TheTechnician27 @ TheTechnician27 @lemmy.world

"Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come t

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Every first-world country that has tight regulation shows an astronomical decrease in gun deaths from the US. It's not more complicated; regulation works, and the more regulated guns are, proportionally the fewer deaths.

... What? I'm taking the piss out of your argument that the tool isn't relevant. You tried to bring "fists" into this as a comparison. Unless you're willing to say that I could go out right now into a crowd of people and kill eleven and wound twenty with my bare hands like I'm the Internet badass from the Navy SEALs copypasta, then you're absolutely full of it and are just running with the recently popularized bad-faith argumentation strategy of "never play defense".

Do you or do you not believe that it is possible for me to go out into a crowd of people of some description unarmed, then kill eleven people and wound twenty with – your words, not mine – "my fists". Are you actually that deluded, or were you mistaken in comparing a car attack to a fist attack?

Boats, trains, subways, light rail, trams, buses, cable cars, micro electric vehicles, bikes, velomobiles, scooters, skateboards, rollerblades, feet, and sensible urban planning where the nearest grocery store isn't an hour's walk from my house don't exist. If it's not a car, I don't wanna hear about it.

ITT: people who don't realize that none of us are supporting guns. We're drawing a comparison between the same ridiculous-ass logic that right-wingers apply to guns to try to stall and misdirect from concrete regulation and the exact same rhetoric people in this thread are making in defense of car culture and lack of regulation and safeguards around cars. Strict gun regulation is good; strict car regulation is good. Strict gun regulation would deter many mass-shootings in the US. Strict car regulation (including even basic considerations for pedestrian safety at the slight expense of cars) would deter car-ramming attacks.

"Why are you talking about guns cars at a time like this? I can't believe you're using this tragic mass-shooting mass-ramming to soapbox about gun car regulation. This isn't the time to talk about how we let guns cars be so dangerous and how the direct result was this shooting ramming. The real cause of this was a mental health crisis. Society needs guns cars to protect ourselves get around. What do you mean, 'Do I ever bring up this mental health crisis outside of mass-shootings mass-rammings?' Uhh..."

So "never play defense" then? On the concept of an analogy and the "fists" thing, right? Everyone is Kiryu Kazuma going around, killing nine eleven and injuring twenty with their fists?

Can you acknowledge that you were wrong about the analogy? And can you acknowledge that comparing a fist attack to an attack perpetrated by a car driver is asinine?

Okay, let's see here. If we put aside the climate change killing untold trillions of animals on top of the mass-extinction event, the untold number of humans that have died and will die from climate change, the number of people displaced by climate change, the over a million people killed annually, the few million injured annually (many permanently and debilitatingly), the billions of dollars in annual property damage, the regions destabilized and the hundreds of thousands killed and displaced over oil wars, the lung issues from air pollution and the brain damage from when it was leaded, the neighborhoods destroyed to make way for roads, the poverty in the inner city caused in large part by unsustainable suburban sprawl, the people bankrupted by the need to own a car, the opportunity cost from the money wasted on overpriced car infrastructure, the amount of hours wasted driving because of said sprawl, the contribution to the obesity epidemic by making people more sedentary, the disenfranchisement of the elderly, young, and disabled who can't drive or would have a much easier time on public transit, that many of those emergency vehicles are responding to car crashes, that lower traffic and less sprawl via public transit and micromobility lowers response times for emergency vehicles (thus saving more lives), and if we totally disregard that emergency vehicles are more than capable of existing in a city built around public transit and micromobility (and much more that I'm forgetting)...

A rounding error in comparison. That your answer was "emergency vehicles" shows that you don't understand the scope and scale of how badly car-centric infrastructure damages everything it touches. It isn't on the same order of magnitude; it isn't even within a few orders of magnitude. If anything, emergency vehicles have been hampered by the rampant proliferation and deregulation of cars, because it makes it harder for them to get to their destination quickly and safely.

So you do or do not understand that when I was talking about guns, I was drawing a direct comparison between your misdirection away from the lack of regulation to mental health and right-wingers' misdirection away from the lack of regulation to mental health? Not actually assuming what your stance on gun regulation is? That is our common understanding now, right? You can amend your comment to acknowledge that you misunderstood this basic rhetorical device? Or acknowledge it in some form? You're not going to "never play defense" me here, right?

I like how they've so far completely failed to defend or even address what they said about "fists" because they know it's a heap of bullshit. They apparently want us to think that the everyman on the street is Kiryu Kazuma who can roll up to a crowded festival and kill nine eleven people with their bare fists then injure like ten twenty more before being restrained and brought into custody.

They clearly weren't educated enough to understand the basic rhetorical device of analogy – that I was comparing excuses for mass-shootings to excuses for car rammings as functionally the same – so I feel pretty secure in posting definitions.

Middle-school behavior for middle-school concepts, I guess?

Edit: sorry, I forgot that they also think this person could've killed nine eleven people and injured twenty with their bare fists, so maybe middle-school behavior was too sophisticated.

Right here, right now, they can be compared to guns assuming this was an attack. Were it not for car-centric infrastructure, a car couldn't even have reached this crowded festival. There would've been trivial safety measures like bollards in place, but because we as a society collectively value vroom vroom over human lives, they weren't in place. With nine eleven killed and twenty injured, it was comparable in devastation to a mass-shooting. Just like when the US values pew pew over human lives, there are mass-shootings.

But you're right: they aren't the same.

• Cars kill over one million people per year, and they injure and maim many, many more than guns do.
• Cars are unnecessary in the vast majority of cases, but they're shoehorned into cities thanks to the enormous lobbying power of the auto industry combined with the widespread, entrenched propaganda that said lobbying has spent the last century producing. We'll rip out safe and affordable transit to make room for these financial black holes, but even the most tepid attempt to push back on this takes decades of activism only to be met with a ridiculous half-measure in favor of cars or nothing at all. (Actually, this last bit does kind of sound like guns in the US.)
• We willingly subsidize cars (tax credits on EVs, free parking, parking mandates, vast road networks, etc.) instead of building the kinds of infrastructure that largely obsolete cars to begin with.
• Cars are absolutely destroying our planet. They're one of the main sources of greenhouse gases, and car-centric infrastructure even exacerbates a major effect of climate change by destroying greenery that absorbs some of the heat (which consequently makes people more likely to drive in air-conditioned cars; rinse and repeat). They additionally spread particulate matter into the air that puts (especially poorer) people who live near major roadways at substantially increased risk of health issues. They divide populations of wildlife, and I could just go on forever.
• Cars are heavily indoctrinated into children as a rite of passage into adulthood that everybody should own. Almost no consideration is given for those who don't.
• Guns have an obnoxious culture to see who can own the biggest, loudest, most expensive, most dangerous, most overkill piece of shit, where you're seen as some kind of sheltered hippie liberal if you choose not to own one. Anyone who barely knows how to use one can own one, and– wait, sorry, that's also cars again.
• I could go on about their infrastructure being an accessibility nightmare, being vastly more expensive, bankrupting cities, disadvantaging people in the inner cities who have to subsidize the car-centric suburbs and deal with their traffic, and so on, but I'm sure I have a character limit.

By the way, "guns are made for killing" can just as easily be warped into "guns are made for self-protection", and suddenly you can compare if their utility outweighs their ease of access and rampant deregulation – just like you can with cars.

And I never said guns weren’t a problem, that’s you talking for me because you have no respect for anyone else’s opinion if it might challenge yours.

I hope you're smart enough to understand what an "analogy" is? If not, here you go. "Analogy is a comparison or correspondence between two things (or two groups of things) because of a third element that they are considered to share." Hope that helps, champ. 🥰

Oh yeah, the old "this isn't a gun car issue; this is a mental health issue". "You're disgusting for trying to make this mass-shooting mass-ramming about guns cars; this isn't the time(TM)." It's such a shame that the US is the only place in the world with a mental health crisis and that's why first-world gun deaths almost exclusively happen in the US, not in Canada where firearms are heavily reg– checks title Oh wait. It seems like "This isn't an X issue, it's a mental health one" curiously always seems to come back to "I want you to solve this nebulous, prolific, and stochastic issue in lieu of addressing the most immediate, concrete problem by regulating X because I really like my privileged position of being able to use X however and wherever I want and fuck anybody who suffers for or questions that privilege."

Why can't it be both? Car deaths have concrete, meaningful steps we could immediately take (pedestrianizing roads, adding bollards to pedestrian streets, reducing car dependency so fewer people own and drive cars, etc., and that's just for incidents where people intentionally use cars to murder people), but it seems like you happen to prefer ignoring the reality that designing cities around cars is horribly dangerous and dysfunctional. "Cars have issues"? Yeah, try reading the title to see one of them.

It's so obvious this attack was trivial to a point where it's not even settled that it was intentional. You think this man could've killed nine eleven people and injured twenty more with his fists? Seriously?? [Editor's note: they seriously compare it to being armed with fists in a now-removed comment.] Even a knife attack is considerably more difficult, and it has at least some minimum barrier that you need to be in some kind of physical condition to perpetrate one, that there's a minimal chance of escaping the scene, that there's more chance of stopping it early, and that a car attack can be done much more impulsively. Plus there's the matter that regulating cars is massively easier than regulating knives. A goddamn infirm 90-year-old has the capacity to perpetrate this attack. And what would've prevented it completely? A few slabs of concrete or steel that any decent pedestrian street would have. Make psychological and psychiatric care free under Canada's Medicare? Absolutely, do it. Do it right now; why haven't we already? Do I think that'd be as effective at preventing this attack as literally just some slabs on the street? No.

Cars need to go, streets need to pedestrianize, and bollards need to go up to make sure cars stay the hell out.

To your point, imagine if this were a mass-shooting and the title were: "Nine people killed after gun shoots into crowd at Vancouver Filipino Festival". "Nine people killed after knife stabs into crowd at Vancouver Filipino Festival." It's so fucking passive as to be sickening. It reminds me of the "Man dies in officer-involved shooting" trope we see in US media because extrajudicial murder by the police is so routine and heavily whitewashed.

The AP gives it the same treatment. The only equivalent I could think of is "Nine people killed after bomb explodes into crowd", and you know why that might be written that way? Because it's not immediately obvious who placed the bomb. This mass-murdering psychopath is in custody; we can say "Nine people killed after man drives into crowd at Vancouver Filipino festival."

Edit: the death toll is now eleven, not nine.

Please see this comment. Even in the event this source isn't LLM-generated, it's bottom-of-the-barrel garbage; it's a Blogger "written by" some rando who doesn't even put in the effort to cite a single source. "Generating a discussion" is exactly the sort of poor, engagement-centric rationale that awful social media companies use to allow and promote dangerous, unsourced crap. I moderate a community for veganism, a cause I deeply believe in and want discussed and thought about. I would remove trash like this even if it were saying everything I wanted to hear and attracting thousands to the community and generating the biggest discussion in recent memory on the basis that I don't want our community to be a part of this unprecedented era of misinformation where vibes are treated as a substitute for critical thinking. I don't give a single shit about engagement in the communities I moderate if it means platforming uncited, likely LLM-generated swill like this, and I feel like that's a reasonable expectation to hold other moderators to.

The number of posts per day shouldn't matter either; if anything, that should make it easier to vet posts like this. If a post can't meet some reasonable minimum standard of quality, it shouldn't exist. Lastly, "if you don't want to see garbage, drown it out with quality" categorically doesn't work. This is a failed experiment. Literally every platform that allows garbage (see: every major social media platform) devolves into garbage because it's so, so much easier to create and then unthinkingly post – then the overwhelming majority don't actually read it to evaluate its quality. If a platform gets big enough on the back of quality posts and isn't maintained, the quality content inevitably gets outcompeted by slop. It shouldn't be the user's job to make sure that better things get posted; it should be the moderator's to foster an environment where quality actually matters.

(I never insinuated OP is a bot; I said the article itself is likely LLM-generated.)

One of the most obvious hallmarks of LLM slop is platitudinous garbage. LLMs especially like to punctuate stories with some asinine fucking quasi-lesson that I would write as a conclusion to a fifth-grade essay – not something I would write as a trained professional. "This/these X remind us/show that [very obvious thing]." Another one of these quasi-lessons about the Streissand effect found here.

There's almost always no such thing as "conclusively LLM", but when you have such an obvious hallmark (I'm sure if I wanted to waste more time entertaining this "but what if it isn't?", I could find many more; I specifically checked the conclusion because it's such a common tell), it arouses suspicion.

Then you get into what "Amusing Planet" really is: a Blogger site run by the person who "wrote" this article – Kaushik Patowary. There's no evidence Patowary has a background in literally anything. Which in fairness, you don't have to, but when you write about such a wide range of subjects and then you see this next bit......

Patowary fails to cite literally any of his sources through inline links or a references section like decent publications do. Assuming Patowary doesn't know enough about 1916 shark attacks to write off-the-cuff about them, he would be going out to find this information. Not only is citing trivially easy if you're doing original research because you have all (or at least some) of the sources right there, but it actively makes it easier as a writer to make sure what initially publish is correct and to make future corrections. Patowary does this very occasionally such as in this article, but it's really, really bad that the ostensible majority of recent articles that don't cite anything.* The absolute bare minimum Patowary could do is sloppily put like two or three links into a references section, and yet he almost always doesn't. As someone who writes, it's harder to write original prose without creating a references section; it's as much to my mind for the author as it is for the reader.

So we have 1) to my mind, preponderance of evidence, and 2) even in the rare event it's not LLM slop, this would be regular Blogger slop that isn't fit for an educational community because the research is anemic at best with almost/literally zero effort to cite resources used. Citing sources is literally the most basic step any even semi-credible resource should use. It's complete, useless garbage if it is or isn't LLM-generated; it's just that it's more likely the former and that the former is much worse.

[1], [2], [3], [4] (they sourced the LG website and literally none of the other stuff; great job), [5], etc.

Putting this here in case you're really just out of the loop.

While shark attacks remain rare, these statistics remind us that, despite all our knowledge and precautions, the sea is still wild. [this is their conclusion]

Okay, so this article is definitely just LLM slop and we should blacklist landfills like "amusing planet dot com" from what's supposed to be an informative community, right?

I read this as "incinerate". A principled, pragmatic opposition to the death penalty in any case I can think of is the only reason I would disapprove.

I'm so sorry that these shitposts keep getting shittier.

EDIT: since I don't want the top reply not to mention this, fuck IT Crowd creator Graham Linehan for the incalculable damage he's done to innocent trans people. He's a worthless, disgusting bigot.

Honestly, I always found that episode... Weirdly progressive? Even maybe by accident? Consider the following:

• The trans woman April is legitimately physically attractive and with a distinctly feminine voice to match.
• She's a legitimately very sweet, intelligent, and earnest person.
• She tells Douglas upfront in no uncertain terms that she's trans (she phrases this as "I used to be a man", but honestly, considering both 2008 and the fact it was used to setup a joke, I think this isn't too transphobic? A trans person in 2008 might've even said this because there was less of a support network to understand that you always were a woman.)
• Douglas gets upset because he thinks he's been tricked, but 1) he absolutely was not, and the episode makes this crystal clear that it's because April made every effort and he's just an absolute dumbass, and 2) Douglas has been portrayed in the show to this point as nothing but a juvenile, overdramatic, chauvanistic sack of shit, and we're clearly not supposed to be rooting for him.
• She's a fantastic girlfriend and becomes the love of his life. A big part of this is because she has a duality between traditional femininity and an interest in traditionally masculine activities, but I also don't think this is terrible representation? I have a trans woman friend who carries herself in a traditionally feminine way but hasn't dropped more traditionally masculine activities that she grew up enjoying.
• She throws the first hit at the end, but this is after Douglas dumps her on the spot after they've hit it off, had sex, and confessed their love for each other because he was too stupid to listen, he tells her to get lost, he basically calls her gross to her face by talking in a disgusted tone about "that operation you had", and flat-out denies her existence as a woman.
• It's made very evident that if Douglas weren't transphobic, he could've lived the rest of his life with a woman who's established to be literally perfect for him.