You would be right if we were talking about normal crime and violence, but we’re not. The cartels aren’t made up of poor people who are committing crimes out of desperation. The people who are in the cartels do the most horrific things just to join, and once they join, they’re in for life. They have very organized hierarchies that keep a strict order, that’s why they’re massive crime syndicates.

They abduct people from their houses, they assassinate politicians, they hold public executions, burn down businesses who don’t pay extortion fees, they torture people they kidnap, they rig elections, they put their corrupted judges and politicians in power, and the list goes on and on. They’re even starting to control the country’s biggest industries. For example, there’s a good chance that the avocadoes you buy from the store came from a cartel controlled farm. Things were bad before, but they’re especially bad now with the Sinaloa cartel being fractured. There’s a lot of cartels competing for the top spot and things are ugly, really ugly. Some of the cartels are especially brutal just for the sake of it like Jalisco New Generation.

Mexico is a very unequal country. The nice areas are very nice. They’re safe, peaceful, have tourists, and are relatively wealthy. But the bad areas? They’re not even controlled by the government, they’re ruled by the cartels. They have so much violence that Mexico as a whole is considered a major war zone by the ACLED. You would think that president would prioritize something this pressing, but she gets offended at the very thought of her doing something about the cartels. Her predecessor, AMLO, did the same thing and he is widely regarded as a cartel stooge. She’s now being increasingly viewed in the same light.

That’s already a problem in Mexico. American immigrants have been moving to the nice parts of Mexico, and they have been inflating the ever living fuck out of the prices there. American money is unmatched, and no Mexican business is going to dumb enough to let it slip by. They’ve been increasing prices and catering to Americans to the point where Mexicans are being squeezed out entirely from the equation.

There are parts of Mexico city where Mexicans are completely priced out. People with houses in the nice parts try to sell them to Americans to get more money. Developers are building condo buildings that cater to American styles, and they’re entirely branded and marketed in English. Businesses in the area notice the increase in Americans walking around and jack up their prices to get a share of the pie themselves, which leads Americans to get another part of the city that’s still cheap to get the most out of their money repeating the cycle. Americans have already been doing this to countries like Spain, Portugal, and Italy, but now they’re doing it to Mexico too.

This doesn’t mean anything because a lot of work in Mexico is informal and done in cash, and so these changes won’t have an effect on the people who need them the most.

Besides, the country is going through an existential crises right now with the cartels ripping the country apart. A lot of people are already criticizing her for not focusing on the most pressing problems, and they’re right. This is nice in theory, but things like crime and violence have gotten so out of hand that parts of the country are unlivable for the average folk. She’s being increasingly regarded by Mexicans as another cartel stooge in office.

Plagiarism has always existed, it just easier over time. Before AI, a lot of students just copy and pasted stuff they found online and changed a some words to get past the plagiarism checking programs. Right now all that manual work got automated so you don’t have to copy and paste or alter what you took, you can just prompt an AI chatbot to do it for you.

It’s not about intelligence, it’s about patterns. The bigger LLMs can already mimic the smartest individuals fairly well.

Lemmy has a small userbase that has a high percent of humans vs bots, but a lot of those people tend to be whackos. Reddit has a huge user base with way more bots and whakcos (both by percentage and raw numbers), but also more normal humans. So there’s a tradeoff there in which platform you use I suppose.

I’m not trying to convince you dimwit, I’m calling you out. But the fact that you didn’t get that tells me all I need to know

Oh hey, it’s the “capitalism is founded on the idea of workers owning their workplace” person.

I wasn’t stating an opinion then, that’s literally the case. You denying reality is your own problem, not mine.

Shitty article has link to non shitty source.

A shitty article that links to a non shitty source still means that it’s a shitty article from a shitty source. The non shitty article that’s linked should be the one that linked because it’s the one the that higher quality. The Irish Mirror actually hired people to do real journalists to do real journalism, and the authors of that article clearly did their jobs well. They’re the ones who should be rewarded with the internet traffic and recognition, not a shitty activist page that lazily rips off the work of others and slaps a clickbait headline on it. I know it’s a foreign concept to you, but to normal people this is called having standards.

If you critical thinking skills were as developed as you think they are, you could click on it.

The irony here is so thick its almost solid that it’s a shame you’re dumb to get it.

Ignore the evidence, discredit the messenger, and lie through your teeth.

This is literally what you’re doing. The lack of self awareness is shameless. I didn’t ignore shit. The OP made a conspiracy theory statement that I asked to them to explain because they clearly posted conspiracy theory bullshit. They made two specific claims that I called out. First, they specifically said that Epstein was Mossad agent, which they failed to prove. Second, he made a string of lies about the Finders group/cult/movement/whatever. He said that they were Mossad/CIA operations to traffic kids to pedophiles and that this evidence was public and well known. I have very thoroughly demonstrated he’s a liar and all his claims are wrong.

I literally linked the public information in my comment and spelled out how the public information he’s talking about directly disproves him and his claims. His comeback was to give a literal chatgpt generated article on some substack that’s run by shmucks who are trying to fearmonger people into buying gold and silver from them. Even then, the AI article is literally a restatement of the wiki article it has zero new information that the wiki article didn’t have. How do they respond to me calling out their lies? They started calling me a fucking pedophile. That’s not ignorance, that’s just malicious misinformation.

It’s completely insane that you’re even willing to entertain low level conspiracy theory level bullshit as fact, not on the basis of accuracy, but on the basis hatred. Demanding clarity and accuracy is not an endorsement, it’s fucking accountability. Do you honestly think that calling out this moron for spreading misinformation means I’m endorsing child rapists? What kind of brain dead notion is that? Fuck Epstein, anybody who’s associated with him, and all other child rapists. You they won’t get a shred of sympathy from me. Are you really going to stoop so low that you’re going to endorse McCarthyist accusations from people who lack basic critical thinking skills? Like what are you even doing?

The thing is that my request thus far hasn’t changed, and it won’t change because I’m ultimately in the right. I asked for OP to provide evidence that actually prove their claims as he stated them. I don’t want a conspiracy theory justification where I have to connect magical dots that don’t exist or open my third eye and see a bigger picture that’s not there. Their second claim about the finders has already been debunked, but if they, you, or anybody else can provide real evidence that actually shows that Epstein worked for Mossad or any government agency in an official capacity to traffic kids like they claimed, then please show it to me and I will gladly concede. Until then, I have no reason to believe conspiracy theories on the basis of “dude, trust me.”

Making death wishes in general shouldn’t be tolerated, I think that’s a basic principle to uphold.

That may be, but he still right. The frontlines are proof. Russia has failed to capture significant amount of territory in 3 over years. All the changes have been comically minor relative to the manpower and resources used, and so far this year, Russia has actually been losing more territory than they captured.

You’re a pedophile

I can’t agree with that. The world needs less conspiracy theories out there. We have way too many floating around.

Said the schmuck who’s been disingenious this whole time with my extremely straightforward point. When it finally came time to address it directly, you danced around like a clown and then gave yourself a soft exit by clutching your pearls over some no name British left wing grifter. Your projections thus far have reflected your actions.

Oh my goddd!!! Owen Jones??? How could I be how foolish and not know who that is? Silly me, of course it’s Owen Jones on Substack.

Now Substack is a site that’s notorious for having its userbase be mostly political grifters, but that can’t possibly apply to the great and almighty Owen Jones.

But first, who the fuck is Owen Jones? You can’t possibly expect people to know random schmuck grifters that you fangirl over.

Owen Jones (born 8 August 1984)[2] is a left-wing British newspaper columnist, commentator, journalist, author and political activist.[3] He writes a column for The Guardian and contributes to the New Statesman, Tribune, and The National[4] and was previously a columnist for The Independent. He has two weekly web series, The Owen Jones Show and The Owen Jones Podcast.

Well well well, looky what we got here. It looks like I was right all along. Now explain to me again how this guy is supposed to invalidate my points about the quality of sources and journalistic standards? If anything you’re proving me right here.

Ah yes, the grand googler has hit me with a rando substack article that’s filled with ads (placed by the authors btw) trying to fearmonger people into buying gold from them. Skimming through the article, which I’m 99% sure is generated by chatgpt, is literally just a rehash of the wiki article that I posted with no additional information provided.

There’s still NOTHING in the article that you yourself posted that supports ANY of your claims. You don’t have a moral high ground when you’ve proven yourself to be the liar that you’re being criticized as. I’m asking you to prove what you said, it’s really that simple. You haven’t been able to do it, you keep trying to assert that you’re right while wagging your finger as if you’re a moral authority on anything.

You can’t squirm your way out of this. There’s no 4d chess logic, there’s no connecting the magical dots, there’s no opening your third eye. You either provide sources that directly prove the claims that you made or your failure to do so validates my criticisms of you by default. If you’re a conspiracy whacko who’s lying and spreading misinformation, then prove me wrong and post your sources. Go claim by claim and spell it out for me, I’ll be waiting but I know you won’t come up with anything.

If you want to criticize tge investigations, that’s perfectly fine. I’m merely pointing out how the person I’m replying to is simply lying and making things up despite them insisting that their claims are public knowledge.

I like how people here have this delusional idea that sovereign legitimacy is based on morality rather than hard power. Countries exist solely because they have the means to exclusively control the territory they occupy. Sovereignty is not given, but taken. It’s why the Taliban rules Afghanistan however they want even though they have no legitimacy in the world.

If morality was the basis of sovereignty, we would have like maybe a dozen countries who would be worthy of being soverign.

There’s no irony. I’m not married to the BCC. I’m merely pointing out that they’re a genuine news organization with journalistic standards and the crappy blog you posted is not. That’s not a controversial statement. The article they produced on this story actually has information, details, and sources… you know like a good source should. The Canary article is as shitty as it gets. It literally only has 4 sentences and a clickbait headlines. Of which, only 2 sentences are actually relevant to the story, and they’re both ripped off from the Irish Mirror article that they linked. This shitty article can’t even be called a summary of that article, which is a legit article that has actual reporting.

The Irish Mirror article actually provides context, testimonies, primary sources, and so on. Which begs the question, why not post that article in the first place? It’s clearly a much better source and a much higher quality article. Why is lemmy littered with fucking The Canary spam everywhere? Why doesn’t this place have higher standards for articles and sources? That’s poor information hygiene, that’s what I’m criticizing… and for some reason that’s what you’re offended by for some reason.