adderaline @ ondoyant @beehaw.org

recovering hermit, queer and anarchist of some variety, trying to be a good

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2 yr. ago

what is too far? what places? i hear this point alot, but do you have examples? real schools that are really going "too far" in some specific sense? where are they? what are they teaching?

bullshit jobs are a compelling concept, but not one i really find convincing. we can say paper pushing isn't a real job or whatever, but large organizations do require staff to manage the complexity of their infrastructure. if those papers don't get pushed, nobody gets paid and nobody doing the non-bullshit jobs know where to go or what to do. not to say that advertising isn't on its own of dubious social value, but profit-seeking corporations wouldn't invest in paying those folks if they didn't make them money or otherwise facilitate the making of money.

i don't really know many on the left who would find the idea of a modern republican less frightening than center-right Democrats, and any awareness of what republican state legislators are currently doing in red states should disabuse people of that notion. whatever disappointments suffered under our current gov are not a match for what was happening under the other guy by any measure, and if you're queer it really should not even be a question as to who is more frightening.

the comment about getting bullied by the GOP and Fox doesn't really make sense to me either. Fox isn't doing great right now, state GOP is hemorrhaging money, and Trump's been indicted several times, with more coming down soon. i'm nowhere near happy with Biden, and would prefer somebody far more progressive, but your perspective just doesn't seem super well informed to me. i'm not sure where you're getting your info.

i'd also like to know what movements have been targeted/destroyed. the things i can think of are the railroad strike, which didn't turn out as bad as people think, and maybe what's going on with Stop Cop City? there are lots of state and city Democrats fucking with that shit, but its a pretty republican push overall, and i don't think the federal government is involved yet.

engineering types do seem to fall off the conservatism cliff more frequently than other science-adjacent professions. so do surgeons, for some reason? at least from what i've observed. i think something about high performance, high pay jobs that require specialized education can make a person more vulnerable to brain worms.

i like the pun, good job.

i really don't like this attitude, and i see this it pop up around here fairly frequently. its kind of elitist? classist? i'll try to articulate myself here, though its not like... directly aimed at you, so try not to take it personally.

computer skills are just like being illiterate, but not in the way you're presenting. if somebody grows up to adulthood and they are illiterate, that isn't some sort of personal failing, its an indication that the people responsible for this person's care neglected their obligation to properly educate their child, or did not have the resources to provide such an education, because nearly everybody can become literate if somebody teaches them. the reality is that every single person on earth comes into this world without the ability to read, write, use computers, or do fucking anything at all, and its the responsibility of the people who do know these things to be open and kind and helpful so that they can learn. did you have the option to take computer skills classes in school? maybe? in a lot of places, no. did you come into technology effortlessly good at everything? probably not. lots of people aren't given the opportunity to hone these skills, or aren't given motivation to pursue them for themselves.

it's a problem in tech spaces. there is this subset of tech dudes who got in early and have made this weird, toxic culture of competition and exclusion that makes pursuing these skills actively difficult for newcomers. no. open source tech is for everybody. computer skills are for everybody. respond kindly and with understanding to those who do not already know these things, please. as much as it seems obvious or natural, it really really isn't. people need to be taught this stuff most of the time. i don't mean to be hostile, its just... the comparison to being illiterate is absurd to me, even if it was just a joke. when have you ever met a person who's illiterate who hasn't been systematically let down by their educators??? have you ever met somebody who's illiterate? they aren't that way because they're stupid, or don't want to learn, its usually something that happens to people who have been profoundly neglected by the systems supposed to protect them, who are poor, disabled, or otherwise marginalized. the stigmatization of illiteracy is cruel to people who have already been deeply wronged, denied full access to language and our vast inheritance of knowledge by systems and people which find it inconvenient to teach them.

i sorta agree with you, it's a bummer that people don't have these skills, that so many don't have a strong grasp of how the machines that are so important to their lives even work. but that isn't their fault, it isn't their responsibility, and our response should be kind and accommodating. it should be a call to improve public education and provide resources to expand access to this knowledge, to build open source and demystify what has been mystified. that's part of why there are so many free educational resources for coding online. because this is a field of study that is not being taught to students by default, as it rightly should be.

i don't mean to go off on you specifically. lots of people don't think very deeply about this, you haven't committed a social justice crime or anything. but this is not a "people are dumb" problem. its an injustice. its a failure that we should do everything in our power to correct.

the lizard thing is unfortunately just antisemitism, and older than zucc himself. the whole alien lizard people running the world bit comes from David Icke, who is very much a fascist, and was inspired directly by old school Nazi conspiracy theory texts like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

IBEW statement. this is one of the unions involved, and their official statement on the matter. pretty positive.

just a heads up, you should look into that rail thing again. the unions ended up getting alot of what they wanted because Biden's admin did actually follow through with negotiations. definitely not cool, but also not the unambiguous support of corporations you seem to have interpreted it as. IBEW statement. there are people who are still unhappy, because capitalism sucks and they should be unhappy, but lots of railworkers got significantly improved working conditions out of it.

fuck man. you gotta be in a pretty good spot not being able to tell the difference. there are people who live and die on the outcomes of these politics. if you really think it isn't enough, get involved in a political project, join a mutual aid program, whatever you think is important, but genuinely even if it barely matters at all (and to be clear, it actually does matter a whole fucking lot, or republicans wouldn't be pouring billions of oil dollars into mobilizing their base) its literally just a single day at most of effort. if you can't do that, you genuinely don't have any right to complain about conservative outcomes.

stop with the prophecy, and stop with the doomer shit. sure, lets say voting biden is "voting for team color". tell me, would the other team be better? fuck no, we'd be getting even more fucked than we already are. there would be a federal abortion ban. the federal government would be pursuing an actively genocidal agenda towards queer people across the country. millions of real human lives would be negatively affected. there would be less than no action on climate change, instead of the "meager" biggest investment in renewables in US history.

it just makes me so mad. if the red team wins, MORE PEOPLE WILL DIE. is that not meaningful? it is to me. it should be to you. vote blue. it isn't enough, but not everybody has the privilege of ideological purity. we have to survive in order to thrive.

we can whine about how we didn't do the right thing before now all we want, but we live in the world of today, and the solution, or at least part of it, must be to keep the actual fascists from doing actual fascism. we have to do more, electoral politics isn't gonna save us, but genuinely it makes me really mad when people get all doomer about this shit. most people used to be serfs. a hundred years ago children were working in coal mines. progress can be made. progress against capitalists can be made. and if voting didn't matter businesses wouldn't be pouring money into politics, republicans wouldn't be trying their best to stop people from turning up.

you have a heterodox perspective here. most people don't perceive vegans and vegetarians as different in some foundational way, and people who self describe as vegans aren't necessarily in alignment with your perspective. i certainly am not. whatever certainty you seem to have about the distinction between veganism and vegetarianism is not as obvious to other people as you seem to think.

if you truly are having trouble understanding why veganism and vegetarianism would be grouped together, you are likely in an information silo, because the links between the two are well described on wikipedia, and the philosophical underpinnings of the movements (because vegetarianism is not just a diet, its an ancient and significant cultural practice) are deeply interlinked.

genuinely would recommend assessing where it is you are getting your attitudes from. to those not invested in the minutia of differences between philosophical movements with similar goals, you arguing to divide along these lines comes off as dogmatic behavior.

i mean i get the impulse, but if we were to blindly trust any sort of knowledge system, science is the one to trust, right? like, any downsides of trusting scientific consensus are necessarily larger when trusting information sources that aren't scientific, and if you follow through with trusting science blindly, you might ignorantly begin to believe that empirical testing and intellectual honesty is necessary for determining the truth of your beliefs!

i don't want to invalidate your experience, but harm reduction research suggests this is a flawed perspective. somebody should be getting drugs for people who need them. quitting some drugs is difficult, if you do it wrong you can die, and if people can get drugs without doing dangerous shit, they probably will. there are cogent arguments to suggest that giving people drugs when they ask for them, providing them with resources that make taking those drugs safer, and giving them a place to live might really make it easier for people to quit, because you are giving them stability they can't provide for themselves. certainly providing rehab resources freely is part of it, but if you remove the need to pay for drugs, alot of the incentive to do bad stuff to get drugs disappears.

it wouldn't hurt tho.

I'm just waiting until these models get completely unraveled by training on output. The more people use generative AI to make stuff online, the more useless the internet is as a data source.