Blake [he/him] @ Blake @feddit.uk

Posts

3

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704

Joined

2 yr. ago

Honestly? There isn't really one. I think the best you can do is expose yourself to various sources and apply a very, very, very high dose of skepticism to everything you read.

There is an absolute wealth of articles online about it, but here’s a couple points to get you started

https://www.thepinknews.com/2020/06/22/bbc-news-institutional-transphobia-kamal-ahmed-crispin-blunt-trans-media-watch/

https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7nv97/lgbtq-employees-are-quitting-the-bbc-because-they-say-its-transphobic

Sure you can, it’s just the median of the range rather than the median person. For what it’s worth, I did look at age distribution statistics and there is some disparity but it’s minimal, which is why I wrote 40% instead of 44%.

Anyways, this is getting much too pedantic, obviously I’m not writing a scientific analysis, it’s just an internet comment, it doesn’t need to be perfect.

The police were founded in 1829. We managed without them just fine before they were founded and we will manage just fine after. I’d propose the creation of a voluntary group of people with no powers beyond that of any other person, but who take some time out of their day to keep watch and deal with any issues that crop up. The overwhelming majority of crime is caused by poverty as you rightly said so there’s likely very little that they would have to deal with.

The BBC hasn’t been impartial for at least 20 years. Not only that, but they’re the most transphobic publicly funded institution in the UK.

Err, yeah, I wouldn’t do that, I’d just buy some other kind of snack!

Believe it or not, but the labour party has changed somewhat in the last 75 years. The current Labour Party are just a Lite version of the Conservative Party. They will not save the NHS.

I’m no more resilient than average, heck I’m definitely less resilient than average, I think you’re just underestimating just how strong humans are and how capable we are to just get on with our lives.

I haven’t read that book, sorry!

I did a quick bit of searching online and found out some interesting stuff about how people tend to report positive outcomes from trauma more often than negative outcomes: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8827649/

Millennials: we’re all adults now, we want to be taken seriously!

Time: passes

Millennials: never mind we’ve made a mistake let’s go back

The US census used 1997 - 2013 as the range. Which gives us an age range of 10-26, making the median age 18 - and I was thinking of 21 as adult, rather than 18 - which is why I said “they’re teenagers or younger” - but yes, you’re right, “only” 40%-ish of gen Z are under 18 :p

Run the same survey again in 11 years and compare 21+ gen Z to 2023’s boomers and I bet the results aren’t even close.

All of the things you suggest (checks and balances, strong education, democratic reform) have consistently been weakened rather than strengthened - this is because they would negatively impact those in power, and those in power make the decisions about implementing those things.

In addition, they would help, but not nearly enough. Checks and balances are a temporary improvement but eventually become captured and consolidated by the power they’re checking/balancing. Education helps people to understand how these systems are abusive, but can be countered by propaganda and misinformation - no one is immune to psychological manipulation. And democratic reform again acts as a temporary improvement, but eventually, power is consolidated and the reforms are integrated.

Humans unfortunately are still quite instinctual creatures, we often don’t have an “off” switch that says “okay, we have enough material wealth / security now, we don’t need to hoard anymore!” because we’re kind of always inclined towards building up a stockpile for winter.

We need to accept the reality of our situation and dismantle power structures - this means the abolition of money, the police, prisons, private property ownership, etc. - this may sound far fetched, but it is the only way that we can have a world without abuses of power and exploitation. I completely believe that it’s possible and worth working towards achieving that goal.

The problem with exploitative supply chains is that they’re chains, so even if you make one link less exploitative, the sources and next steps in the chain likely remain exploitative.

Each improvement makes things better. If we let perfect be the enemy of good then we just allow exploitation to continue because we couldn’t fix it all at once.

Companies have already been exerting influence on these supply chains for decades to “improve” them, and they have only gotten worse. No, I don’t think that’s better.

Manufacturers aren’t going to just sit back and say, “oh well I guess we’ll just not compete in the industry anymore, let’s just let our competitors take it.” No way, the people running these firms aren’t going to just throw away business like that. They’ll lose out on some profits for a while and throw all their toys out the pram about that, but they will not just leave the market (or price themselves out of it). That’s just their gaslighting propaganda.

Stupid article, most of Gen Z aren’t even 21 yet, of course they’re gonna fall for scams, they’re teenagers or younger lol. I got scammed loads of times on RuneScape as a kid, and that taught me better than anything else how to avoid scams.

Holy shit, I hope you found some way of forwarding that to his new partner…

It won’t matter. Labour will not save the NHS.

Fuck the manufacturers. They’ve had years to invest in local battery manufacturing and chose not to, betting on the fact that they could pressure the EU to roll it back. Nope, hold them to the flame. This is a step in the direction of reducing our exploitation of the developing world.

No, legitimate interest goes further than functionally required cookies. Legitimate interest can be treated to mean almost anything, because it refers to the “legitimate business interests of the data processor”. If you’re on a news website, it’s their business to show you ads and to get them to click on them. Therefore, it’s their best interests to improve the click-through rate. This can be used to justify tracking cookies as legitimate interest.

Would it survive the test of a day in court? I don’t know, maybe not, but it probably will never go that far, so it basically doesn’t matter anyways.

It happens much faster than you’d think, and it doesn’t have to be absolute power by any means. Have you seen/heard stories of even tiny amounts of power going to people’s heads? It doesn’t happen because they’re evil people, it happens because they had a way to improve their living situation (maybe even for nothing more than an ego boost) at the expense of others, even if in a very minor way, and chose to take it.

We would all like to believe that the world is good and fair and that if we just got the right people in power, everything would be okay, but that is just not realistic unfortunately. Power almost always corrupts anyone who wields it, and as long as there are unequal structures of power, there will be abuses of power.

Ambition isn’t a binary thing. Most people have some amount of ambition, even if it’s just “I aspire to get a decent job so I can live comfortably”. It’s surprisingly seductive to abuse power to further your goals, even seemingly unambitious goals, especially if you think you can get away with it, and doubly so if you think that your abuse of power isn’t really doing any significant harm (as per my example of taking $0.01 from people). If you give yourself a moral justification for your abuse of power on top of those things, you’re doomed.

I want to believe that if I had significant power that I wouldn’t abuse it, but I have to be realistic. I have no reason to think that I’m special or that I would somehow be immune to this. It’s better for all of us that we get rid of as much of the unequal structures of power in our society as possible.

Fair enough, and no harm done, at least from my perspective. I agree that it is interesting topic worthy of consideration and I think your view absolutely has merit, it just felt more to me that you thought your view was more “valid” because it was backed up by works of speculative fiction, but now I understand that I have misinterpreted your comment, so I apologise for my part in that :)

I’m much happier to discuss the ideas on a level playing field.

I agree that the loss of a pet isn’t generally as devastating as, say, losing a parent while young, or losing a partner. I was thinking about kids - usually their first experience of loss is for a pet, and it’s often really difficult for them, because the experience is so new and kids already have such sensitivity to emotions.

I agree that in a world where people live forever, each loss would be more impactful. I’m sure the first loss would be as difficult (or more so) than a child dealing with the loss of a beloved grandparent - very hard and painful, but there’s little reason to think that it would uniquely break our brains, and I think there’s also little reason to think that something being rarer makes it harder to deal with.

I spent all of my life being able to walk and taking that for granted, with no reason to think I would ever have to deal with the loss of that ability - until something happened and I ended up with a disability that left me unable to walk. It was hard to come to terms with but I managed absolutely fine. And that’s a relatively minor thing compared to what some humans have had to deal with. We are an extremely resilient and adaptable species!

For all those reasons I really don’t think immortality would be particularly difficult for our brains to deal with. I think the significantly bigger problem would be more social and geographic - how would we avoid overpopulation, and would our society/culture continue to progress as it used to? We know very well about how elderly people are “set in their ways”, for example, would that trend mean that if we had immortality in the 17th century that we would still be having arguments about whether or not slavery was ethical today?

Damn! Hope that friend is now an ex-friend, what a crazy dangerous thing to do! Hope you recovered okay from the burns <3