daltotron @ daltotron @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

I would kind of agree with this if it wasn't kind of mean and half of it didn't come out of nowhere, but then it also seems like what you think you value in your own music taste is whether or not something is new, seeing as your main examples of things that are meaningless or bad is "image obsessed scandinavian metal nerd" i.e. derivative and "pastiche of borrowed riffs thrown together by a drug frazzled brummie" i.e. derivative.

i mean, where do you draw the line necessarily between the machine and what it creates? the machine itself is totally useless without inputs and outputs, not to say art needs utility. the beef wellington machine is only notable on its ability to conjure beef wellington, otherwise it's just a nothing machine. which is still kind of cool, I guess, but the beef wellington machine not making beef wellington is kind of a disregard for the core part of the machine, no?

There’s absolutely nothing “necessary” about a nationalist pissing contest between two vile empires.

I dunno, I don't think it was necessary, but I do think we got some pretty cool stuff out of it. Satellites are kind of neat, I like those, I like knowledge about space and radiation and stuff. I would also like healthcare, that's probably a higher priority, but I would like to have both.

Well yeah, it's kind of ridiculous, but I wonder like. How much of that is cause we just don't do it that often? It's sort of like if you saw someone just fill up a cup with their spit and then drink the whole thing. It's nasty, but is there anything really wrong with it? I don't actually know, I don't know anything about the biology and consumption of a large amount of spit, I imagine it has to be pretty alright since we're mostly consuming spit all the time, but I don't really know. Just an example, anyways.

Can I have dibs on your dog? Or, put another way, are you gonna finish that?

Capitalism is a race to the bottom.

Yeah. I agree. I was kind of more on the side that we should maybe not have a race to the bottom, if you can see what I'm getting at

edit: sorry if that didn't come across in my comment, I tend to not want to label every single thing as "capitalism is the problem bro!" because that puts people off, but then I kind of struggle with tiptoeing around the phrasing.

nah, I think it's kind of a way to get rid of pessimism. it's easier for a lot of people to conceive of humanity as just being completely dead, rather than conceiving of a humanity that persists on the face of the earth, enduring the wrath of their progenitors, condemned to a future of pain and misery for as long as the sun still burns. that scenario makes you actively, not only want to kill yourself, but maybe also [redacted] in the process, because the tradeoff seems not so bad, then. if only everyone on the earth was punished for their pride, maybe that, we could all live with, in our sort of, myopic first world "extending the guilt out to the guy in cuba or rural africa who hasn't done shit wrong but will disproportionately be the victim of the decisions of like 5 hollow puppets at the top of power" sort of way. but of the humanity that suffers indefinitely into the future? that's kind of harder to grapple with.

so I end up having to not really buy into either as a matter of retaining my own sanity.

It’s the same here with people who think animal lives are completely equivalent to human lives. This is the logical conclusion they don’t like to think about. If you had mass human death to correct for overpopulation, it would solve the food demand issue – and if mass human death is no different from mass animal death, then this would be the fewest deaths of living things to solve the issue.

I don't know if that really holds up. I don't think we're tapped out totally in ecological terms. I'm willing to be proven wrong on that (I kind of doubt I can, alternatives are kind of under-researched as a matter of principle), but if we're not tapped out in ecological terms, then I think the main limitation on food demand would be the level of labor available for food production. i.e. more people can provide for more people. I kind of struggle to think of a scenario in which misanthropy, or, I guess lack of it, is the problem here, and not like. Mass industrialized production. I don't wanna say capitalism is the problem cause that seems kind of tropey, and it isn't really accurate, but it's certainly not helping the issue, in any case.

I dunno why so many people discount hunting as a good alternative to sourcing your own meat.

Sometimes the whitetail deer populations are fucking insanely out of control because we killed off their predators like 100 years ago in some areas, and similar things happen all over because predators require larger ranges and are less able to integrate with human developments. Sort of like how we have a shit ton of crows and rats and pidgeons, and raccoons. I think it would probably make more sense to source meat from doing your part to clamp down on the populations, than the alternatives, which are predator reintroduction, which isn't always guaranteed to work and comes with complications, as the native species are usually totally extinct, or just like. ecological collapse from overgrazing, which sucks and is bad.

How am I supposed to try to convince you to stop eating meat if I have to set my morals aside and say insert opposing opinion

You have to do this basically every time you want to convince someone, occupying their position better than they can occupy it themselves and still coming out with the correct opinion is part of being empathetic and mature. There's not really any inherent or objective morality to whether or not raising and then killing your own chickens is good or not. Someone who's really invested in the concept of ownership as a specific right is really not going to care about your own moral code of infringing on the chicken's right to not be killed randomly. They're just going to say that it's their right to kill their chicken, and that's that. It obviously has to become bigger than that, you have to give alternatives, spell out why their ideological position doesn't really work out at scale, give out alternative perspectives, you have to be intellectually honest and give them ground when they push back.

If you just kind of, resorting to occupying your own position forever, and then calling out other people that violate that position, then you're just gonna be kind of blindly hitting other people for reasons that they don't fully understand, like what happens on the internet constantly. It's maybe more self-affirming to be someone else's ideological landmine, but I think it's probably harmful overall, because it's a selfish short-term gain that doesn't see the bigger picture. It prioritizes your own self-affirmation over someone else's ability to be emotionally vulnerable and open to new ideas. Your own morals should probably not preclude you from being nice to people that you see as bad or evil or dicks. But then that's just my two cents, I dunno.

what would you think of a backyard farm where chickens are only killed once they're dead? or, are only basically killed when they would otherwise die from old age in the next, say, 2 months, to just put a random number on it? would only be killed when they are diseased, have cancer etc. Cause we already do that with people a good amount of the time, assisted suicide, hospice, whatever.

also what do you think of if we just ate like old people

I think it's kind of a false dichotomy, between spending a lower amount of money (i.e. being poor), and being ethical. I think there's a lot more we could take issue with, on how society is structured, than accept this false dichotomy. There's a better universe out there where instead of having to use paper straws, we all just switch to biodegradable, and it is incentivized that people use metal straws. Same shit with this. There's a universe out there where we eat less meat, where this meat is more sustainably sourced and is locally sourced, which cuts down on logistics, and where, as a result, we don't have to pay 50 bucks for a frankly pretty gross chicken sandwich.

The reason zero tolerance policies get so often implemented is because kids tend to be much smarter in how they go about being dicks to one another than in how they do their schoolwork, or, in how they do almost anything else. If you implement one-sided policies that favor the bullied, it's then in the bully's best interest to instead appear bullied, which can end up being a pretty common tactic anyways. There's also more circumstances under which bullying can take place than just physical. Verbal bullying is much harder to prove and do anything about, and the worst is probably when some random kid gets dogpiled for being different, there's not much teachers can do about that even if it's relatively obvious. Which is also resting on the assumption that the teacher isn't also taking part in the bullying as a way to be seen as "cool" by their students, which is unfortunately something that's not uncommon. There's also mutual bullying in which kids can egg each other on until one goes too far, and then maybe zero-tolerance policies end up making some sense, as the group's behavior as a whole is what really needed to stop.

I think taking a more top-down view of the problem, it would seem to me that there's a similar problem going on to when reagan defunded all of the mental institutions, or whatever metaphor you'd wanna use here. There's a lot of attempts to make things right by removing things, rather than adding things. It's bad to lower a student's grade as a result of their malicious behavior, rather than their output, and usually bullies have bad grades anyways. Can't impose on the parents at all because the parents of bullies tend to either be nutso helicopter parents, or tend to be bullies to their children. And then sending kids to other school districts usually just ends up condemning then to a boiling pot of other kids who are maybe worse, or will exacerbate their behavior as it isolates them more, and in extreme cases it can lead them to criminality. Results are going to be kind of mixed on student counseling, if you have a therapist or psychiatrist on campus that's extremely lucky and can also have mixed results, and there's really not anything else you can offer kids other than that, for a variety of reasons. It's relatively hard to get people to stop being self-destructive in the best of times, as an institution, and it's much harder when those people are kids, and when you're inevitably going to be some underfunded institution, since schools funded by the rich, and their property taxes, tend to have children that will engage in less bullying, even if those kids are subject to other psychologically unhealthy pressures.

We could probably solve a good amount of this by just funding schools federally on an equal basis, or with voucher programs based on student population, but nobody wants to fund/expand those programs because schools tend to be underfunded and give bad results already, and we unfortunately have a tendency in this country to give something less money when it performs poorly, as some sort of sacrifice to the free market.

The only way I've ever had luck on those apps is just by trying to make my profile funny instead of really lame and repetitive. Like, make one that actually stands out, even if it's just a big picture of you in a fish costume holding yourself, or something. It can certainly help if you get a sense for what other dude's profiles look like and intentionally do what will stand out from them, or what will point out the absurdity of them. Then, just wait. That's it, don't surf the app really, that's a pretty guaranteed way to lose hope on everything. If you do scroll, do it sparingly, and sparingly give out swipes, don't swipe on someone cause they're hot, swipe on someone because they either seem like someone you wanna go out with or because they're sending you some other form of signal that actually matters. After you get a match or two, you're gonna wanna swipe through the pile until you can distinguish the person who swiped on you from the blurry preview they give you, and then you can go from there based on whether or not they seem like a good fit or not, generally I opt towards yes even if they haven't put much effort in.

I dunno about tinder, but sometimes you can even delete your bumble profile and the app keeps puppeting around your account, and then you can return later on, and swipe through the pile, until you can distinguish them based on their preview. I've met like 7-8 girls this way and my profile barely even shows my face and it's all stupid jokey bullshit. I think my ELO's probably tanked but I don't really care that much atp. If you're really desperate there are ways to flub the sign-up process and make a totally new account, so you can reset your ELO if you've tanked it by swiping right a million times and getting nothing back.

Nah this is completely right though. Soon as she stops those two kids are gonna bonk heads together, the smaller one needs a bike seat at the very least, and the toddler probably needs one as well. You could still do that with a bike like this, so it doesn't discount the point entirely, but the image itself is a pretty stupidly conceived piece of work.

that's kind of assumed to happen if you packed people into tighter and tighter densities

man, my only options are an I-miev, a leaf, or something like a prius or insight, or some other higher MPG small used car. I would say it can't come fast enough, cause the secondhand market can't come fast enough, but I don't even know if that's gonna be the case. Somehow I can't picture a used tesla, or really most modern cars, for cheaper than like 20,000, or thereabouts.

You know while I do empathize with being asked to care about something and being annoyed at that, it's also annoying to be inundated with takes from people on complicated subjects, who aren't willing to put in some hours worth of work. Nobody's going to be willing to personally walk you through the subject matter and do all of the intellectual labor for you specifically, that's an unreasonable request of them, and frankly, less efficient than just reading.

Seriously, you have to be more concise than that. We didn’t purchase one of your novels to read over an afternoon, we’re browsing a comments section of an online form.

"We" who, bro? If you're not reading the post, don't read the post, maybe it wasn't meant for you, if you don't wanna read it, I dunno. But also, in the words of blaise pascal: if I had more time, I would've written a shorter letter. I'm not gonna waste like an extra hour, on top of the thirty minutes I already spent, to try to compress my thoughts as much as possible. If people are interested, they can read it, if they're not, then they can go read some other dude's comments.

I've kind of been of the opinion for a while that there are maybe a couple different ideas of "free speech". If you have total "free speech", right, everyone is allowed to talk and say whatever they want, much like the public square yadda yadda. You won't get nazis, you'll get spam, something which is obviously bad to anyone with half a brain (increasingly a smaller and smaller amount of the population). Spam is "free speech", technically, as, someone is making the most of their ability to scream at the top of their lungs, maximum volume, they're taking up all of the airwaves as much as is possible, and since these are usually the people with the most resources, it generally falls into the same kind of capitalist maximum usage of a resource in the most efficient way possible, with the minor caveat that nobody sane ever wanted that resource to be used in that way. Everyone needed a little bit of inefficiency in order to grease the wheels of conversation.

Of course, over time, we realize spam becomes less effective than subtly prodding at the collective consciousness, and running a twitter account with snarky remarks. We basically just have to understand here that it's still spam, it's just that the distinction has been moved from maximum volume, to bad faith. Which, is something that isn't necessarily the role of a corporation, just like spam doesn't necessarily have to be a corporation. Spam can also be people that are just scammers. Instead of selling products, these sorts of spammers and scammers try to win you over, drive the discourse in a different direction, engage in a bad faith manner. It fills the same role as spam being the maximum volume in the amphitheater, drowning out any other communications, but this is more insidious, harder to catch, and doesn't necessarily come from a place of malice or like, actual bad faith. If you were an alien listening to the airwaves, you might just hear something resembling a regular discussion, with the distinction that maybe you'd be getting a larger percentage of people getting mad and storming off as they talk to what are basically ideological zombies, or maybe robots.

I can get a bad faith discussion out of taking two people that are temporarily mad, or passionate, invested, about the same thing in different ways, and then controlling the debate in a certain kind of way, say, over a text medium where neither side can communicate effectively. And those are people that should've been able to relate over a shared passion, ideally. I can get a bad faith discussion out of two people that do not speak the same language, out of two people that can communicate just well enough that what's being said sounds sensible, but doesn't actually translate to either side. And of course, I can get a bad faith discussion out of just simple trolling. I mean, that's what trolling is, at a basic level, just taking a devil's advocate nonsense stance super seriously, until other people also do that, basically on the premise that you're someone to talk to. We sort of approach an event horizon with communication, where the closer two people are to actual communication, the more potential for frustration and misunderstanding there is, sort of like the hedgehog's dilemma. So of course you get bad actors who lean into that, and who propagate that behavior and their own sorts of separate language and thought terminating cliches, in order to basically be spam, without being spam. They create bad faith conversations.

And then, of course, I kind of fear the role that AI might take in the coming years, with all of this. Especially if analog computing hardware starts taking off again and people have easy access to building their own actually sensible chatbots resembling some mid-level internet discourse, instead of stuff that resembles what are really smart toddler might write. Then we're gonna see this all play out all over again, with the spam, except in a way that's much harder to detect, and in a way where you don't have to recruit human labor to do any of it. Dead internet theory, but real, basically. I dunno of a real way to counteract any of this, en masse.

I think the biggest thing is that people, generally, just have to put more thought into why specifically they want to leave a comment. Who are you doing this for? It can't really be for the person on the other side of the screen, you know, because the miscommunication is going to be inevitable given enough time, there's nothing you can do to counteract it. I think, inevitably, we all must realize, that the only reason to post online is, because you wanted to.

And so we all become trolls, in a way. But then, as is the ancient wisdom of the trolls, it becomes boring to just inhabit a shallow perspective, to spout nonsense. It's like playing a game with all the cheats enabled. It's fun for a while, probably too long actually, if you're insecure and have a chip on your shoulder, but it's not fulfilling long term. You can get plenty of people to do this regularly, clock in and clock out, be passionless, play the game with cheats for 3-4 hours with no real investment and then walk away. But if you're serious, you have to disable the cheats, to start inhabiting perspectives with real depth, you have to start inhabiting worldviews that aren't your own, but are still fully internally consistent. Ones that just stem from maybe other starting values. Or maybe they are all the same perspective, just given different easily malleable information landscapes. And if that's the case, then you're not really trolling anymore. You're just doing the socrates shit, where socrates invents a fake guy to challenge himself and others. Was that socrates? I dunno, who gives a fuck.

Tl;dr We are/all must become trolls! Memes are the DNA of the soul!

I suppose it'd probably be pretty hard to sell people on lies being good, on the basis of lies being good ground for refutation of those lies, huh?

But then I dunno, I'd take like 30 comments of people all disagreeing with some premise in some similar way, compared to like, a 10 comment long reference getting 30 gorillion upvotes, because everyone has to be god's gift to comedy.