I do believe motivation and attention are closely linked so motivation is likely a factor in the decline we’re seeing in attention capacity

You misunderstand this, the link to motivation has to do with how salient a particular thing is to you overrides any abstracted idea of attention span not that people “aren’t motivated enough” in general which is nonsense moralizing.

Have you seen evidence to the contrary re attention spans?

Yes, lots, see this post where I lay it out in detail.

https://lemmy.ca/post/70915284

Have you seen evidence the concept “attention span” abstracted from context and motivation exists as a scientifically and rigorously defined concept? In a way that is falsifiable and not just narratively connecting correlations into something that gestures vaguely at something we believe is intuitive?

-----Literally ALL of the studies you linked indicate correlation not causation.------

https://www.techscience.com/IJMHP/v27n3/60240/html

Although this study confirms the negative effects associated with frequent use of short video platforms, there are several limitations. First, while the study identified a relationship between the duration of short video usage, addiction to short videos, and the phenomenon of TikTok brain, along with decreased attention control, the cross-sectional design of the research prevents the establishment of causal relationships between the variables.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/brb3.70656

Finally, the cross-sectional, questionnaire-based design limited the ability to infer causal relationships or explore underlying mechanisms.

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2024.1383913/full

Correlation analyses revealed a significant negative relationship between MPSVATQ and self-control, in addition, a significant negative correlation was also found between MPSVATQ and the theta power difference under incongruent minus neutral target condition of the ANT, suggesting that individuals with a proclivity for mobile phone short video addiction may encounter challenges related to executive control and self-control abilities.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/brb3.70656

Short-form video media use was significantly associated with higher inattentive behaviors. The association was stronger among younger participants. No significant associations were found with hyperactive–impulsive or oppositional-defiant behaviors, although total screen time remained significantly associated with these outcomes.

https://figshare.com/articles/journal_contribution/Short_form_Video_Use_and_Sustained_Attention_A_Narrative_Review_2019_2025_/30648764

Although current research methods have their limitations, the evidence suggests that frequent short-video use is associated with poorer cognitive functioning.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02673843.2026.2623337

SVA is significantly associated with reduced attentional control, as demonstrated by studies conducted by Xie et al. (Citation2023), Ye et al. (Citation2025), Zhou et al. (Citation2024), and Singh and Prusty (Citation2025). The correlations were low to moderate in strength (r = −0.23, p < .01; r = −0.56, p < .01; β = 0.43, p < .001; r = −0.209, p = .006).

…

Variations in measurement tools for SVA and cognitive outcomes may also limit comparability, while reliance on self-reported video usage can introduce reporting inaccuracies.

https://www.mdpi.com/2227-9032/14/5/559

Second, due to the cross-sectional survey design, it was not possible to determine causal relationships between SVA, IA, and negative emotions.

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1856148/full

Given the cross-sectional design of this study, the findings should be interpreted as associative rather than strictly causal relationships.

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1774030/full

The potential harmful consequences of frequent use of short-video platforms are revealed in this study. However, the relevant conclusions have the following limitations. Firstly, due to the cross-sectional design employed, the directionality of the associations between variables and the causal mechanisms cannot be ultimately determined.

Compounding it all, incessant smartphone use has dramatically reduced attention spans, replacing “deep reading” with scrolling, and pupil motivation has collapsed.

Citations needed, this is an argument based on a lazy moral panic and this quoted sentence is doing a criminal amount of work here.

For one, attention span does not exist meaningfully when abstracted from motivation and context.

However, teachers’ unions and literacy advocates reacted with frustration. The AOb teachers’ union argued reading levels would never improve as long as “classes are routinely cancelled, non-qualified staff are filling gaps, and the workload is driving experienced educators out of the profession.”

The reading advocacy group Stichting Lezen added that the failure lay “not with pupils, but with an approach that has turned reading into a set of mechanical comprehension tricks rather than fostering deep reading habits”.

The real reason is the above one, kids these days are given far less of a future than they used to be and are no longer seen as anything but a burden by neoliberalism.

Yeah, it is terrifying that people coexist with people in their communities who they rely on as contributing community members while being fine with them living in traumatic precarity.

Tardigrade all you ever bring to the conversation seems to be fear mongering about China, you behave like a cardboard cutout with only three or four tag lines it says when you press the button.

Some European far-right and far-left political parties have discovered an unlikely area of convergence: a degree of alignment with China. While not universal across the ideological spectrum, certain parties and individuals within both groups have leveraged overlapping arguments to challenge the more critical stance adopted by several EU members and the European Commission toward Beijing. This emerging alignment, though nuanced and varied in intensity, holds potential implications for EU-China relations and the broader political dynamics within Europe.

lol what a weaksauce article, where is the systematic connection with the left here?

Fixed it thanks

I’ll stick to my leatherman that I can open the blade with one hand, that locks well and that has a stiff spine to keep from bending or glancing off a cut dangerously.

Yeah that was just a joke about basic swiss army knives not actually having good knives…

Hell yeah for sweden tho!

Switzerland proceeds to cut their hand badly from the swiss army knife blade not having a locking mechanism and folding under pressure.

For helicopter pilots trained on Apaches their trainer helicopter the Lakota is widely used for bambi bucket firefighting, search and rescue, medical evacuation/transport and disaster/emergency response around the world, the skills and experience transfer from Apaches to non-wartime helicopter contexts. The same goes for the full stack of humans supporting and maintaining the operational capability of the helicopters.

For jet turbine flying bombs the argument is far more tenuous, though the diversity of non-wartime utilities fixed wing propeller driven drones provide is nearly endless.

the real reason you really dont want hot jet engines is because of cheap heat seaking missiles launchable from anything including infantry units

That is precisely why this drone’s carefully designed engine shrouds that are also low radar profile are such a sophisticated design.

Look at the engine shrouds on modern low radar profile low infared signature jet aircraft, it is the same idea and it makes the problem you think is simple into a much more complicated problem.

A missile needs to really see into the blazing core of the jet cone to be decisively effective which is one of the reasons the Su-57’s widely spaced jet turbines visible from a dizzying array of angles paired with its low radar profile design make two comical brothers who hate each other.

https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a22341/f-35-stealth-infrared/

edit I believe the engine is bolted to the outside for display purposes but maybe I am wrong

The bottleneck is only access to capital and small jet turbines… unless of course you don’t have a fleet of hovering command centers/dragons that are hauling a dizzying array of armament, two highly trained humans, high powered sensors, countermeasures and the communications infrastructure to serve as eyes for your blind mass produced flying bombs… if you don’t have that then the bottleneck is mass producing mini autonomous fighter jets which is a massively more difficult and ethically fraught challenge*.

In particular radically simple pulse jet engines may proliferate on (nonstealthy) platforms that fit the former type, especially in interceptor/decoy roles.

*the best example of this latter, much harder to nail down design goal is Turkey’s Kizilelma, and don’t take this as an indicator this is easy, take it as an expression of Turkey’s strength + them being in many ways blocked manned fighter jet access.

What is problematic or biased about the quote I provided?

Why are you accusing me of abusing reports to silence people who criticize me? Saying I am “abuse reports” about a single report you don’t feel is valid doesn’t feel fair to me.

Sure I will remove the “highly unreliable source”.

The ruling class always makes the same fatal mistake of believing people who condescendingly have been denied meaningful help for decades will act reactionally when provided the alternative vision and opportunity to burn it all down, damn the consequences.

I don’t know if it is irrational in a way though it usually ends up being a self immolating act for the desperate and poor, we are talking about human beings here, agency and free will are burning fires within us and given enough abuse that fire can be twisted into a rage that just wants everything to break around us in an enactment of a fantasy of eruptive “justice” coming to the people and systems that inflicted that suffering and denial of agency. When you corner an animal, instinct kicks in, we are no different.

This is why neoliberalism leads to a collapse into fascism, it locks society into a place where help is condescendingly denied continually while the narrative that neoliberalism is superior to conservatism (which is true) is used to beat any criticism from the left into submission.

Yes but neoliberalism was necessary to get to this point, fascism is worse than neoliberalism but that doesn’t change the fact that neoliberalism inevitably leads to a collapse into fascism by refusing to deal with structural issues until it is too late.

You have to be joking the art can only be interpreted strictly in that linear fashion, by the same logic Mein Kampf is barely fascist.

Fascism brought nothing new to the table that The Magic Mountain hadn’t already dismantled with fervor.

You have no conception of the relationships between simultaneous polarized reactions to the same perceived existential questions that dominate public discourse, what a morbid, lifeless view of history…

Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain is a large modern epic-philosophical poem about the struggle between light and darkness, health and disease, life and death. Since the writer wants to depict this struggle in its ideologically pure, most abstract form, he chooses to a certain extent an abstract environment in which all the phenomena of the capitalist world appear in all their essence, not obscured by the petty events of bourgeois everyday life.

This environment is the “Magic Mountain” – a fashionable tuberculosis sanatorium in Switzerland. People from all strata of bourgeois society meet here; all of them are in a state of forced inaction, artificial isolation from everyday worries. Thus, their social position does not essentially change, according to circumstances they give the opportunity to the individual, the best of them to ponder over the meaning and direction of their life.

On this Wednesday, Thomas Mann introduces his hero – a decent, honest German youth from a wealthy family. Here, in contact with other patients, he gets acquainted with the spiritual trends of his time. The path of his inner development is the content of the novel. Thomas Mann shows what an almost magical attractive effect had the conditions of Germany at that time on the morally sensitive bourgeois: sickness, darkness, death. Dissatisfaction with one’s own, purely personal life, an existence aimed only at achieving material goals, a moral disgust for the rough, barbaric sides of this life and at the same time the inability to understand that they are generated by the lack of social freedom in Germany, made these people defenseless against dark forces.

These people are ready to accept fascist “socialism,” which is nothing more than a demagogic disguise of universal enslavement.

Thomas Mann understood even earlier this defenselessness of the German bourgeoisie in the face of the dark forces of reaction and showed it with tragic irony in his short stories.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/1943/humanism-barbarism/ch05.htm

Robert Heynen’s article, “Cultures of Confinement: Health, Illness, and Madness in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and The Magic Mountain” details the parallels of the theme of mental illness and the rise of authoritarianism in the real world, historical Weimar Germany, and the events within the film (Heynen 683). Heynen explains how mental asylums were a strategy for authority figures in Weimar Germany, in which they could place individuals who started leftist coalitions and organizations, as a way to squash such political opposition (Heynen 683–684). Through the lens of this theory, Dr. Caligari would represent an authoritarian fascist figure responsible for gaslighting his citizens, or patients, to commit murders through some sort of hypnotic mind control or brainwashing, as well as imprison revolutionary figures who pose a threat to his authoritative reign of his domain. Heynen also points to the writer Kracauer as an influential interpreter of the film as depicting the early breeding grounds of Nazism and authoritarianism in Germany at the time (Heynen 685).

https://dainealmaclean.medium.com/how-the-cabinet-of-dr-73660400e5e3

And yet how could Europe resist a novel that ends with the outbreak of a world war during which, to quote The Magic Mountain’s narrator, ‘so many things began whose beginnings, it seems, have not yet ceased’.

As the late Polish poet Adam Zagajewski once wrote, ‘We’re still dealing with the heroes of The Magic Mountain.’ And, let’s add, Adrian Leverkühn and Serenus Zeitblom, the ‘heroes’ of Doctor Faustus. But Thomas Mann did more than simply write about the cultural and spiritual transformations of German society in the early 20th century. He lived them. The reason that he became such a forceful foe of Nazism is because he shared the same intellectual and cultural roots.

https://engelsbergideas.com/notebook/thomas-manns-cathedrals-in-prose/

Putler and his rapist ally Trump have been responsible for frauding their own elections

Right but the way that has occurred is well documented in both cases with Trump and Putin, what I am asking here is beyond indirect dark money funding of political groups in Germany (which is definitely wrong I am not defending it) what are the mechanisms of interference that are so grave as to make people question the results of the election?

What are the nature of these accusations? Actual faked votes? “Gerrymandering” style manipulation? Deregistration of valid voters?

I don’t doubt that Putin would try to do this kind of thing, not for a second but also when I look at my own country… Putin didn’t need to make Trump win, we did that all by ourselves, yes russia threw gasoline on the fire but focusing on that is missing the point of fact that we started the fire here all by ourselves.

Then why do stupid propagandists and their brain-dead victims need to lie contantly about those imaginary weapons used on Palestinians?

There are a couple of alarming things about your response here.

First, why are you so focused on being angry at the people you consider who are misinformed about something you have explicitly said is a target of propaganda? Even taking your argument at face value, you seem angriest at the symptom of misinformed people not the causes driving it, which I think reveals a lot about your character.

Second if you don’t think Germany has been directly supporting Israel during the course of the Palestinian Genocide, you are simply misinformed and I urge you to take a step back and reconsider some of the things you may have dismissed said by others just because it clashed with how you thought things were.

https://www.ecchr.eu/en/press-release/despite-international-warnings-germany-continuously-exported-billions-in-arms-to-israel-from-2023-to-2026/

Keep your damn eye on the ball, what matters is the Genocide stops not that you get to be righteously angry at people who you considered were fooled by misinformation/disinformation.

Oh so you still think the “only defensive weapons” line still works?

Pathetic.

You insult my intelligence by thinking this kind of shitty logic will work on me, you also insult this community by talking down to their intelligence with lazy arguments like this.

When a Genocide and War is occurring, if you give tools of war to the people perpetrating Genocide and War you are responsible for empowering their Genocide and War, whether the weapons are “defensive” or not is a laughable distraction from that basic reality.

Pertinently, in modern warfare the most crucial enablers for offensive action are air defenses and ballistic missile defenses, this is a basic consequence of combined arms warfare and it makes your framing absurd based on its first principles alone.

Unless you have substantiated evidence to share that this election was tampered with please stop spreading potential misinformation about it.