ELI5 why is anarchy not "the guy with the bigger stick" making the rules?
daltotron @ daltotron @lemmy.world Posts 0Comments 528Joined 2 yr. ago
daltotron @ daltotron @lemmy.world
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So a couple narratives, right. One is that they're just gonna blow all their generational wealth on nothing and blah blah blah fuck off, and then those that do have generational wealth are just gonna get it eaten up by government inheritance taxes, and maybe debt collectors, who are less sympathetic, because fuck debt and specifically people looking to wring old people for all their worth. Scum, lowest of the low, should be lined up and pelted with. Maybe small coins? Pocket change? Could be kind of ironic.
At the same time, little weird that people will make a big stink about medicare and social security going underwater, and then not want to pay taxes on inheritance, because they're entitled to it. That shit doesn't track, really. They could advocate for less spending on the military, sure, but if the conception of the economy is that it just kind of works like how a house balances debt (it doesn't), then paying debts should be good, no? Weird double standard in western culture, still. Everyone hates usury, but simultaneously conceives of "the economy" as working through it, and "the economy" as being, if not good, then incredibly important and worth protecting at all costs. Point is, the common conception of how the economy works is flawed, and then some people have an idea of how it should work, but, in any case, the ire should be drawn with that, rather than with "the boomers". Attacking "the boomers" is weird. It's treating a symptom, not the cause.
Second, also a weird note, is that "the boomers", monolithically, are holding onto their jobs, or something. Certainly, a good proportion, and probably the majority that are still holding out, are doing so because of a lack of alternative, and despite how good it may feel, it's probably not moral to blame someone for, say, being an alcoholic in their 20's and 30's, and say they don't deserve to retire on that basis. Kind of scummy. A good amount of boomers face that situation, and face worse situations where they aren't even at fault for their positions, really. Any racial minority, really, including some we now consider to be white.
Then, a small proportion are refusing to retire because they're just at the top of the company. Board executives, big decision making guys. Unfortunately for the rest of us, we will never get their positions. If they retire, will their job be taken by some millenial? Will it be taken by someone in Gen X? Would it even matter, or would the position inherently be both corrupting, and magnetic to the corruptible and corrupt? Probably the latter, probably it wouldn't matter who it went to, because it's just part of a larger power structure and whoever gets hired is going to be in further service to said power structure, as it's self-reinforcing.
Also, this shit is never true. ohhhhh no social security is going away because the boomers are retiring! nooo! you should be able to invest your retirement into a private account on the basis that the government's social security and retirement plans are going belly up because of all the boomers! nooo! this shit has been spinning for like 40 years, do not believe the hype.
Mostly to me it's just really funny. Like it's also really sad, that's true, but it's also funny, because of almost how incredibly stupid and shortsighted it is. Like, what does everyone think is gonna happen in 50 or 60 years? All the zoomers and millenials perpetuating this shit are just gonna get blamed equally by all of gen alpha and beta for deflecting all the blame onto boomers, and having done nothing to prevent, or even turn back, say, climate change. Or microplastics, or maybe like, if they're really on the level, all of gen alpha will really get on their parents case for being absentee parents that abandoned them to a horrible digital wasteland via ipad.
Like unless we gain empathy, and, beyond that, understanding, as to why each generation acted the way they did, unless we gain that insight and historical context, we're just gonna keep treading water, as every new generation has to figure out everything by themselves, and can never learn from the mistakes of their progenitors. You don't even need to like boomers, or boomer culture, or really even like, morally approve of why they did the things they did, you just need to understand how they justified it, and what they were thinking at the time. But people don't wanna do that, instead it's just easier to blame the olds.
Yeah I think that would be cool. I think we should all be spied on. I think we should all submit everything we've ever done to every authority. Every time I'm taking a shit, I record a small video and save it to my publically active telegram channel that's full of dead al-qaeda members and federal agents posing as them. So dictates the holy doctrine.
I dunno, it's moreso the fact that people don't bring up how every other web service is spyware whenever they get brought up. You get a fair number of those complaints, and more on lemmy, where everyone is a linux focused privacy psycho, sure, but I think the disproportionate level of shit flung at tiktok isn't really organic, and people aren't judging the app on the actual merit of the thing. If you wanted to, you could pretty easily fling shit at tiktok on the basis that you can't really control what it is you're watching at all, and so it can very easily take advantage of people who have no self control. You could judge it on the basis that they implement policies to curate their content pretty heavily to be more attractive (eliminate the uglies). You could judge it on the basis that the platform basically has no active moderation to police speech and will allow very obviously white supremacist and conspiratorial content to flourish. All of those are pretty true criticisms.
But instead, people don't know what the fuck they're talking about, and they just want to fearmonger about chinese invasion some more. What I'm saying is that the claims spiral into shit like all the kids being brainwashed, on the basis that china has it's own tiktok, doyun or whatever, you know, when that doesn't make any fucking sense and those two ideas aren't really logically connected. China has it's own everything, for the most part, they exist behind a curtain. Obviously, if they have their own tiktok, which no duh they will, it's gonna be controlled by the chinese government, and then the chinese government is gonna spin that so their censorship is for the good of the people and for the good of the kids. But then instead, people will accept that claim at face value, and use it to turn around and say that the chinese are brainwashing our kids, when ironically they've just bought chinese propaganda. That's the type of shit I'm talking about. There's no like, measurement, or self-awareness, of what actually there is to hate about china, people just end up kind of talking shit based on the points that they've been fed by propagandists who benefit from their ignorance. People would just as easily hate tiktok if it was censored by the chinese on the basis that "this content isn't beneficial to society, this content is" type shit, and people actually do already criticize tiktok for that because they're full of shit and can't make up their mind and believe the app to basically just be controlled by some foreign red menace government.
Do you see where I'm coming from? People that aren't willing to actually understand the shit they're talking about, they just hear a surface level narrative and then decide to parrot that unflinchingly, and then, duh, of course that narrative is gonna be a tool to, in this instance, try to take a bite out of a foreign company in order to get them more tapped into US intelligence, and allow US intelligence more access to their data, while at the same time providing US business interests with a neat and shiny new toy.
This shit is Vine. We had this same social media platform in 2013, basically. Everyone's just freaking out about it now because it's owned by china, and everyone's been made to worry about threats to national security, even though we can all kind of agree that the american government also sucks and is heinous. It's giving me some "Only I can bully my little brother!" kinds of vibes. It's like the same shit as when europeans get brought up, at any point, anywhere, and then americans start making fun of british people having bad teeth and knife crime and stuff, even though they have basically all of that but worse. Nobody's a nationalist until another country gets brought up, and then suddenly everyone's the most patriotic proud to be an american motherfucker. It's cringe. It reminds me of when we started calling them "freedom fries".
Tiktok sucks so hard, but then occasionally I find a minor nugget of wisdom or a piece of information so helpful that it makes me keep the app. Just the other day, some said he applies antiperspirant to his feet in order to keep them warm, because then they'll sweat less, and will get less cold in the socks. I didn't even really know that was a problem I was really having, but now, I will never have cold feet again. There's also always eelfeel, so I'm alright with it as a whole.
More broadly I do hate how kind of walled off the app is. I try to share videos on snapchat, oof, snapchat cuts it off so it's only the first five seconds of a video. Best to send the link, but then, if you don't have tiktok downloaded, it takes you either to the app store, or it hits you with the shitty web browser. Maybe fine for seeing a single tiktok, on mobile, but it's pretty bad on desktop since it's not formatted for it, and overall it, just is kind of ass to deal with, especially on repeat. Hate the modern internet.
Edit: Sorry, nvm, I guess I didn't understand that we were fearmongering about the evil chinese technology brainwashing our youths with their wiles in this comments section.
Even though I agree with all of this, it seems like this speaks more to an american perspective than to any other given country, and all your citations are from an american perspective as well. Though I think you could maybe make an argument on how the police are conventionally leveraged to protect private property, and private property is bad, and how if you were to take away the "protecting private property" element of their job description, you'd basically be abolishing the police. You could make that argument, along more universal lines, but that's kind of contingent on people agreeing that both private property is bad, and that police are exclusively the protectors of private property, and nothing else.
In any case, I wouldn't really be willing to make so certain of a statement on the police departments of other countries. I've never really heard anyone say anything bad about, say, finnish police, for example. British cops, they wear funny hats, they go "oy", and shit, I've not really heard anything good about them, but finnish cops? Never heard bad about them. I also think a lot of what makes the police in america bastards, is because the prison system here is so fucked up and so punitive, and so particularly bad, compared to a lot of other countries.
I also kind of like, as an aside point. What do we do about park rangers? They're technically cops, but you wouldn't really hear anyone thinking that we shouldn't have them, or that they should be actively abolished. I say this to mean, you know, as with the first paragraph, what do we really mean by "police"? You've given a pretty good description of the fact that the police suck, but not really why, or how they could be fixed.
I thought this was kind of an old meme by now? I seem to remember it being reported on in english media by the late 2010's, like 2018/2019, and the half-life of memes is pretty bad anyways + I would assume english media would get around to these things somewhat after they'd been spent anyways.
My bad, I was thinking of "躺平", lying flat, as mentioned in the article.
In any case I think there's definitely like, an element of this reporting that is, you know, relatively obvious in the amount of bias. You might compare this to, say, if china reported on like, growing incel movements, or something, as evidenced by the spread of andrew tate. Or, maybe better, the quiet quitting movement. They're not technically incorrect, and those are pretty significant problems, but it's also, you know, there's a reason why they're choosing to report on that, and not like. I dunno, something else. Say, toxic work culture. Sigma male grindsets. The total inverse, you will rarely see reported on by, you know, the fucking wall street journal. I have a skepticism for the motives of the media, is basically all I'm saying. I agree with the memes though the chinese government and chinese society et large kind of blows chunks, similarly faulted as is most of modern society broadly.
I mean, anyone can put up that sign, though, that doesn't really mean it really has any bearing on reality.
I also don't really think that "whether or not they can afford repairs or insurance" is on the foremost mind of looters. Well, foremost, I would think "hey this is easy money" for the vast majority, or "hey fuck everything", maybe,
But I would also think that, in terms of political activism, you would want to target businesses which aren't equitable, and which are leeching things out of the community. Gentrified businesses, businesses which are just kind of, external to the community, businesses where the owner is just a real piece of shit, stuff like that, I think, would be more in the realm of political activism. You know, if you're doing any of that, then you would more likely want to target businesses that don't have insurance or can afford repairs, actually, because you'd be more likely to get those businesses shut down, or driven out of the community.
Walmart and businesses like it are part of the biggest lobbying groups for increased police presence and these events are a gift to their narrative.
That's kind of an argument you could make against any political activism, though. The civil rights marches were framed as riots in the media of their time, and obviously, they got at least some of what they were looking for, in the end, so their tactics were successful. Arguments about optics never really strike me as supremely convincing. They don't argue about the merit of the act in general, they argue about the aesthetics of it, which is much more fraught, and theoretical, and doesn't actually really have to do with the thing itself. I also don't really find this whole like, strategic nihilism to be a convincing counterargument either. "oh, well, walmart as a whole won't be toppled by any actions we take on the ground, our energy would be better spent doing something else", and then you ask "what else" and people just kind of gesture in the direction of a nonprofit, or local politics, or something to that effect. That's not to say those more organized forms of activism don't have their place, but if we were just relying on easily corporate captured nonprofits and easily corruptible local politics for activism, we'd also be fucked.
Both things, to me, would seem to have their role. They are all mutually beneficial to one another in terms of political leverage.
You know, I think looting maybe gets a bad rap. I think maybe stealing is actually cool. Reminds me of how people are chill with diogenes shitting on the sidewalk, but then as soon as someone does that in real life, they're gross and weird. Everyone is cool with robin hood, or some gentleman thief or rogue, but as soon as it happens in real life, everyone turns into the sheriff of nottingham's little armored men.
I would like to see the statistics on what percentage of post-looting walmarts stayed in the neighborhood, because I think it would be a pretty clear win if those walmarts left those neighborhoods. Worse in the short term, as jobs won't automatically get propped up, and even in some long terms you can see things turn into food deserts, ghettos, or ghost towns as other forms of capital just get pulled out, and people get nothing. Sort of a choice between shit and shit, there.
Other alternative that people bring up is locally owned stores, but plenty of locally owned stores, ones that are easier to topple over and more vulnerable to looting, are/can be owned by shitheels. Being a small business owner doesn't preclude you from doing active harm to your community/not actually being a part of that community (this is more often the case than not), and it isn't inherently a good thing. It isn't inherently beneficial to society at large, and you still have just as well a chance of being a parasite and running your local business in an exploitative and shitty way, and in a way where that shit needs to get thrown out of the community. The only thing that being a "small business" means is that you're potentially just doing less damage than walmart, not that your actual structure, or existence, is better, or more well justified. Which, to be fair, is an advantage. Small business owners are specifically going to be more likely to see pathways to mutual benefit because they're more vulnerable.
So the alternatives to walmart, in the common conception, are kind of a mixed bag, or are negative. More on that later.
In any case, looting will probably not topple walmart anytime soon, unless it maybe every walmart in america got looted of everything they had, like, seventeen times in a row. But the point isn't to topple the corporation as a whole, the point is just to drive them out of the local community (potentially), and take back something in the process. You can even use this as leverage against local governments, like with the george floyd protest. It's an "objective legal decision", or whatever, to send derek chauvin to prison, but it's also a decision that the local government is forced to make, because if they don't, there will be more protests/riots/lootings, more large businesses will pull out of the community, and be less likely to invest in the community in the future, which damages the municipalities bottom line, and could potentially even put them in jeopardy. d
Again, you could argue against this, on the basis that, if less tax money is being put into the local government, they will be more likely to cut everyone's benefits and resources, over, say, dropping police budgets, right, but again, is that an argument in favor of the status quo, or is that just saying we need to redo some of the shittier parts of the local government as a whole? It's just like with walmart pulling out of the local community, and then everyone loses jobs and, it turns into a food desert ghost town situation.
I also kind of really doubt that walmart is providing more to the local government than they take, in a lot of cases. They're eating up lots terms of tax revenue, to maintain the ability to travel there. Yuuuuuge parking lots, car-centric design, which means they're more likely to be farther away and require more public infrastructure to subsidize them. This is going to be more the case for your appalachian municipalities, though, your rural communities, I think your urban communities are gonna make a little more money on walmart, maybe enough to break even.
So, to me, it would seem kind of obvious that the toppling of walmart isn't necessarily the big problem here, it's the lack of good alternatives.
I.e. give me aldis, give me costco. Give me a sustainable and equitable co-op that can provide local jobs, while reinvesting excess funds into the community from which the people who run it are hired. Give me a credit union that's willing to give that co-op a loan to start their business. Gentrification is potentially not a bad deal, for reinvestment into these communities, as long as it doesn't price out the existing residents, and push them into a lower cost suburban hellscape, where they will be atomized, and taken advantage of even further, with even less recourse to escape. Which will always be the case, of course, the primary investors into these communities are always predatory business interests, and not co-ops, which are basically nonexistent in america and typically have less capital to invest in ventures like this. Race to the bottom.
It always seems like a problem, that people need to somehow construct an entire alternative world, and start from basically scratch, in order to make a better society, right, but realistically people just need like. The most basic investments, which they aren't getting. This is why dual power is pretty important. I would be willing to wager that people are pushed more into this anti-social self-destructive nihilism, because it's very easy for people to burn out in it/become just cynical mercenaries, you can more easily justify their arrest or murder, and because you control the systems and avenues they would otherwise use to build that real dual power. So, you can more easily lock them out and force them down the other path. That's just kind of my rampant speculation, though. Why you see a lot of screaming disillusioned people who know that the system is wrong but don't know why or what to do about it except try to tear shit down.
I dunno. The discourse around this issue really bugs me still.
also lemmy really needs paragraph indentation and line breaks hoo lee this shit is hard to structure after I've written it all out in a rambling garbage sort of way. had i more time I woulda written a shorter letter probably though
Instead of an office chair, I opted for a loveseat, on risers, that I can pull fit inside of my desk.
Risers end up being necessary for a standing desk, if you have a loveseat, apparently, because a loveseat sits much lower than most good computer desks that I've found, so to get comfortable typing position, you need good risers. You're also gonna need a couch that stands up higher than your loveseat's feet, so you can clear the feet and pull the desk in far enough (it might still not be enough, frankly). You might wanna opt for castors, though, since then you can make use of a standing desk, if you have one, which is probably a good idea instead of sitting on the couch for too long.
And, you know, after all that, I get a seat that's kind of frankly not that comfortable to sit on for extended periods of time, because nobody has engineered their couch for you to sit on for multiple hours. I would wager that's probably a bad thing anyways. I've been looking into standing-to-sitting desks, in order to overcorrect from this problem of sitting in one position, and get a desk that I can sit on the floor with, and basically whatever position I want. But that also kind of sucks, because there are only two and they are both like 1000 bucks.
On the other hand, a loveseat is much better for spooning, than having two office chairs. So that's a bonus, if you wanted to spoon at your computer. Or you could just cast your screen to the smart TV you probably already have and buy a bluetooth computer controller for like 20 dollars or less.z
I hope someone reading this gains some insight because of this. You should buy a regular chair. It's expensive but just buy it please I'm begging you, don't make my mistakes again.
Floors, carpets, stairs, your feet, a bicycle, maybe even your car, dirt, gotta invest in good walkable dirt, uhhh, what else here... socks, probably chairs, ladders, flights, if you're flying always invest a lot in it, uhhhh. yeah probably some other stuff.
I dunno I guess the point of my joke is that I think this is one of those heuristics, or like, general expressions, that ends up taking longer to say than what it actually means. "invest in your shoes and bed" takes longer to say than "invest in anything that keeps you off the ground".
I find a lot of people can kind of fall down from this path, into anti-natalism, and then malthusianism, and then ultimately eco-fascism and eugenics, through what I like to call the "idiocracy deduction". Name pending. The sort of idea that, if stupid people are the only one having kids, only stupid people will promulgate, and then we'll all be stupid. Substitute stupid, for whatever political ideological group you don't really like (or even minority group), bam, shit's wacked. So, logically, stupid people, or, my political opposition, or, people I don't like/who can't be trusted to have kids, shouldn't be allowed to have them. After all, you know, it's more ecologically conscientious to not have kids, so we should just kind of force everyone to not have kids. A lot of this is also going to come down to like, third world countries tending to have higher birth rates because of higher infant mortality, and also tending to have higher emissions, and those two are connected because ???. It's sort of the inverse of christian conservatives who want to force every white anglo saxon protestant into having 70 billion kids, and then do things like ban abortion on those grounds.
I think there's also this like, really stupid idea that if we have more people, somehow those people will not have any jobs, based on some naturalistic concern. This is stupid. It's less that we've surpassed the planet's carrying capacity, and more that we all are just fucking morons who live in an 18th century economic hellsystem. That's the core of why mathusianism doesn't work, because there is no "hard" carrying capacity to the planet. People in ancient times had to occupy much larger portions of land in order to support themselves, because their crops were not selectively bred to maximize their calories, and because of diseases and shit, which is part of why agriculture sucked back in the day compared to hunter-gathering, (even though in practice the two aren't really that different, hunter-gatherers just move around more and thus have access to that larger space which they need to "grow their crops"). In any case, you'd have to build some argument that we've entered a period of natural technological stagnation, which is pretty fucking hard to do because you have to thoroughly discount any conceivable future technologies that might help, and you have to discredit the amount of blame resting on the current economic system.
So, yeah, I dunno. I find the whole dealio kind of dumb and stupid. Seems like an overcorrection, kind of like those hardcore atheists that were everywhere in the 2000's and 2010's, and you could tell they'd all grown up being raised by radical fundamentalist christian parents or whatever, or just that christians are fucking annoying (big if true), and then have kind of a limited perspective, even just on all religions, because of that, on top of not really being politically different enough from those christians, if you actually boiled it all down. Everyone's a neoliberal, at the end of the day, everyone's buying in to the same premises and arguments, even when they disagree on some issue, and then they all fail to see the bigger picture and just kind of end up splintering themselves into more and more radical extremist positions.
Actually you can stop reading here (if you even read all of that, good luck), but I kind of wonder if that's just like, an inevitable facet of late stage capitalism. It sort of seems to me like the ideological version of spam, which I tend to think of a lot as an analogy for capitalism "maximizing efficiency". Spam is nonsense, nobody wants to read it, and yet, it will inevitably eat up all the bandwidth if left unchecked, because those with the most economic resources want to cut out all other avenues of communication, and, "make efficient use of the bandwidth". The fact that everyone eventually becomes kind of radicalized and pushed into these nonsensical extremist positions, totally lacking nuance, the fact that, you know, people slip into fascism, it seems kind of along the same lines. People get pushed to what the maximum extent of their political ideology will allow, through some mechanism, despite liberalism kind of inherently being a modest and compromising ideology at heart, one that becomes incoherent if you actually push it to any logical extremes. I dunno if there's anything there, about how people's conceptions of things gets shaped by like, the larger economic system at work.
why would anyone ever implement that hare brained scheme? most people that I've talked to just want an alternative to bombing the shit out of gaza and killing 21,000 people and like 8,000 kids or whatever, they're not saying israel should immediately just like, dissolve, and all israelis should be left to die and shit. They probably wouldn't even let themselves be killed, without a fight, you'd see something more like an impromtu military junta state crop up and increasing radicalization form among it and then on both sides, and you'd just get a repeat of what's currently happening but probably worse. I don't think that would ever reasonably happen, even, this is a dumb bullshit hypothetical. Even the people who want the dissolution of israel want it over the course of multiple years, or decades, even, where some jewish guy from staten island that doesn't even speak hebrew goes back home, and everything just kind of goes back to what might be considered "normal". The logical follow through of "I dislike it when a bunch of people are getting massacred" isn't "well now I guess we can't do anything at all, they can just march in and kill everyone and that's it. woops. look at what you made us do!". Most people recognize this, and just want the violence to stop as fast as possible, which is why nobody's really talking about the long term plans for what might happen after this. They're too focused on the horrible shit happening right now to propose anything.
The other punch style is the self punch. This is where you make fun of yourself or your own “group.” For example, I’m Jewish. If a non-Jew makes a “Jews run the world” joke, it’ll likely come across as highly anti-semitic. If I were to make that joke, I’d stand a decent chance of getting a laugh. (Well, assuming that I had basic comedy skills.)
This is also potentially pretty bad, though. It is a hard line to tread, to make fun of the absurdity of the claim, without, at the same time, validating the premise, for those who believe it, part of why being a comedian is so hard. You have to attract the people who would otherwise believe such a thing, and then illustrate the idiotic absurdity of the claim itself, and you know, the idiocy of the believers of it. You have to make them face it. If you just end up pulling off an exclusive "self-punch", and especially one against "your group", it's very likely to just be accepted/seen as you selling yourself and your group out, in order to validate everyone's preconceived notions, even if that wasn't necessarily your intention. Just like that dude who made a country song a while ago about politicians in washington being shitty, but also being about people on welfare eating cookies or whatever. A conservative narrative got pushed about his song, despite how he wanted, retroactively, for that not to be the case.
I dunno, there's a couple problems there. You can still punch up or punch down while recognizing that everyone's equal, because we can recognize that status doesn't have to really do with whether or not someone's equal. i.e. someone can be lower or higher status, monetarily, socially, while still being of equal worth, in terms of like, their value as a human. So you can still "punch up" or "punch down", because there's still problems in society, we don't live in a kind of totally equal utopia, or what have you, and to not recognize that and say that we do, and then use that as a justification to be able to punch down, you know, that would be bad.
Oftentimes, the reason people find ire with "punching down", is that it makes fun of people from the perspective of their lack of status and their lack of worth as a human. It's fine to make fun of disabled people, in general, but it's not really funny to make fun of someone who's in a wheelchair, for the fact they're in a wheelchair, most especially if you're not in a wheelchair, because that's punching down. You also see this thing where people who occupy minority positions, like being in a wheelchair, will try to ingratiate themselves to the majority, sometimes with some degree of success, by basically punching themselves in the face socially. "Oh, I'm in a wheelchair, isn't that so funny guys?", but unironically, which negatively impacts, in this example, the disabled, especially as it is used as evidence for being like "hey disabled people are okay with it" or "hey this other guy's okay with it, so if you complain, you're just lame and don't have a legitimate grievance". Now it's their "choice" to punch themselves, but we can also recognize it's arising from their need to try and improve their situation, and the extenuating circumstances, and so it's kind of not that funny in the broader picture, and we also try not to blame them for it on the basis that it's as a result of their circumstance.
You would probably get better laughs and better comedy out of it anyways, if you tried to point out the kind of existential insanity of being someone in a wheelchair, and moving through the modern world, which has not been crafted for you. People in wheelchairs have difficulty using the restroom, for example, because restrooms aren't really laid out for them, so you could maybe come at it from the angle of "why do we still have urinals", or "what the fuck is up with asian squat toilets", or something to that effect. Maybe make fun of everyone wanting you to cut off your legs, and give you robot legs, when really all you wanted was to have a wheelchair that lets you piss and shit, and like, an elevator that isn't broken. The reason chapelle's modern shit isn't that funny, imo, is because he doesn't understand the perspective of trans people enough to make effective jokes out of it. Which, to be fair, is pretty hard to do, if you're not trans. Which is sort of why most comedians don't try it, the same way most white comedians don't try to do racial comedy about black people.
That's not all to overcorrect and say that all his shit in "the closer" was bad, because it wasn't, and he had a handful of good points, but the problem is going to kind of arise when those good points also come with a handful of pretty bad points and pretty bad jokes. Just like his actual show. If I had to wager a guess, I'd say that a good amount of dave chappelle's popularity comes from the double tradeoff of it being extremely popular in the 2000's to kind of be more comfortable with being "edgy" and making fun of black people, on the basis that they're equal, and "I'm not a racist, so it's okay" type shit. People laughing at him, rather than with him, but on the basis that we live in a harmonious post-racial society, barring all of the "weird racists". He even ended up saying as much, as to why he wanted to quit his own show, that he felt people were laughing more at him. The double tradeoff I'm talking about, there, is that he was using the same platform, out the other side of his mouth, to make funny and insightful comedy that pushed the buck. He could attract white people looking to laugh at the minstrel and misogyny, but then turn around and give some good shit on top of it. Even just to portray the reality that black people were still oppressed. Is that tradeoff worth it? It maybe is, if you're able to give good enough insight to kind of balance the rest out, but if the insight is lacking, if the perspective is lacking, then obviously people are gonna be more likely to get very frustrated with it. That's all me talking out my ass, though.
It’s actually probably 100% probably that pitbulls on average strictly bite at the same rates as other dogs…
I'm sorry, but this is a probably 100% probably on average strictly convincing sentence you've got, there.
None of the idiots who brag about driving a semi have done any of that either.
That's definitely not true. People can still have a self-image as a kind of asshole truck driver, and also still use their truck. People make this argument, that somehow these kind of aesthetic qualities have some sort of bearing on who does or doesn't use their truck, and to me, it just kind of comes across like the only people who are allowed to drive trucks are the people who are acting in socially acceptable ways.
The argument is less about the people who use their truck, and more about the relative frequencies of use for everyone generally. Most people would be better covered by a rental. And then we could also make the argument that our development patterns would encourage the use of trucks far too much anyways.
Edit: wait, did you mean to type semi, or hemi? I kind of assumed hemi, but if you mean semi that kind of changes everything and I don't know how to respond to that.
I don't really know if any of that holds true if I already have the game in my possession. Maybe if it was theoretically the case that future software was harder to pirate for some additional drm insanity, but then the neat thing is that games that are just released are harder to pirate and tend to never be on sale, so that's a kind of automatic balance. Also
There is also the fact that others see you using it and are encouraged to not using alternatives.
what do you mean by "alternatives"? alternatives to piracy? alternatives to the games people want to play?
I'm not the smartest guy or the most well read or what have you, but the idea is basically that whenever someone becomes overtly greedy or authoritarian, the mutual benefits of co-operation kind of ensure that this is a non-issue. Everyone that's co-operating would simply choose not to co-operate with that person, or that organization, and then they end up not getting very far. Maybe if it turns violent, then the same thing happens, just in that everyone kind of mutually crushes the organization, or dissolves it, or what have you.
You know I think the point most people fire back with is that authoritarianism tends to be thought of as like, more effective, right, because they can "make the trains run on time", or some such nonsense, but I think they're just conflating this with the idea that authoritarianism is more effective in a crisis, which is partially why authoritarianism is constantly inventing crises to combat. The idea, basically, is that if you have a singular leader, you can pivot and accommodate things more easily, make judgement calls easier, and you gain a capacity for rapid response. This is, you know, questionable, things end up being more complicated in practice, and leaving everything to a singular point of failure is a pretty easy way to make a brittle system. At the same time, even were it completely true, it's still only true for the short term, that it's more effective for short term gains. Long term gains, mutual co-operation, is much more effective.
Basically, the refutation is that greed isn't really a fundamental component of humanity insomuch as it is a choice, and anarchism tends to think that greed is a pretty bad one. Not only for everyone but the greedy, but just generally, for mutual, long term gains. If you change the environment significantly enough that you can ensure this is more overwhelmingly the case at the macro scale, then you've kind of "won" anarchism, in a sense, you've won the game.