mindbleach @ mindbleach @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

"It beats smoking" is a low fucking bar... that I already mentioned.

What conversation do you think you're having?

How bluntly does someone have to say 'this is good compared to smoking, but caused harm for non-smokers' before y'all stop projecting whatever shallow kneejerk absolute suits your fancy?

'Vaping is negative except compared to smoking.'

'Oh yeah well what about compared to smoking?!'

... ibid.

'Injustice is fine, actually. I am very smart.'

K bye.

Cigarettes are sufficiently regulated that the industry was going to die. No outright ban was necessary.

That is no longer the case, directly thanks to this shit. Like if Philip Morris started selling nicotine patches as a brand new drug.

"The science is clear" only means, vaping beats smoking. A fact absolutely no-one questions. But vaping is worse than not vaping. The lesser-evil argument only works when there's no third option. Like "neither."

Serving the same purpose as smoking, while being less dangerous, is great... compared to smoking.

But the purpose of smoking fucking blows.

Addiction has societal impact. Reality exists outside the individual.

Ape in a zoo beats his chest until the visitors walk away. That'll show 'em.

You're why enforced civility is a fucking nightmare to deal with.

'This doesn't affect you!' It does. 'Well make it don't.'

The real Doom 3.

I know id got on the anthology-naming thing after Quake II, but... FEAR was right there. Pick another monosyllabic name for your id-formula FPS and half the criticism would vanish.

He's causing harm.

Doing it as a joke isn't better.

Or true.

People are welcome to stop acting like tribal cultists whenever they want to. Every moment is the right moment.

"It beats smoking" is a low fucking bar.

The science is that putting shit in your lungs is not great. There's no upside for non-smokers. It's a lark. The only truly positive side is that it's objectively better than inhaling smoke, and that only matters if it's a tobacco alternative - and contains nicotine. Which let this low-impact delivery mechanism create new addicts.

Two decades in either direction and the calculus would be trivial. 1990, the way people smoked back then? We'd solve the epidemic overnight. Trade it for vaping in a heartbeat. 2030, the way statistics were headed? Pointless and inexcusable. A brief fad that would linger in countries with hookah culture.

Instead, the worst-case scenario happened immediately. The same murderous liars made money hooking a new generation with a fairly unsafe and hideously addictive chemical. Like they'd previously done by adding filters, and then menthol, and then cloves.

A man who reached sixty-seven, wealthy and loved, and put a gun in his mouth while at the kitchen table.

If it sounded cool to do, I do it anyway, and keep it to myself. Never have to clean that shit up. Unfinished? Who gives a fuck, I did it, job sorted.

If it sounded like it needed to exist... thank god, someone else did it for me! Not my problem. git clone, next idea.

"Both sides," says one side.

I absolutely stole that from somewhere else. It had a similarly revelatory effect and has been wedged in my brain ever since. (Oh hey, I made a note of who to blame: r4b1d0tt3r, MD.)

Not to speak ill of the dead, but... there's every chance the reasonable bastards you knew would update their bullshit and be even worse. I think your professor did you a disservice in exactly the way I'm sore about. Fascists are conservative. Fascists are hyper-conservative. That never means they're extra-vigilant against change. They openly demand transformative destruction of existing society, so they can reinvent something that's always been around. If that sounds contradictory it's a side effect of how it's total fucking nonsense. They're just saying words. It's not a rational worldview. It's the innate tribalism of the human animal, cranked to eleven via modern rhetorical gimmicks.

"Branding" is the only place conservatism makes any goddamn sense, because it's a story they tell. They're lying. They're just saying words. When you were in college their reputation was bullshit they made up about times before you were born, and when you were born their reputation was bullshit they made up about when your parents were young. Right now they're surely selling bullshit about twenty-odd years ago. I'm sorry to say I haven't paid much attention on account of US politics being such a dumpster fire that your worst scandals seem quaintly desirable. We've got people wistfully apologizing for George W Bush's rainbow of doom and torture prisons, or the Gingrich-era witch hunts against against homosexuals and liberal activism, or the goddamn AIDS crisis under Reagan. Even here, you're hand-waving that absolute scumbag Richard Nixon did one good thing under intense duress because he expected it to flounder. This is a con job that has been pulled on you. And us. On the world, really, at scale and continuously, to this day.

The traditional branding of conservatism is "we did everything good, but now we're angry."

That myth of eternal innocence as justification for outright violence is the only consistent story of this tribalist mode. It is pure ingroup-versus-outgroup storytelling. Good things in the past? Us us us, fuck them. Bad things now? Well they must have stolen the good things from us. (Nevermind who was in charge!)

When you find yourself saying 'by this definition of conservative, leftists are conservatives,' that is a shit definition. My apologies to your professor.

He's only being incompetent for attention, says someone who thinks they're defending him.

Nobody says shit like "communists want community" or "egalitarians love eagles." But that's constantly happening for conservatism. People will bend over backwards making up what reeeeal conservatives must surely want... in complete denial of what the visible super-duper-majority of self-identified conservatives actually say and do.

Forty-four billion dollars to not have the employees, offices, servers, code, reputation, vetting, or brand.

And his hot new name for this smoldering ruin is... X.

Absolute fucking child.

Digital software delivery is perfectly fine.

DRM is intolerable.