• 0 Posts
  • 17 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 7th, 2023

help-circle

  • Libraries are safe spaces for minorities and the LGBTQ+ community. Books in general spread awareness and raise empathy and can also help struggling young people understand that they are not alone.

    That quote isn’t saying people of these communities read or use a public library more than those who aren’t; it’s pointing out that the erasure of public safe spaces and resources affects groups that benefit from their existence more.

    All of that doesn’t even mention the content that was likely present in those 500,000 books.



  • I’m no defender of AI and it just blatantly making up fake stories is ridiculous. However, in the long term, as long as it does eventually get better, I don’t see this period of low to no trust lasting.

    Remember how bad autocorrect was when it first rolled out? people would always be complaining about it and cracking jokes about how dumb it is. then it slowly got better and better and now for the most part, everyone just trusts their phones to fix any spelling mistakes they make, as long as it’s close enough.


  • Madison, the victim, told her story online and was met with the vitriolic, violent hatred you’d expect from a woman pointing out the misogyny of the internet’s favorite tech boy. She shared her story mostly to warn other women what to expect from working there as well as a step in her own healing process.

    She never wanted to sue them since they are much wealthier than her and she kind of just wanted to move past that part of her life. Linus Media Group isn’t going to sue her for defamation because even if they can win, as they claim (which I personally have my own doubts, but I’m an outside observer with no legal education), it’s still a very bad look.

    Since no parties are bringing litigation to a court, the litigation happens in the court of public opinion.


  • This is becoming frustrating. We are on the same page that violence is the only answer; I’m only insisting that we understand that the violence has to be done against our fellow humans. It is a tragedy, but one that must be enacted because, as you say, there is no negotiation to be had here.

    Denying their humanity weakens the claim of righteousness and, moreso than enabling room for their bad faith bullshit, directly feeds into their bad faith claims of antisemitism as dehumanizing them removes genocide from the argument and all your left with is killing animals/barbarians/evil monsters. I don’t know about you, but that argument is wholly unconvincing to me. You can certainly claim that because they’ve engaged in genocide, that’s why they’ve lost their humanity, but again, it’s an unnecessary mental step that gains us nothing and weakens the argument for deploying violence against them.

    For the soldier / PTSD argument, I again disagree. Soldiers kill people. There should be no way around that fact. Dehumanization and making it easier for soldiers to mentally compartmentalize the taking of life is not a good thing and can easily be warped to make soldiers follow any order, regardless of the moral imperative. The soldiers can and should be made to understand that they are committing a traumatic amount of violence and death in order to stop an entire genocide. Violence is a tool and it must be wielded responsibly and with full understanding that the violence is both necessary and just.

    Also chill with the faux philosophical ramblings of simulations and video game analogies. I don’t care what you believe outside of this context, but this is a serious issue and talking about “disabl[ing] PvP flags for the middle east” belies that this is the real world (simulated or not) with real, serious consequences. It damages your entire argument and makes you come across like you don’t see the actual human pain and suffering this massacre has caused.


  • Yeah, I agree with everything you just said, but make no mistake, the monsters committing genocide are still human beings. Denying that blurs the line of the purpose of violence done against them and makes it difficult to understand that we must constantly be vigilant against rhetoric and propaganda that advocates for genocide as it is scarily easy for people to fall into patterns of thinking that can justify genocide.

    It is irresponsible to say that, because they are actively committing genocide against a population, they are no longer human beings and that is why they deserve violence. It’s an unnecessary extra step that opens the door for the very same genocidal thinking. They are people who have engaged in genocide with no signs of slowing down or stopping, and for that one reason alone, deserve violence until their threat is quashed. That is enough for me; I see no reason or benefit to dehumanize them to justify righteous violence.


  • No, they are people. Ignorant, hateful, and actively supporting a genocide, but people nonetheless. My comment was explicitly calling out and criticizing the impulse to dehumanize the “enemy”, real or imagined. Thinking of Zionist Israelis or Nazis as less than human not only perpetuates the mindset that allows these groups to carry out genocide, but at the same time denies how easy it is for average people to fall into such traps.

    It leads to thought processes similar to “If you have to be less than human to support a genocide, then obviously what I support can’t be genocide because I am definitely a human.”

    And I’m definitely not one of those “oh, we just have to talk to these hateful ignorant perpetuators of genocide because they simply don’t understand why they’re wrong”. I’m of the opinion that violence is absolutely necessary to uphold equality if the situation has been left to get as bad as it has. I’m mostly just railing against the idea that people who support genocide are somehow less human because of that hatred.



  • Listen to how a large portion (obviously not all) Israelis talk about Palestinians. They genuinely do not view them as humans and certainly do not value their lives. They speak of the ongoing genocide with gleeful anticipation. People will literally go to the border to taunt Palestinian parents who’ve lost their children or the orphans themselves.

    They’re not shooting a 4 year old kid, they’re simply shooting another “worthless” Palestinian. This way of thinking was and is specifically crafted to enable almost every genocide that has ever happened.



  • but it’s MUCH cheaper, so keeping with every other shitty idea he’s ever had, Musk was REALLY banking on Tesla engineers to make a crazy breakthrough so he could reap billions in reward.

    It worked at SpaceX because of a perfect concoction of all the best rocket scientists and engineers wanting to work at SpaceX, since it was one of the only space programs not owned by a government and could push the boundaries, the technology being possible and wildly practical to implement, and massive government subsidies.

    Tesla is in the car market, which is notoriously competitive and, while they do have massive government subsidies, they don’t have the best engineers and musk’s insistence that they “figure out” how to shove autonomous driving into a medium that simply doesn’t provide enough information drives even the better engineers away.

    I really wish my government would stop funding his ego and let his fantasy projects die already.



  • to cause the symptoms by shaking a child, one would have to shake the child extremely violently, with forces comparable to being in a car crash. You really have to have the intent to kill to cause the levels of brain injuries described in SBS.

    A lot of these kinds of convictions are because a parent or caretaker admitted to trying to shake the baby to wake it up after it was already unconscious, due to an accident or the baby just falling ill suddenly. in the particular case, the baby slipped from the fathers hands after a bath and hit its head against the toilet. a terrible tragedy, but not murder. and since he was autistic and didn’t display the “proper” emotional response, nurses even went so far as accusing him of sexually assaulting the baby beforehand on no other evidence than the fact they didn’t like the cut of his jib. Now the state will murder him for that


  • If I pull a fire alarm in a crowded theater and a person dies in the panic because they were trampled, it’s still my fault because the danger wouldn’t have existed without my actions. if the police hadn’t engaged in a reckless and pointless chase so they could feel like an action hero, this woman would still be alive - in case I need to spell it out for you, the theif wouldn’t have felt the need to drive into oncoming traffic without an entire department chasing him down - and they would’ve still apprehended the criminal. real life isn’t like GTA where if you hide in an alley for a few minutes your wanted level disappears.

    another point: if the cops couldn’t find the criminal without engaging in a deadly chase, we still have the same conclusion of cops being absolute pig shit at their supposed job. ALL cops are bastards, especially the murderous psychopaths that wanna feel like speed racer in between harassing minorities and shooting dogs


  • “War is Peace” is doublespeak; an inherent contradiction. Anybody can say it and still see the contradiction and believe that it isn’t true. Doublethink is the internalization of that doublespeak. A Party member says it and sees no contradiction. Deep in their hearts, they understand that to be in a never ending war is to experience neverending peace.

    All that to say that doublespeak was certainly a thing in the novel, as it labours on the distinction between doublespeak and doublethink.