Oh no doubt, everybody had some kooky ideas.

Positively giddy. :)

The Navy cooked up all sorts of whack-a-doodle ideas that didn’t have a chance in hell of being feasible, much less useful, but that’s definitely the silliest I’ve seen in a while.

You’re right, relative density and the chemical composition necessary to oxidize fuel combustion definitely are irrelevant, thanks for reminding me!

Ohhh, shit, my bad. I hadn’t seen that.

Why are you replying to someone else and pinging me? I’m just making a silly joke over here.

To the best of my knowledge the navy has never flown a plane underwater. If I’m wrong about that then please do enlighten me, I’d love to read that shit.

(Disclaimer: This article seems to have been posted to several communities on lemmy, so I’m going to comment this under every single one I find.)

Hmm, I’m not liking this headline. Let’s try rewriting it a bit, shall we?

Why YOU (the person writing this article) are knowingly volunteering for Trump, and how to stop trying to blame everyone else for it.

Yeah, that’s better.

Every time Trump says or posts something bizarre — whether it’s a typo, a wild conspiracy theory, or an AI-generated image of himself as the pope — social media explodes.

Led by who? The media. People like you, the author of this very article, writing articles with the explicit purpose of generating outrage so they can sell more ads. You know you are making this problem worse and you don’t care, so stop trying to blame it on everyone else.

This tactic is shockingly effective

Because you enable it, you platform it, you amplify it. If people like you would stop writing articles that amount to ‘notorious fire hose of bullshit spews even more bullshit’ it would be a whole fucking lot less effective.

Those who amplify Trump’s absurd statements into top news stories and endless scandals aren’t undermining his agenda

That’s you and journalists like you. So fucking stop it. Stop writing articles about how Trump’s presidency is Putin’s wet dream (looks like someone had the good sense to delete that one), how Trump is going to invade Canada, ‘dire warnings’ about Trump’s fraud, etc. With your current article blaming everyone but yourself for this problem the hypocrisy is finally piled high enough that I can no longer ignore it. So please, in the kindest possible terms, I would like to cordially invite you to fuck ALL the way off with your nonsense.

Since you went to the trouble of making a list, let’s go through your points one by one, shall we?

1. Understand his strategy … By flooding the public with scandal after scandal, lie after lie, they create confusion, fatigue, and a sense of helplessness.

And you would think the people who work for media, who are ostensibly the most media-liteate among us, would have recognized their own prominent place in it. It’s not ‘them’ flooding the world with their scandals and lies, it’s YOU. You are creating in articles like the above (not to mention this one) the helplessness that you purport to be working against.

2. Be ruthlessly selective with your attention … Skip outrage bait.

Like the 3 articles I mentioned above that you wrote?

3. Be mindful what you share … Ask yourself before you share: Is this helping people understand, organize, or act

Practice what you fucking preach.

4. Focus on meaningful action … Take a moment to honestly compare how much time you’ve spent absorbed in Trump scandals with the time you’ve put into meaningful efforts or thoughtful planning to help protect democracy.

And how much time have you spent on articles like the above ginning up exactly the sort of outrage that you now purport to be against? How much meaningful effort and thoughtful planning have you contributed to this? If this article is your best example I’m gonna go ahead and guess basically none.

5. Keep the faith … Making us feel afraid and helpless is a key goal of authoritarian confusion tactics.

And, apparently, a key goal of media shills like you who enable it.

6. Help others tune out the noise … When you see outrage bait spreading online, speak up.

Here the fuck I am, speaking up.

and why it’s so important to stay focused on what actually matters: useful, actionable information.

None of which is in this article. Instead what we find is victim-blaming, projection, and a frankly shocking lack of self-awareness that you are the problem, not the solution. Nobody on social media is doing original reporting here, they’re all linking articles written by people like you, and blaming the victim is the oldest fucking trick in the book to try to shift the blame from yourself: ‘If only you would all recycle harder (or, what seems to be your personal favorite, stop eating meat) we wouldn’t have climate change,’ ‘If only you would all put down your phones we wouldn’t have an epidemic of loneliness’, ‘If only you would all vote the way I think you should we would live in a magical happy place where nothing ever goes wrong.’

All bullshit, all the time. But that’s okay, I have a few of my own:

If only the media would stop being a willing mouthpiece for fascism.

If only the media would stop chasing ad revenue and start actually trying to inform the populace with unbiased, non-sensational truth about what’s actually going on.

If only the media would stop blasting every fucking word Trump and his bullshit-factory crank out.

If only people like you would stop telling us everything is our fault and take some fucking responsibility for your not-insignificant part in this.

Plane not fly in water, plane fly in air.

That sounds like some incel shit right there. But since you said you’re married I’m forced to assume that you came by your misogyny honest?

You are wrong. Yeah times have changed, but not so much that you can’t just fucking talk to someone. Say hi, strike up a conversation, whatever, and trust that anyone who doesn’t want to talk will say so. The important thing when that happens is to listen to them and leave them alone.

Yeah, I also see the appeal of just having one job and being able to focus utterly on that. In my case I was running the grill and making the sandwiches too, so I had to switch between them regularly without messing up orders or letting the meat cook too long and with frequent interruptions to run to the opposite end of the store to grab a new box of burgers from the freezer, and it was kind of the combination of doing multiple different things that kind of coalesced into the idea of being the calm amidst the chaos and somehow getting all of it right.

Yeah that’s kind of my point: society has not stopped to think about the fact that the water is at a full boil and has been for a while. If I had my way ads would just be a basic, boring, ‘This product/service exists, and this is what an independent panel of testers has determined about its functions and capabilities.’ There have definitely been products that were advertised to me that make my life easier and that I use every day, so I don’t want to lose the ability to discover them, I just also don’t want these companies putting their dick in my ass and whispering into my ear that I’m not good enough person as a person if I don’t like it.

Oh yeah, I grew up in the 70s/80s when that shit became rife. I loved Saturday morning cartoons until I got old enough to realize that they only existed to sell me toys (and to sell ads for other toys.)

This is why I use my phone as little as I can get away with, because these companies have built their apps as these little walled gardens where it’s illegal to modify them to block their ads when that’s not the case on a website. Fortunately in my situation there are very few occasions where I have to use my phone or an app for something.

Yeah I get the history, I’m more commenting on the fact that nobody really said ‘Huh, is this a good idea?’, it just slowly infiltrated everywhere and like the frog in the pot of slowly-boiling water we don’t realize the shit we’re in because of it.

Marketing basically just consisted of “here’s my product, here’s why it’s superior to others.”

That’s what I think advertising ought to be. ‘This product/service exists. Here’s what a panel of independent testers (folks like Consumer Reports) has determined about its functionality, capabilities, etc.’ No music, no slogans, no ‘vibe-n-style’ or whatever, just someone describing the basic facts about the product or service. Because I don’t dispute that I have seen ads for something and been like ‘holy shit this will make my life easier’ or whatever, so I don’t want to not be able to discover products… I just also don’t want to be manipulated by the companies that have a financial incentive to push them.

This right here is why I think advertising is manipulation. Cause even the subtle shit where you’re like ‘That was weird’ and shrug it off is still affecting you days, weeks, even years later. I grew up in the 70s and 80s and there are so many fucking stupid ad jingles and slogans stuck in my head, half of them I don’t even remember who they were for.

Interesting, I just use a private DNS on my phone set to dns.adguard.com and it catches most things, but I’d like to hear more about this. I’ve considered setting up a pihole but there are people in the house who work from home and need to do VPN shit so I’m reluctant to mess with that, but if I can just change the firmware on the router…

Nah, I pay for my bandwidth, I get to decide what it does and does not get used for. Even if that’s not nearly as big a concern as it used to be in like the late 90s, it’s the principle of I’m not going to pay for you to shove your garbage down my throat.

And yeah I haven’t seen an ad in years and years on PC. People complain about youtube ads and I’m like ‘What’s that? I watch a lot of youtube and I’ve not seen an ad in like 10 years.’ Sadly on mobile that’s a little more complicated, but adding a private dns of ‘dns.adguard.com’ blocks most things.

Yeah, good point.