Candelestine @ Candelestine @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

Simple solution: Turn youtube comment notifications off.

He doesn't strike me as a man particularly interested in educational facts, but he casually references an ancient Roman military unit. The fascists love Rome.

This is a really fun neuroscience question, it's kinda diving into the different functions of the prefrontal cortex (conscious decision-making) and the cerebellum. (has a major role in muscle memory)

The cerebellum is one of the most interesting body structures. It's actually like one super long ribbon cable that's been folded up to take up minimal space.

I mean, it's unavoidable. Everyone draws their own line in the sand based on what they think is "right" and "wrong", using whatever best tools and ideas are available to them, picked from the avalanche of options.

The line will not stay put from generation to generation, that's not a reasonable thing to ask for. If we go back 50 years when tv was king, it's not like all the tv shows were equally good, or stayed good.

So, it's kinda just on us to seek out and pick the right things to support, and be prepared in case those change too. It's kinda the whole reason I'm personally here on the Fediverse. I mean, back in the stone age our ancestors had to do the same things, its not like their environments always just stayed perfect. If something changes and you don't want to starve to death, you gotta just do something. Can't just wish it away.

Yeah, this was always my big one too. I'm a green at heart, but I learned a brutal lesson then, that I'll carry inside of me forever. A lesson that has only gotten reinforced by the slow march of modern fascism.

Democracy requires dialogue, patience, empathy and compromise. The alternative is authoritarianism, and the unavoidable power struggles that come from too much centralized power in a world with ambitious humans. We need to remember that, and dialogue and compromise with our, in many ways younger-self progressives, instead of trying to corral them. We can do this. We are not too afraid.

Give em hell Bernie.

Hey, cool. I've never actually watched one live, thank you. I think I know what my around-the-house background video is gonna be for a few days.

It's an embracement of the things they feel don't cost them anything anymore, they just have nothing left to lose in that dept, in their own minds. They could try, just like any other person, but rather than trying to be good and risking failure and rejection, it can feel preferable to embrace the darkness and be able to have confidence in their own control of their path forward. They'd rather be rejected for being vitriolic scum, than trying to be funny and charming and failing at that.

Imo anyway, I've never been one and can't speak from personal experience, simply been around in some seedy internet spaces before, and I understand toxic masculinity well.

Taiwan is very mountainous and urban, and has few good beaches for landings. It is also wealthy, and high population. Could probably take a page from the Swiss method for staving off aggression in the early-mid 20th century.

For the record, the US has been oil independent for around the past 10ish years or so, since our fracking boom. We're still vulnerable to global price fluctuations, but when it comes to strategic necessity, we don't actually need overseas oil, and probably never will again.

So, it was fairly accurate propaganda at one point, about 20ish years ago perhaps, but things do tend to change given enough time.

... hear hear. There are few things I hate more in modern politics than having to align myself with our military-industrial complex, as it feels like a deep and personal betrayal of some of my own strongest and longest-held beliefs.

But ... every tool has its purpose, and this is exactly what they're for. Would they maybe, just maaaaybe, like ... some more money?

Starting to lean towards the fuck-it direction here...

If they hate the govt so much, fine, shut it down. Again. See how it works for you. Again. People just don't learn.

I was going to engage in some debate with this, but after your last paragraph I no longer find it necessary.

It illustrates one of the nastier, but also more important of life lessons. No system or even choice is going to be without its own flaws and vulnerabilities, they'll just be different ones from system to system. So, it's less about any one system being "right", or even just "better", but instead "appropriate to the circumstances/environment/goals".

Once you acknowledge this, it becomes a lot harder to passionately defend any particular system, because you're no longer as eager to ignore its own unique vulnerabilities. I believe deeply in democracy and freedom of information for instance, but I cannot bring myself to ignore that it creates a vulnerability for us that someone like Xi Jinping, with his powerful control over the local information space, simply does not experience.

Authoritarian systems, on the other hand, have to deal with the very basic fact that there is nothing divine or magical about that man on top, he's as human as the rest of us. So, if you get rid of him, you may be able to take and keep his job. Where in a democracy you'd just have to face re-election within a few years.

Pros and cons, always, with pretty much everything. Then the next most important consideration imo is simply scale. Some systems work very well within very small scales, say, a small family. But when scaling these systems up, it can change the circumstances enough that their value changes.

To illustrate this I always like to use littering a banana peel. If just one person litters a banana peel, it is largely harmless. If, however, a million people litter banana peels all in one spot, you can actually create a potential problem where one did not exist before. Scaling the behavior up changes how we need to think about it. This has a lot of ramifications for business in the modern world, where scale is usually desirable. Also feeds into many civil engineering problems.

... good point. I have a lemmy.ca alt for this exact reason.

For me it's more about something with the potential to undermine the deathgrip of facebook, twitter, etc from our societies, in an attempt to partially address the steady increase in utter braindead stupidity and mindless vitriolic hatred stemming from profit-driven algorithmic control of our broader information ecosystem.

That requires the eventual growth of a decentralized sister ecosystem of sorts, able to act as a viable competitor. So, to compete with the giants, that's basically a fairly significant chunk of everyone. On Earth.

Fortunately you can always just defederate the highest population centers, I imagine that would become very common eventually. Especially if they tried monetization or something, which would probably not be unheard of with larger userbases.

All that said, I do feel you and also personally like smaller communities. But I'll just move to one once World gets too big.

Ah, I see. If true, then the screenshot I was defending was the real troll, trying to sow distrust. Or it remains possible it was all a big misunderstanding. Thank you for helping clarify this for me.

I do understand now that the admin of this Instance has their own idea for how to combat even the best of trolls, and I think it's something worthwhile that should be attempted. Extreme, radical inclusion, basically. Not without its own challenges, for sure, but it might prove very beneficial overall.

On the whole, this has overall been (a little ironically) educational for me, so thank you for your patience. It is appreciated.

This is a massive exaggeration and mischaracterization of what I said. I was describing a possibility, and think it is likely that some not most or all people fit my description. Are you attempting to imply there are zero cis conservative larpers on that Instance or something? That would be surprising to me, given this is the internet, but I will admit that it is possible.

Please note, I was not attempting to insult your community. But I do think awareness of conservative methods makes it easier to fight back against them where and when they appear, and nowhere on the internet is actually fully, permanently safe.

Culpable deniability is a critical cornerstone of conservative methods. All their behaviors must be explainable as potentially innocent, otherwise they are a very low-quality troll, likely to be detected and overall be ineffective. But still, they can learn from experience and grow in skill.

It would be very appropriate for you to question whether I am trolling right now, though a quick perusal through my history should illustrate I'm a fairly classical liberal that ultimately believes in freedom and equality. In my case, this has evolved into a belief that people should have freedom to transition, if that would make them happier, so I do support trans rights.

Bringing this back to methodology, I do not think trans people, being so small in number, have very many realistic options for progress outside "civility politics". But that is simply my opinion, I can agree to disagree on that one.

It's circumstantial. Could be calls for violence, exaggerated requests for inappropriate empathy, general unreasonableness? The mechanism of action for real life effects is a stubborn hardening of everyone's positions and a general breakdown of willingness to engage in serious dialogue in the long-term.

No, they would not go through all that work, you're right. They would take something else someone has established and try to infiltrate it later.

You might be surprised sometimes. It's not some one-off thing of kids-will-be-kids. It's organized campaigns where an individual will manipulate a community somewhere into serving their interests.

Like, I could write a guide on how to do it, publish it somewhere, and then share that to 4chan or discord or something. It would be received as very funny by some, and a very small percentage of 4chans millions of users could possibly start attempting it. That small percentage is still in the hundreds or thousands of individuals though. And they're high-energy, passionate, and capable of learning through experience.

4chan takes a very militaristic approach to things sometimes, as a sort of poster child for toxic masculinity. So, they are capable of organizing sometimes. Or at least used to be, my experience was from a lot of years ago, before /b/ died of cancer.