The mesh increases the ‘hit box’ of the interceptor. It’s conductive, so it is more likely to trigger the kamikaze than a normal in-air collision.

I don’t think the interceptor is expected to survive a successful interception. In the case of a miss, it will be reusable tho, unlike other defense munitions. If any parts of either drone survive, they’ll fall in defender controlled territory, and be available to be fed back into the drone manufacture supply chain.

Cheap kamikaze drones have loose wires on the front. When the wires touch, like when they collide with an object in front of them, it completes a circuit that detonates the payload.

A wide conductive screen mesh on the back of an interceptor drone seems like a cheap, simple countermeasure.

From Folding Ideas’ “Triumph of the Will and the Cinematic Language of Propaganda”:

‘Triumph of the Will’ is not a triumph of film-making. I just want to lay that out before we even start. Chances are good that you’re familiar with ‘Triumph of the Will’ by reputation but have never actually watched it beyond referential clips, and a sizable portion of that reputation is in its value as an advancement of the art of filmmaking. This is propaganda.

Like, that belief is in and of itself propaganda.

Nazi sympathizers spent a lot of time between the film’s release in 1935 and the war promoting the idea of ‘Triumph of the Will’ as an advancement of filmmaking. It was an intentional message to promote Nazi state art as superior, to suggest that the Nazi mechanism can produce better more proficient art than the artist the Nazis were busy throwing in jail.

It is however not a triumph of filmmaking; it is a triumph of budget. None of the ideas or techniques were new it is simply that no one had previously thrown enough money and resources at propaganda on this scale before. We’ll come back to this and develop it in more detail, but I want to be upfront with the fact that you should be highly suspicious of any messaging surrounding propaganda.

Not that it matters, because I didn’t make a whataboutist argument in the first place.

I agree that you didn’t make an argument.

Where a ‘liberal’ is anyone a totalitarian disagrees with, and a ‘source’ is a half-hearted general link to a Wikipedia article.

Edit: Davel has now expanded his low-effort response to be more than a Wikipedia link to Five Eyes.

That’s some really low-effort whataboutism.

The tactic is an old favorite of the Soviet Union, and Marxists/the far left in general; the strategy was originally used in the form of “And at your place, they hang black people.” The term ‘whataboutery’ itself, however, only dates back to 1974 with its use in The Troubles in Northern Ireland, whereas the term ‘whataboutism’ dates back to 1978 with reference to the Soviet Union.

In recent years, whataboutism made a comeback in Russia under Vladimir Putin’s regime (since they seemingly learned all the wrong lessons from the Cold War), and has also seen a rise in usage by Donald Trump, his support base, and the rest of the far-right.

I enjoy her writing too. Her piece on the threat of Facebook entering the Fediverse does a great job of making the case.

Let’s be clear that I am anti-Putin and anti-Kim.

Ad-hominem means “to the man” – that is, instead of attacking the message, one attacks the credibility of the messenger. This also includes when instead of defending the credibility of a message, one defends the credibility of the messenger. Ad-hominem is exactly the purpose of the MBFC bot. Instead of fact-checking the individual article, it tells you if the article is credible or not based on its clearly biased assessment of the article outlet.

You are correct in that ad-hominem is generally a terrible way of judging credibility. I am not making an ad-hominem fallacy. I am responding to an ad-hominem fallacy that has been spammed in every thread in this community.

Groups like MBFC use their position as gatekeepers of the political spectrum to disguise radical ideas as centrist positions, and it’s ironic that !world using such a biased propaganda platform to tell its readers what is credible.

Bias is not the same thing as propaganda, propaganda is not the same thing as misinformation. Articles should be evaluated on how factual they are, and there are plenty of platforms that are doing the hard work of verifying information without putting their political ideology above their credibility. This bot is a mistake.

Before removing the bot, !news mods removed comments critical of the bot, and ignored the overwhelming negative feedback and the consensus that the bot should be removed when they opened the discussion up to the community.

!politics and !world now appear to be willing to change course. The vote to “Kill” – stop their bot from advertising MBFC in all of their posts – appears to be leading in both communities.

If you upvote the Kill comment so that this lead becomes a landslide, you can make it even more embarrassing and difficult for them to claim ‘bots’ or backtrack.

Voice of America (VOA) is a state media network funded by the United States of America, whose purpose is to project soft power through journalism. In 1948, Voice of America was forbidden to broadcast directly to American citizens to protect the public from propaganda by its own government. The restriction was removed in 2013 to to adapt to the Internet age.

In 2005, the Washington Post reported that suspected Al-qaeda operatives were flown into Thailand to be detained and tortured. VOA’s remote relay radio station in Udon Thani province has been widely suspected to be the torture site.

Most people do not believe that propaganda is anything that disagrees with the United States Government’s foreign policy, and find the idea that the VOA is less biased than the New York Times laughable. Lemmy.World endorses these absurdities by advertising Media Bias Fact Check in every post in their community. You have a limited time to let !politics and !world know what you think.

Like the stupid titles and vocabulary of the Klan, or the infantile memes of frenworld.

Voice of America (VOA) is a state media network funded by the United States of America, whose purpose is to project soft power through journalism. In 1948, Voice of America was forbidden to broadcast directly to American citizens to protect the public from propaganda by its own government. The restriction was removed in 2013 to to adapt to the Internet age.

In 2005, the Washington Post reported that suspected Al-qaeda operatives were flown into Thailand to be detained and tortured. VOA’s remote relay radio station in Udon Thani province has been widely suspected to be the torture site. VOA has been conspicuously silent on the charges. Their reporters have unparalleled access to the details of the case, but none of them appear to have done any investigation.

According to David Van Zandt in MBFC’s methodology:

It’s crucial to note that our bias scale is calibrated to the political spectrum of the United States

To better understand this statement, it should be noted that MBFC regards VOA as “least biased” despite its uncontroversial status as the United States’ official propaganda outlet.

ABC News is a brand of Disney Advertising.

Manufacturing Consent has this to say about Disney news media:

Ben Bagdikian notes that when the first edition of his Media Monopoly was published in 1983, fifty giant firms dominated almost every mass medium; but just seven years later, in 1990, only twenty-three firms occupied the same commanding position.

Since 1990, a wave of massive deals and rapid globalization have left the media industries further centralized in nine transnational conglomerates-Disney, AOL Time Warner, Viacom (owner of CBS), News Corporation, Bertelsmann, General Electric (owner of NBC), Sony, AT&T-Liberty Media, and Vivendi Universal. These giants own all the world’s major film studios, TV networks, and music companies, and a sizable fraction of the most important cable channels, cable systems, magazines, major-market TV stations, and book publishers. The largest, the recently merged AOL Time Warner, has integrated the leading Internet portal into the traditional media system. Another fifteen firms round out the system, meaning that two dozen firms control nearly the entirety of media experienced by most U.S. citizens. Bagdikian concludes that “it is the overwhelming collective power of these firms, with their corporate interlocks and unified cultural and political values, that raises troubling questions about the individual’s role in the American democracy.”

These structural factors that dominate media operations are not alI-controlling and do not always produce simple and homogeneous results… The beauty of the system, however, is that such dissent and inconvenient information are kept within bounds and at the margins, so that while their presence shows that the system is not monolithic, they are not large enough to interfere unduly with the domination of the official agenda.

–Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, “Manufacturing Consent”

El Pais is a brand of PRISA, an advertising and media conglomerate with headquarters in Madrid, Spain.

Article link - Video footage appears to show Russians killing surrendering Ukrainian soldiers

Fuck the Heritage Foundation.

Threads.net federation status on major Lemmy instances:

• Awful.systems - Blocked
• Beehaw.org - Blocked
• Blahaj.zone - Blocked
• DBZer0 - Blocked
• Dubvee.org - Blocked
• Eco.br - Blocked
• Feddit.org - Blocked
• Feddit.nl - Blocked
• Feddit.uk - Blocked
• Hexbear.net - Blocked
• JLai.lu - Blocked
• Leminal.space - Blocked
• Lemmy.best - Blocked
• Lemmy.ca - Blocked
• Lemm.ee - Blocked
• Lemmings.world - Blocked
• Lemmyf.uk - Blocked
• Lemmygrad.ml - Blocked
• Lemy.lol - Blocked
• Lemmy.ml - Blocked
• LemmyNSFW.com - Blocked
• Lemmy.one - Blocked
• Lemmy.zip - Blocked
• Literature.cafe - Blocked
• Mander.xyz - Blocked N
• Pawb.social - Blocked?
• Quokk.au - Blocked
• Reddthat - Blocked
• Sh.Itjust.works - Blocked
• SLRPNK.net - Blocked
• Szmer.info - Blocked
• Tchncs.de - Blocked
• Aggregatet.org - Not Found
• Aussie.zone - Not Found
• Feddit.cl - Not Found
• Feddit.it - Not Found
• Futurology.today - Not Found
• Infosec.pub - Not Found
• Lemmy.one - Not Found
• Lemmy.pt - Not Found
• Midwest.social - Not Found
• Monyet.cc - Not Found
• RBlind.com - Not Found
• SDF.org - Not Found
• Lemmy.world - Linked
• Sopuli.xyz - Linked

Also, in memoriam:

• Feddit.ch - Blocked

Small clarification, @MindTraveller participated in that thread, but was banned while a comment of theirs was removed in a separate post. That’s why they’re not included in the list.