I was agreeing with you that there are too many tankies and Putin fanboys around here, making it sometimes annoying even if you don't belong to the idiot brigade of right wing Americans.
I think joining an instance that's defederated from Hexbear and Lemmygrad could be a good starting point for an enjoyable experience here. You don't even need to hold right wing opinions, being an anti-authoritarian leftist is enough.
On the contrary. Many charities benefit from volunteer work hours that simply would not be possible on a normal government contract. The efficiency of some charities simply cannot be matched by State institutions, as people don't want to volunteer working for the state.
Some volunteer positions could possibly be replaced with well-paying jobs to lower unemployment rates at the benefit of the economy, but people also get a sense of purpose from volunteering. The charitable economy ran by volunteering and donations is an incredible asset for any society, no matter how great the social security net is. And in my experience, a better security net is often correlated with more charity.
That's not to say shitty charities don't exist. But good luck financing all the activities of the Red Cross through a state budget, paying everyone for their work.
Yes, I think I got your point - the soup kitchen should be financed by taxes rather than volunteer contributions by charitable souls. And I of course completely agree.
Even then, there might be room for a charity providing a social space for those with fewer means or who find themselves in a rough spot in life. I think no matter how well the state is doing in guaranteeing for people's needs, there'll be some room for civil society to make a contribution; if nothing else because the sense of purpose it can give the helpers is in its own right a goal worth pursuing.
I read @bustrpoindextr as not criticizing the charities directly, but rather reflect that they represent a systematic failure of government structures. We shouldn't need homeless shelters or soup kitchens - there shouldn't be homelessness or hunger. Taxation and sensible public spending should render charity unnecessary.
Which is a nice thought - I wouldn't judge people for giving their money to political interest organizations promoting solidarity rather than directly to charities.
It's a fine balance between patching the flaws of the system and trying to replace it all together. In some extreme cases charity might make the system just bearable enough that it's not overthrown, which might occasionally do more harm than good in the long run.
I'm not sure this is a valid critique of Kant - he invites us to step back and consider how we would address the problems more rationally and in ways that could be universal rules, rather than merely as an emotional response. We might very well conclude from this reflection that we should organize politically and deal with systematic injustice rather than donating to the local soup kitchen.
Personally I think there's room for both - in an ideal world the public should guarantee a baseline, but there might still be room for charities. The soup kitchen might not only help the people it serves food to - it might also give a sense of purpose to those volunteering for it.
I like Kant's take on this. He argued (roughly, by memory) that giving to people begging on the street directly was a selfish act, as it's satisfying our own need to feel better about ourselves more than the needs of the homeless population, and would lead to an unfair distribution giving more money to those who are talented at evoking empathy rather than those that might need it the most. He argued that the unselfish thing to do would be to donate to the cause indirectly, responding not to the emotional response in the moment but to a rational consideration of the needs of the homeless population.
I think he has a point. That said, there's nothing wrong with being selfish every now and then, especially not if your selfishness gives someone a warm meal. And empathy is a healthy human reaction.
Your parents seem to have failed to grasp the challenges facing the homeless population. A better take would be "don't give that guy money, start donating regularly to a local charity instead and help make sure that help is given to all those who need it".
By what standards do you rank us? Half of us are stupider than average. We're all of very limited intelligence - the best we can do is to team together to function as one gigantic brain of humanity, drawing from the strongest qualities of all of us. That way the world can be brought forward by brilliant scientists who are completely stupid in their own way, and who would never survive a week on their own.
Politics are tricky, but I think it's more fruitful to think of people as brainwashed than stupid. The amount of propaganda we're subject to these days is unprecedented.
As for general stupidity, be charitable; judge people by what they're best at. Most people have one thing or another they are great at, and our differences is what makes humanity occasionally great.
Lemmyverse doesn't really make sense, as it would all be visible from Kbin instances (unless they are all defederated).
What would make sense is a term for the "microblogverse", referring to all the posts from Mastodon/Miskey/Kbin/etc. This makes up the majority of the Fediverse, but it's mostly invisible to Lemmy users.
More theoretically, it's the part of the Fediverse that deals with threads rather than posts: You share some sort of content (text, images, a video, a link) along with a title, and people comment on it. The most common content type in the Fedverse is posts/microblogs, which it what Mastodon operates with. These posts are generally not visible from Lemmy, meaning that the majority of the Fediverse is invisible from Lemmy; what you see from there is only the "threadiverse" part. Kbin seeks to bridge the two.
You can view threads in Mastodon, but they appear only as the text of the title along with a link to the rest of the content. People can of course comment as normal.
Bitter coffee is also cheaper for a reason, as you can use worse beans and burn them. These beans need to be used as well, so it's a good thing people like it bitter.
When it gets weird is when people pay for expensive bitter coffee.
And discoverability, it still has ways to go on the social networking integration. I still don't know how to go from watching a peertube video on a peertube instance to liking/boosting it on another fediverse service, even if I wanted to.
That said, I have been following Peertube for a couple of years, and the progress has been incredible. It makes sense to create a solid foundation for video playback first, and a lot of people seem to not understand the extent of the innovation Peertube has made in that regard. Social media tools obviously come second after providing a solid service, and I have no idea it will develop in great ways in the coming years. :)
I guess people tend to look to astronomers for information about space, while the Fermi paradox probably borders more on philosophy than on astronomy. And in a lot of people minds philosophers are not real scientists, unlike astronomers.
sab @ sab @kbin.social Posts 1Comments 683Joined 2 yr. ago
Ah, yeah, sorry - that was badly phrased. I shouldn't have included Kbin on that list. I'm on Kbin myself, just worded myself poorly. :)