Rottcodd @ Rottcodd @kbin.social

Posts

26

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275

Joined

2 yr. ago

So... trying to place restrictions on someone with all the self-restraint of a two-year-old.

This should be amusing.

It absolutely makes sense and yes - game theory specifically addresses it and explains it.

At this point, the American political and corporate systems are effectively rewarding and thus selecting for psychopathy. The gloves are off, and success goes to those who are willing and able to do absolutely whatever it takes to succeed, no matter how much harm it does. Those who are constrained by morals, principles and empathy are at a disadvantage.

Trump and Musk and DeSantis and the like aren't aberrations - they're simply the leading edge of a broad dynamic - the most obvious extreme examples of the personality most suited to success in this corrupted era.

Unfortunately.

It should be noted that the last three of those things require the exercise of authority to enact, and that authority is vested in people and institutions that flatly will not exercise it in pursuit of things that will in any way undermine their privilege or that of their wealthy cronies and patrons, and all of those things would do just that.

This is where it becomes relevant that the Democrats are only relatively less corrupt than the Republicans. They feed at the same corporate trough as the Republicans - they just have to, and do, play a somewhat different game to stay in office and maintain their privilege.

The Democrats have already demonstrated that when they have uncontested power - the presidency and congressional majorities - they will still find a way to fail to actually deliver. That's not just supposition - it's established fact. It's what they've already done. There's certainly no reason to believe that they're going to do any differently in the future.

Now that's not to say or imply that I disagree with you fundamentally. The first half of your list would at least slow the decline and putting Democrats in office would be broadly better than putting Republicans in office.

But the Democrat establishment, and the DNC in particular, is too corrupt and too compromised to provide more than token opposition to the oligarchy.

Elsewhere in this thread, a poster wrote of the possibility of the Republicans self-destructing snd the Democrats fragmenting. I don't think that's particularly likely, but it is attractive, since it would serve not only to eliminate the most overtly corrupt and destructive party but to provide a rallying point for those who call for genuine reform - the handful of actually decent politicians of the AOC/Sanders type could potentially have some real influence instead of just being lone voices made ineffectual by their subservience to a well-established and thoroughly corrupt party hierarchy.

Again though, I don't think it's at all likely.

Yeah - it is more or less the way that old and previously healthy civilizations generally die. The details differ, but the overall dynsmic is fairly consistent.

As a civilization ages, the broad focus shifts from working to contribute to its well-being to living comfortably off of its established well-being to scrambling to grab as much of its diminishing well-being as possible as quickly as possible. And the US is well into that last phase.

There are only a few ways it can play out from there. The common people can force the civilization into a sort of reset, as the French did in the late 18th century, or the civilization can just go into a long, slow decline like Egypt did or it can collapse under some combination of rebellion from within and attack from without, as Rome did.

The third scenario is far and away the most likely for the US.

As an old guy, I'd have to agree, though as a leftist turned anarchist, I don't give much of a fuck.

I think back though on the Republicans of my youth, and it really was a notably different party.

It's sort of weird to phrase it like this, but they were assholes with principles. I mean - they were shallow, bigoted assholes then too, but it was more common then for them to still be like the old '50s All-American cliche - patriotic, proud, moral, hard-working, honest... conservative in the old sense of the word. I didn't agree with them at all but at least they had a relatively coherent, if shallow and ignorant, ideology that they generally actually lived by.

Somehow though, especially over the last 20 years or so, they've morphed into this bizarre and startlingly toxic mix of psychopaths, hypocrites and grifters. They have no principles at all really - just things and people that they hate - and it's not even vaguely about trying to accomplish things that they sincerely (if mistakenly) think will make the world a better place, but just about fucking over everyone else. And even themselves, if they can colorably believe that by doing so they'll manage to fuck someone else over even more.

I sincerely believe it's a sort of collective mental illness, and truth be told, I think it can only lead to the collapse of western civilization, and the US in particular. There's nothing really that can stop it. It's effectively a closed loop in which greedy psychopaths fuck things up for their own profit and privilege, ignorant psychopaths look for someone to blame for the fact that things are fucked up, power-hungry psychopaths point them at some vulnerable fringe group and tell them that it's all their fault, then while everyone's distracted, the greedy psychopaths fuck things up even more. And 'round and 'round it goes, like a turd circling a toilet bowl. And there's only one way that can end.

So this is pretty much Karla the boke and Alvin the tsukkomi?

I'm okay with that.

Of course they are.

A pertinent point that Solzhenitsyn made in Gulag Archipelago - he said that in all the time he spent in the gulags, he never once met a person who had not been legitimately convicted of a genuine crime.

The way it worked was simply that the USSR had such an extensive and nebulous set of laws that it was effectively impossible for anyone to obey all of them all the time, and so much information on all its citizens that whenever an official wanted someone disappeared, it was just a matter of checking through their records and finding which law(s) they had broken, then arresting them, trying them and convicting them.

The US oligarchy is actively pursuing the same basic strategy, and for the same basic reasons.

Ironic that they're effectively proving that you were right to not trust them...

I wish she could've seen that.

I left Florida in '93, and there were times I regretted it. There were a lot of good things about Florida, and it was always interesting. And once you adapt to the weather, it's nice (if a bit dull).

Now though? Holy fuck I'm glad I'm not there. I don't even understand what's going on there - it's like some sort of mass psychosis. It's gone way beyond a political shift - it's more as if someone decided that the thing to do was to establish some sort of right-wing version of the Khmer Rouge and a bunch of Floridians said, "Yeah! That'd be great!"

At the rate they're going, it's only a matter if time before they start systematically killing "undesirables".

Seriously.

It depends on the instance - I have multiple accounts.

Kbin.social because I like the kbin software better than the lemmy software, and because Ernest is awesome.

Lemmy.world because it's definitive (when it's up).

Lemmy.one because it requires people to not be assholes.

Lemmy.ninja because the admins somehow manage to be both diligent and goofy, and because ninjas are cool.

A probably too long post about an entirely different way of viewing things:

I have accounts at... I guess about eight instances. I didn't see any reason to pick one, so I just signed up for everything that looked interesting and promising.

I expected to eventually settle on one, but as it turns out, I actually like having multiple accounts. I have four that I rotate between at the moment. Oh, and with the same username on each, though I still haven't decided if that's a good idea or not.

First, I have a kbin account and multiple lemmy accounts. Even though lemmy has more users, I much prefer kbin just as far as the software goes - it's just a better UI. And Ernest is awesome.

Beyond that though, each instance is a different experience, since the federated communities on each one are different, depending on what other instances they're federated with and which communities from which instances people have subscribed to. And I've amplified that by having different sets of subscriptions on different instances.

Kbin.social has a good mix of content but without most of the botfarm instances. I like that. That's where I do virtually all of my serious posting.

Lemmy.world (when it's up) has a wide range of content, but too much of it, even not counting the bots, is too shallow IMO. It feels too much like Reddit for my tastes. It is the best one to check in on for the most popular topics though, and it's where I'm most likely to be subscribed to communities for memes, humor, drama, pictures - all that sort of junk.

Lemmy.one actually feels like what it is - an instance that demands that users behave themselves. It's nice when I want to just unwind, because it's already the case that problematic instances are defederated, and I have a limited set of feel good subs there. I almost never post from there though, since I don't trust myself to behave.

Lemmy.ninja is my favorite. It's just quirky little instance with terrific admins and an amusing aesthetic. It's little though - 120 users last I heard. That shows in its all, which is fairly limited, presumably just because few people means few subscriptions so few federated communities. That's fine though - it's a selection that matches my interests fairly well. And ninjas are cool.

And I'm still on the lookout for a serious, scholarly sort of instance - somewhere that will be a comfortable home for subs to philosophy communities and the like.

If I have reason to believe that someone is so tech-illiterate that they'd be unable to deal with a 7z, I just use something else instead - likely zip.

I use IZArc, so it's all the same to me.

...while insisting "I'm not the one who's out of step."

That's the funniest thing I've read all day.

The only thing I'll potentially sort of miss is the cynical comedy of the absolutely godawful shit they recommend when they don't have a watch history to base anything on.

How is that proving their point?

The question was wherher "Lemmy" was deliberately and unnaturally biased, akin to a car forum that was biased entirely toward Ford and against Chevy.

There is no mechanism by which that could even be accomplished here, since there's over 1,000 individual instances, each subject only to the authority of their individual owners.

So the answer to the OP's question is and can only be "no," simply because it's literally impossible for it to be otherwise - there is no mechanism by which any such lemmy-wide bias could be imposed or enforced nor is there anyone with the authority to do so.

So clearly, if the downvotes prove anything at all it's something else.

I would say that, as far as the OP's thinly veiled concern-trolling goes, it's fairly obvious that what they prove, if snything, is that bias against right-wing ideology occurs naturally on internet forums, even in the absence of mechanisms by which it might be enforced or people with the authority to enforce it.

You might do well to honestly consider why that might be the case.

I believe that the oligarchs will try to do exactly that - I just don't think that they'll succeed.

And in trying and failing, they'll so undermine society and bring about so much frustration and anger that our civilization will not survive.

I would presume that in 100 years, if humanity still exists, we'll be deep into a dark age, so there likely won't be much in the way of widespread taboos at all. Individual clans and tribes will undoubtedly have their own taboos, but there's no telling what they might be.

Oh look - election season has officially kicked off with the DNC's first attempt at trying to guilt trip people into voting for their shitty candidate.

Expect many MANY more of these in the months to come.

It really takes a special kind of scumbag to decide that the proper strategy is to nominate a dismally corrupt and/or incompetent sack of shit then try to guilt trip people into voting for them and blame the voters if they lose, when they could just nominate a decent candidate and people would willingly and even eagerly vote for them and they'd win easily.

I sometimes wonder what it's like to be that entirely devoid of principles or integrity.

I imagine it involves a lot of alcohol.

Greener Than You Think by Ward Moore.

It's a satirical science fiction novel written in the 40s that, aside from the dated cultural references, might've been written today.

The MC and narrator is a salesman who answers an ad wanting someone to market a product that will make it so that plants can extract nutrients from virtually anything. The woman who created it envisions people in even the most barren areas being able to grow food regardless of the quality of their soil, but the MC believes that she's just a dumb woman who doesn't understand business, and obviously those people couldn't afford to pay enough for this product, so the better idea is to market it to suburban homeowners to put on their grass.

Which leads directly to the entire world being overrun by an unstoppable mutant strain of bermuda grass.

Throughout the entire chain of events, the MC remains completely oblivious to the threat facing humanity, and is instead entirely focused on profiting off the events. He's like every self-absorbed politician or corporate executive rolled into one, overtly bringing destruction to countless people in his blind pursuit of profit and privilege, and railing against anyone or anything that stands in his way.

And naturally, the people he meets pretty much universally loathe and detest him. And if he notices it at all, he ascribes it to their purported jealousy or envy or ignorance.