balsoft @ balsoft @lemmy.ml

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1 yr. ago

Non vegans at least have the excuse of being deeply indoctrinated, and having 90+ percent of people reenforcing and defending their behaviour. The ultra rich dont.

In a way, they have been indoctrinated by capitalism, and are reinforcing that indoctrination by being the capitalists. I can totally believe that most rich people consider themselves "good people" because they have "succeeded" in the capitalist system.

Keeping people in a cage is crueler and riskier than just killing them.

That's debatable by itself. But I'm not talking about keeping people in a cage. I'm talking about trying to forcefully re-educate them and re-integrate them into the society. If they refuse or fail then that's on them. Even keeping someone in (a humane) prison for life is still less cruel then murdering them IMHO. This is demonstrated by the fact that most death row inmates fight their conviction up until the last moment, even though their living conditions there are awful. People who volunteer to be killed usually have severe mental issues, thus it's closer to suicide then an informed decision.

I don’t think you quite grasp just how far gone the rich are.

As I've said, I've met and talked with one of them. They're not all innately awful evil people (I don't think there are any people who are born evil), merely shaped to be such by their situation. And therefore, a lot of them could be turned into productive members of society with enough re-education, therapy, and honest work.

It’s the fact that Mercurial tags the commit with the name of the branch that it was committed to which makes it much easier to determine whether a commit is included in your current branch or not.

Isn't this trivial in Git too? git branch --contains COMMIT ?

It’s absolutely not 0, people constantly try non violent means of renegotiating social relations and get nowhere, in fact they usually get executed for the trouble.

Imprisonment and confiscations is definitionally violent; I'm not advocating for a non-violent solution to a problem which is perpetuated by violence.

Remember that I'm not talking about peaceful protests. I'm talking about isolating the parasites, trying to turn them into humans and giving them a second chance if we're reasonably certain they're not a threat anymore.

Revolutions have left people alive and they consistently side with counterrevolutionary forces and violently crush anyone attempting to improve equality.

Prisons are places where people are placed to stop them from causing further harm. Hard to help reactionary forces when you're isolated from society.

The hope is that during that isolation it's possible to change their ways.

As far as I can tell, this has never been tried by anyone.

I mean french revolution says hello? The worst that can happen is they scuttle off, rouse reactionary forces, and violently oppress billions again. Which they have consistently done no matter how attractive the proposed alternatives have been.

The french revolution was orchestrated by the bourgeoisie. The then-billionaires never "scuttled off", they were literally half the Assembly. And that revolution also executed most of the old elites, the old order never really came back but was replaced with an imperialist order practically brought about by the Assembly/Convention themselves, so I'm not sure what point you're making here.

Also people who aren’t vegan and have encountered the idea also suck, so that isn’t exactly making your point.

This is like a good 80% of the population nowadays. Do we execute all of them? No, we try to make them understand the consequences of their lifestyle, and teach them empathy for all living things. That's my point.

Nobody has ever demonstrated an effective treatment for such a disordered mind.

How many times have we tried? It's 0. AES countries throw them in (somewhat) brutal prisons or execute them, and capitalist countries with rehab-oriented prisons don't consider parasitism a crime (which of course it is).

The same has been said many times about murderers and rapists in the past (and, by some people, in the present too) - and yet look at rates of recidivism in Scandinavia. 80% or more of violent criminals become productive members of society after being released.

Are parasites worse? Sometimes. I've had the displeasure of talking to a person worth ~$1B (it was Evgeniy Kaspersky for reference). They just didn't want to think about all the suffering they are causing, instead saying shit like "I worked hard for this, if other people worked as hard they'd be as rich". Just like most people don't want to think where their chicken nuggets come from and how they are produced. I don't think they lack empathy, they're just trying their best to avoid feeling it towards people they're exploiting.

AES countries need to push the envelope of humanity, not be stuck in brutal 17th century ways. Try to teach everyone empathy and understanding, give everyone a second chance, the worst that could happen with a parasite is that they try this shit again after being released and go back to prison, with their wealth confiscated for public good once again.

Yeah sure, Scandinavian countries are capitalist and thus billionaires are treated as demigods. We still observe that their prison system has better outcomes for everyone involved (convicts & society) compared to US/Chinese system of "prisons as punishment only" and learn from it.

That's kinda irrelevant to murdering someone. But yeah, if you make your prisons places that fix people rather than places for punishment (provide prisoners the ability to learn actually useful skills and put them to use, and offer therapy) I think that even some of the worst parasites, murderers, etc can eventually become useful members of society (see the Scandinavian prison model for how this can be applied quite successfully).

That's a bit better, I guess? But then China still executes the most people in the world every year, most of them not even billionaires. How many of them are innocent working-class people framed for something they didn't do? (Hint: historically that percentage is alarmingly high if you look at other countries). Fuck that shit, countries should abolish executions after their socialist revolution succeeds.

Counterpoint: if you deem killing hundreds to thousands of others by spreadsheet to make your line go up, you have to be made an example of.

Sure. Confiscate everything they have, confiscate everything their family has, put them in prison. There is little difference in deterrence between that and the death penalty.

I don’t care if Eichmann could have been rehabilitated or if Netanyahu can, they’re not worth the manpower required to get them there.

Whether you care or not is irrelevant when we're talking about a human life.

Crimes of necessity are one thing, death or cruel punishment won’t do a single bit. Crimes of greed? Those fucks only understand deterrence by threat of violence, because all they think of is themselves.

Sure. Imprisonment is definitionally violence.

If the Sackler family had been executed for their crimes I bet you’d see far fewer claims denied and insulin wouldn’t be worth an arm and a leg.

Or, uh, if this shit was properly regulated in the first place there wouldn't be as many parasites getting wealthy on it, and there would be no price gouging. Look at the rest of the "developed" world, insulin is basically free there, and 0 executions were needed to get there (unless we're counting the threat of proletariat revolution, but then the US also had that). Those who would still abuse the system could be imprisoned to stop them from doing so.

It’s self defence, you’re talking about people that have demonstrated a complete lack of empathy and a complete lack of wanting to use their resources to rectify that or limit the harms they can do.

It's definitionally not self-defense to kill someone who's already in handcuffs. I don't care if they are straight up evil, no living being deserves to be murdered once they present no actual danger.

Yep, NixOS as a base + some Flatpak store for installing apps. In fact, use impermanence to just drop all OS state apart from logs, network settings and flatpaks. That way, "turn it off and then on again" will almost always work to fix the OS.

Seconded, it somehow manages to lag on my overclocked 5950X w/ 64GB of RAM. (this may be related to the Dark Mode extension or some shit, however it's still absolutely inexcusable)

Nobody deserves the death penalty. It's just cruelty with no benefit for the society. Studies show, time after time, that it has little to no deterrent effect. Its only purposes are either narrow-minded vengeance or preventing a person from being freed once the current government fails.

That said, I'm all for confiscating all wealth from anyone worth over a billion dollars and placing them under arrest until they can effectively demonstrate they are no longer a parasite on the society.

Since this actually sounds like a good decision... Over/under on Trump promising to double the amount of nukes and turn China into a nuclear wasteland unless they do something for him, by the end of next week?

Given the rate of executions during Trump's last tenure, I think it's feasible he would've crucified Jesus for the crime of existing while brown, if given the chance

Still kind of interesting that those conditions are satisfied here, and (according to the article) it does indeed suggest that the song is learned rather than genetic. I wonder if there are studies for other animals, e.g. ones for which we know that their communications are passed down genetically.

Keep following the train of thought. If a good system requires well meaning, educated, active members to keep it going, then a good system is one that produces those people.

That is naturally the case. I'm mostly arguing against the idea that the current system is bad because "your rights can be taken away". Capitalism is bad because its sole purpose (as in "The purpose of a system is what it does") is redistribution of wealth and power from the poor to the rich, or from working class to owning class if you will.

I feel like this is the case regardless of the system? You can't just install a "Good" leader once and expect them to provide everyone with equal rights forever. You can't even build a "Good" system once and expect it to provide you with rights by itself. It would still require well-meaning, educated, active, and organized constituents to continuously stand up for what is right, prevent corruption and abuses of power, etc.

There are no physically inalienable rights. They are ultimately just ideas and not laws of nature, and thus require enforcement by some human persons, and any such person is subject to corruption by power.

There are no infallible systems. Social systems are but humanly devised constraints, and humans can and will overstep those constraints. It takes other humans to reinforce the system and maintain the constraints.

That said, the system of capitalism is obviously a shitty one for everyone but the top 0.1% (and this percentage decreases with time), we as a species should do better. Socialism isn't perfect either, but at least it empowers much more people to be active participants rather than slaves.

To reiterate, it is simply not possible to "build a system in which no one has the power to take

<rights>

POTUS? Nobody. No single person should hold a position with such power.

It's not too bad tho, we've already replaced this with Github actions: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/356023

I don't think it's a solution for this, it would just mean maintaining many distro-agnostic repos. Forks and alternatives always thrive in the FOSS world.