daltotron @ daltotron @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

this website has defo been infiltrated by right-wing groups

I mean it was kind of inevitable on lemmy.world, right? An ostensibly centrist instance that kind of tries to brand itself as the "mainstream" socially acceptable lemmy instance. It was basically liberal from the start, you know? Appealing to users flooding in from the reddit exodus. The more explicitly leftist influenced things are going to act more, you know, liberal with the banning out of self-preservation, and so are inevitably going to kind of like, paradoxically, cordon themselves off into little, I mean, basically echo chambers, so they're not going to appeal to a kind of broader audience as much.

It's all kind of inevitable from the structure of the site, I think.

You know this kinda makes me think that it would've been funnier if they connected two cities that hate each other more than just like, dublin and new york, which I can't really think of as ever having had beef. Maybe NYC and chicago, or something. You can't really put something like this in texas or LA because nobody fuckin walks anywhere, unless maybe you put it in like long beach or like some random part of Austin or something. Seattle? Does Seattle have beef with anywhere? On the other side, could we connect Dublin with like, London or something? Maybe some city in northern Ireland?

Are new yorkers really that high strung about it? I would think if anything they'd get more mad about like, insults to hot dog carts or something, but that might strike me more as a philly or chicago kind of thing, come to think of it. Maybe bagels? I feel like the average new york bagel is probably a better kind of undersung food hero, compared to the average overpriced to shit new york slice.

Well are we just equalizing based on boob number, or are we also equalizing based on average boob size? Because some men also have boobs due to hormonal imbalance, and that's even more if we decide to count like, fat induced moobs for whatever reason. The hormonal imbalances at least would probably bring the average back in favor of slightly more than one boob. If we've equalized it to boob size then we'd probably all have like small A cups or something.

That doesn't really seem very equivalent. The closest equivalence I can think of is either the terrorism of the founding fathers, which is too far back to really strike the same chord, or maybe like, american drone strikes or something. Or, maybe if I was feeling particularly cheeky, I might compare it to the violence enacted by the civil rights movement, since that was also a domestic american liberation movement maybe comparable to the IRA, but, I dunno. not really any american style equivalence there.

asimptote

? what does this mean

I’d churn my own butter

vile, never heard it said this way before, I'm stealing this for personal use

Yeah see the problem with the first two examples you came up with is that I can count a lot of people I've interacted with that believe that shit. Maybe I need to get new friend groups, but it's really hard to avoid poe's law online, because you can find basically anyone who will believe any random shit you come up with, if you try hard enough. There aren't any strawmen online anymore, there's just viewpoints. Weaponized apathy is pretty good though I like that one. Going to a protest and just like bringing a grill and being like "I just want to grill for god's sake". You've arrived at the function to grill but also to be apathetic in public where people will see your apathy, very nice, very absurd.

Ooh, new strat I just remembered exists that might solve this issue a little bit, self-contradictory satire. It gets everyone really mad, but also it's impossible to conceptualize of what's actually being said without putting in a little bit of thought to actually sus out what's happening there. Being a pro-life fundamentalist christian that thinks of life as happening at conception, but also being early term pro-abortion and pro stem cell research, pro-test tube babies, pro-genetic modification. God creates the man at conception, and we are trying to act more in the image of god, it's only right to toy with life in the same way, maybe. I dunno, just spitballing, but maybe something like that could work as a satire. A satire of nothing, a satire of someone that doesn't exist, I guess. A satire of everyone, total hypothetical.

damn, these kindsa guys are really gonna bring about the human-prion shit huh

"free" means nothing though, it's just a substitute for other values. It's not just free as in "if it doesn't harm me, you're allowed to do it". As another commenter pointed out, one person, they would espouse the freedom to have and own and use guns for self-defense, right? I could just as easily make the argument that guns, collectively, when this right is enabled, impinge on my freedom not to live in a gun-free, potentially less violent, or at least less lethal, society. The freedom provided by publically subsidized or collective single payer healthcare, vs the freedom to "not have to pay for everyone else's healthcare. If I just rely on freedom as a value, it indicates nothing. It's a sock puppet ideology. There's always another value there which is being substituted for it. Liberalism can't just equal freedom, or else it's just totally meaningless. While it does have a broad specific meaning as it refers to a specific school of thought, it's not totally meaningless as it otherwise would be.

Liberalism is a political and economic philosophy which espouses the merits of the free market as a collective decision making structure, which can allocate resources according to price signals. I.e. take resources in the economy and allocate them to where they best need to go, which is sort of what any idea of the economy has to do. It also generally espouses an idea of a naturally occurring meritocracy and rational actors, which the free market relies upon to be of real merit. At the extreme end you get shit like idiot anarcho-capitalism and the austrian school of economics, which is very resistant to government interventionism and kind of holds a religious adherence to free markets and their freedom from governance or regulation by governments. Guys like adam smith. Maybe in the middle you have more standard forms of liberalism, that still support free markets, but also support a pretty decent government and sort of see the two as being opposed to one another. Probably that would slot in a little more into neoliberalism, on the side of markets, and then classical liberalism leaning more towards government intervention. And then on the far end you get shit like nordic government and social democracy more broadly, which would try to engage in capitalism while still building out large support structures, as generally opposed to democratic socialism which seeks to basically eliminate conventional capitalism altogether. You also maybe get "market socialism" somewhere in there, inasmuch as a kind of inherently contradictory ideology like that can exist.

None of what I said really has any commentary on general social issues. You won't find it in there, in any of those mostly economic philosophies, you won't find positions on gay rights or trans rights, generally, civil rights more broadly, or drug use, or crime and punishment. There's not any position on civil rights more broadly which is specifically intrinsic to any of those philosophies. Nothing on "open-mindedness". The same could be said of communism, or really any economic philosophy outside of like, normal fascism, which everyone kind of has a hard time defining. Libs, mostly, but I won't elaborate on that one until you press me on it.

In any case, that's what liberalism as an economic philosophy all tends to mean, tends to refer to, that's the larger, broader category. As you might intuit, it's mostly just kind of, "capitalism", in it's many different forms. None of this is meaning-twisting, this is all just shit that's existing in the academic literature for a long while. I'm not a language prescriptivist, so I'm not going to say that it's wrongly used, when it's not strictly conforming to academic definitions, and I will freely admit that most of the reference I see to it in colloquial conversation is kind of just like, to mean "woke", you know, to refer more to socially progressive outlooks more broadly. But I think it's important to question kind of why that is, why it's seen as this thing that's only kind of half-invisible to the population, why it's completely divorced, colloquially, from any economic definition, and instead just refers to like, ahh, that guy, that guy's a lib, that guy thinks black people should have rights, what a lib cuck, kind of a thing.

Tracking the warping of language is a pretty important thing to do, because it tells you all about the intentionality with which it's used, the broader political strategy, the core philosophies of the people using it, it tells you where they've come from and what they're referring to. More specifically, these kinds of changes of meaning that take place within certain words, they serve to cordon off, or, serve as an evidence of the cordoning off, of certain populations from others. The word is transformed in such a way as to make communication between groups impossible, and is also transformed in such a way as to totally eliminate that to which it previously was in reference to.

I don't think using liberal to mean "socially progressive" is necessarily the wrong way to do things, but I do think that the academic definition, the academic reference, the idea there, it still has a lot of value. If one serves to obfuscate the other's shorthand, I would find that to be kind of a tragedy.

added, should I begin at the beginning or are there recommended episodes I should listen to first over others?

Ah, yeah, I see. I think if you're going for that, the satire has to be more well-calculated than most tends to be. It can't just be like, an extreme portrayal of opinions, because then you'll either Poe's law yourself into getting people that agree, or you'll offend perhaps a target audience that needs their mind changed. I think I have noticed that I have had more success trying to kind of like, find a gap there, and then turn it around. Shitting in the street is likely to get you arrested sort of thing, if done as protest, RIP modern diogenes. But filling a cup with your own spit and then drinking it, that's very weird, not something that anyone can really verbalize any logical opposition to, and is offensive. I don't have any like, good political illustrations of that kind of satire, but, I'd go with something along those lines, something that can very obviously point out a flaw.

One of those little steel k-cup filters. I don't get locked into their dumbass ecosystem and I can still make a good single person cup of shitass costco joe instead of a whole pot or doing a whole pour over maneuver.

yeah nobody remind em of the WMD fiasco

I mean something that satire gets pretty rightfully dogged for a lot of the time, as a schtick, is a lack of nuanced understanding of an issue. Like south park's manbearpig schtick, or maybe like, I dunno, borat. Idiocracy. Office space, maybe, dunno, haven't seen that one, don't know too much satire. Tropic thunder, I guess, right. None of these are really nuanced portrayals of what they're satirizing, because to do so is kind of antithetical to the genre.

yes, very true very true, your core point is true

Nothing good comes from a discourse when one relevant side is shushed every time they speak up. And this is the case.

I mean I think it's a pretty mutual like, set of actions that happens as a result of the initial framing of the conversation being like a stupid absurd obvious ragebait hypothetical more than like, a systematic failing in our society. Or, rather, I think the systematic failing of society is that these conversations are only allowed to come about, to blow up, out of those sorts of bad faith framings, rather than happening more naturally on even ground. I think that's the root cause, which I think affects both people groups, rather than it just being like a cultural failing that you might attribute to. I dunno, something else, something not as good as that.

I don't even think it has to be like, in person, necessarily, I just think it needs to be engaged with in good faith outside of like, the framing of the conversation as being spurned on by some sort of hypothetical, or being spurned on without like. Reportage between two people, without a relationship there pre-established. I've definitely had compelling conversations online, it's just that it happens so often to be kind of, in spite of the larger machine they took place inside of.

I mean the phenomenon of televangelists and televangelical megachurch pastors that spread their messages and propaganda through the same avenues as conventional media is a pretty like, well documented thing, I'd say. Tune into AM radio or cable TV and you can probably still peep some of them doing their thing. I don't think their point is necessarily invalid, but I also think there's more of like a happy medium between, watching TV all day and going outside and bumming around town as a latchkey kid and frying your brain on spice in the back of a much older guy's car, or like. Robbing a low rent low security corner store on the edge of town.

Replace sex with race and you see how bad the viewpoint is.

I agree with your general point but I don't think these things are really comparable or exchangeable in any way. Or at least, not in that kind of way of like, word search, replace, kind of thing. More complicated than that, for the fact that they exist together and not separately. The whole like, white women accusing black men of being rapists in order to get them lynched because they're racist, thing, that exists on the same continuum, as a phenomenon, as the like, classic stats of male on female SA. Even on a larger scale the like, using female sexuality and purity as a way to justify racism is a thing that exists on the same continuum. I dunno, I guess I'm just advocating for things to be more complicated than just like the word search replace shit, which I see quite a lot, and I think it misses the point a little bit. Still agree with your general point though.