Rottcodd @ Rottcodd @kbin.social

Posts

26

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275

Joined

2 yr. ago

I've long been partial to orange tabbies and standard issue cats, but my current one - a stray that just showed up one day and moved in - is a tuxedo, and that just might be my new favorite.

The prettiest one I've had was a Siamese/tabby cross (also known as a lynx-point Siamese), She had classic Siamese markings and blue eyes, but instead of solid color points, her dark patches were gray tabby stripes.

I've found Goodreads to be a generally dependable source for synopses.

And that's it. I don't consider reading to be a competition to be won or lost, so all of the progress tracking stuff is pointless at best, and the reviews are some startlingly awful mix of egos vying for attention, edgelords trying to demonstrate how hiply counterculture they are and people who apparently can't even manage to communicate using words.

It's likely that if/when it closes down, I won't even notice.

The two things aren't mutually exclusive.

Yes - some number of people have melded religion and politics. There's nothing new in that.

But I'm talking about a different dynamic.

Religion is only in part, and arguably not even primarily,about deities and creation myths and such. To some significant degree, and arguably primarily, it's about establishing and maintaining a sense of identity and community, and providing self-affirmation. People adopt and practice religion in large part so that they can self-apply a label that represents a particular set of values and virtues that they wish to project, and so that they can surround themselves with, and gain positive feedback from, like-minded fellow believers.

To that end, each religion has a set of values and virtues that are presumed to be possessed by whoever wears their label, a designated community of believers, a set of beliefs to reassure the believers that theirs is the one true faith, and a designated set of enemies upon whom to blame all wrong and toward whom to direct their hatred, reinforcing both their sense of virtue and their sense of community.

And those things are the things for which a growing number of people in the west are turning to politicsl ideology. They've just filled all the gaps that would otherwise have been filled by traditional religion with secular counterparts. They still have a faith which they share with fellow believers, they still have a label they can wear to designate their faith, they still have tracts and preachers and their sermons, which are still alternately about the inherent correctness of their own faith and the evil of the heretics and unbelievers, they still have a set of morals by which they can maybe attempt to live their own lives, but much more importantly, against which they can judge others, and so on.

It's really all of the same sorts of things serving the same purposes - it's just different insofar as it's centered on politics instead of religion.

I don't think it's even particularly notable except insofar as so many seem to be completely unaware of it. In fact, I would say that that broad dynamic of seeking identity and community and self-affirmation by investing oneself in some specific belief system and joining with others who share those beliefs and thus that identity is one of the most common and basic human traits. For some reason, it's come to be associated (and often disparagingly) with traditional religion, but people actually do the same thing with any number of different ideas or credos.

And currently, and particularly in the west and particularly online, a significant number of people do it with politics.

My theory is that many westerners in our current era have effectively replaced traditional religion with shallow political ideology.

So instead of going to church so they can be surrounded by fellow believers and hear a sermon telling them that their faith is the one true way and that every evil is rightly blamed on the loathsome unbelievers and heretics, they go online so they can be surrounded by fellow believers and hear a sermon telling them that their faith is the one true way and that every evil is rightly blamed on the loathsome unbelievers and heretics.

Seriously.

i was just about to post about that - my tuxedo also loves zipties and I have no idea why.

The thing that most stands out to me about Musk and his ilk isn't their hate - it's their cowardice.

If they would actually own their hate, I'd have some bare modicum of respect for them. At least then it would be a principled stance. A loathsome one to be sure, but at least principled.

But they're too cowardly and weak-willed for that. They're all telling it like it is and going their own way and fuck your feelings right up until someone calls them out on it, then they instantly turn into weepy schoolgirls moaning about how picked on and persecuted they are.

Of course he was - I'm sure it was understood and accounted for when he was hired that his job was to promote DeSantis to the Nazis, and if/when some shit hit the fan, he would be very publicly fired.

I'm sure it works just like police brutality firings, and he'll just get hired by a neighboring campaign.

At this point, every new day brings new things that are going to astonish future generations (if there are any).

They're going to look back and be amazed and repused by seemingly entirely inexplicable examples of our impossibly obvious stupidity and insanity.

Hey c'mon - he was on vacation, so he was doing what he loves most.

Megamind

Monty Python's Life of Brian

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels

Not Another Teen Movie

Well... sort of.

Trump never has held and never will hold any coherent political views of any sort. His entire focus is on himself, and the rest of the world only matters to the degree that he might manipulate people and things to feed his own ego, greed and lust.

So what'll likely actually happen is that his mindless supporters will rage, the psychopaths who want the world that having him in power will bring will fan the flames of that rage while whispering in his ear, and yes - he'll go full fascist. But not because of anything to do with fascism specifically - I doubt he can even grasp the broadest concept of it. It's simply that that will be, and to some notable degree will be contrived into being, the thing that he will believe will lead him to what he really wants - simply to feed his bottomless ego, greed and lust.

Dang right! That thar's the probbim wif edjumacashun! Too much larnin' n' not enuf prison!

Those third party search tools already exist. I expect that apps will begin linking to them or even including their own version of the same function.

And really, it's vanishingly unlikely that somebody so dull-witted that they couldn't even find the most notable instance on a given topic if it wasn't already on their instance's All is going to end up on such an obscure instance in the first place.

Again, I don't think it's a usability problem at all - I think it's just people expecting the fediverse to be essentially identical to the monolithic corporate social media to which they're accustomed, then faulting it for not being so.

I block every one I see, without exception.

Right, but exactly because that's a thing that people value, the "problem" will be solved organically. Community searches already default to sorting by activity, so over time, one community will come to be seen as the de facto "main" community for that topic. Just as is the case on other forums, except over time and by consensus instead of from the start and by decree.

We may be thinking of different populations of users.

Yes and no.

Much of that bit I excised from the last response concerned the users you're specifying. It is true that I wasn't initially considering them, so you're right as farcas that goes, but...

The folks using Lemmy right now don’t really need much help to get what they want out of it. But if the fediverse is to grow, even if it never hits Reddit/Facebook/etc numbers, its developers should look at ways to decrease friction to getting the best experience.

a lot of the reason I ended up excising that part is that it was an overall shift in the topic. Yes - as I noted, I can see how that "friction" could be considered a problem. But personally, I think it's a good thing.

But again, that's really a different topic.

And as a bit of an aside, it's taking every ounce of my willpower to not translate that admirably diplomatic passage you wrote into less generous terms...

I'm not sure that most wouldn't, but yeah - I don't doubt that some wouldn't subscribe to multiple instances.

I had a whole section here about the notion that quantity equals quality and the benefits of barriers to entry and so on, but it felt digressive at best, so I'll just say that (with multiple provisos) I do at least see how it might be legitimately believed that redundant communities are an actual problem, so that's something.

Thanks for the responses.

See though, I still don't see the issue.

you probably still have the downside of the users — and therefore the content & comments — being spread too thin

How are they spread too thin?

This thread and the OP are on lemmy.ml. I'm on kbin.social. You're on lemmy.world. And the only reason I know all of that is because I checked each one. Until I checked each one, it was just a thread and I responded to it and you responded to me and it all just worked and there was no way to even notice that three different instances were involved, since it made zero difference.

If the mods of the communities had a tool to federate/merge at the community level, that gives the benefit of the network effect.

What benefit is that?

Right now, I can go into the list of communities on any instance and search for a subject and get all the communities that are about it. And yes, as I already noted, if I want all of them, then that means I have to click on more than one subscribe button - a few seconds of extra effort.

So the only "benefit" I see is saving myself that few seconds of extra effort, which hardly seems worth caring about.

I genuinely don't see a real problem.

For all the times I've seen people complain about this, I still don't see what the supposed problem is.

Yeah - it's just a tiny bit more effort to subscribe to three communities instead of one, but then that's it. It doesn't matter in the slightest from that point on, since all three of them are going to come up just the same in my feed.

I honestly think that there really isn't a problem - that really, there's no notable way in which anyone is actually negatively affected. It's just that it's different, and different is bad.

Of course they did.

The days in which businesses competed by trying to make the best possible product for the best possible price are dead and gone - sacrificed on the altar of shortsighted greed.

The current strategy is to make the shittiest possible product for the highest possible price, then try to manipulate things so that it sells anyway.

And that's been Tesla's strategy since day one.