To echo some other comments, it seems like this article proves that boycotting is in fact one of the only ways to hold companies accountable. That’s why so many states in the US have passed laws making BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) illegal when it comes to Israel.
Bret Stephens has been pissing me off since he started writing opinion pieces for the New York Times. He’s one of those conservatives who works incredibly hard to try to sound ‘reasonable,’ but if you pay attention to his language, he’s still just a warmongering piece of shit who pretends Israel can do no wrong. He has always believed that Israel is never the aggressor, despite the tens of thousands of innocent people they have indiscriminately murdered.
He has been on the wrong side of history for sooo many different conflicts and political issues, not just regarding Israel.
Yeah, he’s a never-Trumper, but that doesn’t make him a good person.
You can reliably find him justifying immoral and hateful uses of violence and destructive neoconservative policies. So I guess he fits right in at the New York Times.
Because it does its job terribly. It provides inaccurate information when it would be faster for any one of us to just do a search for ourselves. And when it can’t figure out a source, it still spams the post, instead of just staying out of it. There has been widespread opposition to the bot existing at all, from day one, and the mods seem to have ignored all of us who say the bot sucks and only gets in the way.
It also has links to ground.news baked into it, despite that site being pretty useless from what I can tell. I get strong sponsorship vibes, and we don’t need that crap on Lemmy.
I didn’t like the bots on Reddit, and I don’t like the bots on Lemmy.
how do they know?
I have to know now, this is bugging the hell out of me. Is it an estimate based on daily downloads? Do they get a ping when you connect to the internet, and if so, why would they count that as a boot? If I boot this on an air gapped laptop, there’s no way they could ever know, right? So many questions. Regardless, this seems like a weird thing for them to brag about.
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I’m so glad this guy is sticking with the bit. Patrick Gathara for those wondering. This framing does a spectacular job of exposing the absurdity of American politics and ‘American Exceptionalism’ on the world stage.
He did one for the Democratic Convention too, which was excellent.
I appreciate the clarification on how these laws work. I think you’re right that their popularity doesn’t necessarily imply effectiveness, it probably has more to do with the impulse to join in the virtue-signaling. But their popularity does send a strong message that how people and companies spend their money is important, and I’d argue that means they must be at least a little bit effective.
And the laws are wildly unpopular with the American people, but were still passed in the majority of states, which also tells me they must be doing something: