jacency/#brand-safety
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