And I dream of a world in which, instead of merely wishing to oppress and murder this group of people instead of that one, people don't wish to oppress and murder anyone.
There is a lot of backwards ideas that get accepted as “leftist,” when they’re really statist.
This is my objection too.
All too many people here don't seem to even begin to understand the inherent threats of institutionalized authority, so in their rush to head off the recreation of the Third Reich, they're basically advocating for the recreation of the Khmer Rouge instead.
The bottom line, in my view, is that the shutdown strategy is more about creating drama, publicity and campaign fundraising for certain lawmakers than it is about seriously reducing the deficit.
My plan, when I started reading this article, was to treat the author's explanation of a better way to budget as just a speculative mental exercise, then respond to say that that was all well and good, but it didn't matter because this isn't really about budgets and deficits and fiscal responsibility, but... pretty much exactly what they then said right here.
I'm not sure how to react to that. I was expecting the author to be just another naive policy wonk, so wrapped up in plans that they never noticed that the politicians who would have to enact it are just a bunch of lying, self-serving sacks of shit who are only interested in privilege and self-aggrandizement and couldn't care less about actual policy. But apparently they know that and... went ahead and laid out a strategy anyway?
It's reached the point (or had a couple of years ago, which was the last time I went to a wiki hosted there) that it's virtually impossible to even read an entry, since there are so many ads that the actual text of the article spends more time off the screen than on it.
It's something I was never actually conscious of until I stopped and thought about it yesterday because of this thread. I've just always moved the scroll wheel in the way that it seems like it should work, and it works the way it seems like it should.
The thing you're apparently calling "traditional" seems natural to me.
I've never really stopped and thought about it before, but as far as I can figure, my brain expects the part of the system that does or would actually touch the surface to drag the screen in a particular direction through the simple workings of physics.
On a touchscreen, it's simple - it's my finger actually touching the screen and it drags the screen around exactly as I'd expect.
With a mouse, my finger isn't the important part because it's not touching the surface (or more precisely, the mousepad that substitutes for the surface). Rather, my finger is contolling the mouse, and the underside of the mouse is touching the surface. And as far as that goes, the "traditional" way it works is correct - when I move my finger downward on the mouse wheel, the bottom side of the wheel - the part that would actually be touching the surface if it was a purely mechanical system - is moving upward, so would drag the screen upward.
I first learned the wisdom of waiting until after the bulk of the bug-squashing was done before expecting to play a reasonably stable game with Oblivion, 17 years ago.
Granted that Cyberpunk 2077 was a particularly egregious example of the problem, but still...
The thing I really can't understand, and a likely consequence of the ubiquity of apps, is all of the people who can't seem to function without them.
Like when the Reddit exodus to the threadiverse happened, people started immediately crying for Lemmy apps. And it doesn't seem to matter that much how bare-bones or unstable one might be - the important thing is that it's an app. That's all that seems to matter to them.
It's as if they aren't even aware of the fact that these are all websites, so they all work in a browser - as if to them, an app is a necessity and they can't figure out how to accomplish anything otherwise.
Right, but that wasn't really my point. I mean "artificial intelligence," as the term has come to be used in this current world in which, for example, film and television producers want to have large language models write scripts, is a substitute for intelligence, in that people who don't possess actual intelligence want to use it to create strings of words with which to impress other people who don't possess actual intelligence. It's pretend intelligence by and for people who don't possess the real kind.
Right, but that doesn't answer my question. If anything, it makes me more curious, since this isn't the first time he's been singled out for doing the same thing that virtually all of them do as a matter of course.
I'm not saying it's a bad thing - quite the contrary. Charging (and preferably removing from office and imprisoning) corrupt politicians is not only a good thing, but arguably the single best thing we could do as a nation right now. Official corruption is at the heart of virtually every single ill that this country currently suffers.
But it's notably a thing that's almost never prosecuted, in spite of the fact that it's not only widespread, but often brazen.
So again, I'm just curious what's special about him - why a government that generally turns a blind eye to corruption has chosen to prosecute this particular instance of it.
I have no doubt that the corruption is real, but that's sort of beside the point, since corruption is essentially universal in Washington. There has to be some reason that they focused on him specifically when they legitimately could charge pretty much anyone and everyone. Charging one Washington politician with corruption is sort of like charging one Burning Man attendee with drug possession.
Yeah - I used to check in on it from time to time, and there were always new responses, and new people trying to argue with him, and he'd just run them in circles with hilariously overly literal (mis)interpretations of whatever they said. It went on for years.
I'm pretty sure I remember the admin deleting part of it while it was still active, and eventually deleting it entirely. It's a shame - it should've been saved for posterity.
Years ago, on IMDb, a poster called rabbitmoon kept a thread going for years on the Rambo board that is still the best I've ever seen.
The whole thing started with him posting that he was shocked when, about a third of the way through the movie, there was a scene in which a character was shot with a bullet from a gun. Then he countered, completely earnestly and deadpan, every response he got.
The original thread is long gone, and the only thing I could find of it is an excerpt that was posted on Reddit - LINK
It just struck me that artificial intelligence is an accurate term after all, just in a different sense than the classic idea of a non-living consciousness.
It's "artificial intelligence" in that it's a substitute for real intelligence.
I have accounts on a dozen or so instances, though I'm only really active on maybe half of them. That gives me a fair amount of variety (every instance is different, depending on who they're federated with and what communities the users have subscribed to), and makes it so that if one of them is having issues, all that means is that I won't be using that particular account.
The relative lack of users doesn't bother me in the long run - yeah, it's sort of unfortunate that there aren't enough people to maintain really narrow communities, but I much prefer a thread here, on which there might be only three responses but they're all trying to actually communicate ideas, as opposed to a thread on Reddit, where there's 100 responses and 99 of them are just regurgitating memes.
Really, my biggest problem with the threadiverse is all of the people who want to make it into something it's not - who want to centralize and streamline and homogenize it so it'll have more appeal to easily-confused, meme-regurgitating idiots. I like it pretty much the way it is (with minor improvements around the edges of course), and would much rather that it be left to just slowly and surely draw in people who actually appreciate it for what it is.
And not only will you make everyone's lives better - seemingly ironically, by simply accepting the fact that you're often wrong, you actually make it more likely that you'll be right.
That's the part that I think people especially need to understand, since a refusal to admit that you're wrong is generally rooted in an ego-driven need to be right, and refusing to admit that you're wrong guarantees that right is the one thing that you won't be. You'll just keep clinging to the same wrong idea and keep failing to fulfill that need to be right.
If, on the other hand, you just freely admit that you're wrong, then you're instantly free to move on to another, and better, position, making it that much more likely that you'll actually be right. And if you don't get it that time, that's fine - just freely admit that you're wrong again and move on again. Keep doing that and sooner or later you actually will be right, instead of just pretending to be.
So you'll not only make everyone's lives more pleasant - you'll actually better serve your desire to be right. What more could you want?
Rottcodd @ Rottcodd @kbin.social Posts 26Comments 275Joined 2 yr. ago
And I dream of a world in which, instead of merely wishing to oppress and murder this group of people instead of that one, people don't wish to oppress and murder anyone.