I don’t know if I believe people are predisposed to tribalism (it seems to occur in animals frequently enough that it wouldn’t surprise me, but I also don’t feel educated enough on the topic to really have a judgement) but honestly I don’t think it matters. I fully agree with you that there’s at the least a learned component to it, and imo the nurtured behaviour is more relevant than the “natural” behaviour, if any. I really believe in what you mentioned, that building a culture promoting better behaviours will result in them - and it seems like a good (and literally necessary) direction for society to evolve in if we want it come out the other end of capitalism as anything other than a wasteland.
What I’m talking about is more immediate than a slow cultural shift can be, though - I’m talking about the people around us now, who haven’t had the benefit of the revolutionary behaviour you mentioned. For most of us alive now, it’s exactly like you said - the tribalist behaviours have been rewarded and enforced through our lives in this society. Everything I’m talking about will hopefully be irrelevant when we can raise a generation with the pro-social behaviours you described; it’s just that to get there, we’ll need enough people on board to reach a cultural tipping point, and that’s why I can’t give up on getting people free of the far-right alternative reality. Well, that’s the selfless portion anyway - the selfish bit is that those ideologies are too fucking annoying to listen to so if it’s someone I care about, the only options are to cut them outta my life or try to deprogram them lmao.
That is why that person went back to believing in shit, a single day of conversation is not going to change years of learned and reinforced behavior.
Hard agree. That being said, I apparently left the end of that story implicit and not at all obvious (it’s late and I’m sleepy, dumb, and adhd, sorry) - when we went back to the topic and got down to confronting that root emotion, they got better at recognizing what was happening and now question the fear-based anger the topic inspires instead of using it as an excuse to dismiss new info. It obviously didn’t make them a paragon of tolerance overnight, but I consider a lack of unjustified hatred for drag queens and a willingness to challenge that unjustified hatred a huge step in the right direction. The most important element was clearly their willingness to have an honest dialogue and put in the work when they recognized they were doing something wrong, but the facts were critically important to dispelling the far right narrative that inspired the hatred in the first place. That’s where I’m coming from when I say we (everybody left of far right) literally cannot abandon the emphasis on provable facts - for the flawed people we collectively are now, betrayed by our society like you described, I just don’t like our odds in my neighbour example. I really believe in what you said, that we can train ourselves and each other to be better, but we can never get there if we disregard the facts to pick a losing fight with fascists on their own terms.
I’m not saying that fact checking everything will wipe out far right ideologies or lead to any notable result really - just that if we stop trying to hold people accountable for the truth of what they say, we won’t have the time we need to figure out and work towards what will.
Democrats are definitely also guilty of living in their own reality, but ime theirs is more created by misrepresenting facts versus the republican dismissal of them. Their lies are more often misleading truths with a massive fucking asterisk - that’s shit behaviour and I’m not defending it or them, but they’re absolutely not “as much if not more divorced from reality” than republicans. They’re not married to reality either, but theirs is a divorce where they’re at least still on speaking terms lol.
You’re right that they’re not part of the left, and I shouldn’t conflate them with the actual left, but thinking about the far right’s misinformation campaigns gets me thinking in very “us vs them” terms and I do still (reluctantly) consider them part of the “us” in that specific area. A very problematic part, sure, but I consider it like how I’d probably be a lot more accepting of police for a minute if I was locked in a room with only an armed cop and a rabid bear.
Also, I wanna be clear that I’m not discounting the value of appeals to emotion - on top of what you said, they’re also probably one of the best ways to really get stuff done on a community scale. My point is just that we’re not nearly as good at them as the (far) right, so throwing away the boring factual components of our messages would be like jumping into the water to wrestle an alligator. We have to accept that we’re just built different for fights on those terms, and focus on other ways to win.
The reason the right is in control is because the controllers of the means of production monetarily rewards right-wing (including right-wing liberal obviously) behaviors and ideology.
Absolutely, on the government scale this is def more of a factor, but at the individual level I really think the appeals to emotion are how they keep their voters in line. To me that’s one of the scariest things about the right, is how incredibly good they are at making people continue uncritically accepting their reality in the face of literally any contradictory evidence.
It’s anecdotal, but nearly every person I talk to who agrees with the right on some issue (eg trans rights, abortion, racial justice, whatever the flavour of the month is) maintains their stance on the issue through anger, fear, and/or hate. If you’re able to get into an honest dialogue with them about it, they’ll eventually reach a point where their talking points/strawmen are exhausted and they can logically see the conclusion that eg. trans people existing is okay, actually - and this is where I find that root emotion comes out. Every time I’ve had any success trying to deprogram someone who’s been brainwashed into these reactions (not often cuz I don’t have infinite patience, but at least five or six times by now), it’s been by following this chain of events and then directly addressing the emotion it brings out in them. I find until they notice it in themselves, they won’t consider any amount of proof or logic unless it’s stuffed down their throat, and even then the next time they’re reminded of it, the memory of the emotion is stronger than the memory of the proof. I’ve literally sat down with someone and gone through every aspect of fucking drag queen story hour to see why it made them so irrationally angry, and after disproving all the misinfo and enough leading questions (“what do you think the kids are learning from this?”, “is there anything to disapprove of in the lesson that different ≠ scary?”, etc) they realized and agreed that it wasn’t problematic after all. The entire thing was based on facts (systematically disproving every bullshit claim they’d heard) and their own reasoning (in response to pointed questions) and they fully accepted the result - but without addressing the root emotion (fear, in this case) they didn’t internalize it and the next bit of right wing lies that came out put them right back into irrational anger about the subject. It took less than a week.
Anyway, I definitely agree that the one-sided class war is the fundamental cause of this problem, and I’m not suggesting we ignore it to address the symptoms. I’m just saying that even if stewardship of the objective facts isn’t a particularly good weapon in that war, we shouldn’t throw it away thinking it’s no good to us - that shit is a shield that we would be so unbelievably fucked without. I just cannot imagine a circumstance where the left can win on a battlefront of purely emotional investment - like lets’s treat a random person as a blank slate and have the two sides both talk about their new neighbour with no need to stick to facts. Like you said, we’ve got some inspiring shit: justice, equality - “your neighbour’s a living thinking being too, maybe feeling isolated in a new place. let’s go see if they need any help getting settled in”. Probably gives some good emotions, but requires a little thinking and then conscious action. Meanwhile the right goes “that new person’s fucking awful, I just saw them eat somebody’s cat”. Absolutely zero barrier for entry - it takes conscious effort NOT to buy into their fearmongering. We have a powerful message, and I have no doubt that a lot of people will make the conscious efforts required to try to live up to the ideals; I just also have no doubt that more people will take the path of least resistance and I know I wouldn’t wanna be the new neighbour in this thought experiment.
Ugh, this has turned into a rambling fuckin essay of a reply and I’m sorry about that, I just don’t have the energy to go back and try to wrangle it on topic right now
They talk about the infectiveness of fact checking, and sure, the effect they described is depressingly common. More importantly tho, what’s the alternative? If the left stops trying to keep discussions grounded in verifiable facts, I strongly doubt the right will quit their bullshit and take up the job. Letting politics get even more divorced from reality would only make the right more powerful - we’ll never be able to beat them at appeals to emotion when the only emotions they need to appeal to are the low hanging fruit of anger and fear.
Idk, the article raises a good point but it just feels incomplete to me without raising an alternative or at least acknowledging the need for one.
*that they don’t want
This situation is so funny to me, if anyone’s thinking from the headlines it’s just another boring nothing fine on a trillion dollar company please do yourself a favour and read about it. I mean it still totally is a nothing fine tbh, but the circumstances are definitely not boring
Markdown uses underscores for italic, which is why they also need to be escaped with backslashes.
Not sure I can articulate the difference well, but there’s def types of asses you find more commonly on women vs men and vice versa. That’s my attempt to group the types you find more commonly on women together - not very precise, but if you do a couple image searches for comparison it’ll hopefully be clearer.
Obligatory fuck ford - the irony of his corrupt ass calling anyone else greedy is almost funny - but more importantly why would this be a problem? The article says Singh denies the pension is a factor, but if he wanted to hold out a little longer to get the money that he’s earned then… good for him? They don’t even seem to be accusing him of prioritizing that over the public good or anything, just of wanting money that he *checks notes* worked for and would meet the criteria to claim? The ability to scoff at being paid for your political work is a red flag to me (might indicate corruption/generational wealth/etc), and they’re really out here acting like it’s a moral requirement for office.
8gb of ram is definitely not ideal for the computer lifetimes people expect from macs, even for a very basic user, but it’s not too low to be forgivable except for the fact that modern macs use a SOC design and can’t upgrade the “RAM” (I know it’s not conventional ram; still gonna call it that). That aside, assuming “they” is still apple, the majority of what you said is… not correct. I’m gonna try to reply to each point without being a dick, but I’m sorry in advance in case it comes off that way or if it goes way too long. In order:
The average Mac owner’s use cases are nowhere near too demanding for the hardware - ever since they stopped trying to cram inefficient intel cores into a tiny chassis with the world’s shittiest cooling (2020), macs have been significantly more powerful than the average user needs in the short term. Someone who’s only trying to run some safari/firefox tabs, iMessage, a music client, and maybe a document or spreadsheet editor at most isn’t gonna be held back by the hardware of today at all - shit, 2020’s original base M1 macbook air with no fans would still be chugging along just fine today with that workload. On the off time a user like that does max out their ram (chrome with a million tabs, or if they’ve got a lot open and try the new apple intelligence stuff) modern ssds are fast enough that bumping a program into swap space doesn’t make the UI take a year like on HDDs. Should there still be more than 8gb ram on a computer (theoretically) designed to last 8+ years? Ideally, yes, but it’s really not the dealbreaker (again, for the average use case) that people make it out to be - it’s not gonna suddenly turn a new mac into a steaming pile of shit on year 3 or something.
About upgrades, I’m not really sure how to address this - what upgrades are just adding LLMs? Whether you’re talking computers or phones, I can’t remember an upgrade cycle for either in ages that hasn’t been double digit power increases. Software-wise, none of the upcoming software updates are “just” AI stuff - ios 18 adds a bunch of cool shit and while I don’t follow or care about Mac software, I’m sure a lot of that made its way over there too. This part is a little pedantic (please don’t take it as me being an asshole lol, zero hostility I promise), but I also wanna note it’s not just LLMs - they’ve got multimodal models for images and video too.
Your last point is subjective so I won’t try to claim your opinion (other than the bit about modern hardware running at capacity) is wrong. I do wanna offer a counterpoint tho, because while I agree that AI is overhyped and a lot of what companies are bragging about is mostly fluff (fucking genmoji???), there’s some tangible ways it’s gonna improve user experience. A more flexible Siri is probably gonna be the most-used one, since needing to be perfectly explicit and clear about what you want Siri to do is probably its biggest problem rn. An LLM backend will let it look past a badly phrased request or a stutter to the actual meaning of what you were trying to say, which is gonna make telling someone you’re about to get there while driving so much less painful.
The one I’m personally most excited about is one of the multimodal AI capabilities - fuck the image generation/editing (fun but overhyped imo), semantic media searches (searching photos for “mom and dad in front of that one waterfall”) are such a game changer, and the idea that I can have that without sending my photos and contacts to some external server is so wild to me.
Anyway, not trying to argue that 8gb of ram is a good design choice or force you to like AI, but I’m pretty into cpu/gpu/SOC advances and couldn’t just let them be slandered
Exactly, what can AHK do that a generic plasma shortcut plus a script in your language of choice couldn’t?
Genuine question, I haven’t looked at AHK in years
It physically hurts me to say anything in facebook’s defence, but to be fair this is an account centre link to an account config page
To add to this, with rustup you can add different build targets than the current system - could let you build the binary on a more powerful pc and then just scp it over.
Yep, not implying it is - like I said, just taking the point to a logical extreme where (ideally) everyone would agree that at least some speech can’t be allowed with no repercussions. I’m curious where along the spectrum of fucked up things to say you’d personally draw the line - were you focusing on the distinction between nazi shit/gore and a direct threat because you’d consider either/both allowable, or just wanting to point out a false dichotomy?
Yeah nah gay guy here to ruin your theory - I’ve got absolutely no attraction to boobs and/or feminine asses. I’m sure some tendency towards bisexuality is more common than strict homo/hetero-sexuality, but I strongly doubt I’m alone in this either.
I can see what you’re saying in the sense that nothing should physically be stopping them from saying it, but also nothing should be insulating them from the consequences of what they say, right? To take it to a logical extreme, if a kid says they’re going to shoot up the school the next day, I hope we can agree that requires more from school admins than just “well, it’s his right to say that”.
I personally also think it’s stupid for a school to be involved for a shirt like in the OP (western society is much too puritanical about simple nudity/body parts, imo), but there’s clearly a line somewhere about what speech/expression can be allowed in public. Assuming you can agree with that, where would you want that line to be? I’d personally draw the line before it reaches threats to peoples’ physical/mental health (like the nazis and gore I mentioned).
Out of curiosity, would you say the same applies to putting nazi propaganda or violent gore on a shirt and wearing it in a school?
I’m not even into knives, but if this is the shit you guys get up to in this community I’m def subscribing lmao
I didn’t consider account recovery, that’s a good point. Personally I don’t usually bother with it for anything I want to be private - if I lose it I lose it lol.
It’s still not perfect, but some of the private email hosting providers like proton have email aliases, so you could use one for recovery without giving any info to hackers (assuming you trust the email provider). Definitely less secure than only a public key being exposed, but maybe an acceptable tradeoff for the convenience of an existing established solution?
Damn everybody seems to be hating on this and idk shit about the history of anarchy to say if it’s valid, but I gotta add that this quote goes hard
You rule out social networks, but why? Wouldn’t a fediverse microblogging (or full blogging) platform work fine for the purpose? Just pick an irrelevant username and a strong+unique password and only access your account through tor using any and all relevant best practices.
Given you want the continuity of the author preserved, I don’t see the functional difference between the posts being associated with an anonymous account and them all having your public key. Am I missing something?