Exactly. This is the good thing about federation. If you don’t like the community you’re in, move to another one that better aligns to your values. No one’s speech is “limited”, but other instances aren’t forced to listen to you unless they want to.
Anti-anxiety meds.
Anxiety isn’t the cause of all people’s short fuse, but it was for me.
And to be clear, I wasn’t really “anger” issues as in “blowing up at other people”. You don’t work retail long before you learn how to put on a happy face. It was more “anger issues” that I would just seethe to myself at all the stupidity around me, completely unable to let even the littlest shit go.
Driving was the worst. I was an asshole as a driver. My entire time travelling to work would often be filled with a constant litany of yelling and swearing to myself, knowing full well that the other person can’t hear me.
There’s a kink for everything. It may not be a large base, but I’ll bet it’s there.
Because humans create their gods in their own image. Not the other way around. Your god becomes a reflection of what you already tend to believe because it exists solely as a justification for believing it.
If you’re part of a society that believes that all outsiders are bad. You’re going to invent your god that proclaims outsiders to be bad. If you’re part of a group that has no sense of monogamy, you’re going to create a god that proclaims “polygamy is good”!
Gods are the invented paragons of whatever society created them.
Soooo…clutz, basically.
Based on the average age of Lemmy, I’ll go out on a limb and say I’m probably older than you.
What you call “informed positions” is simply giving up on seeing the reality over the propaganda. Your cynicism doesn’t allow you to separate the theory of capitalism from the reality of capitalism. You’re essentially no different than those people who say that anything except the current situation is essentially “socialism”, which by definition must be bad. But just because corporations have taken over capitalism, doesn’t mean there isn’t a fight to be had to try to change that.
I’m very close to 50 years old. I’ve got plenty of my own life experience that I don’t need any of yours thanks. If you want to give up, go right ahead. Some of us believe is a system where capitalism is contained by strong government regulations and social safety nets. Why do we believe this, because there’s plenty of European countries that already do this. Just because North America is completely bought out by corporations doesn’t mean that’s just what capitalism is.
Go be a sad sack defeatist on your own time.
Capitalism is inherently parasitic
I fundamentally disagree with that.
Venture Capitalism is parasitic. But Capitalism itself is not at all. At it’s heart, if we continue with the landlord analogy, let’s say that you are renting a house from the OP’s Aunt. She’s paying the building insurance. She’s paying the maintenance, (or in some good old fashioned cases doing it themselves). She’s dealing with the paperwork involved in owning a home. Hell, in some cases you don’t even have to mow your own lawn. So of course she’s charging you rent. It’s not a charity.
But if she’s a private owner, than your rent stays with her. She uses what she needs to maintain the building and…yes…makes a profit that then gets spent in the local economy.
The only time there’s an issue is when your rent is being sent to a corporation that may not even be in the same country as you, and that money leaves your local economy for good.
To use an anecdotal example, I’ve worked in my time for two different furniture stores in my town. One was a chain, and one was/is a family run operation from the beginning. And yes…that family is wildly successful; I’m not guessing millionaires, but close to it. And I don’t begrudge them at all for that. Because it’s family owned, they aren’t forced to only care about a stock price or about profit. My boss would randomly come up to me, sometimes multiple times a year, clap me on the back and say “You’re doing a good job, I’m going to add a buck an hour to your wage.”
Because they can. Because for all intents and purposes, you’ve got a better chance to be treated like a human being when a corporation isn’t in the way.
The chain furniture store would only give out raises when forced to by government mandated cost of living increases, because anything more would cause the stock price to go down.
The heart of capitalism is my first example. The reality of capitalism is my second unfortunately. But that’s not the fault of capitalism itself, it’s the lack of government oversight protecting us from predatory corporations.
No.
I of course can’t speak for anyone except myself, but for me, what your aunt is doing is what essentially capitalism is all about.
Its when those landlords get replaced by venture capital corporations and reits that it becomes a problem.
In your aunts case, the rent money stays local, contributes back to the local economy, etc…
In the case of venture capital and corporate ownership, the only goal is to increase a stock price for a corporation. None of that money gets returned to the local economy except for possibly hiring a local property management firm to handle things on the ground for them.
When capitalism remains about people, all of good. When corporations take the reins of ownership so their profit becomes the sole motive is when things go bad.
Economic chaos for a little while, and then everyone would just go on with their lives. Economically it would matter of course; America became the richest power after the first world war when all of Europe needed loans to fight their “great war”, causing the greatest transfer of wealth the world had ever seen.
But culturally, I’m betting the number of people who would give a shit if the United States stopped bossing everybody around is far less than they think it is.
The american sense of importance is strongest mostly in their own heads.
This is exactly the right answer.
I think it’s a complicated question. I say yes, but with caveats.
He needs to be prosecuted in order to keep the letter of the law running. You can’t just say “you can’t kill anyone unless the rest of us don’t like him.” Laws should be about absolutism.
However the sentencing does not have to be absolute. Find him guilty (because technically he is). Then give him a suspended sentence because of extenuating circumstances.
Thought so. Just making sure.
Just to be the nihilist in the room, I honestly think that the point of no return for humanity occurred the moment we stepped down from the trees and started to evolve. And I’m not actually kidding.
I’m not an evolutionary expert, so I’m more than likely talking out of my ass, but I was an Archaeology Major with a focus on the Bronze Age Collapse and what I can tell you is this…
From a certain perspective, the same evolutionary traits that brought our species to this point, are the very same traits that will keep us from moving forward past it. Selfishness, resource hording, greed, the urge to continually expand at the expense of others. Fear of “others” outside of ones own community; all these things in some form were beneficial to growing from hunter gatherers to urban/agricultural societies. We needed organisation to build cities, so we created monarchies. We needed ways to control the growing population, so we created a fear of a deity.
We needed a reason to not allow too many people in to our society so that we didn’t waste resources, so we created borders and the concept of “others” that aren’t like us. Now, all of that has to get binned if we have any hope of getting past this point because the only way forward is as single planet, not petty nation states. But every single thing that brought us to this point prevents that from happening. It’s ingrained in our very DNA, so to speak.
Awesome. Thanks!
Not to be a debbie downer here, but it’s important to keep in mind that unless expressly stated otherwise, so-called discoveries that are only published in out-of-the-way (ie. not respected scientific journals) have usually not been peer reviewed or had their results replicated, which is the entire point of the scientific method.
Point to a group that cannot defend itself and people will vote in your favor
“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” – Lyndon Johnson.
Still ultimately Conservative policy to this day.
Even the big guy needs middle-management sometimes.
I don’t disagree, but that’s not really my point.
What you’re arguing is basically akin to people who sat out the vote because “Genocide Joe”. Which is what gave America Trump 2.0 in the first place. Yes, the established Military Complex is flawed and in some cases downright evil. But the response to that isn’t “fuck it, let’s burn it down and give a fucking toddler direct control of it.”
You don’t fix things by picking the worse option on purpose. That’s utter lunacy.
That’s not how Open Source works. Is this Chinese version of the AI likely biased? Yes…almost certainly.
But Open Source means that anyone can download and use the same source code and same technology to tinker with it and create one that isn’t biased and has nothing to do with the Chinese government.
The power of Open Source is that regardless of who creates the software originally, a million eyes are literally looking at the code. It’s nearly impossible to hide any shenanigans.