What I’ve found is that after a week socializing with twins, it’s pretty much impossible to confuse one with the other, especially if they’re older. There’s always some little quirk that differentiates the two. The parents who raised them would have to be out of the world shitty if they can’t tell apart their children.
I could see this happening when they are babies though. Like 6 weeks in Bob becomes Tom and Tom becomes Bob and you might never know. I don’t think that would be harmful at such a young age though.
There was a case in my country where two babies were swapped at the hospital. One mom had the presence of mind to take pictures right after giving birth, which she used to prove that she was given the wrong baby (hers had a full head of hair). The other parents were blissfully ignorant of the fact there was a switch.
And if one of them do have a bad allergy or disease you should really have a system in place to tell them apart and not rely on just looking at them and hope for the best.
Yeah, there was an episode of full house with this idea - they used their footprints to tell them apart. I can imagine you couldn’t be doing that all the time tho.
Exact same plot in an episode of Suite Life of Zach and Cody, too, complete with birth certificate footprints to confirm their identities. Although, the episode ends with the mom simply recalling off the top of her head which one belonged to who instead of making any direct comparisons, which always bothered me in an episode about the mom having confused the two in the first place.
Having had twins, I can’t imagine it happening 6 weeks in for more than a few minutes. 6 hours, definitely. 6 days, maybe. But by 6 weeks, you know who is who. Even identical twins are pretty easy to tell apart after having spent significant time with them. It’s actually pretty common for parents of di/di identical twins (which are the type that could be fraternal) to not think their twins are identical only to have everyone else notice they are.
I have two boys who are not twins, 4 and 6, and I switch them up all the time. They don’t even look the same. One looks exactly like me and the other looks like if my wife were a man.
I just get my wires crossed all the time. I do the same with my two dogs (ones stocky and brindle and ones leggy and tan…both about the same height/weight though).
That is fascinating! My dad always called me by my brother’s name and vice versa. He would start with the wrong name and end with the right name, so it would feel like we both had two names.
My grandmother had this quirk where she’d start reaching for names of people she knew because she just couldn’t remember your name right then. I like to think her brain was buffering.
They’d usually be in the vicinity of each other, like my brother or father’s name, but sometimes she’d be way out there with a cousin or the neighbour.
I tell you though, it didn’t feel great when she looked right at me and called me by the family dogs’ names before she got to mine lol
This is super common though. I mix up my kids’ names on a daily basis, it’s not because I don’t know who they are or can’t tell them apart. They do think it’s hilarious when I mix them up with the chickens.
The common factor is that I am usually saying the same mindless stuff to my kids (and chickens), like “get down from there” or “move out of the way please” or “stop making so much noise”.
Can confirm. During my whole primary school there were two twin girls in my class and me and all my other mates could tell them apart instantly but any other child in the school couldn’t. Actually we were quite surprised when they couldn’t because for us was quite obvious to differentiate them both.
Have siblings who are twins. Can confirm. In fact growing up with them it was weird to me that people got them confused with each other at all given how different they really are
This. I know identical twins, at first glance they look exactly the same, but with a little time it’s pretty easy to tell them apart. Even in older photos it’s not that hard to tell which is which.
Keep in mind that you two also aren’t used to telling each other apart. You’re perspective is always from the inside and the other is just the other. Your parents or other siblings would probably be much better at differentiating between you two. (I would assume.)
Any time I tried to post a shower thought on Reddit it was deleted because it either was posted previously (at any point in time, even if it was years ago) or was posted somewhere else online, not just Reddit, also at any point in time.
I’ve seen a few great ones lately, but I’ve also been seeing a ton from people who don’t understand the concept very well. Things like “it’s not nice to be mean to people” or “there are more countries in Asia than China, Japan, and South Korea.” I can’t really say much as I haven’t posted anything myself, but c’mon people!
I get that this is a contentious topic and I agree that Musk gets too much coverage, but…I strongly believe that people should be able to post whatever they want as long as it adheres to the community’s topic (technology) and adheres to the rules.
The arguement of, “I don’t wanna see {topic here} so stop posting about {topic here}” is a really slippery slope. Clearly there are quiet users here that DO actually want to hear about X news and DO want to dicuss it. What about topics that appeal to you, or like 20% of the community, but 80% couldn’t give a shit? Where is the line?
Realistically, this is on you. You don’t like it? Downvote and scroll past it. Want a perfectly curated source of news you care about? Use an RSS reader that offers topic filters. This is a community of diverse interests that may not always reflect yours. Deal with it, or go elsewhere.
Go to any tech site, publication, podcast YouTuber, etc. All of them are talking about Twitter. Mainstream tech has agreed that Twitter / Facebook are tech.
Im not saying I agree. I’m not saying even that I care about these topics. I don’t. I think Musk is an idiot and actively avoid news about his BS. But clearly a lot of people do care and a lot of people agree that Twitter is tech.
If this community wants to specify a definition of tech that differs from the mainstream, then they need to put it in the rules and accept that we need to control the acceptable conversation because certain members of the community are getting triggered by having to scroll past posts related to Musk or his properties.
This statement indicates that what is technology is decided by popular opinion, not by any inherent meaning in words. Certainly the meaning of words change with time and they have no inherent meaning, so in a very real sense, definitions are decided by popular vote. However, if Twitter is a tech company, then so is every newspaper, magazine, bank, credit card company, any business with a data base for inventory management. It’s a useless definition. Let’s go with the actual mainstream definition of a tech company, a company that develops, produces, licenses or sells technology or technology services, and Twitter doesn’t do any of that. It sells ad space and subscriptions, the business model of a media company.
That’s how language works. Language evolves and adapts over time via social pressure. Nobody uses words exactly as they are defined in the Oxford English Dictionary. Words are given meaning by people and inevitably those meanings shift and change as people use them in new and different ways.
Just because you adopted pedantry in order to push out topics you hate hearing about doesn’t mean everyone else has to adopt your constructed definitions.
Just because you adopted pedantry in order to push out topics you hate hearing about doesn’t mean everyone else has to adopt your constructed definitions.
It’s not so much about the definitions as it is about the expectations. This is lemmy, we aren’t in a bubble, remember… and just because you go with whatever the mainstream tells you doesn’t prevent other users from trying to determine if this community meets our expectations of discussions around actual technology rather than mainstream gossip.
Yes, I’ve just said that languages evolve. I’m saying that “technology companies” has not yet and will not ever evolve to mean “companies that develop, produce, license or sell technology or technology services, and also Twitter”. When Twitter starts getting involved in tech, it will be a tech company.
This argument is kind of saying “/c/technology should contain any topics which are interesting to people subscribed to /c/technology”.
We’re not a publication, podcast, or youtuber. This is a community aggregating posts about the topic of choice. We’re not trying to gather up users by posting things that are interesting to our existing users.
So news of an online store doing shady shit constitutes as “tech news” because they run a web site? Strictly speaking the wheel is also technology, so a post about the history of the wheel seems like a worthy post in a tech community? We might as well post anything here because almost everything you use in your daily life is either technology or related to technology. While I do understand the philosophical aspect of the answer it has no practical value when it comes to defining what kind of content should be posted here.
There needs to be a more practical understanding of what the community considers “tech” so that wrong kind of posts don’t get spammed here. For me personally the internet has been around for most of my life. It’s not some new a shiny thing, it’s as common as the wheel. Therefor I don’t consider just running a bog standard website “tech”. Similarly I don’t consider Twitter / X a tech company, they’re a social media company that uses software as a tool. I haven’t considered anything about Twitter, except firing the engineers, as tech news since Musk wanted to buy Twitter. Maybe even before Musk tried to buy it, but who remembers things from eons ago. If there was news about some kind of exploit on Twitter or a data breach, that I could consider tech news because that is generally related to the actual tech they are using for their business. But a Twitter rebrand? Has literally nothing to do with tech beyond the tools they used constituting as “tech”. But then we’re back to square one where I could post about a new bicycle coming out, because the wheels bicycles use are “tech” and the frame material being used is produced by “tech” and there’s a lot of “tech” that goes into a bicycle. But somehow I doubt this is what the community cares about.
According to you it definitely does, that was literally your argument for having anything remotely tech related as tech news.
My argument was that it needs to be actually related to tech/art to considered that. If we want to be super critical of art then just writing that at an urinal may or may not be art. For the sake of argument let’s say it’s not. But if someone takes a picture of it (or turns the entire thing into a composition) and puts it in an art gallery then it is art. It has to contextualized somehow as art to be in a gallery and that contextualization defines it as art. Similarly tech news should be in in the context of tech, which is why something like rebranding a company is not necessarily tech news.
yes, I was using the famous example that broke the Fin De Ciele -era snobbery about art and the distinction between artist and artisan to make a point.
my point is that you can’t define it. So you say “should posts about the wheel be included?”
and the answer is if you exclude all things about wheels where do you draw the line? someone creates a new type of ball bearing that revolutionizes manufacturing, but thats not allowed because it’s a wheel? Someone uses a new archeological discovery about an ancient device to invent a modern one? No posts about cars, trains etc? No posts about waterwheel generated activity?
Like I said before, I understand the philosophical aspect of this argument. Strictly philosophically I even agree with it, but the argument has no practical value because it’s essentially saying “moderation is pointless”. In practice most people would still want moderation because some moderation (even if it’s not 100% correct) is better than no moderation.
That’s an even bigger contentious debate. And the fact that there is no one mutually agreed on answer means we either need a formal definition in the rules or the people in this community need to understand that there are people that exist with a broader or narrower definition of technology than they have.
That said, like it or not, go to any major tech blog, podcast, YouTuber, and they all talking about X / Twitter. The tech communities outside of Lemmy have all agreed that Twitter / X is technology. And Lemmy doesn’t live in a bubble.
The tech communities outside of Lemmy have all agreed that Twitter / X is technology.
This is an “appeal to authority” logical fallacy.
Personally I think an argument that “Twitter / X is technology” is a very, very difficult argument to make. It’s a social media company. Is every company that has a website “tech”?
It’s also a generalisation. Perhaps if twitter invented a new decentralised database that might be “tech”, but marketing decisions are not.
Marketing decisions of a tech company are valid to be discussed. We discuss marketing and other business decisions of many tech companies and will continue to do so. Your argument is invalid - you’re not the arbiter of what are and what aren’t valid discussion subjects.
the debate rages on. Frankly, I think you’re moronic to complain about Twitter here. They are regularly influencing tech media reporting and they launched as a tech stock.
I think it would help define it or give examples of what it is or isn’t intended to include. Should it include biotech, materials tech, or is it limited to computers, Internet, AI? Or…?
Technology to me includes things like papyrus and typewriters and the above and much more. But what I expect to see in a technology community is narrower than that.
I think it would help define it or give examples of what it is or isn’t intended to include.
Agreed. I’d rather not see this place turn into frontpage news for tech companies (even if the subtext is critical). Currently the predominant things being posted are Elon/X or Big Tech Bad. I feel that if the focus was more on the technology aspect, we can get away from the gossipy/reactionary “news”
…but that’s what happens when you call a community “technology”. Its a pretty damn broad category and these days, incredibly mainstream.
Communities like " technology" are going to be as mainstream as they were on Reddit. There is nothing you can do about it unless you convince the mods to spend 14 hours a day curating and removing posts from people with mainstream definitions.
If you want a more curated definition, or you have more niche interests, then you probably want to go to a different community. Heck, maybe start your own. Be the change you want to see.
It seems a bit silly to go to a community called “technology” and then complain that it represents what 90% of technology news sources are talking about.
Typewriters are technology, but information about what color of shoes is being worn by the guy who bought the typewriter patent from its inventor isn’t technology.
I’ve tried so many and I’m always on the hunt for better ones. I wss on Pallabre until it went abandonware. Currently on inoreader but still hunting.
Problem is that I want something that can easily sync my feed and subscriptions across devices, but the ones that support that compromise in other areas. I might need to just settle for good import/export functionality. But Inoreader works for me for now.
But the nice thing is there are a ton of RSS apps out there. So, theres bound to be something for everyone.
Politely disagree, in that I suspect this is a hypocritical sentiment. Most users who get off of Elon news will agree with this position now but then cry foul when this community is spammed with a subject not to their liking. And as much as the ideology of free speech (rightly) resonates, just like with free markets, some minimal regulation is needed in practice; otherwise some fanatics could choke this feed up with, I dunno, 99% Microsoft news, all the time, and you wouldn’t be able to say shit because you “strongly believe people should be able to post whatever they want”. I doubt that you would stand by your lofty convictions so strongly then.
Beyond that, there is nothing wrong with expressing a desire for more or less of something—it’s just an opinion. It’s a bullshit argument to say, “If you don’t like it, instead of articulating why, just use the limited non-descriptive tool provided to reduce your passionate sentiment into a trivial binary value and cast it into the sea of thousands just like it; or else, like, go create an entirely new community or a custom feed or whatever you want. But mainly, just fuck off.”
I don’t give a FLYING FUCK about Elon. I actively ignore any posts about him or his shitty empire. Stop using the behaviors of his idiot stans to argue with me. I am not them.
What I do care about is a community telling people what they can or cannot post, not through rules changes, not through mod action, but by agreeing internally to bully every person who dares to post what every tech publication is talking about.
I think you need to evaluate why you let this shit trigger you. I mean, this is like going to a coffee shop and raising a stink because they sell pumpkin spice lattes. Don’t consume it. Use Lemmy’s tools to filter it out if you really need to.
Its not the community’s job to cater to your specific content desires. This isn’t a news site. Its a place for people to talk about whatever they think technology is. It’s your job to moderate what you pay attention to.
Funny enough I think it’s a hypocritical sentiment but on the other foot – users who are tired of this news are going to eventually find some news they are interested in, and then resist having it sequestered somewhere else.
Your point is absolutely valid, but what’s happening at Twitter really is only relevant to social media news. There’s no tech changing or advancing, just a really bad marketing decision. I personally do not believe that this is tech news or relevant to it.
Doesn’t matter. People can post whatever they want. And people can vote on whatever they want. And Elon content is being voted up. What this post is really saying is:
“STOP LIKING THINGS I DON’T LIKE”
And these people need to get over it or stop using Lemmy. You’re not entitled to only see the content you want.
So what’s odd here is that this is tech devolving. X is a software services and technology company that pioneered a field. We are watching that fall apart in real time.
Technology doesn’t exist in a vacuum it is entwined in society. Business decisions are undoing years of a societies integration into daily lives. This is like witnessing the fall of Rome in fast forward. So oddly enough this is an live use case in the convergence of society and tech., which is technology.
Like it or not, it’s tech news. When Intel does something interesting, or Google wets the bed again, we’ll talk about that a lot, then. Right now it’s Elon doing dumb stuff. Last month it was spez. If we ban every hot news topic, what’s left to discuss?
I was under the impression that this was a community to discuss technology, not one that discusses the business decisions of companies in the technology sector, and certainly not the decisions of a social media company that is only tangentially related to the technology sector.
Whether we like it or not, it’s pretty damn hard to separate technology from business (and also politics)
The direction of technological advancement, as it stands today, is largely driven by businesses. What technologies are developed and what they get used for, depends on who’s throwing money at it and how they want to make money from it.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m sick of hearing about Musk. But the internet is one of the most amazing technological achievements humanity has ever created, and a lot of people use it for Twitter/X, and so their business decisions have pretty far-reaching implications for the rest of the internet. Trying to ignore that leaves out big chunks of the picture.
I think you’re missing the point that we’re here to discuss technology not the business of it.
Just because technology is driven by business processes doesn’t mean that this form must also be consumed by discussion over business processes that are only somewhat related to technology.
I’m not sure why this distinction is difficult. If you want a technology politics community then make one, stop polluting technology with technology politics.
Apparently not, given how many people post and upvote articles about technology business.
But frankly, I don’t think you can isolate technology from the business and politics around it. You can choose to only talk about specs and functionality, but it is often being driven by business interests regardless.
Unless you are talking about some social blunder they have done during vacations, “Google CEO does a big dumb dumb” is sure to have implications for the technology and the users of said technology. As Elon Musk’s decisions are having to the structure of Twitter’s platform and their users.
At this point I think it’s very misguided from technology enthusiasts to believe that the matter can be discussed in isolation and detached from human interests. In fact many of the ills of social media, gaming and AI came about because the matters were handled in such a way, and consequently they had political implications.
They were not designed in isolation from business and politics either. Phones moved away from 3.5mm to only have a single USB/Lightning input so that they could sell more wireless earbuds, and iPhones will be forced to change use USB-C due to an European Union decision. Business. Politics. Technology.
But why google created a new standard, what the standard is, how it will be used, what other companies will adopt that standard, when products using that new standard will become available, etc. are all on the business side of things, and so can be directly affected by Google’s CEO doing a big dumb dumb. Without the business side of things actually making things happen, a new standard is just a bunch of rules that someone wrote down.
Remove business from the equation, and you’re mostly left with technical papers that describe hypothetical technology that no one is actually making, and hobbyists cobbling together gadgets in the basement or writing code in their free time for fun. And don’t get me wrong, that’s cool stuff too, but it’s a much more niche community.
In an ideal world, we’d probably have about 3 different communities, one dedicated to the businesses side of technology, one dedicated to pure technology with specs and technical papers and such disconnected from business, and a 3rd one where we discuss both aspects and how they come together in the real world. Since we only have the one main community though, to me at least, the third approach seems most appropriate for here. If you feel so strongly about it, perhaps you should consider creating those other communities, perhaps call them something like TechBusiness and PureTechnology.
The two are inseparable unfortunately. Business and the actual technology itself are closely intertwined. Talking about technology in a vacuum can be somewhat interesting, but it doesn’t work in an online forum. Applications of the technology are going to require business. And if you can’t discuss the applications, what will you discuss? An online forum doesn’t have enough subject matter experts to solely discuss the technology.
I agree tech and applications of it tend to go together. But dumb business decisions of tech that has gone mainstream like telephones and PCs certainly doesn’t have to enter the discussion. And they don’t always tie to application of tech.
As a counterpoint, there’s still plenty of tech news that isn’t necessarily business related for telephones, with constantly developing smartphone technologies. I don’t know that going mainstream precludes it from offering good discussion.
I was kind of hoping for content about new or interesting technology not news about mainstream tech business stuff.
I want to hear about developments in tech like AI, batteries, biotech, robotics, and so on. Things that give us hope or terror. :)
News about idiot CEOs being douchebags isn’t technology. Is business news. It isn’t an advancement. It isn’t novel. It isn’t the most interesting topics in technology.
Oh, and an interesting follow on, if someone runs a technology consultancy, can they post about their business successes and issues? They’re in the tech business after all. Or is this simply limited to the who’s who of bad actors? The big, 3 4, 10, 15? What is the cut off?
Twitter isn’t a tech company any more than Visa or the New York Times are. Twitter uses technology. They do not develop, produce, or sell technology products or services. It is a media company that sells advertising space and subscriptions, just like a newspaper, something no one would call a tech company.
I disagree. It’s not tech news. Twitter or X losing a few subscribers to mastadon or threads is a Sunday. And on Monday we’ll get an article about people moving in the other direction. Distilling entire categories of news to one person or company makes us less informed, not more. We’re just echoing the same talking points back and forth at eachother.
I’m definitely not saying Elon or Twitter is NEVER tech news but, jesus, I don’t need or want to know about every tweet he makes and every shit he takes. I also don’t think these things shouldn’t be recorded in some way. But the magnitude it’s posted is straight up Elon worship whether you hate him or support him.
I do what I’m able and willing by downvoting items that aren’t news or discussion-worthy and not interacting with those comment sections but there is just so much. Is there a place to just read news about technology and not tech business tweets turned into “news” stories? This is a genuine question if someone has info.
I guess it’s subjective, but from my perspective the weekly thought bubbles of billionaire / millionaire owners of tech companies is not what I think of when I think about “tech news”.
Is the solution here to have megathreads?
For me personally I’d be happy enough for someone to create a redditandtwitternews community and then ban any such news from this community - but I’m pretty sure my views on this are not generally held.
Edit: actually no, I don’t think it is really subjective. If twitter invented a new database language that would be tech news. A social media company re-branding is not tech news.
I think you’ll find a lot more leftists interested in platforms that are not powered solely by money and profit. Lemmy, much like Mastodon and other federated platforms, only need instances to run to be usable. It doesn’t require millions of dollars to keep it afloat.
Generally speaking centrist and right wingers, especially in Western countries, tend to be very capitalist. They only understand the value in terms of money.
But I think this is a bit of a biased comment. Many right wingers went on to fringe corners of the internet, Places like voat, 8chan, Trump’s twitter (what’s it called?)… Basically all the places where QAnon festered. They believe that mainstream social media is censoring right-wing ideas. I don’t really see them favor platforms that are “capitalist”.
they were looking for unmoderated corners, not for places not powered by money and profit. Which I find orthogonal to the comment from OP. That there’s some overlap on the end result doesn’t mean OP was biased at all.
You hit the nail on the head there. There are lots of reasons to seek out a less corporate, less mainstream online community. No need to invoke any horseshoe theories.
So far I see very little evidence of QAnon type ratholes here, probably in no small part because the platform doesn’t really seem conducive to paranoid echo chamber type activity.
AND if my one USB-C port wears out from use, now I need a whole ass new phone now as opposed to “oh damn, well the phone still works without headphones, I’ll suffer for a bit until I can comfortably replace it.”
This is actually something I had once considered too. It’s not that they want to downgrade the port itself, it’s also that they want to downgrade the AMOUNT of it. I went looking for phones with two ports (I was also curious about using a phone as a data bus) and I could literally find none.
This is why when it comes time to decide on a compromise, Bluetooth (and its audio issues) wins out versus anything with ports. Because it’s a solution that doesn’t throw away options with it.
It’s a rant from a veteran social media/blog writer from some of the earliest days of the internet.
It’s a bit repetitive, occasionally overwrought, and very long, so feel free to skip some paragraphs, but if you’ve been around the net for a while, especially if you were here before Facebook, you’ll recognize exactly what they’re describing and know that anger.
That feels like 25 years of shit I’ve never been able to find the words to say.
Stop benefitting from the internet, it’s not for you to enjoy, it’s for us to use to extract money from you. Stop finding beauty and connection in the world, loneliness is more profitable and easier to control.
Stop being human. A mindless bot who makes regular purchases is all that’s really needed.
I was looking for that article a couple of weeks ago, and for the life of me could not remember where I'd originally seen it. I didn't even notice it was there when digging this up. Amazing!
Thanks for sharing, I see what you mean about it feeling like something you have wanted to say.
A section I liked is
And I also understand that we are the generation who has to go through this part of it. We’re the ones born in time to be forced to make the rules and defend them. To say hey maybe one guy shouldn’t be able to own the village square. Because it was never remotely possible before. It’s all new and we have to figure it out. To agitate and legislate and be constantly vigilant. Maybe it’ll all seem so obvious and settled in 50 years, but those are our 50 years and no one else is going to have to be the first to have these conversations and try to make policy out of them. That’s us, it’s our lot, and it sucks ass, but this technology is the singularity we geeks have been talking about, and it turns out it’s not just impossible to imagine life on the other side of it before it happens, but it’s really fucking hard to figure out life on the other side of it once you get there, too.
Lately I’ve been feeling a sense of dull but oddly optimistic sense of resignation about the fate of internet and privacy and all the AI bullshit, and I think this paragraph captures that feeling.
I think that the main problem with hosting videos on this platform is the amount of space. Keep in mind, Lemmy runs on donations, it does not have venture capitalist backing of any kind. So even if the support for videos (or gifs) eventually comes, it will either be very restricted (i.e. max 8mb uploads, similar to Discord’s free tier uploads) or disabled entirely by the instance admins because the cost for hosting video will be just way too much.
Time will tell, I guess, for now there’s no video support being mentioned anywhere on GitHub issues, so it is likely not planned.
So the writing’s on the wall: Imgur will sooner or later intensify its enshitification, so it’s not safe relying on it for image/gif uploads for Lemmy…
At least in kbin, if you link a video on a site that allows embedding it includes a handy little button to show the embedded video automagically. Not sure how it's handled in Lemmy though. :)
I remember when gatekeeping was for the truly elite, now we have all of these newbies around who know enough to think they’re better than the uninitiated
Here is what you can do: make a bet with her on things that she think is going to happen in a certain timeframe, tell her if she’s right, then it should be easy money. I don’t like gambling, I just find it easier to convince people they might be wrong when they have to put something at stake.
A lot of these crazy YouTube cult channels have gotten fairly insidious, because they will at first lure you in with cooking, travel, and credit card tips, then they will direct you to their affiliated Qanon style channels. You have to watch out for those too.
they will at first lure you in with cooking, travel, and credit card tips
Holy crap. I had no idea. We've heard of a slippery slope, but this is a slippery sheer vertical cliff.
Like that toxic meathead rogan luring the curious in with DMT stories and the like, and this sounds like that particular spore has burst and spread.
Rogan did not invent this, this is the modern version of Scientology’s free e-meter reading, and historical cults have always done similar things for recruitment. While you shouldn’t be paranoid and suspicious of everyone, but you should know that these things exists and watch out for them.
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this is the modern version of Scientology’s free e-meter reading
I actually have a fun story about that. They once had a booth on my college campus so just for fun I let them hook up their e-meter to me. I was extremely dubious that this device did what it claimed, but just for fun to mess with it I tried as hard as I can to think calm and relaxing thoughts. To my amazement, the needle actually went down to the “not stressed” end, so I’ve gone from thinking that the e-meter is almost certainly bunk to thinking that it is merely very probably bunk.
That isn’t the funny part, though. The funny part was that the person administering the test got really concerned and said that the device wasn’t working properly and had me take the test again. I did so, and once again the needle went down to the “not stressed” end. The person administering the test then apologized profusely that the device was clearly not working and said that they nonetheless recommended that I take their classes to deal with the stress in my life. So the whole experience was absolutely hilarious, although at the same time incredibly sad because I strongly suspect that the people at the booth weren’t saying these things in order to deceive me but because they were genuinely true believers who were incapable of seeing the plain truth even when it stared them in the face.
it’s a skin galvanometer. It measures sweating directly based on the fact that sweat is electrically conductive, then interprets more sweat as more stress. this is a fallacy as the fact that stressed people tend to sweat does NOT imply that sweaty people tend to be stressed. this works to the advantage of scientologists because genuinely stressed people will measure high, but so will a lot of unstressed people or people who are only stressed by the fact that they suddenly find themselves in an experiment. False positives and true positives are much more common than true or false negatives, and also much more profitable for scientologists. When you successfully beat the test, the person administering it insisted you go again because it’s kinda rigged and they assumed that a second reading would come back with the needle pointing strongly toward “give us a bunch of money”.
this is the central fallacy behind lie detectors as well, as they measure skin galvanic response, heart rate, and other things that are correlated with stress but can have myriad other causes, then they assume that people are stressed when they lie, then they take a flying leap to the conclusion that anyone displaying symptoms of stress must be lying.
then interprets more sweat as more stress. this is a fallacy as the fact that stressed people tend to sweat does NOT imply that sweaty people tend to be stressed
It’s close enough to convince people. If there were no correlation between sweatiness and stress, the E-meter wouldn’t be a convincing recruiting tool. If it always just went to “stressed” no matter who used it or how, it wouldn’t be as convincing either. The fact that sweatiness and stress are somewhat correlated means that it can be used to bring people into the cult.
oh no one is doubting that it’s a good scam. it’s quantifiably a truly great scam, having bilked billions from a whole lot of people. but it is a scam, and the electroconductivity of your skin is not a measure of your spiritual state
My sister always mocked her and starts to fight her about how she has always been wrong before and she just get defensive and has not worked so far, except for further damage their relationship.
No, don’t mock her, that’s the last thing you should do, don’t be emotional, be calm and ask her if she want to take the easy money if she is so sure about these things, it has to be provable, objective events where there is no wiggle room, like the natives with arrows for example.
Cults will always want to isolate their perspective members from their current support groups. Don’t let them do that past the point of no return.
See if you can convince her to write down her predictions in a calendar, like “by this date X will have happened”.
You can tell her that she can use that to prove to her doubters that she was right and she called it months ago, and that people should listen to her. If somehow she’s wrong, it can be a way to show that all the things that freaked her out months ago never happened and she isn’t even thinking about them anymore because she’s freaked out about the latest issue.
You can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into. You have to use positive emotion to counteract the negative emotion. Literally just changing the subject to something like “Remember when we went to the beach? That was fun!” Positive emotions and memories of times before the cult brainwashing can work.
The good part about it is that once she writes her predictions down (or maybe both of them do), they can maybe move on, and talk about something other than the conspiracies.
Assuming all the predictions are wrong, especially if your mom forgot how worked up she was about them months ago but completely forgot about them after that, it can be a good way to talk about how they’re manipulating her emotions.
it took a total of one hour of youtube autoplay for me to go from “here’s how to can your garden veggies at home” to “the (((globalists))) want to outbreed white people and force them into extinction”
Genuinely, though. You describe democratic worker councils, large public programs, criticize Capitalism, even point out Imperialism, and everyone agrees with you and what you want, as long as you don’t call yourself a Marxist.
I see this a ton on Lemmy, if I describe what I want and how I want to get there, very few people openly disagree unless I add that this is Marxism. So, I’ve stopped trying to hide that these ideas are Marxist and instead focus on correcting misconceptions about Marxism, like thinking Communism would have no government because Marx used the word “stateless” when describing it, not realizing he meant things like Private Property Rights and other statist means of upholding Capitalism. Marx wasn’t an Anarchist nor did he want Anarchism.
Indeed, as soon as you mention Marxism then the whole conversation becomes about that. Simply discussing the concepts with people without using trigger words tends to be a lot more productive. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what people want to call it, as long as they can understand what course of action is desirable.
I do think it’s useful to dispel the veil, though. People simply agreeing with concepts doesn’t mean they will pursue action, it’s important that people actually understand Marxism, at least in my opinion. Agitprop is good.
We shouldn’t fall into a trap of defining what’s extreme as a deviation from the mainstream liberal bias in the west. In my view the idea that a minority of people should own the means of production and dictate the economic reality for the working majority is what’s extreme. It is true, that Marxists advocate for extreme measures for overthrowing an extreme system though.
I generally agree, however whether something is reasonable or just has little to do with deviation from the norm. It’s linguistic gymnastics, really. Marxism is extreme in the sense that it is a firmly Leftist position in a world dominated by Capital, but is perfectly reasonable at the same time.
I dunno, more of a monologue than a response, but I hope it cleared up my intent.
For sure, I do think this is worth pushing back on though. If we agree that the world capitalism built is itself extreme then, a firmly Leftist ideology is perhaps something we should be striving for to get away from the state we currently find ourselves in.
Would you care to elaborate on what aspects of these beliefs you find to be extreme. Is it the idea that workers should own the fruits of their labor, or perhaps the idea that the purpose of work should be for common benefit?
The problem is, Marxism was created over 100 years ago. I bet Karl Marx wouldn’t agree to his own theorem for the world we live actually. It needs upgrades, and an other name and shouldn’t be set in comparison with the systems which tried to be marxism / communism.
Smaller steps would be a good start, why not take a closer look at Portugal? A left government recreate the whole state in just a few years and save the country from being bankrupt. This wasn’t Marxism, but it was a left wing party with really good ideas.
The problem is, Marxism was created over 100 years ago. I bet Karl Marx wouldn’t agree to his own theorem for the world we live actually. It needs upgrades, and an other name and shouldn’t be set in comparison with the systems which tried to be marxism / communism.
On what grounds do you think he wouldn’t agree? Marxists since Marx have expanded on his ideas, like analysis of Imperialism, but Marxism is stronger than ever and consistently proved correct.
Smaller steps would be a good start, why not take a closer look at Portugal? A left government recreate the whole state in just a few years and save the country from being bankrupt. This wasn’t Marxism, but it was a left wing party with really good ideas.
Well, the general form of Marxist ideology in the population is not so much. But some elements of this ideology are so strong that the Republican Party uses this model of discourse for its voters.
Have I finally met that unicorn of perfect ignorance for whom the “Trump Is a Leninist” thinkpieces were written for? I’m just dying to know what part of Marx is used by Republicans!
I called it! Though I suppose it was plain enough by the time I came across it.
Faux-populist rhetoric is not a Marx thing and Magats are absolutely not opposed to big business. It’s like Trump’s only thing that he’s a billionaire due to real estate and other related fields.
Describe “Marx’s theorem” without paraphrasing wikipedia. This is nonsensical and as an adult you’re supposed to read about the things you choose to talk about. Linnaeus lived three centuries ago, but would you throw out taxonomy? Is the scientific method outdated because Francis Bacon wouldn’t know a thing about modern science? People build on the epistomological and ontological frameworks to make a living tradition.
An ideology has to evolve over time in order to remain relevant to the generations that come and go from time to time. If you don’t do that, you will stagnate with a small group of people.
To gather more people, you have to find a common ground of the groups that are marginalized from society at that time, and you have to lead them to achieve that goal.
The word ‘Marxism’ means five different things in five different fields. You’ll need to be clearer about what exactly you feel should change.
From what I understand, the core ideas of Marxism - the ones about epistemiology, metaphysics, sociology and history - are more or less universally accepted in those fields (to the point that a student of, say, history may learn Marx’s theories as revealed truth, without even questioning them). His writings on economics are controversial, but again the core of it has remained largely unchanged.
Also, Marx thought of sociology, economics and so on as sciences, meaning that a theory is either right or wrong (or partially right). How many people believe in them has no effect on their truth value. So I don’t get what you mean by an ‘ideology that is friendly to a large part of the population or marginalized groups’.
yeah thats why we read the works of other theorists that have lived since him and have taken his ideas an updated them and applied them to new circumstances at every moment since he wrote his books, for fucks sakes most communist dont even call themselves Marxists most of us call ourselves Marxists Leninist. Also if u actually read anything Marks wrote u would realize that while specifics are almost all outdated the ideas themselves and methods of analyzing and understanding things hold up just fine.
Marxism is a living, constantly evolving science, so it very much adapts with the times.
It’s best to think of Marx and Engels as the Newton of political science and sociology… did they get everything right, and should we treat their words as gospel? Of course not, but their central tenets and ideas stand, and they built a solid foundation for others to build on.
We can recommend a lot of works on how marxism has evolved as a science, and how modern marxists view class struggle in the 21st century.
This miiiight be an artifact from taking a picture from a moving car. A narrow pole in the foreground would become a wider blur due to the shutter time. It doesn’t seem like that happened here, there’s not horizontal streak.
Google maps also used to do this when stitching together multiple photos from the multiple cameras to get a panorama picture. It just fades the sides of the pictures and overlays them, and you get something like this.
It looks like the bricks on the top front of the building and the sign are photoshopped in
If you zoom in, those bricks are much bigger than the bricks around the garage doors and on the side, and the transition is rounded and happens in the middle of bricks. Whoever made this must not have masked out the pole (assume that’s also legit) because the brick texture and the bottom of the sign go over it
The “collapse” is a cope. A non denominational version of the rapture. It being “all over” is something people dream of because oblivion also means an end to pain.
Society won’t “collapse”.
Life will just get shittier and shittier in such a slow, gradual manner that most people won’t even realise it is happening. More work for less pay, less rights and freedoms, more repression, more wars, etc.
I think people tend to underestimate human resilience. To use the bronze age collapses as an example, sure, it brought down existing polities, the names drawn on maps changed.
But most of the cities were still there. People still lived in them. Does changing the rulers while keeping a similar paradigm ultimately matter that much? I’m reminded of accounts of the experiences of some Afghanis during the American intervention there. First they paid their taxes to the Taliban, then the govt we set up, then the Taliban again. shrug.
While supply chains could be disrupted, any time that happens it opens the door for another profitable enterprise to rise in its place. People suffer, some die, but life goes on. If the knowledge of how to build those supply chains is still around, it will be done, and swiftly.
If a group blew up a hydro dam, or other electrical source plant and also destroyed water stations, you would see local society and ecomony crumble quickly. People aren’t prepared, like they may have been in the 50s for food/water supply, etc. You would have chaos. So an enemy would just need to coordinated that across cities…its why have web/internet enabled infrastructure is a security diaster waiting to happen.
The people would remain though, and begin to rebuild unless the attacks were extremely broad and sustained for a long duration. No power or water stations in Gaza any more, but they are still hanging on in very dire conditions.
People are resilient. And adaptable. Just because we do things one way that works for us does not mean that one way is an absolute requirement.
Not that there wouldn’t be chaos, suffering and casualties. Just that it wouldn’t be the end.
I think that’s a little sensationalist. For instance, we do find the ruins of ancient cities in archeological digs and can link them to where we do have surviving records of their appearance in stories.
Your point is taken, though. I do, however, remain convinced that people massively overestimate how many people would die in some form of collapse though, unless it somewhat swiftly took down major portions of the Earth’s biosphere.
I think this is the more accurate take. I think the world at large is more likely headed toward a world in chains or world war 3 disaster scenario more so than anything.
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