kromem @ kromem @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

Even if there's a working class revolution, things are still completely fucked.

The biggest issue isn't who is in charge, it's the fact that humans are fundamentally incapable of cooperating across large groups.

We couldn't even get the population to wear masks during a global pandemic killing so many people that hospitals needed to bring in refrigerator trucks to store the bodies.

But those same salt of the earth workers are going to negotiate climate controls with China?

Yeah, right.

In general I love the idea of the US moving more and more towards only supplying defensive munitions to countries (such as the long list of really fucked up countries we deal arms to that would surprise most people).

We could always take special action to supply offensive arms in response to justified conflicts such as in Ukraine, but let's not let authoritarians build up a stockpile of offensive capabilities from US sweat during times of peace. That's a recipe for less peace.

But by all means we should let allies buy as much defensive capabilities as they desire.

Being an ally to the US should be more associated with the benefits of protection from bullies than capacity to bully.

(And most important IMO is that we don't allow selling tech officially or privately by US corporations to enable authoritarians to abuse their own citizens. Something we very much do and I really wish we didn't.)

One of the more interesting aspects of history is the progression from the notion of a very limited and inaccessible resurrection of a body to the idea of a very accessible resurrection of the spirit/mind.

The latter is IMO probably best embodied (pun intended) in one of the early Christian apocrypha from a group that was known for rejecting the canonical focus on a physical resurrection of a body:

Whoever drinks from my mouth will become like me; I myself shall become that person, and the hidden things will be revealed to him.

• Gospel of Thomas saying 108

It's such a wild march of progress from kings trying to preserve their bodies to a tradition rejecting the Eucharist of consumption of a body in favor of a Eucharistic consumption of words and ideas to resurrect the essence of the individual.

And looking back from an age where we are literally seeing patents granted to trillion dollar companies around resurrecting the dead digitally, the "resurrection of words and ideas" crowd was more on to a practical tract of thinking than the "resurrect my goop" crowd.

In fact, the Egyptians when embalming themselves discarded their brains thinking it was garbage filling of the skull. Not exactly the best strategy in hindsight.

I wish the high seas had better quality. So much isn't available in 4k at least in the waters I've checked out.

Yeah.

You literally have a story in the Bible where a dude gets what appears in the text to be a matrilineal birthright stolen from him by the guy named 'Israel.'

Basically as time went on there's this aggressive rewriting of earlier periods of the history. It's hard to identify exactly when this happens (the Bible suggests it's earlier on, but the reforms are anachronistic given discovered communications with Jerusalem and a Greek historian in antiquity claimed the history of the Jews had recently been edited by Persian and Macedonian rulers).

But much like how Greek stories made pretty much everyone important Greek, the Israelite and Judean version of their history made everyone important Israelite or Judean and had the stories take place locally where they definitely didn't happen.

After the 10th century BCE the Biblical history starts to check out more and more, but before that it's not at all true for the people and places claimed. But it seems to be in line in parts with attested history of different people who were settled in the area between the 12th and 10th centuries BCE.

It's more the opposite.

That the mythologized history in the Bible does check out to a surprising degree for a LBA/Iron Age tribal ancestral origin of many Jews alive today.

The problem is it's not for the Israelites and Judah, and that's what's going to be the very controversial part.

Can't believe this shit-hole country was an actual threat ever.

We have representatives of the US political party leading for President right now echoing Kremlin propaganda on the floor of Congress and their candidate is cheered on and welcomed for saying he'll be a dictator who will undermine Western diplomatic relationships opposing Russia and would even encourage Putin to invade those countries, all while state level party representatives are literally saying that 'democracy' is a bad word that they oppose.

How the fuck is Russia not an "actual threat?"

There's more to modern warfare than nukes, missiles, and tanks. And by the end of November Putin stands a very good chance of having won the kind of megalomaniacal victory that Stalin or Hitler couldn't have possibly dreamed of.

Many, but not all.

It only takes a few percent of a political party to reject a candidate to tip the election one way or another.

Your experience of that is pretty much the key reason I've not bothered to explain this outside of a very limited specialist community I owed a lot to as I was putting it together.

I keep seeing new finds that would be really interesting to discuss, and I kind of hate seeing users confused about their own ancestral history while sitting knowing the answers, but I'll be damned if I'm going to be the one putting controversial answers out there in a more public way.

People are fucking nuts and it seems each day care less and less about actual truth and facts and more about tribalism and confirmation bias to the point of irrationality.

Over the next few years a lot of stuff will be identified by AIs capable of better correlation of data points than researchers to date, and then it can be the AI that gets to be the object of crazy people's ire and not actual humans that were just nerding out over research and data.

Most of the F2P games.

It's clear to me reading this that if people really want to further humanitarian concerns over the Palestinian civilians they should avoid the literal tribalism around the topic and the false dichotomy of 'sides.'

It would be a lot harder to criticize a protest branded as a "pro-civilian" protest that simultaneously called out the human rights abuses on the Palestinian people and the Israeli hostages.

That asked the university to divest from any investments funding either Hamas or Likud as long as either were carrying out war crimes against civilians. Yes, in one of those two cases it's a moot request, but by requesting both it furthers the comparison and similarities between the two and their extremist methods.

It would also give no cover to extremist voices calling for the destruction or harm of civilians on the "other side" of the conflict (as sampled in the article). It's no safe space for pro-Palestinian voices calling for the killing of Israeli citizens nor for pro-Israel voices calling for (or turning a blind eye to) the bombing of the Palestinian civilians. True antisemites or Islamophobes would have no safe harbor there.

It takes the conversation from being about two opposing political sides to the 'sides' of "protect civilians" or "kill civilians" which is a position that's incredibly hard to justify being on the other side of no matter one's political beliefs.

And as has been discussed in various literature about the importance of reconciliation, it creates the space for victims of violence against civilians and secondary trauma in this conflict to feel their trauma can be heard without facing minimization to justify the trauma of the other political side - something that's been happening far too much on both of the current sides of this discussion.

Disavowing violence against civilians should not be a political statement, and it being packaged as such is clearly a huge factor in how that message is being subverted and suppressed. Even the way Finkelstein straight up gave a messaging shift that would have improved the success of the core message he's been supporting for years before this and then immediately had someone lead a chant of the very message he pointed out as undermining the narrative was ridiculous. Polarizing messaging might find solace in either a "pro-Palestinian" or "pro-Israel" protest, but wouldn't be a good fit for a "pro-civilian" protest.

It would also be nearly impossible to brand a counter-protest to. What the hell do you call yourself if you are protesting against "pro-civilians"? The "pro-authoritarian" protest?

As long as the call for humanitarianism is wrapped up and divided into political sides and literal ethnic tribalism I have a feeling that the call is going to continue to get ignored and suppressed while local tribalistic tensions and conflict becomes more and more center stage instead. It might be smart to rebrand the messaging where the focus on humanitarianism is center stage and the only 'tribe' being championed is 'human.'

Literally just after talking about how people are spouting confident misinformation on another thread I see this one.

Twitter: Twitter retains minimal EXIF data, primarily focusing on technical details, such as the camera model. GPS data is generally stripped.

• Source

Yes, this is a privacy thing, we strip the EXIF data. As long as you're not also adding location to your Tweet (which is optional) then there's no location data associated with the Tweet or the media.

• Source (9 years ago)

People replying to a Twitter thread with photos are automatically having the location data stripped.

God, I can't wait for LLMs to automate calling out well intentioned total BS in every single comment on social media eventually. It's increasing at a worrying pace.

The problem with how you are describing it is that it's not that the physical mechanics of measurement are necessarily causing collapse as if you end up erasing the persistent information about the measurement it reverses the collapse, such as if you add a polarizer to the other slit as well or add a polarizer downstream that untags the initial measurement.

So in your example, if you simultaneously shoot a bunch of BBs at empty space next to the pile of glass cards where they could have been, or discard the BBs which reflected measuring the cards in the first place, suddenly the pile of glass cards reassemble themselves.

Attempts to try and dismiss the 'weirdness' of the measurement problem or QM behavior IMO ultimately do the reader more of a disservice than a service.

Really? They cancelled local primaries? That's news to me.

Or do you just mean that they didn't have a significant primary for a sitting party candidate for President, just like pretty much every candidate in history in that same position for any party?

I too would have liked a serious primary for this year, but that would have been a significant exception, not the rule.

The only way it really would have happened is if Biden decided not to run at all.

By voting in primaries.

There's more than just the president. Local elections and specifically primaries are what reshape the representative body.

Looking for something to do?

You can throw the first stone for only $9.99.

No, you end up drinking the Kool aid at gunpoint after turning your life over to a narcissistic cult leader.

What you may not know is that this paper, along with the National Enquirer, were the result of the efforts of Gene Pope.

A guy whose job immediately before buying up and transforming the Enquirer was in the CIA's psychological warfare division.

This was around the time the CIA was upset with national coverage of UFOs. Suddenly stories about them were appearing alongside "Elvis lives" or Bat Boy, and no reputable news would touch UFO stories with a 10' pole.

There's always people like this in various industries.

What they are more than anything is self-promoters under the guise of ideological groupthink.

They say things that their audience and network want to hear with a hyperbole veneer.

I remember one of these types in my industry who drove me crazy. He was clearly completely full of shit, but the majority of my audience didn't know enough to know he was full of shit, and was too well connected to out as being full of shit without blowback.

The good news is that they have such terrible ideas that they are chronically failures even if they personally fail upwards to the frustration of every critical thinking individual around them.