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rwhitisissle

@rwhitisissle@lemmy.ml

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rwhitisissle ,

Democrats suffer from a condition that I've come to call "Democratic Realism," named after Capitalist Realism. No matter how much they get their shit kicked in. No matter how badly they do. No matter how little they accomplish. No matter how badly they look or do in debates. Democrats always believe, beyond a shred of doubt, that they'll win elections without trying. Not because of their own merits, but because they're just the only "real" choice; they simply can't fathom anyone willingly voting for their opponents.

Hillary barely campaigned in the "flyover states" that she needed to win because she couldn't be fucking bothered to actually try. It wasn't worth the effort to try and persuade people she thought of as her lessers. And the DNC just went "well, it's obviously her turn. She's been waiting for the chance at the presidency for 20 years now. We should go ahead and let her be president." Because that's the mentality. They don't have to "win" elections. They just pick a candidate and they get to win, because there is no "real" alternative. That Bush and Trump won don't indicate that, yeah, actually, you do have to fight for the people who are voting for you, otherwise they'll vote for the schmuck that appeals to their basest and most venal instincts. Those were just flukes...right? And you don't have to inspire confidence and admiration in others, because they should just recognize how smart and accomplished and inoffensive their candidates are, and that they're told to vote for them by people that are smarter than they are, so they should just shut up and do it.

It's a party driven less by any kind of ideological goals and more by a pervasive sense of smug, impotent, lazy egotism. And, yeah, they'll get a shitload of votes in the elections because the alternative always seems to be someone who is one goose-step shy of a literal Nazi. Biden will probably even win the popular vote. Y'know....just like Hillary did...

rwhitisissle , (edited )

The coalition of the ascendant concept is kind of insane when you remember for a moment that the popular vote is kinda worthless in winning elections. The electoral college is structured in such a way that conservative whites have a larger share of the electorate relative to their minority peers. It doesn't matter if you're a lock for California and New York (enclaves of coastal elites and minorities alike) if you lose the entirety of the South, Southwest, and Midwest, enclaves of...the opposite of those things, really. This 538 article on it has links to other discussions related to this and represents a fascinating look into the relationship between popular votes and electoral votes. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-a-difference-2-percentage-points-makes/

rwhitisissle ,

Fuck, the original Pacific Rim wasn't even good. Like, how you gonna set such a low bar and somehow slide under it with room to spare?

rwhitisissle ,

"This woman, who suffers from body dysphoria and constantly gets more and more plastic surgery (a behavior which harms no one but herself) is the same as this fictional serial killer who tortured hundreds of people to death."

But in all seriousness, I don't think it's nice to make fun of people's appearance.

rwhitisissle ,

First time?

rwhitisissle ,

Ah, yes, Drawn Together. The perfect show for people in the early oughts who thought South Park was both too clever and not nearly crude or mean-spirited enough. I've seen every episode at least twice.

rwhitisissle ,

Yes, we should ban all those, too. Or just enforce EU style privacy laws in America.

rwhitisissle ,

Controlled opposition.

rwhitisissle ,

It's "y'all" - as in a contraction of "you all."

As the Internet Gets Scarier, More Parents Keep Their Kids’ Photos Offline (getpocket.com)

Here's a non-paywalled link to an article published in the Washington Post a few days ago. It's great to see this kind of thing getting some mainstream attention. Young children have not made an informed decision about whether they want their photos posted online.

rwhitisissle ,

As the internet gets scarier

How the fuck is the internet getting scarier? This isn't the random gore and porn filled, go to a forum and immediately get targeted by a sex-predator, internet that I grew up with. The internet is a corporate walled garden of mega services that feed disinformation and bullshit to people, but your odds of getting genuinely victimized as a child are so much lower than they used to be.

rwhitisissle ,

The Mayflower brought the Pilgrims to America, not Columbus (which is also, for some reason, misspelled in the title of this post). I'm guessing OP didn't pay much attention to their history class this year in what I'm going to assume is middle-school.

rwhitisissle ,

pavement princesses

Insult seems vaguely misogynistic.

rwhitisissle ,

I mean, both are bad.

rwhitisissle ,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7X3Q-mTluM

rwhitisissle ,

This is the truth. People like to tout EVs as the end all, be all, "silver bullet" for the petrochemical industry. Bullshit. Your EV is riddled with oil-based products and asphalt contains a shitload of petrochemicals. EVs are better than gas burning cars in the same way getting stabbed with a knife is better than being shot. If you really want to help the environment by buying a car, buy a used car instead of a new one. Still, nothing really compares to just having a society where the average individual doesn't need a vehicle. I think if we had a more robust service economy structured around couriers who took care of shopping and delivery, and then had a genuinely decent public transportation system or taxi options, we'd do a lot to reduce emissions. But the car is itself a sign of affluence and personal freedom in America. Always has been; probably always will be. Ownership of one, especially an expensive one, confers a certain status, and that's a cultural problem, not an environmental or material one.

rwhitisissle ,

Collecting Magic: the Gathering cards works much the same way, except you at least have some tangible cardboard with a highly variable price instead of a digital token signifying you own the concept of an ugly piece of digital art at the end of a day.

rwhitisissle ,

If there's one thing I learned working in IT it's that devs actively half-ass their error messages, routinely misspell critical words you're gonna grep for in logs, and never even consider having someone in Product read over customer-facing error messages like this. All they see is a Jira ticket that says "include the following verbiage in the VPN rejection message" that was typed up by a mostly plastered PM one afternoon after they downed 3 margaritas at "lunch" at the taqueria next to their office. And then they just copy and paste that shit into whatever bullshit HTML template took the least effort to find.

rwhitisissle ,

Have you never heard of police dogs?

rwhitisissle ,

"State capitalism with Chinese characteristics"

rwhitisissle , (edited )

Everyone's saying that this works in 3 dimensional space, but this also works in 2 dimensional space such that each side could be at a minimum six feet. The resulting structure would be a rhombus and not a square, with the distance between two of the individuals being much greater than 6 feet, though, which the artist did not accurately represent.

rwhitisissle ,

I also wouldn't be surprised if even the automated processes that edit your comment to be gibberish even accomplishes that. Text is, in the software world, remarkably cheap to store, even at volume. It also compresses easily, is remarkably easy to tie to version control mechanisms, and with reddit's comment system can easily be structured as a part of an existing dialogue tree. They know people are pissed at them and are looking to nuke their comment history, so I wouldn't be surprised if they already have multiple cold storage backups of reddit's entire site comment history over the course of months or years. Right now, that data is the most valuable thing they have, their reputation as the "front page of the internet" be damned.

rwhitisissle ,

Mom: "Honey, try reading a book or something for once. You're almost about to graduate from high school and you've literally never read a book to completion in your entire life. Actually, I'm going to say only 1 hour of cell phone time a night until you finish a book of your choosing."

OP: *This post*

rwhitisissle ,

I think the issue here encompasses several factors: 1) you seem to be conflating the kind of moral panic driven legislation which has historically always existed with a silencing tactic aimed at dismissing youth-driven cultural criticism and 2) this meme screams low hanging fruit, appealing to the emotions of young people for whom having their phone taken away is like torture while also engaging in the, at the moment, very popular denigration of older Americans as being out of touch and dismissive of continuously worsening societal issues. Point 1 is understandable, as criticizing new things as being a corrupting influence on young people is as old as dirt, as is the propensity for the powers that be to dismiss cultural and material criticisms of the worsening state of peoples' lives in hard times. And while they may exist as a part of a shared rhetorical and ideological ecosystem, their relationship is too complex to be purely causal, as your meme seems to be suggesting.

rwhitisissle ,

Sailor Moon grows up to be the queen of the moon. Possibly also the Earth, although I can't remember. Either way, she's no ally to the proletariat.

rwhitisissle ,

One of the litany of incredibly annoying people that make up the cesspool of "political youtube." He is, specifically, a leftist in some capacity. Maybe an anarcho-communist, maybe a syndicalist. Who knows? Probably not even him. Does a lot of debating and reacting to things.

rwhitisissle ,

busting

Very different use of busting from my perspective.

rwhitisissle ,

Every American should go to a Bucees at least once in their lifetime. It's like a distillation of the intersection of what people in Europe think America is and how Americans also perceive their own nation.

rwhitisissle ,

I know what 2 girls 1 cup is but I don't understand what else is being referenced in this image.

rwhitisissle ,

That's not what gaslighting means, OP.

rwhitisissle , (edited )

Gaslighting comes from the movie Gaslight (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslight_(1944_film)). It refers to the practice of lying and manipulating someone into questioning their own recollection of events and general memory in order to cause them to doubt their own sanity, mental faculties, or perception of reality. This is not gaslighting because you are not being lied to about events that have happened. You're being lied to to try and convince you to not do something that you should/would typically want to do for yourself. These are different things.

rwhitisissle ,

Probably lukewarm take: Social media shouldn't be a utility because it provides no social value or improvement of quality of life in the same way other genuine public utilities like electricity, water, sewer services, or general access to the internet, might. It's also putting the government in a position in which it functionally would have to provide a platform for everyone equally, Neo-Nazis, climate deniers, anti-vaccers, and every other person with "insert terrible belief here" included.

Ultimately, saying social media should be a public utility is like saying casinos and strip clubs should be public utilities. Just because it's fun to use doesn't mean it's good for society or come anywhere close to meeting the definition for the level of necessity typically attached to something as a public utility.

rwhitisissle ,

When businesses ask you to contact their help-desk via WhatsApp, it’s a utility. When people call and message friends, family, and colleagues almost exclusively on WhatsApp or Messenger, it’s a utility.

Except...no, it's not. That's an extremely naive understanding of what a "public utility" is. A public utility is not defined by how many people use something. Public utilities are essential services that typically operate on economies of scale. That is to say services without realistic replacement and which have large upfront creation and maintenance costs and which only make sense to provide access to a large number of people. You can't replace electricity with some alternate source of power. It's electricity. Same for water. They're fundamental services that are required for other services to exist. Without electricity you don't have phone or internet. Without water you can't have sewer systems or indoor plumbing.

WhatsApp, by comparison, is trivially easy to replace. A business chooses to use WhatsApp for customer service. They could just as easily setup a Discord server or just establish an 800 number for you to call. They have immediate drop-in replacements. Arguing otherwise is sort of like arguing that Coke should be considered a public utility because a business serves Coke products. They don't have to serve Coke. They could serve Pepsi. Or anything else.

Also, your reasoning is kind of skewed, because in order to even use something like WhatsApp, you need other, already existing services. Namely internet access. It makes literally no sense to say "WhatsApp should be a utility" without first arguing that "internet access for all individuals at a national level should be a public utility." Which I would personally argue is something that does qualify as a utility, far more than any specific social media services or app, and the fact that it isn't is a huge problem for the United States.

Godwin’s Law People preaching [insert terrible belief] on a government platform would be removed and charged for hate speech just as much as they would be if preaching these things in public spaces.

Oh, okay, "Godwin's Law" is it? Cool. Here's an actual law. Like a literal piece of legislation that exists: it's called the First Amendment. I don't know if you're just speaking from a non-American context, or just don't know how "freedom of speech" is codified into law in the United States. Maybe you're a kid or something and just haven't learned that in school yet. But freedom of speech in public places is universally protected under the constitution. Like, there are still public Klan rallies in certain parts of the country. This is what allows those to happen. If the United States government maintained its own social media service, it would functionally not have the power to moderate any content that was not explicitly illegal. Bigotry and hate speech are not illegal under the constitution.

rwhitisissle , (edited )

First off, I think you are being very rude. I didn’t call you names or make assumptions, so please treat this with more respect than a Twitter thread.

I'll think about it...
...Okay, I thought about it. No.

Olvid, a French alternative to WhatsApp, was made in 2019. It took a law passing last month banning all ministers from using non in-house messaging services to stop people from using WhatsApp. I wouldn’t consider that “trivially easy”.

Except in your own example, a viable alternative was immediately available. Users didn't switch because they didn't have other options or were physically limited from using anything else. They just preferred to use WhatsApp. Switching to an alternative was trivially easy. People just didn't want to because of personal preference. It would be trivially easy for me to stop drinking coffee every morning and only drink water - there's nobody pointing a gun at my head to make me drink coffee - but I like coffee and would be annoyed by giving it up and probably have a hard time quitting. The same is probably true for many people. Should access to coffee be considered a utility? Probably not.

I already said this is a “government problem”. I said this in reference to the US government, because this isn’t really an issue for most countries :/

You mentioned WhatsApp. Several times. WhatsApp is owned by Meta, an American company. If you want it to be a public utility and its owned by an American company, which country is going to be the one to make that happen? Also, calling "completely eradicating the first amendment in order to make it so that the American government can forcibly seize and censor people on its new state run social media websites" a "government problem" is an atomic bomb level of understatement.

First off, I think you are being very rude. I didn’t call you names or make assumptions, so please treat this with more respect than a Twitter thread.

rwhitisissle , (edited )

It’s about momentum.

Once again, the popularity of something is not what defines its status as a utility.

If I stop using Whatsapp, I now have to convince everyone I’m in contact with to also use the alternative when msging me before I can actually stop using WhatsApp.

Yes, that would be devastating, wouldn't it? "Hey, I'm not on WhatsApp anymore. If you want to reach me, please send me a text message or an email." Wow. So difficult. \s

I am confident the EU could do it. A complete transfer of ownership isn’t necessary for other countries to use exported services as public utilities. Public-private partnerships exist.

Could do it and "has a reason to do it" are very different things. There is no motivation there because WhatsApp and other, similar services, are ubiquitously available. It would be a largely pointless endeavor. Also, the EU has the same style of media freedom laws as the United States. If they ran a service, they wouldn't be able to censor the content on it. Like, legally speaking it couldn't. Hope you like a state-run platform for European Nazis....because that's what you'd get.

“American freedom of speech = Nazis get to speak” was your stance before. Now it’s "Anything but American freedom of speech = government censorship". What am I even supposed to say here?

You implied America's first amendment was a "government problem." I described what would happen if the United States got rid of it. I don't know if you need to say anything, but you might want to brush up on your reading comprehension skills.

rwhitisissle , (edited )

They pretty much all say that South Africa presented a case in the Hague that argued that Israel has violated the 2nd article of the international genocide conventions and that Israel has acted with genocidal intent towards the people of Palestine. Or is there something else of note that isn't being discussed? Like did a horse briefly get loose in the court and they had to stop proceedings to try and catch it?

rwhitisissle ,

Comfortable middle class. Upper class people have full time servants. They don't come to your house. They're just always there.

[Thread, post or comment was deleted by the moderator]

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    rwhitisissle ,

    What part of this is a meme?

    rwhitisissle ,

    Religions and philosophical traditions frequently have overlap. It's not really an either/or situation.

    rwhitisissle ,

    Baby Boomers as a generational cohort are well on their way to completely dying off and generational antagonism is a tool of the capitalist class to turn the workers of different ages against one another. Be better than that. Make better memes.

    rwhitisissle , (edited )

    Is the inheritance of generational hatred depicted here even real? Some of the nicest people I've interacted with in my entire life were Baby Boomers. I've met shittier Gen Xers and Millennials than Baby Boomers.

    rwhitisissle ,

    And pretty much an equal amount actively fought against those policies, but were not politically effective in doing so as a result of complex historical and political factors. The Baby Boomers were and are complicated, just as everyone is, and it's kind of incorrect to treat them monolithically because as a generational cohort, the Boomers were ludicrously massive. So much so that there can actually be considered two dominant sub-cohorts within that generation. Early boomers protested Vietnam and made huge contributions to American racial, gender, reproductive, and sexual rights. Late generation Baby Boomers, sometimes referred to as "Generation Jones" grew up in an era of political malaise, and lived through the economic recession of the 1970s, Watergate, the Iranian hostage crisis, and a bunch of other things that helped to shape their more generally conservative political identities.

    rwhitisissle ,

    And it's always been a cudgel used by the powers that be to distract from the real sources of everyone else's problems. Funny how that works.

    rwhitisissle ,

    It assumes multiple entire generations of people were shitty and verbally abusive to their children on the basis of nothing more than being from a different generation.

    rwhitisissle ,

    I remember being fairly drunk and going to see Interstellar at an indy arthouse movie theater that sold you overpriced craft beers. I remember relatively little of the finer points of Interstellar other than the fact that I couldn't stop laughing at how monumentally dumb it was. I have no idea why they even had it so that McConaughey's character had a son that he just basically didn't give a shit about because he wasn't as smart as his dad and sister. He's like "Oh, I miss my daughter Murph so much. Also the other one is probably still alive assuming he never drank any pesticide. What's his name again? Stumpy? Whatever." Also I loved how Matt Damon played a soulless robot better than Bill Irwin, who voiced the actual soulless machines in the movie. God, what a fucking terrible movie.

    rwhitisissle ,

    Letterbox is where you go to find some truly wild takes. It's filled with people who have no genuine sense of media literacy, combined with a profoundly unjustified sense of confidence in the universality of their own opinions.

    rwhitisissle ,

    We're also to some extent innately combative creatures. People will say "Oh, I showed people the facts and they still didn't change their mind. They're just idiots stuck in their ways." Okay, cool. When you tried to present these facts, did you do it in such a way as to treat them courteously or as an equal, or did you do it in such a way that you got to feel like you were dunking on them rhetorically? Because it's not as simple as presenting someone with facts. It's doing so in a way that doesn't make it feel like you're trying to establish some kind of superiority over them. Because then they're not presenting facts to you, they're just attacking you and your position. And these are very different things, conceptually and emotionally.

    rwhitisissle ,

    The theory of simulation does not address intelligence. Intelligence abstractly is something that exists inside the simulation, it may value nothing outside the simulation. You thesis is lacking evidence.

    I think you mean "it may value nothing inside the simulation." Because what you wrote doesn't make any sense as it's written. In either case, my "thesis" is not a thesis. It's an observation of similarity. Both beliefs presume some kind of external motive force behind the universe's existence. I never made any argument about the intent or abstract values of whatever that thing may or may not be or how it perceives the universe it "created." I think the only thing lacking here is your reading comprehension skills, as you're clearly adding unfounded assumptions onto my observation independent of what was actually stated. Also, I posted that like a fucking month ago. Either you're necroing dead threads looking to pick a fight or whatever instance you're posting to fucked up its syncing with its federation.

    rwhitisissle ,

    You're getting caught up on phrasing and nothing else. Let it go. "Intelligent design" as an ideology and describing something as "intelligently designed" are not the same thing. The core similarity is what I've already described. You want me to mean something beyond what I've stated because you're incapable of accepting what you read at face value. I have no interest in speaking further with someone without the intelligence to do something basic as understand the words they read.

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