OpenStars @ OpenStars @startrek.website

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2 yr. ago

You... may not enjoy the answers:-P.

Hrm, strategic placement there... :-P

All that I know is that the questions are wonderful and it’s the only thing in life that never gets boring.

YES - THIS IS IT!!! Like, whether we have free will or not, I do not know,(but as we mentioned, it doesn't even matter b/c either way we need to act as if we do) but whether we SHOULD have free will is something that we could answer... if we knew for certain that there was an external entity. Star Trek is famous for exploring this. Like even if the actual Zeus did exist (they never met him iirc but Kirk did run into Apollo/Mercury at some point...), what "claim" would he have over humanity? Same with Arthur C. Clarke's (2001 A Space Odyssey) saga: just b/c they gave us our start (into sentience, or even seeding DNA & thus life itself?) doesn't necessarily mean that they should have agency over us...

Whereas on the other hand, whatever OS I am running on my computer (Mac OSX for me, though I hear that some people on Lemmy prefer Arch btw:-D) very much should obey my commands. e.g. when I tell it to reboot or to shut down a misbehaving program, I want it to do it NOW (or at least... soon, even if it needs a few moments to wrap things up, that's arguably far better b/c then it can do so safely). That, to me, seems to go beyond "might makes right", b/c we literally put in love, care, attention, and design into making that OS. The gulf b/t human sentience vs. like a worm or even a bacteria is far lesser than the gulf b/t us vs. the programs that we write, in terms of autonomy. We own it b/c we MADE it. (I am ignoring future AIs where we set up the system but then it kinda makes itself - a fascinating thought that very likely could qualify for an exemption, so here I am just bypassing that line of thinking entirely)

Anyway, I love thinking such thoughts:-D. I have no idea if doing so offers practical benefits (I kinda do not care!:-P), but it very well might. e.g. just how much agency / oversight did Elon Musk offer to building his Tesla cars? With all the crashes & potentially actually fatal consequences, it seems that even he did not put in the effort to truly know what those cars are all about. Thus if some hacker were to do so, would they "take ownership", and be able to bypass certain features & controls, in a manner that even Musk himself (& most of his engineers) has no idea exists - and in so doing, would they have that "right", or is that just another example of "might makes right", where they can & therefore they do? (which is a power that they could wield for good - e.g. go ahead and pay the subscription service, in order to help keep the company afloat, and yet still patch security vulnerabilities that the company itself never bothers to implement - so such a thought would not have to be solely due to piracy & stealing considerations)

According to such thinking then, if the Illuminati control the world, then can Anonymous help fix it, like Robin Hood? Except that Power Corrupts, and Absolutely Power... well the latter actually often turns around and converts to good, given enough time passing and the proclivities of the person, but even 99.99% Power corrupts nearly Absolutely, so it might end up being the other way around - perhaps they will merely join or subvert the Illuminati, or even become co-opted by them unknowingly? Trump presented himself as a style of "Robin Hood"-esque "savior" type, saying how he was going to "drain the swamp" and fix all the problems, but he did not work out so well. And while that attempt was blatantly obvious to anyone who has eyes, who is to say that the next attempt will be so readily detectable?

You do not need to apologize: Trump had a lot of us fooled, and I don't think your underlying idea - motivated by compassion - is wrong at all. I happened to not be fooled, at least in that same sense, but only b/c of my background having been similarly fooled by earlier events (so without those, I easily could have been), and even now I agree that he did a lot of good: by exposing the vulnerabilities inherent in our system, he may have done a lot better than Hilary Clinton would have to cause them to be fixed? She would have papered over the whole situation - her whole message was just "the status quo is absolutely fine" - but it is FUCKING NOT FINE!!!?!!! So I understand why people voted against her, even if that meant voting for him. Even now, I think her particular brand of insensitivity to people's needs is far more toxic & deadly than whatever Trump may have wrought for us - even if that leads to the death of America, it seems preferable to me to at least be honest about that death, rather than to keep claiming the "this is fine" meme (as in, "THIS IS FINE - OR ELSE!! Do not say that you are not fine, or you will be imprisoned!"). Unfortunately, Democrats seemed to have learned very little from the whole thing.:-(

Part of what I mean in that I am losing hope for democracy, is that I am wondering if I should be gaining hope in whatever may replace it? If this truly is a non-viable solution to begin with, then whatever we end up with later could potentially be better? Like, instead of a nation full of suicidal people who cannot afford housing and hate their jobs, what if we accepted that we are mere peasants and at least came to peaceful coexistence with that thought? I dunno, maybe I sound like a subversive there, but it is a thought that I cannot shake from my head. Is being a slave more "honest" than being a "free" employee, who nonetheless depends on their job for food/housing/medical care/existence? I guess you could say that I am questioning EVERYTHING - even just what our "freedom" may offer us? Unlike the earlier discussion points we mentioned, I despite these thoughts... but if they are coming at us regardless... then I at least want to struggle to open my eyes, regardless of whatever I might see:-(. In so doing, I am prepared to leave my religion, or double down harder on it, or shift it over to something else, or wherever the facts (as best as I can see them anyway) may take me. And that's good imho - I feel proud about that aspect of myself:-).

If you see yourself in others, whom can you harm?

It is a common bumper sticker on vehicles that I saw a few years back, often alongside the words "Coexist". The latter phrase is fantastic, but the phrase I mentioned really rubs me the wrong way. I believe it is Buddhist? Anyway, as you picked up on, my reaction was not how it was meant to be interpreted:-D - and I get that, and don't even hold it against the statement itself, except... I still have my preferences about the whole affair, and I happen to hate it:-P, and I am okay with having that emotion about it. Life is a journey, not a destination, and all that.

I wanted to be sure that I conveyed that I feel like I cannot win when it becomes a “struggle” - even at best if one side or the other were to totally conquer the opponent, then I overall would lose.

Speaking of life being a journey, it seems to me that it was not meant for us to be comfortable 100% of the time, nor perhaps safe either. If we were hyper-diligent and did everything correctly, every time, would that be "good" - is that then our "goal"? Certainly the opposite cannot be true, b/c then we'd be dead, but is the goal then the opposite, or is that a fallacy of False Dilemma? Moreover, is there just one path through life, that a "perfect" person would have taken, let's say if they were in my situation, or are there many ways, and our flaws are what make us beautiful, in part? This is one area where religion has helped inform my thinking: the word "perfection" should (perhaps) rather not mean "lacking any flaw" so much as "being complete, lacking nothing (major)". Therefore I do not strive to eliminate my flaws as if this is some kind of war and my goal is to murderize my opponent, but rather I accept them, embrace them even, and thereby find my peace. And then I get up off my butt and do something about them, one at a time, and it never sticks, but still I keep moving forward - and you know what? That is enough for me. Perhaps Nirvana, for us, is not absence of pain - or in other words, even if it was, we are human beings and not meant to exist in such a state? Thus, I do not want Discipline to always win, nor Comfort to always win, but rather both, each as seems best in the current moment. Maybe that's stupid of me, but it's a thought.

Anyway, the context was that people love you, b/c you show care & attention to them - but I hope you also fail to do that sometimes as well too, so that you can take care of yourself as well? Yes, you read that correctly: I wish failure upon you ("muwha-ha, a pox upon thee!!", ahem no wait, not like that!:-P), when/where/as appropriate, if that helps you to ultimately succeed. e.g. if you have a job interview the next morning, and you are fairly nervous about it, and then someone calls you at 2am needing something - perhaps they got drunk and wanted a ride home from 2 towns over or something - maybe don't answer? Hopefully they'll be fine, but you also need to be fine as well? The "right" thing to do in that moment may not always be to continue to give of yourself selflessly, if doing so would cost you a big job (which perhaps the drunk friend may not have even remembered, b/c of their drunkeness, but when sober they may have even agreed with the decision?). Anyway, you (Kendrick Lamar) already said it: "I choose me, I'm sorry" (hopefully not always as in "solely", but at least sometimes it does need to be done!?).

Btw, good luck with your whole house situation - I am certain that cannot be trivially easy to handle:-).

Recommended by who though? Spez, that's who. Race-baiting works to increase "engagement" e.g. clicks and comments, thus it continues.

"Safe" for the passengers then, but is nobody else truly around that could get hurt by the derailment?

Also, how many tied to the tracks are literally murderers who if not themselves killed in this manner, will go on to kill many more again?

Or did these people - cult members? - have themselves tied to the tracks willingly, wanting that easy death rather than slavery of the continued drudgery of existence?

I... might be overthinking this.:-P

How many people were inside the trolly though, and would die if it derailed?

Congrats, you just entered the running to become the next CEO of Boeing. :-|

That's... messed up. Fwiw, I am using the webpage UI - not an app - and it shows up perfectly for me. But yes, it has been enjoyable to discuss more deeply with you than is usual on a social media site - this is the power of Lemmy!:-)

We seem to have this fucked-up system where the two parties literally WANT to take turns - Republicans (until Trump came along) back themselves into a corner wrt e.g. Climate Change, then depend on hope that a Democrat will get elected and actually take care of it, then they will still "blame" them for all that "hippy stuff"; and then Democrats want to lower taxes on the wealthy so depend on hope that a Republican will get elected and make that happen.

An example is the border crisis: there are real issues there, that both side want to do something about, yet both sides are also leaning so heavily into politicking that they cannot manage to accomplish anything at all. It even/especially got so bad that they did finally manage to do something, almost, before Trump made some phone calls and shut it all down.

Just like the stock market, the appearance of things somehow matters more to them than reality. "Game theory" predicts that you simply cannot stamp out such a type of "cheating"/"gaming the system" set of behaviors - it's literally impossible, and can even work to the favor of the overall system in odd ways (like viruses infect cells, which ngl is bad for the individual cell, but as they do they can bring along genes that trigger behaviors inside of them, which exceedingly rarely but in a population rather than individual sense can save the whole damn species from an extinction-level event, especially for bacteria where the number of cells and infection events are both exceedingly large and they already exist more in a population rather than individualistic mode to begin with) - but such modelling also predicts (iirc) that when the threshold is reached that not only a few people cheat it but it BECOMES the system, then it all begins to break down.

At that point, people either need to move on to another new system that has not yet been fucked up, or else the whole thing crashes down. Either way involves a lot of pain.

For myself, I have lost faith in democracy, as it seems most people have alongside of me. That is not to say that we should ignore our responsibilities, it is just that I don't think they will counter these trends towards evil behaviors of greed and exploitation. I used to hold out great hope, but now I think that was naive, wishful thinking. But the only thing to do is move forward, and we'll see how it plays out I suppose. Maybe this is one of those things where like "it always seems darkest right before the dawn"?

On the other hand, what exactly are the actions that we (liberals) are doing to counter the effects of both globalization and automation? (links to any resources explaining that would be welcomed, though not your responsibility ofc - I will find them eventually!) We did manage to raise the minimum wage - that's excellent - but for the most part while the other side seems greedy, we seem lazy.

Case in point: abortion. While the overturning of Roe v. Wade is solely within the purview of the Supreme Court, why don't more states have more laws on the books or in the works to add protections in at the state level, as conservatives are doing on the other side of that issue? Diligence wins the day, regardless of who does it (as the phrase goes: you reap what you sow) and yeah I know about slow & steady wins the race but... are we merely slow, or are we living in a fantasy dreamland where somehow everything will magically fix itself without any effort on our parts? People are dying over there, and while we must allow others to live however they choose, why not enshrine some protections for "ourselves"? THAT much at least, is not something that can be adequately explained (imho) as "it is the Republicans fault" - wouldn't that lie solely within our own purview?

por que no los dos? I aim to please after all:-P.

And if you happen to die in the meantime, well then in that case you cannot sue :-P.

Life is difficult for redshirts. Fortunately not for long though! :-P

Another aspect: Republicans' methods may (MAY!?!?:-P) be deplorable, but they manage to actually deliver. Not governance - unless you count how they went in to sabotage it in the first place, in which case mission fucking accomplished there - but e.g. they promised tax cuts on the wealthy anti-abortion laws, and say what you will about that (and much should indeed be said!), but they got it done. It took decades of efforts, but they DID IT.

Meanwhile, Biden declared that the pandemic was over. The WHO disagrees, but he was so extremely over-eager to work in a "win" that he resorted to that falsehood. We expect that from a Republican, but when a Democrat does it, the base eats its own.

Republicans also manage to protect the rights of gun owners. Mind you, perhaps they shouldn't, but they do. Have Democrats protected the rights of workers even a tenth as well as Republicans protect their guns? Mind you, I can't really answer that, bc minimum wage is up enormously compared to what it was, accomplished over the course of the last decade. And unemployment is down too. And gas prices are lower. But the wealthy are even richer than they've ever been, and inflation is up, as are home prices, and medical care too. Overall it feels like a downwards move, but also upwards too - one step forward, two steps back?

And while Republicans are to blame for much of it, the old codgers in Congress can barely spell the word "internet", much less comprehend how that interrelates with home prices. Government is SLOW (AF), and corporations are running circles around it, basically doing whatever they please, and leaving the future CEO to pick up the check.

I recall sci-fi where governments might still exist, but taking a back seat to corporations that have sucked all the real power out of the world, leaving none left over for the peasants. More and more we see this lived out every day irl - e.g. who in the USA will stand up to Apple, or Google, or Facebook (yeah they have different names now and I don't even care:-D)? Yet Democrats do nothing at all about it.

Conservatives have a much easier sell - all they have to deliver is "nothing functions anymore", and they get the credit. But it's not just 10% that want that - it's like 42-49% of the nation, and due to the Electoral College system, they can win with that. Maybe Democrats backed themselves into a corner, but that's the game that needs to be played, I suppose. And it would help ever so much if those extremely old and extremely wealthy people would bother to learn stuff about their base, so as to stay in power rather than hand it over to the side that wants to burn it all to the ground.

That is so true - we lost our democracy long ago, having been replaced by a plutocracy, and now people like Elon Musk want to enshrine that even more directly.

The oddest part, in my mind, is that the founding fathers warned us about exactly this, saying that it was the greatest threat to the fledgling nation - so it is not like this took us by surprise. They said that when there are no barriers to citizenship, the masses who can be most easily swayed will get swept up by the wealthy who have the ability to buy their votes.

But we still fell into this trap regardless, having been warned, their/our eyes watching it happen the whole time, but apparently unable - or rather unwilling - to do anything about it. Just like Trump's legal troubles: the system is set up to protect people like him, so now it works to his benefit yet despite everyone seeing how broken it is, nothing can - or rather will - be done about the situation.

It would be so nice to have real choices to pick from. Conservatives deserve that, liberals deserve that, the 80% of people who are in the middle deserve that... but we will not merely be handed that, we would have to make it happen (except we cannot, or rather - once more - will not).

Omg I agree with all of that so hard, as well.

The purpose of the conspiracy theories being less "here, believe this one thing" and more "somewhere, somehow, there is corruption in the government" (uh... duh?), and then promising to go in and fix it, which I guess gets taken at face value b/c the person "looks like" the message recipient, in some manners that count?

But also, Trump never did "win", so much as Clinton "lost". And then later Biden did not "win" so much as Trump "lost". Before that, Romney lost, before that McCain, and on and on it goes. So all the conservatives have to do to make Trump palatable - that guy who "Christians" like despite how he barges into little girls dressing rooms while they are changing, and talks about grabbing women by the actual irl genitals - is to make Biden seem worse.

Which both Biden, by virtue of doing things in a boring manner, and the news media, by chasing after what bleeds & therefore leads, are cooperating along with to make happen. I dunno, I really hope they can pull it together in the next several months - the clock is ticking, and this time the literal planet Earth may be on the line (not only WWIII, but also climate change seems to have suddenly jumped towards us by something like ~100 years quicker than we expected - btw I entirely made that number up, but that Arctic temperature spike of 38.9°C/70°F in a single day does lend such a "feels like" statement some credibility doesn't it!?).

Meanwhile, people are gullible as hell - but since we know that, why aren't we doing anything about it? Then again, I'm not smart enough to know what things might possibly work in that regard:-D.

Astroturfing: Maybe... but also, we don't need to ascribe to malice what is explainable with just flat, sheer stupidity. Though it could be that too.

Between the two though, the latter is far more damaging imho. That gets perfectly illustrated in every zombie movie ever where the giant horde of zombies lies outside awaiting to devour everyone inside of a safe space, and inevitably someone who is just literally that dumb tells themselves "but surely they won't eat my face off!?", and proceeds to open the door, which promptly gets everyone inside killed, often while they are literally sleeping & thus absolutely defenseless, b/c they trusted the guards to protect them and thus let down their guard to rest.

The "other", the "enemy", can only do so much to harm us. It is when the call comes from inside the house that the real danger begins. Like, if you wanted to destroy something large - a nation, a religion, a movement - the best way is not to go at it with a gun, but to join it instead, and subvert it from the inside. Look at e.g. Google that "helped" the development of Android, or how people are releasing genetically-modified mosquitos to help combat malaria. So if e.g. Russia wanted to bring down e.g. the USA, it could... oh, I dunno, let's say send over Fox News, then wait a few decades for that bomb to go off. It would be quite effective. Not only would it disable American interference in Russia's agenda - e.g. as it conquers other nations such as Ukraine but also does many other activities e.g. in the Middle East - but that process could at best even convert your former foe into an actual, full-on ally. Even on purely theoretical grounds, what could possibly be more beneficial for your side than to not merely deny resources to your enemy but to actively increase your own capabilities? There are a LOT of advantages to having a friend, perhaps second only to e.g. doubling your own power (and even that only from the perspective that people such as Putin seem to ascribe to, whereas many people who think differently would actively prefer the opposite as in the former over the latter).

Russia is known for funding the extremes on both sides of hot-button issues. By making every movement into a grotesque version of itself, they foment division, and regardless of what those particular issues are (abortion, LBGTQIA+ rights, guns, who even cares), that division is the real point. For example, although this one is just me guessing, who came up with that name to "defund the police"?!? Democrats were talking about increasing funding, and listening to the very people who know the most about the situation - the police officers themselves - who unequivocally state that they feel unprepared to go in and handle the "mental health" types of scenarios. That is by far what gets the majority of police killed - like as you turn to arrest the husband that was beating the wife & kids, suddenly the wife is stabbing you from behind to defend him, even when she was the one who made the call in the first place. That shit is traumatic AF, and those officers that survive such a scenario most often quit. So how did the liberal movement to help police suddenly get twisted into sounding & even doing the polar opposite of that? And using statistics that are the exact opposite of true - e.g. Trump gained support among police by going around telling them the "feels like" statement that >90% of murders are due to interracial crime... except the true statistic is <9% iirc (specifically white-black at the time was I believe 3-6%).

For the anti-vax scenario, and this one I'm not guessing on b/c we've literally traced this propaganda back to Russian troll farms, they similarly warped the agenda not from "the vaccine is new and relatively untested, b/c of the unprecedented speed with which it was developed" but all the way over to "the vaccine is dangerous and if you truly cared about people you should even prevent them from taking it even if they desperately want it for themselves (e.g. by violently destroying the batches)". How is that about "their" rights to not take a potentially "dangerous" substance, when they are actively preventing others from making that choice for themselves?

So anyway, yeah, even liberal propaganda can be as bad as conservative - even if Republican politicians are acting far more dangerously than Democrat ones i.e. obstructionism. I can never find this quote anymore, but at one point around the time when the pandemic status was being officially ended in the USA (despite how the WHO says that it is still on-going), someone (I thought it was the FDA Director, or something along those lines?) said that "the greatest killer in the USA today is stupidity". Heart attacks from the way people eat, car crashes from the way we drive, soon we can perhaps add planes falling from the sky, obviously all the easily-preventable diseases where people barge into hospitals (sometimes, heart-breakingly, waving actual guns at the staff) demanding cures for despite having passed all the possibilities for such in the past by refusing to prevent it even knowing that no cure for it exists once the condition is entered into, and ofc we will soon need to start adding the effects of climate change e.g. heat exhaustion, and ofc already we can add senior abuse aka "excess deaths" during the pandemic that somehow "wasn't real".

Anyway, I kinda went off the deep end there didn't I? :-P At the end, all we can do is our best, as we try to move forward.

Oh, and yeah, I used to try to have these kinds of conversations, but long before I left Reddit I had already long ceased that. There is only so much complaining at "walls of werds" you can hear before you realize that what you are offering is not being received, thus obviously the only friendly thing to do was to stop. I too would have GREAT discussions even on Facebook - I don't know if I ever convinced anyone of anything, but even so it was wonderful to hear from e.g. a conservative who was an actual social worker and so who had the potential to inform me better than my more theoretical analysis of a subject (although my point in turn there was that stats do not lie, as in a few counter-examples do not mean that a trend in the opposite direction does not exist). Those kinds of discussions in full friendliness and mutual respect, regardless of the outcome, are part of the spice of life for me, and may I just say "fuck Reddit" once again for having spoiled them by enshittifying their platform, e.g. by turning away (and in some cases actively booting) the mods - which started to happen long before Rexit by continually ignoring the mods asks to allow even already-existing moderation tools, b/c it was not in line with their profit model:-(.

So, you can respond to any or all or none of this, in any timeframe, but in any case I do hope it was somewhat interesting:-).

POV: your project manager went in an "cleaned" it all up by removing them - your (sic) welcome! 😜

I dunno, they might be the only creature to survive what will be left of Earth afterwards!? :-P

(Translation: Klingon/pIqaD: Qapla'!)