AbnormalHumanBeing @ AbnormalHumanBeing @lemmy.abnormalbeings.space

Some weird, German communist, hello. He/him pronouns and all that. Obsessed

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4 mo. ago

Plot twist: Nicole is a real person, building the biggest polycule to date!

That's so funny, my new girlfriend is also called Nicole, and you won't believe it, I met her right here on the Fediverse! 😍

Ha, I got interested in researching what exactly Mennonites are, and funnily, the German Wikipedia article has, in its very introduction, this disclaimer:

In den Medien gibt es immer wieder Berichte über Mennoniten in Nord- oder Südamerika, die einen sehr konservativen bis weltabgewandten Lebensstil pflegen und die in der Regel einen deutschen Hintergrund haben. Diese Gruppen stellen jedoch nur einen kleinen Ausschnitt aus dem mennonitischen Spektrum dar, in dem es auch viele modernere, angepasstere und liberalere Gemeinschaften sowie viele andere ethnische Zugehörigkeiten gibt.

Translation by me:

"In the media, there are regular reports about Mennonites in North- or South America, who have a very conservative or even withdrawn lifestyle, who usually have German ancestry. These groups are, however, only a small section of the whole Mennonite spectrum, in which there are also many more modern, more adjusted and more liberal communities, as well as many other ethnicities."

Seems like your American Mennonite exiles are making the rest of the Mennonite world defensive.

Hm, I get the sentiment, and while I think that can be a dynamic to consider, I know authoritarian systems often have this dynamic, where the upper class believes themselves to be worthy of "forbidden" knowledge. Take Kim Jong-un having been sent to school in Switzerland, the Nazi top brass collecting and enjoying otherwise censored/forbidden media, many early modern philosophers staying alive by tutoring the children of aristocrats and later industrialists, with knowledge that wouldn't be allowed for the "common rabble".

Now, they indeed are in the conflict of wanting their children to be obedient extensions of themselves and at the same time wanting them to be competent enough to carry on and be useful to their own legacy. That has been a pretty inherent conflict to patriarchical systems, including those in contemporary capitalism, basically ever since class society has been a thing. But overall, they do want at least the children they expect to take their place one day, to be competent enough to withstand the "dog-eat-dog"-world they favour, which often includes education on "alternative thinking".

You are right, though, of course, that all those things will still be viewed through their ideological lens. Historical developments like class conflict has to be taught from their perspective, for example, and with the moral stance of the ruling class on it. Knowledge will often only be superficially understood, so they can feel superior in "knowing" it, without risking proper engagement. But those dynamics are also very old and widespread even today. I remain with my position of thinking, that they do want an "elite" education for themselves, including things otherwise deemed inappropriate or even forbidden. Hypocrisy is an integral part of authoritarian systems.

They want their own children to be educated in private schools and by tutors not available to common people, and everyone else just educated enough to do their jobs and work for them.

Maybe a few scholarships especially targeted at a few poor "gifted" children, that produce false hope and additional shame if you can't be "good" enough for one of those scholarships.

I think there's a missed chance to have mint and other "cooling" herbs on the outer rim

Genuinely, though, it is hard to gauge at times which actions are:

• Genuinely malicious plans to increase his and his cronies' wealth
• Confused, because Elon or Trump were in a specific mood that particular day
• Some actor behind the scenes manipulating them by taking advantage of their impulsivity
• The genuine incompetence of the newly appointed loyalists (or the algorithms/AI they use) within the new deep state
• Genuinely ideologically motivated stupidity, from Libertarians that drank their own cool-aid within the administration.

It is genuine chaos. But overall, the effects are pretty disastrous, no matter what exactly causes which actions.

The Wing Commander series in general was such a great showcasing of combining cutting-edge tech with well-designed presentation. I remember watching my bigger brother playing the games and the impressions just burning themselves into my brain.

While this is very funny, and definitely representative of a sort of ignorance/arrogance commonly found in ideologues - I recently learned that most people talking about the effect have, in fact, been Dunning-Krugering themselves.

Insightful video on the topic.

What most people expect the effect to look like:

What the actual results were:

I can't be certain in this case, but the usual suspects are not being connected to as many servers (e.g. not scraping some because of robots.txt settings), delays in scraping the stats, or excluding some servers consciously because their stats are deemed a bit suspicious.

The one shown is from join-lemmy:

https://join-lemmy.org/instances

Also of interest for people that love statistics (which I do):

https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy

https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats

EDIT: As you can see, the Fediverse being what it is, it's basically impossible to get an exact, definitive count, so the numbers will always be a bit fuzzy. But they clearly show trends

He’s giving a full demonstration of just how untouchable he feels.

This is such a huge part of the psychology behind authoritarianism. It's about harsh rules and repression, and the perverse enjoyment of the privileged few, that can be above the rules. It's like a schoolyard bully, really, beating you up but also snitching on you to the teachers, and then enjoying the teachers not believing you. The hypocrisy is not a fault within authoritarianism, it's an essential component, of how it functions ideologically.

Taking away their feeling of being untouchable, is a massive part of how to combat it. That requires, at this point, revolutionary change, because damn, the foundations of property are all in their favour.

To paraphrase Zizek: "You can't change people, but you can change the system, so that people aren't pished to do certain things."

In general, people have historically always acted within a historical-material framework that influenced their actions and thoughts. Only changing the framework changes people's actions down the line.

The thought, that it all depends on people being "better" is part of an ideological distortion, in service of the status quo. As is the thought, that you would have to change the people instead of the dynamics of production and property. Ideology presents the former as hope and the latter as impossible, when it is precisely the other way around.

No, you are thinking of hot cock water.

Cock water, meanwhile, is a variant of gamer girl bathwater.

It does sound a bit like the really cringey words you hear in German dirty talk, like "Ficksahne" - "fuck cream".

“essence fluid”

I guess the Daoist alchemy history is visible there

Now, as much as I genuinely respect what their scientists have achieved with DeepSeek, especially with limited resources and import restrictions on hardware, and how it is Open Source and all - this will most likely end up enshittifying 90% of what it touches, still, just as "AI" like that does anywhere. "Good" to see those dynamics are the same on both sides of the Pacific (and Atlantic, actually), including overvalued stocks from hype.

Also, is archive.ph down? I tried .ph and .is and both timed out for me, when I tried to generate an easy-to-share link to the article.

Yeah, his videos and articles are usually insightful - but his thumbnails are often weirdly bad. In this case, I wonder if he thought the original article and his own stance towards it were somehow mor commonly known with people, or if it was an unfortunate attempt at clickbait.

You load sixteen tons 🎶

except that perhaps the corporation has more freedom to trounce upon the rights of the citizenry.

That is exactly the kind of freedom they are looking for, and don't underestimate the psychology there - it feels like freedom to them, the kind of freedom that allows for injustices to prevail. I'm reminded of an anecdote of Ẑiẑek, talking to a bunch of fascists in former Yugoslavia, where they in no uncertain terms revealed, that it had been tyranny to them to not be able to be violent, rape, plunder, etc. and that the chaos of the breakup had been a liberatory event for them, psychologically.

Never assume "freedom" is something, that opposing classes and groups in general agree upon when it comes to its definition.