Rottcodd @ Rottcodd @lemmy.ninja

Posts

57

Comments

122

Joined

2 yr. ago

I would assume that first and foremost it's that, as the old saying goes, the squeaky wheel gets the grease. And disabled people and their advocates aren't squeaky enough.

Cynically, I think there's another explanation...

I think a lot of activism doesn't actually generate meaningful results. To some significant degree, it just serves as something for people to fight over and politicians to fundraise and campaign on.

To serve those purposes though, it has to be controversial - there has to be a basis on which one party can take a stance in favor and the other a stance opposed. And another handy feature of that sort of activism is that it doesn't have to actually be enacted, and in fact, it's better for the politicians if it's not. That means that the ones who supported it can fundraise and run merely on having supported it and on the need to counter the evil other party who opposed it, while those who opposed it can fundraise and run merely on having opposed it and on the need to counter the evil other party who proposed it. And since no money was spent on any program, that's that much more money the politicians can funnel to their cronies. It's basically free publicity with a bit of "Let's you and them fight" mixed in.

And LGBT might as well have been tailor-made for that exact purpose.

But with something like advocacy for the disabled, there's no basis on which either party could dare oppose it, so there's nothing to fight over, and worse yet, if it's proposed, there's no excuse for not passing it, which means they'd have to pay for it, and that's money that they'd rather be funneling to their cronies.

So politicians mostly just ignore it.

On the contrary, a volunteer army allows the ruling class to prosecute wars without risk to their own families.

As does conscription, since there are always exceptions made for that explicit purpose.

So that works out the same either way.

If a war arrives that is necessary, justified, and also has broad support among the population there will still be those who avoid fighting because they know that others will do so for them.

Yes - there will always be such people. The issue is how many of them there would be.

I would say that a nation that's unhealthy enough to have so many such people that they would make the difference between winning and losing deserves to lose.

You can make a similar argument about taxation. By your logic payment should be optional, since a society that genuinely wants to be just and fair should also voluntarily want to give money to achieve that.

Yes, and I in fact would. And with the same proviso - any society that would fail as a result deserves to fail.

!manga@kbin.social

It's pretty much a lost cause, at least for now, but I keep posting anyway. And it's not like it's an imposition - I check in on Mangadex a few times a day anyway, to catch up on my follows and maybe browse the new updates, so I just post discussion threads for the stuff I like and would like to discuss.

Years ago, I used to post a lot on the Reddit manga sub. It was always much more active, but my tastes in manga are obscure enough that most of what I was following didn't get posted otherwise. But then the sub grew to the point that there were more enthusiastic posters even posting that, so I stopped.

That's made it sort of awkward on kbin though, since I'm still just posting the sort of obscure stuff I like. In order to grow the community, it would be better to post more popular series, but that just seems sort of dishonest to me. It seems to me that if I'm not even reading a series myself, I have no business posting it.

So it goes...

IMO, it's always wrong.

At heart, I believe that the claimed authority by which governments draft people is illegitimate - that all nominal justifications for it are necessarily insufficient, self-contradictory or self-defeating.

But that's a more fundamental point, and one about governance as a whole.

Even if I pretend that such authority is legitimate, I still oppose conscription.

A volunteer army serves as a check on militaristic excess. If a war is both legitimate and necessary, then people will willingly fight it. If people will not willingly fight it, then it's almost certainly the case that it's not necessary or justified.

And if it is indeed the case that a war is necessary and justified and there's still insufficient support to provide for a volunteer army, then frankly, the nation is too sick to be worth saving anyway.

Any argument for your freedom is an argument for everyone's freedom.

Ah... I love this thread full of people smugly congratulating themselves for not being the sort of people who would smugly congratulate themselves for being intelligent.

To the question:

The three broad alternatives available to me are to present a simplified version of a thought, which will potentially fail to do it justice and will likely fail to really communicate it anyway, since understanding it will require background knowledge the listener likely doesn't possess, to present a full explanation of the thought, which will be long and ultimately dull, or to keep my mouth shut.

I used to do a fair amount of the second, with predictable results - either listeners grew quickly bored, or they were genuinely interested, which would encourage me to continue until they grew bored.

Now I mostly do the third, and would that I had started sooner. It's far and away the better way to live. As a general rule, people just don't want to know about, for instance, my proposed method for reconciling the need for some measure of absolutism in moral judgments with the reality that moral judgments are necessarily highly subjective and situational or my assertion that institutionalized, hierarchical authority is fundamentally illegitimate since there is no nominal justification for it that isn't arbitrary, self-contradictory or self-defeating.

When I want to communicate those sorts of ideas, I write them out in long posts that are likely not read. Day to day, I just smile and exchange pleasantries and otherwise keep to myself.

Well... yes. I don't see it as much more than simple materialism simply because I don't think that humanity in general is anything close to equipped to make much more of it.

With the internet, cheap mobile phones, and wireless tech, humanity has given itself a global consciousness

Yes, and that global consciousness has revealed itself to be to some significant degree petty, ignorant, self-absorbed and mean-spirited.

I think that at this point in time, humanity is far more in need of philosophical and sociological advancement than technological.

In your example though, I would argue that what that actually illustrates is that the establishment, maintenance and expansion of institutionalized hierarchical authority, and particularly through military means, is fundamentally evil.

It's not that evil has an advantage broadly, but that evil essentially axiomatically has an advantage when pursuing fundamentally evil ends.

Or in simpler terms, the disadvantage good people would have in war is not an argument against good, but an argument against war.

To borrow the new age term, an old soul.

There are just people who possess a sort of cynically detached understanding of the world and people. They aren't fired by largely pointless passion or desire, they're intelligent and perceptive enough to generally understand things and emotionally mature enough to generally accept them and they have a way of just sort of gliding through life, maintaining a relatively even keel instead of getting distracted and disconcerted by irrelevancies.

Every single person I've ever known who was like that has been or is special to me.

I don't care what other people choose to do with/to their own bodies. It's none of my business, at all, ever.

For myself, I'm not sure. I don't have the means, so it's irrelevant, but if I did... I don't know. I don't have any issue with it really, but it doesn't particularly appeal to me either. I can of course see advantages to overcoming the limitations of a natural body, but for whatever reason, I've never been much for pursuing fulfillment by acquiring things (which is pretty much what augmentation boils down to). It just seems to be too much hassle for too little gain, and particularly since the acquisition of things never leads to real fulfillment anyway - it just fuels the desire to acquire even more things.

Most likely, given the choice, I'd choose to just continue to inhabit my natural, unaugmented shell. But I really don't know.

I can't even quite visualize how that could happen.

Yeah.

June was glorious. It was like the internet of the 1990s all over again. There wasn't a lot of content, but what there was was posted by actual people who would actually engage in good faith. I had forgotten what that felt like.

But it's been all downhill from there, and at this point, it's starting to feel like Reddit, just on a smaller scale. More all the time, I'm just seeing rage bait that's posted either by a bot or by a person who might as well be a bot, and if I bother to respond to it, it's likely that if I get any response at all, it's just going to be a string of shallowly emotive rhetoric and fallacies that again is either posted by a bot or by a person who might as well be a bot.

I'm cynically unsurprised but still disappointed.

Two favorites that come to mind:

Contact

Baby Driver

Just Right

Lemmy isn't a platform at all. It's a piece of forum software.

The platforms are the individual instances - lemmy.world or lemmy.ml or lemm.ee or whatever. There's well over 1,000 of them total. And they range all the way from extreme left to extreme right, and from rigidly constrained to entirely open.

And since it is the case that there are well over 1,000 instances, each of them privately owned and managed by whatever standards the owners prefer, there is no mechanism by which any particular bias can be maintained at anything above the instance level. That necessarily means that any lemmy-wide bias you might see can only be organic.

You might honestly think about that, and what it says about the ideology you're trying to pretend you're not defending.

I can sort of understand people who can't bring themselves to avoid Amazon - again, for me it's really just a gut-level aversion that happens to coincide with an ethical stance. If I didn't have that gut-level aversion, there's a good chance I wouldn't be able to resist either.

But yeah - the chain restaurant/coffee shop thing just makes no sense to me at all, no matter how I look at it. There are regional and local versions of pretty much anything one might want, and they're pretty much universally both better and cheaper.

I don't really go out of my way. It's more like an ingrained habit.

Most notably, I've never bought a single thing from Amazon. I don't even have an account with them. That's not an ethical decision though - it sort of works out that way, but really it's just a gut-level reaction. The whole idea just repulses me - just looking at a page from their site is somehow gross and creepy.

By the same token, there's a long list of businesses I've either never gone to or at least haven't in the last twenty or so years - Walmart, McDonalds, Starbucks, Taco Bell, Olive Garden, Kroger, Subway, Jack in the Box, etc., etc. Basically, if they're big enough to run national level advertising, they are eliminated from my consideration. And again, it's not really a conscious choice - they just gross me out. It's like the instant I set foot in a place like that, I can feel it corroding my soul.

So when I'm looking for somewhere to shop or eat or whatever, just like anyone else does, there are specific places I don't consider at all. And all major corporations are on that list.

So what's left over - what I choose from - is local or regional, not because I go out of my way to choose them, but just because they're the only ones I'm willing to choose in the first place

And the sort of surprising thing, even to me sometimes, is that I'm by no means starved for choices. There's a world of alternatives out there.

Or maybe... just maybe... this is backwards and the notable thing is that statistics have been cited in support of a claim that the economy is improving, despite the fact that at least half of Americans believe that it isn't.

I don't even understand this headlong rush for an app. And especially being so desperate for an app that you'd use one that embeds ads unless you pay to remove them.

It just seems completely backwards to me.

With Reddit, it made sense - it was awful in a mobile browser, the official app was complete garbage, and either way it was buried in ads So you could (and I did) use a third party app and get a cleaner and more useful interface and no ads.

But Lemmy's already fine in a browser and it's ad-free. So what's the point?

I could maybe see, somewhere down the road when the apps are complete and established, it might be interesting to experiment with some and maybe find one that's got just the features I like most. But that's not what I'm seeing. What I'm seeing are people desperately clamoring for an app - any app - it doesn't matter how primitive and janky it is - they just desperately need to have an app right now, today, this instant. As if lemmy is completely unusable without one.

And it's just... not that way at all. Sure, it could be better, but it's fine.

So I just don't get it.

I couldn't even watch the whole thing - my cringe meter topped off with Canti in a suit, sounding like a TV weatherman.