comfy @ comfy @lemmy.ml

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29

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974

Joined

3 yr. ago

No I'm not.

No, they're not a regular person.

Their decisions, as a Chief Executive Officer in a national healthcare company, have the power to ruin lives on a systematic level. Their abuse of their social role results in adverse health outcomes, financial debt, poverty and resulting starvation of families on a scale of millions. And they have willingly and knowingly done this for the sake of profit, for greed. Whether what they do is legal or not is completely irrelevant in the real world, whether they are directly violent or legally coercive doesn't change the reality, the bottom line is their actions have the same kind of health and financial effects as a violent thug robbing innocent victims, except on a scale of millions. That is systematic oppression.

Can you do that to people? Not even a disgusting school shooter does as much damage as this CEO does each month. They are not a regular person. They mass murder people, indirectly and legally.

Why would wishing murder on oppressors make someone bad? This isn't some regular person.

Organized violence with modern surveillance techniques is virtually impossible.

No it isn't. Why would it be? Organized violence happens every day.

Absolutely not. Whether it was the reason behind it or not, this person and others like them earned such a fate. They are a menace to public health and they are consistently and knowingly complicit in many avoidable deaths and widespread suffering as a result of their actions. I am critical of this kind of action in the sense that I don't think it's a viable strategy for producing change and improving society, but I'm as critical of this assassination as I am of the many assassination attempts on Hitler.

Shame on anyone who defends such anti-social humans.

ah, only off by 3 years. That's pretty good for science fiction.

I’ve never been accused of being a bot for having an unpopular viewpoint before!

Ah, you get used to it pretty quickly.

I actually had seen one page from this site because it talks about how a niche religion is WITCHCRAFT and SATANIC, but that front page is a work of art.

You say this as if it's some inevitable law of society, but I disagree. The profit extraction phase isn't an inevitability, especially online where digital hosting is relatively cheap and services can be run with 0 income, and many larger sites have run off unconditional donations only (and therefore without having to compromise for investors). The domination of content by exploitative actors can be combatted, especially when you aren't desperate for income from corporations.

It's obviously an uphill battle, but it's been done at smaller scales for social media sites and had been done at large scale for other sites like archive.org and Wikipedia.

It absolutely does. What happened to twitter could happen to a successor. The successor matters.

I disagree with saying there's nothing wrong with it, just as I would disagree that there was nothing wrong with the original Twitter. It is creating conditions which lead it towards for-profit behaviour which will end up hurting users, unlike some other platforms which are not run for-profit.

This is a far-reaching difference with real societal impacts if the platform becomes dominant, not just some difference in taste that can be hand-waved away as nothing.

I disagree with saying there's nothing wrong with it, just as I would disagree that there was nothing wrong with the original Twitter. It is creating conditions which lead it towards for-profit behaviour which will end up hurting users, unlike some other platforms which are not run for-profit.

This is a far-reaching difference with real societal impacts if the platform becomes dominant, not just some difference in taste that can be hand-waved away as nothing.

but hot take: federation doesn’t solve enshittification. It just devolves everything into little shitty internet fiefdoms.

Enshittification, by definition, is a result of profit seeking, especially from venture-capital funded projects.

Shitty internet fiefdoms are shitty, but it's got nothing to do with enshittification.

made solely for their artistic merit

There's a huge middle-ground between pure artistic pursuit and callous profit maximization.

Plenty of the bigger non-profit games (like FOSS games) have easy modes. I'm actually having a hard time trying to think of ones which don't. And I'd call them all niche and indie, made primarily for enjoyment over market interests. In games like STK, it's clear from the bug tracker and forum that the primary devs (passionate and experienced players) are trying to balance their intended experience against accessibility - if some of them just made the game how they think it should be played, it would be very different.

Yep. I don't argue for things I don't believe are the side I should be on. Sometimes I make tongue-in-cheek arguments (think A Modest Proposal) but that's not in a discussion. I don't get into arguments as a sport or to make people angry, so why ever be on a side I think is 'wrong'?

Why wouldn’t the developer want as many people as possible to buy the game though?

I've never made art (incl. games) with the intention of having as many people view it as possible. Many developers make games as a hobby rather than for mere profit, and some try to draw a compromise in the middle.

I know this doesn't apply as much to major well-known games created by professional game development companies, but there are other incentives guiding development beyond maximizing purchases.

I don’t think any games are obliged to offer an easy mode.

That's a valid stance. It's ok to make art which is not intended for everyone, or even the majority.

However, if you're charging people money for it and they are surprised by the difficulty and can't enjoy it as a result, I think that could be a potential ethical issue. But if you make it clear it's a difficult, challenging game, then I see no problem.

You can then take it further by outlawing absolutely any lobbying and sponsorships of political campaigns; have an equal amount of funds set aside that allows each candidate an equal amount of airtime/advertising/etc… You could take it even further by having a government owned and dedicated channel for each candidate to showcase their agenda and goals that they’d like to run on, with proper fact checking and ability for voters to hold those candidates accountable post elections.

I don't understand how these good ideas will become law until there are a majority of elected representatives outside of the two corrupt parties.

I also don't believe a majority of elected representatives outside of the two corrupt parties will form until those ideas become laws.

The game is rigged.

Simply saying “more candidates won’t fix it”, is the same as not doing anything at all.

It is absolutely not. If we can analyze a situation and conclude ahead of time that a strategy is not viable, then we can avoid wasting huge amounts of effort, time and money on something as functionally useful as doing nothing at all. When I say 'the game is rigged', I'm not saying do nothing. I'm saying don't play the game and expect to win. There is a world of politics outside the 4 year cycle of elections which has historically proven itself capable of gaining workers rights, protecting minority groups and improving our lives. (This also don't mean to simply ignore electoral politics, even Bernie's campaign was pragmatically useful in some ways, but don't expect that we're going to topple the mafia with trendy campaigns and ballots)

The Two Party System is a result of FPTP voting; take that away and implement RCV and the Two Party System will begin to crumble naturally.

I agree that FPTP systematically promotes a two-party system and ranked choice voting enables it to me more easily removed, but I would point out that it's not an automatic inevitability that RCV will . Australia, for example, has had RCV (IRV) since 1918:

The preferential system was introduced for federal elections in 1918, in response to the rise of the Country Party, a party representing small farmers. The Country Party was seen to have split the anti-Labor vote in conservative country areas, allowing Labor candidates to win on a minority vote. The conservative federal government of Billy Hughes introduced preferential voting as a means of allowing competition between the two conservative parties without putting seats at risk.

Yet I would classify Australia as effectively a two party system for many of its decades (if we treat the Coalition as a single party), with 90%+ of votes going to one of two parties, until the past few decades.

I want to emphasize I'm not disagreeing, because one could characterize this recent change as it naturally crumbling, albeit with factors causing it to only really catalyze recently: [quote re: 2022 federal election]

Australia is unusual in electing independents at all, let alone in large numbers. There are more independents elected to the Australian House of Representatives than elected to the US, UK, Canada and New Zealand Parliaments put together. The recent growth in minor party and independent representation is just the latest example in a long history of power sharing in Australian parliaments.

What will more candidates do?

I don't see how that addresses the issue, at least on a federal level. Bernie was one of the most popular candidates in previous elections and that didn't count for anything. It's clear that the game is rigged. Look at other countries, where the equivalent party to the Democrats (that is, the 'middle left') has a leadership still beholden to corporate interests despite their working class rank-and-file and substantial union lobbying.

Third parties already exist and you can see how viable they are. The FPTP spoiler effect isn't going away any time soon.