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Jim Bont posted:Can someone explain what happened to Matt Taibbi? From memory he started falling off when he preemptively dismissed the whole Russiagate thing based off the Barr version of the Mueller report, but it might have started earlier. Was a source of funding cut off? Or was he just hanging out too much with Greenwald? probably both. it sucks because i really liked "i can't breath"
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Sep 4, 2022 05:02
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Jim Bont posted:Can someone explain what happened to Matt Taibbi? From memory he started falling off when he preemptively dismissed the whole Russiagate thing based off the Barr version of the Mueller report, but it might have started earlier. Was a source of funding cut off? Or was he just hanging out too much with Greenwald? He feels like one of those people whose fire-spitting political activism ultimately turned out to be contrarianism driven by deep, personal discontent that was merely metastable prior to social media becoming a brain-dissolving mess, but could not survive prolonged exposure to the Extremely Online. He went absolutely daft, one way or another.
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Sep 4, 2022 05:08
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I forgot that he spent awhile in like 2019/early 2020 writing constantly about how 'cancel culture' was basically the worst threat to society above anything else
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Sep 4, 2022 05:50
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Every time I saw one of those I mentally added '....also don't go back and read any of those old Exile articles where I'm boasting about my horrible treatment of women.' Which I'm sure was entirely unrelated to his newfound concerns.
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Sep 4, 2022 11:50
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People mistakenly considered Taibbi a leftist because of his reporting during the financial crisis, but it turned out that he was just a reactionary. It's just that the US typically views being reactionary as the domain of the right wing and so has a blind spot when it overlaps with things leftists are saying. You see this a lot with, "left," media figures. They rise and fall not because of any change in their thinking, but because the times around them change. They continue to do the same things, but ultimately they become incongruous. Separately, this problem has gotten worse. There's a lot of reactionary tendency in the modern mainstream Democratic party right now because of Trump. So there's a ton of weird overlap on all sorts of Trump-related nonsense between non-MAGA Republicans and mainstream Democrats. It's an absolutely horrible time in politics, and the second Trump goes away a lot of people are going to be really embarrassed by the company they were keeping. ErIog fucked around with this message at 12:33 on Sep 4, 2022 |
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Sep 4, 2022 12:30
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To be fair to Taibbi he has always been a bad writer, his ideology just took a bit longer to catch up.
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Sep 4, 2022 12:49
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FlamingLiberal posted:https://twitter.com/emmavigeland/status/1566119251823443971?s=21&t=gUueJxJPDTcISrILcBtisQ Tabbi did some good writing during Occupy Wallstreet but gently caress me he's gone full CHUD. Is it the FYGM effect?
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Sep 4, 2022 15:53
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ErIog posted:People mistakenly considered Taibbi a leftist because of his reporting during the financial crisis, but it turned out that he was just a reactionary. It's just that the US typically views being reactionary as the domain of the right wing and so has a blind spot when it overlaps with things leftists are saying. I don't know about that, I read Griftopia and I wouldn't call it reactionary, for example Griftopia, Matt Taibbi posted:This is pure social Darwinism: self-interest is moral, interference (particularly governmental interference) with self-interest is evil, fancy version of the Gordon Gekko pabulum that "greed is good." When you dig deeper into Rand's philosophy, you keep coming up with more of the same. Iirc what happened is that around 2017 or so Taibbi got canceled for some old articles that included jokes about sexual harassment which he says were only satire, he lost some nice well-paying media gigs as a result, and basically went "oh my god there really is liberal thought control, the conservatives warned us but we didn't listen", which is both funny and sad because the attacks on him originated in conservative media who hated him for criticizing Wall Street.
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Sep 4, 2022 16:30
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VitalSigns posted:I don't know about that, I read Griftopia and I wouldn't call it reactionary, for example Yeah it's this, he was criticised for some writing he did about sexually exploiting and abusing women in post-Soviet Russia which he tried to say was him making satirical critique about the exploitation and abuse of women and then shook himself into chudocity over the unfairness of being held to account.
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Sep 4, 2022 16:32
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Yeah doing drugs and abusing (likely underage) victims of sex trafficking, just a funny satirical joke for ol' Matt Taibi. His OWS reporting was great but yeesh, good riddance.
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Sep 4, 2022 17:17
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I thought GWB brought the war on terror home? Or was that Obama who was president on 9/11?
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Sep 4, 2022 17:35
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Kavros posted:He feels like one of those people whose fire-spitting political activism ultimately turned out to be contrarianism driven by deep, personal discontent that was merely metastable prior to social media becoming a brain-dissolving mess, but could not survive prolonged exposure to the Extremely Online. He went absolutely daft, one way or another. I've talked at some length with Matt, by sheer concidence. Back in 2008. Taibbi really, REALLY wanted to be the next Hunter Thompson. He wanted to not just be 'big in lefty circles', but BIG. He thought going into imploding Russia would be a good literary hook in the post Cold War world, but discovered that nobody cared about Russia except as a boogeymen. He then tried to dig into the zeitgeist of post-Financial Crisis America, and did a rather decent job in many ways. But again, there's no grand appetite for that kind of firebrand when it goes systemic; people want to have their prejudices reinforced, not to be told that even the politicians they like are in the bag. Still, it got him spots on MSNBC, big pieces in Rolling Stone. It seemed to be going well. Then people looked into his old Exile book and found something to hang around his neck. I'm 50-50 on Taibbi being an assaulter due to how much of that vehicle was wild Thompson-style invention to make Moscow seem like edgelord neoliberal Babylon. Half the staff were just Taibbi and Ames under different pen names pretending to be KGB agents, rich investors, etc. But it stuck, and was enough to sink him and make a lot of very rich people happy that issues like selling every parking meter and water table to Saudi Arabia was firmly off the news. That really, really broke his brain. The fact that other figures accused of sexual misconduct get a lot of respect from the media (including the current and former US presidents) did not help matters. Since mainstream legitimacy and fame were off the table, he went for the easy road: culture war. His work denouncing banks makes for some inroads with the crypto loons, who 'also hate banks', and he can claim to have been cancelled before it was cool. Apparently, that is enough to tap into that Freeze Peach bonanza that keeps hacks like Andrew Sullivan, Bari Weiss and other human pukes rich and relevant.
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Sep 4, 2022 18:03
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Sephyr posted:Taibbi really, REALLY wanted to be the next Hunter Thompson. He wanted to not just be 'big in lefty circles', but BIG. This is somewhat normal. The appeal of chud media is that it provides a shortcut to respectability, why spend years or even decades building yourself up to be the next Walter Cronkite when you can write one article about the Great Displacement and suddenly crowds of people hype you up like you're already the greatest journalist in media today.
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Sep 4, 2022 18:27
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I can one hundred percent see him both 1. thinking he was going to be the next hunter thompson and 2. never ever going to make it as the next hunter thompson He was actually one of the very early figures in essentially radicalized me fully out of the mainstream at a pretty young age. I read this and didn't understand why people didn't seem to know or care about how indefensible this all was https://www.corpwatch.org/article/great-iraq-swindle
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Sep 4, 2022 18:43
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FlamingLiberal posted:I forgot that he spent awhile in like 2019/early 2020 writing constantly about how 'cancel culture' was basically the worst threat to society above anything else Between Russiagate and his MeToo moment over his Exile days he's become extremely bitter and contrarian. Even today he's spending all his time on twitter arguing with randos about Russiagate.
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Sep 4, 2022 20:26
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Kavros posted:I can one hundred percent see him both Yeah, same here, really. I was already on track due to loving some authors of my own country, but on a world/US angle, Billmon's old blog (an amazing commenter/writer who was around on and off, and then vanished for good when Trump won), Mark Ames, John Dolan and Matt Taibbi were the one really pointing out that the emperor had no clothes.
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Sep 4, 2022 20:29
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The Islamic Shock posted:https://www.openculture.com/2016/11/umberto-eco-makes-a-list-of-the-14-common-features-of-fascism.html I feel like I read this same listicle when Obama and Bush were presidents.
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Sep 5, 2022 03:21
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je1 healthcare posted:I feel like I read this same listicle when Obama and Bush were presidents. Eco's original essay on Ur-fascism predates both.
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Sep 5, 2022 04:27
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PhazonLink posted:I'm not color blind but thats a dumb logo for a org, just a square? I can’t tell from this if you can’t see the TK inside the square logo? My friend once described a color as “peanut butter green” and that’s how we found out that she had been color blind her whole life so it’s quite easy to get to adulthood without knowing.
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Sep 5, 2022 16:47
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It only makes sense, they're pea nuts
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Sep 5, 2022 16:59
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Tesseraction posted:Are these right-wing cranks becoming more popular, though? Their videos appear sure but they're overall really boring. If you need long-form content then people go more to Twitch where you can find political content running basically 24/7 and they often deliberately use the raid feature to keep you in political twitch when they're finished with their own broadcast. In fact people like TheQuartering rely on livestreaming for the content in their hours-long snoozefests that are way less entertaining when your messages can't be read out in real-time. a lot of these guys? absolutely. i checked sargon's channel the other day and while his videos have decent numbers (over 100k), surprisingly he doesn't upload very often. however, bunch of other rightwing shitheads like thequartering, geeks and gamers, fresh and fit, sneako, crowder, tim pool and jorp among others, are doing better than ever. then you also have certain yt channels that focus on general variety of content that are massive like Moon and SunnyV2, which aren't as open about their biases like the other guys i mentioned, but they sneak their reactionary takes in their videos.
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Sep 5, 2022 21:47
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Also the new YouTube ripoff of TikTok, Shorts, is on it's own algorithm and when I tried it a few times it fed me constant videos of alt-right shitheads despite the main YouTube recommendations on my account being clean after my various dislikes. I think every second video was Jorp, Rogan (which ok, maybe not fully right but certainly a gateway to it lol), etc, and Andrew Tate; the last one is weird because even though he's now banned I keep getting videos surfaced of other accounts showing his clips.
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Sep 5, 2022 21:55
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Mr Interweb posted:then you also have certain yt channels that focus on general variety of content that are massive like Moon and SunnyV2, which aren't as open about their biases like the other guys i mentioned, but they sneak their reactionary takes in their videos. Hmm. Hadn't heard of these chuckleheads... might need to look at them to get a taste of the poison.
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Sep 5, 2022 22:13
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Mr Interweb posted:then you also have certain yt channels that focus on general variety of content that are massive like Moon and SunnyV2, which aren't as open about their biases like the other guys i mentioned, but they sneak their reactionary takes in their videos. I started watching SunnyV2 a couple months ago because I find “what ever happened to so-and-so YouTuber” an interesting subject. I forget which video it was but I had a tinge of “is this guy alt right?” during one. I watched some more with that frame and yeah it’s subtle but definitely there
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Sep 5, 2022 23:16
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Are all of you permanently signed in to Google accounts or something? That's terrible for a large number of reasons, but it also means you're missing out on the only correct way to use YouTube: always in an incognito window, with ublock origin configured to block the content frame of the main page to avoid being deluged under a sea of :-O faces.
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Sep 6, 2022 00:06
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Less Fat Luke posted:Also the new YouTube ripoff of TikTok, Shorts It never registered to me WHY there was suddenly YouTube Shorts until reading this post just now. Jesus, TikTok really has been eating everyone's lunch, haven't they?
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Sep 6, 2022 00:09
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I wonder how bad Twitter is kicking themselves for getting rid of Vine
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Sep 6, 2022 00:19
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Weatherman posted:Are all of you permanently signed in to Google accounts or something?
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Sep 6, 2022 00:22
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QAnon Anon just did a Star Wars fandom episode that included Geeks and Gamers. I had never heard of the guy before but drat, it was a hectic switch being flipped. I teach in high school (just started at a new school) and I had one student compare me to Andrew Tate and another student compare me to Joe Rogan. First kid, I said “I know we have only known each other for a few weeks but have I ever given any impression that I am that hateful towards people that are different than me.” Kid said no but that I was funny too and that he guesses I am not like state.” Kid has told me that I am still his favorite class (economics) this year. Second kid, I said “do I look like I have no idea what I am talking about like Rogan?” Kid said no. I asked why he would compare me to Rogan and he said that “I was just smart like Rogan and I am good at talking and having a discussion with them.” That hurt some. But the kid still like what I teach (psych). It really dawned on me that these guys could be doing good and getting viewers. For my students, it seemed like content was secondary to other things.
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Sep 6, 2022 01:01
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I usually keep my Youtube recommendations pretty clean of trash, blocking when I need to and opening anything I dont want to look at regularly in incognito. But lately i've been seeing a bunch of channels that look like right wing trash but have weird sounding channel names. Started looking at their past videos and seeing that they were completely different until recently and then pure trash videos. Assuming that its the result of some hack somewhere. I see something like it at least once every few days 
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Sep 6, 2022 01:05
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Bizarro Kanyon posted:It really dawned on me that these guys could be doing good and getting viewers. For my students, it seemed like content was secondary to other things. They're kids, and they're still learning. Part of that is not knowing when someone you look up to or trust is spewing bullshit. It might be worth it to spend a day talking about critically evaluating sources, especially with the amount of junk stuff out there for both psych and econ.
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Sep 6, 2022 01:13
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I don't follow the JRE too closely, but this recently came up, and seems like a worryingly explicit endorsement of a really dangerous media ecosytem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7vkPqUj2tk There are plenty of meaty quotes, but a classic one is "Who's behind Rumble?"... [mumble mumble no real answer], IT'S PETER THIEL YOU MOTHERFUCKERS. Also need to be noted that "Free Speech" invariably translates to "unchallenged far-right propaganda". If there is going to be a downfall, this is going to be a big part of it.
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Sep 6, 2022 01:16
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Professor Beetus posted:Yeah doing drugs and abusing (likely underage) victims of sex trafficking, just a funny satirical joke for ol' Matt Taibi. His OWS reporting was great but yeesh, good riddance. It should also be noted that OWS (And #unity4J, the Julian Assange defence movement) was a "catalysing" moment for a number of characters - Casandra Fairbanks, Tim Pool, Glenn Greenwald, etc. Whether they were there in good faith and got turned, or whether they were there in bad faith to turn people, remains to be seen. But the fact that they all had such a big role in minimising the role of Russian influence on the "left" around the time of the Mueller investigation, and are now still pumping content from this far-right propaganda pipeline, is worth noting.
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Sep 6, 2022 01:22
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Bizarro Kanyon posted:QAnon Anon just did a Star Wars fandom episode that included Geeks and Gamers. I had never heard of the guy before but drat, it was a hectic switch being flipped. Part of it is probably that the inexperienced minds of children have a hard time distinguishing between cruelty and being funny. I know that I was into some nasty poo poo when I was younger without really understanding what it was, to say nothing of the things I occasionally said and did myself.
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Sep 6, 2022 01:51
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Kids, and many adults, are idiots because they see 10 boring articles about Dickpox evolving slowly in Madagascar because of whatever. They're all based off of an AP/Reuters article and are bland/straightforward. Joe Rogan hits a blunt while laughing about a video where a dog fucks a peanut butter jar and gets stuck. He then brings on Jordan Peterson who makes a claim about biology that he's not qualified to make. Joe Rogan can't believe it. That's amazing. A second guest, the guy who got escorted out of an SNL audition because he showed up as "Blackface Serena Williams as Barack Obama" says Asians don't get Dickpox because they're too busy doing math 18 hours a day. Joe then says he read somewhere on the internet that white people are the only ones that can do real math. Everyone nods sagely. He brings up a browser window from RealHoaxTruther.net with an article that cites the manufactured nature of Dickpox (the QUM-receptor is 6F6 which is just 666 and the RNA strand fed into a barcode reader spits out ILUMINATiCORP). There's a quiet moment as he hits a blunt again and asks if Dickpox would make his penis bigger or smaller. Kid at home is like "This guy asks the real questions the media can't"
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Sep 6, 2022 02:27
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I 100% already spend a decent amount of time calling out BS in psych and Econ. So many kids have been told it and have bought into it.
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Sep 6, 2022 03:19
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Bizarro Kanyon posted:I teach in high school (just started at a new school) and I had one student compare me to Andrew Tate and another student compare me to Joe Rogan.
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Sep 6, 2022 03:34
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Hollandia posted:Are you bald? Nope, been with graying hair since 18 but still have it (although it is thinning)
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Sep 6, 2022 03:40
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Bucky Fullminster posted:It should also be noted that OWS (And #unity4J, the Julian Assange defence movement) was a "catalysing" moment for a number of characters - Casandra Fairbanks, Tim Pool, Glenn Greenwald, etc. Whether they were there in good faith and got turned, or whether they were there in bad faith to turn people, remains to be seen. But the fact that they all had such a big role in minimising the role of Russian influence on the "left" around the time of the Mueller investigation, and are now still pumping content from this far-right propaganda pipeline, is worth noting. Hi, welcome to the thread. It is indeed really loving dumb to clutch pearls over a few hundred million in online ad buys from Russia in one election cycle when a multi-billion-dollar-per-year right wing media empire has been hosing down the American populace every year for 30 years. The cultural and political impact is not even close.
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Sep 6, 2022 03:57
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Paolomania posted:Hi, welcome to the thread. It is indeed really loving dumb to clutch pearls over a few hundred million in online ad buys from Russia in one election cycle when a multi-billion-dollar-per-year right wing media empire has been hosing down the American populace every year for 30 years. The cultural and political impact is not even close. Hi, thanks, I'm not clutching pearls nor am I talking about ad-buys.
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Sep 6, 2022 04:05
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