It’s one thing to hear the warnings of scientists my entire life on the ravages of climate change. It is entirely another to see it play out in real life. News of fire and destruction will become as commonplace as school shootings in less than 10 years. Living in Hell will be normal soon.
With the same people who block action on gun violence now offering thoughts and prayers to climate change victims and saying that anyone trying to solve the problem is just politicizing a tragedy.
Based on my own training in environmental science, I can say that virtually all phenomena in nature have multiple, interacting causes. To synthesize what I’ve read about the wildfires on Maui, the direct factors were: invasive grass species which have taken over much of the land area after the sugar cane and pineapple plantations shut down decades ago; a flash drought on the island; and high winds from Hurricane Dora. A flash drought means it’s hot and dry enough to pull moisture out of the plants and the ground, so the conditions on the island were very, very dry. The dry grasses burn quickly and intensely, and the fire was fanned by 70-80MPH winds from the hurricane passing by in the Pacific Ocean.
Climate change has a role in making flash droughts much more likely, and more intense. It also helps fuel bigger, stronger hurricanes. Thus, a flash drought coinciding with a hurricane is much more likely due to it.
It is entirely another to see it play out in real life. News of fire and destruction will become as commonplace as school shootings in less than 10 years
In Australia someone’s house burnt down the other day. I haven’t heard of any bushfires this year, but that house burning down sure pushed us ahead of the school shooting count for the year.
As an iced tea enjoyer, who has been to almost 40 states that is absolutely untrue. I’ve never been to any restaurant that serves sweet tea but does not serve unsweetened as well. Some places especially in the north don’t consistently have either, but in my experience, if they have one they always have the other
Nope. Plenty of places in the midwest only carry unsweet and “flavored”, not regular sweet tea. The flavor is usually extra sweet fruit flavored syrup like raspberry or peach.
Okay fair enough, I haven’t been to many Midwestern states, especially rural areas of those states. I was more referring to places carrying only sweet tea and not unsweet
I have been all over the continental United States of America, except California, Washington, Arizona, Nevada, and that other state up there between California and Washington that I always think is Vermont, driving a truck and have literally never been to a place that had sweet tea but not unsweet.
I’ve seen a few the other way around, but that was in New England, about as far from sweet tea culture as you can get.
Maybe a gas station or a fast food joint that use the syrups instead of brewed, but you don’t want to drink that shit
I live in GA, where if you order tea it will be defaulted to sweet tea. However, I have never seen a place that doesn’t have unsweet - you just have to order it that way.
They usually have the milk on hand for cooking, or just the kids menu. If my family of 4 can easily go through 2 gallons a week, I can’t imagine a resteraunt having problems using up milk before it goes bad unless they over-purchase
I think it’s a high fructose corn syrup joke, but that’s more like squeezing all the sugar out of a cob of corn and pretending it’s juice concentrate in my mind.
What’s wrong with water? I usually just get water and ask for lemon slices to squeeze into it. Which is a game changer and they always have on hand because of the alcoholic drinks lmao
Afaik, the only other options besides what you listed for beverages anywhere is milk, coffee and tea. And depending where you get them, the coffee and tea may as well just be sugar (or aspartame) too.
Well, coming from a tropical country to the US was a disappointment there. I used to be able to get a variety of freshly squeezed juices almost anywhere, and the only thing they serve around here are bottled OJ’s that barely taste like orange. It’s not even like there’s a limited variety at the grocery store, it’s just not a thing…
Most juice has a lot of sugar. The ones that don’t don’t generally taste that good.
But bottle OJ tasting like shit is a real thing, they have to do so much to it to get it to last for more than a week on the shelf that all the flavor is sucked out of it.
Yeah no added sugar. The juice generally contains enough sugar on it’s own. Fruit juice is about as nutritious as a soda. You’re taking the sweet part of the fruit and leaving behind the fiber and other nutrients.
Sugar is sugar, HFCS found in sodas and juice with added sugars is more concentrated, but your body still sees it and treats it as sugar.
Which it also just happens to see as something to hoard because for our entire evolutionary timeline sugar was a rare resource to be had. It wasn’t until the industrial revolution that we began being able to have sugar whenever and however we wanted. Which on the timeline of evolution is nothing but a blimp, a speck of sand.
Different kinds of sugar are all sugar when they get to your gut. Anything beyond “the body treats this like sugar” is just a pissing contest.
When you juice something, you’re leaving 95% of the nutrients in the fruit, extracting the sugar water, and telling yourself you’re drinking healthy. That’s just not the case. The meat of the fruit is where that stuff is at. The fact that some of it makes it in to the juice is incidental. It would be better to drink a glass of water and eat the orange, than to juice the orange. Unless you then throw the juice away and just eat what’s left of the orange. That’s probably the best thing.
Different kinds of sugar are all sugar when they get to your gut.
Nope fruits are high in fructose while sucrose, aka table sugar, is 50:50 glucose and fructose. Fruit has the same or even worse makeup sugar-wise as HFCS, glucose can be used pretty much directly by the body while fructose needs to be processed by the liver, into fat. Evolutionary speaking that makes a lot of sense as when there’s a lot of fruit around it’s summer and you need to fatten up.
Real fruit vs. juice is a matter of fibre and satisfaction from chewing, it’s way easier to overdrink than to overeat fruit.
Where I come from we just take the meat of the fruit and blend it with milk or water (and yes, we call that juice), I you have never try it, go get a ripe mango, blend it with milk and you’ll have a delicious smootie, you can use water but imh milk is superior for that use case.
Of cours that is no possible with oranges for example, but there a aloooooot mor fruits than oranges.
If you ever have the oportunity to have some guayaba-milk-juice, don’t pass it up, the shit is the nectar of the gods.
You’re trading HFCS for plain old sugar. Most fruits are approximately 50/50 fructose and glucose, while HFCS is between 42% and 55% fructose, with the balance being glucose.
Chemically and biologically, they are basically the same.
Juice is still pretty sugary, even fresh squeezed. They naturally have sugars in them which is why they are sweet. While a lot of premade juice also includes added sugars. There was a study posted somewhere on Lemmy not too long ago that showed most American’s sugar intake came from fruit juices and not sodas as previously thought.
’ll have a number 6 with extra dip. Big Smoke: I’ll have two number 9s, a number 9 large, a number 6 with extra dip, a number 7, two number 45s, one with cheese, and a large soda. Make that diet, I’m trying to watch my weight.
Surprise surprise, her doctorate is in psychology. She works with special ed kids and I’m guessing she’s either decided or parents are self-reporting that they’re “vaccine injured.” 🙄 What an asshole.
“My little Johnny was a perfect student until the medical establishment gave him a learning disability!”
This seems to overlap psychologically with the “my child can do no wrong” crowd, the ones who blame teachers, coaches, librarians, video games, sugar, red dye, gluten, participation trophies, or pretty much anyone or anything except themselves for their child’s problems. The common thread is a profound lack of self-awareness.
On the anti-vaccination issue, there’s also a hefty dose of misinformation from people who are making money from selling the idea to gullible people, but there’s definitely a certain psychological profile who falls for it most often.
I feel like a lot of these parents are also doing the insidious thing of trying to justify that it isn’t “their genes” that are responsible. Like having Autism or something in your family is a dirty secret and “taints” their “family line”.
They’re kind of right. LLMs are not general intelligence and there’s not much evidence to suggest that LLMs will lead to general intelligence. A lot of the hype around AI is manufactured by VCs and companies that stand to make a lot of money off of the AI branding/hype.
I believe they were implying that a lot of the people who say “it’s not real AI it’s just an LLM” are simply parroting what they’ve heard.
Which is a fair point, because AI has never meant “general AI”, it’s an umbrella term for a wide variety of intelligence like tasks as performed by computers.
Autocorrect on your phone is a type of AI, because it compares what words you type against a database of known words, compares what you typed to those words via a “typo distance”, and adds new words to it’s database when you overrule it so it doesn’t make the same mistake.
It’s like saying a motorcycle isn’t a real vehicle because a real vehicle has two wings, a roof, and flies through the air filled with hundreds of people.
Which is a fair point, because AI has never meant “general AI”, it’s an umbrella term for a wide variety of intelligence like tasks as performed by computers.
Do you mean in the everyday sense or the academic sense? I think this is why there’s such grumbling around the topic. Academically speaking that may be correct, but I think for the general public, AI has been more muddled and presented in a much more robust, general AI way, especially in fiction. Look at any number of scifi movies featuring forms of AI, whether it’s the movie literally named AI or Terminator or Blade Runner or more recently Ex Machina.
Each of these technically may be presenting general AI, but for the public, it’s just AI. In a weird way, this discussion is sort of an inversion of what one usually sees between academics and the public. Generally academics are trying to get the public not to use technical terms loosely, yet here some of the public is trying to get some of the tech/academic sphere to not, at least as they think, use technical terms loosely.
Arguably it’s from a misunderstanding, but if anyone should understand the dynamics of language, you’d hope it would be those trying to calibrate machines to process language.
Well, that’s the issue at the heart of it I think.
How much should we cater our choice of words to those who know the least?
I’m not an academic, and I don’t work with AI, but I do work with computers and I know the distinction between AI and general AI.
I have a little irritation at the theme, given I work in the security industry and it’s now difficult to use the more common abbreviation for cryptography without getting Bitcoin mixed up in everything.
All that aside, the point is that people talking about how it’s not “real AI” often come across as people who don’t know what they’re talking about, which was the point of the image.
All that aside, the point is that people talking about how it’s not “real AI” often come across as people who don’t know what they’re talking about, which was the point of the image.
The funny part is, as I mention in my comment, isn’t that how both parties to these conversations feel? The problem is they’re talking past each other, but the worst part is, arguably the more educated participant should be more apt to recognize this and clarify or better yet, ask for clarification so they can see where the disconnect is emerging to improve communication.
Also, let’s remember that it’s not the laypeople describing the technology in general personified terms like “learning” or “hallucinating”, which furthers some of the grumbling.
Well, I don’t generally expect an academic level of discourse out of image macros found on the Internet.
Usually when I see people talking about it, I do see people making clarifying comments and asking questions like you describe. Sorta like when I described how AI is an umbrella term.
I’m not sure I’d say that learning and hallucinating are personified terms. We see both of those out of any organism complex enough to have something that works like a nervous system, for example.
I’ve often seen people on Lemmy confidently state that current “AI” thinks and learns exactly like humans and that LLMs work exactly like human brains, etc.
Are you sure this wasn’t just people stating that when it comes to training on art there is no functional difference in the sense that both humans and AI need to see art to make it?
Weird, I don’t think I’ve ever seen that even remotely claimed.
Closest I think I’ve come is the argument that legally, AI learning systems are similar to how humans learn, namely storing information about information.
It’s usually some rant about “brains are just probability machines as well” or “every artists learns from thousands of pictures of other artists, just as image generator xy does”.
People who don’t understand or use AI think it’s less capable than it is and claim it’s not AGI (which no one else was saying anyways) and try to make it seem like it’s less valuable because it’s “just using datasets to extrapolate, it doesn’t actually think.”
Guess what you’re doing right now when you “think” about something? That’s right, you’re calling up the thousands of experiences that make up your “training data” and using it to extrapolate on what actions you should take based on said data.
You know how to parallel park because you’ve assimilated road laws, your muscle memory, and the knowledge of your cars wheelbase into a single action. AI just doesn’t have sapience and therefore cannot act without input, but the process it does things with is functionally similar to how we make decisions, the difference is the training data gets input within seconds as opposed to being built over a lifetime.
If you’ve ever actually used any of these algorithms it becomes painfully obvious they do not “think”. Give it a task slightly more complex/nuanced than what it has been trained on and you will see it draws obviously false conclusions that would be obviously wrong had any thought actual taken place. Generalization is not something they do, which is a fundamental part of human problem solving.
That’s true of any technology. As someone who is a programmer, has studied computer science, and does understand LLMs, this represents a massive leap in capability. Is it AGI? No. Is it a potential paradigm shift? Yes. This isn’t pure hype like Crypto was, there is a core of utility here.
Yeah I studied CS and work in IT Ops, I’m not claiming this shit is Cortana from Halo, but it’s also not NFTs. If you can’t see the value you haven’t used it for anything serious, cause it’s taking jobs left and right.
Crypto was never pure hype either. Decentralized currency is an important thing to have, it’s just shitty it turned into some investment speculative asset rather than a way to buy drugs online without the glowies looking
Pretty sure the meme format is for something you get extremely worked up about and want to passionately tell someone, even in inappropriate moments, but no one really gives a fuck
Depends on what you mean by general intelligence. I’ve seen a lot of people confuse Artificial General Intelligence and AI more broadly. Even something as simple as the K-nearest neighbor algorithm is artificial intelligence, as this is a much broader topic than AGI.
An artificial general intelligence (AGI) is a hypothetical type of intelligent agent which, if realized, could learn to accomplish any intellectual task that human beings or animals can perform. Alternatively, AGI has been defined as an autonomous system that surpasses human capabilities in the majority of economically valuable tasks.
If some task can be represented through text, an LLM can, in theory, be trained to perform it either through fine-tuning or few-shot learning. The question then is how general do LLMs have to be for one to consider them to be AGIs, and there’s no hard metric for that question.
I can’t pass the bar exam like GPT-4 did, and it also has a lot more general knowledge than me. Sure, it gets stuff wrong, but so do humans. We can interact with physical objects in ways that GPT-4 can’t, but it is catching up. Plus Stephen Hawking couldn’t move the same way that most people can either and we certainly wouldn’t say that he didn’t have general intelligence.
I’m rambling but I think you get the point. There’s no clear threshold or way to calculate how “general” an AI has to be before we consider it an AGI, which is why some people argue that the best LLMs are already examples of general intelligence.
Depends on what you mean by general intelligence. I’ve seen a lot of people confuse Artificial General Intelligence and AI more broadly. Even something as simple as the K-nearest neighbor algorithm is artificial intelligence, as this is a much broader topic than AGI.
Well, I mean the ability to solve problems we don’t already have the solution to. Can it cure cancer? Can it solve the p vs np problem?
And by the way, wikipedia tags that second definition as dubious as that is the definition put fourth by OpenAI, who again, has a financial incentive to make us believe LLMs will lead to AGI.
Not only has it not been proven whether LLMs will lead to AGI, it hasn’t even been proven that AGIs are possible.
If some task can be represented through text, an LLM can, in theory, be trained to perform it either through fine-tuning or few-shot learning.
No it can’t. If the task requires the LLM to solve a problem that hasn’t been solved before, it will fail.
I can’t pass the bar exam like GPT-4 did
Exams often are bad measures of intelligence. They typically measure your ability to consume, retain, and recall facts. LLMs are very good at that.
Ask an LLM to solve a problem without a known solution and it will fail.
We can interact with physical objects in ways that GPT-4 can’t, but it is catching up. Plus Stephen Hawking couldn’t move the same way that most people can either and we certainly wouldn’t say that he didn’t have general intelligence.
The ability to interact with physical objects is very clearly not a good test for general intelligence and I never claimed otherwise.
I know the second definition was proposed by OpenAI, who obviously has a vested interest in this topic, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be a useful or informative conceptualization of AGI, after all we have to set some threshold for the amount of intelligence AI needs to display and in what areas for it to be considered an AGI. Their proposal of an autonomous system that surpasses humans in economically valuable tasks is fairly reasonable, though it’s still pretty vague and very much debatable, which is why this isn’t the only definition that’s been proposed.
Your definition is definitely more peculiar as I’ve never seen anyone else propose something like it, and it also seems to exclude humans since you’re referring to problems we can’t solve.
The next question then is what problems specifically AI would need to solve to fit your definition, and with what accuracy. Do you mean solve any problem we can throw at it? At that point we’d be going past AGI and now we’re talking about artificial superintelligence…
Not only has it not been proven whether LLMs will lead to AGI, it hasn’t even been proven that AGIs are possible.
By your definition AGI doesn’t really seem possible at all. But of course, your definition isn’t how most data scientists or people in general conceptualize AGI, which is the point of my comment. It’s very difficult to put a clear-cut line on what AGI is or isn’t, which is why there are those like you who believe it will never be possible, but there are also those who argue it’s already here.
No it can’t. If the task requires the LLM to solve a problem that hasn’t been solved before, it will fail.
Ask an LLM to solve a problem without a known solution and it will fail.
That’s simply not true. That’s the whole point of the concept of generalization in AI and what the few-shot and zero-shot metrics represent - LLMs solving problems represented in text with few or no prior examples by reasoning beyond what they saw in the training data. You can actually test this yourself by simply signing up to use ChatGPT since it’s free.
Exams often are bad measures of intelligence. They typically measure your ability to consume, retain, and recall facts. LLMs are very good at that.
So are humans. We’re also deterministic machines that output some action depending on the inputs we get through our senses, much like an LLM outputs some text depending on the inputs it received, plus as I mentioned they can reason beyond what they’ve seen in the training data.
The ability to interact with physical objects is very clearly not a good test for general intelligence and I never claimed otherwise.
I wasn’t accusing you of anything, I was just pointing out that there are many things we can argue require some degree of intelligence, even physical tasks. The example in the video requires understanding the instructions, the environment, and how to move the robotic arm in order to complete new instructions.
I find LLMs and AGI interesting subjects and was hoping to have a conversation on the nuances of these topics, but it’s pretty clear that you just want to turn this into some sort of debate to “debunk” AGI, so I’ll be taking my leave.
I agree, there is no formal definition for AGI so a bit silly to discuss that really. Funnily enough I inadvertantly wrote the nearest neighbour algorithm to model swarming behavour back when I was an undergrad and didn’t even consider it rudimentary AI.
Can I ask what your take on the possibility of neural networks understanding what they are doing is?
Yes. But the more advanced LLMs get, the less it matters in my opinion. I mean of you have two boxes, one of which is actually intelligent and the other is “just” a very advanced parrot - it doesn’t matter, given they produce the same output. I’m sure that already LLMs can surpass some humans, at least at certain disciplines. In a couple years the difference of a parrot-box and something actually intelligent will only merely show at the very fringes of massively complicated tasks. And that is way beyond the capability threshold that allows to do nasty stuff with it, to shed a dystopian light on it.
I mean of you have two boxes, one of which is actually intelligent and the other is “just” a very advanced parrot - it doesn’t matter, given they produce the same output.
You’re making a huge assumption; that an advanced parrot produces the same output as something with general intelligence. And I reject that assumption. Something with general intelligence can produce something novel. An advanced parrot can only repeat things it’s already heard.
LLMs can’t produce anything without being prompted by a human. There’s nothing intelligent about them. Imo it’s an abuse of the word intelligence since they have exactly zero autonomy.
I use LLMs to create things no human has likely ever said and it’s great at it, for example
‘while juggling chainsaws atop a unicycle made of marshmallows, I pondered the existential implications of the colour blue on a pineapples dream of becoming a unicorn’
When I ask it to do the same using neologisms the output is even better, one of the words was exquimodal which I then asked for it to invent an etymology and it came up with one that combined excuistus and modial to define it as something beyond traditional measures which fits perfectly into the sentence it created.
You can’t ask a parrot to invent words with meaning and use them in context, that’s a step beyond repetition - of course it’s not full dynamic self aware reasoning but it’s certainly not being a parrot
If you ask it to make up nonsense and it does it then you can’t get angry lol. I normally use it to help analyse code or write sections of code, sometimes to teach me how certain functions or principles work - it’s incredibly good at that, I do need to verify it’s doing the right thing but I do that with my code too and I’m not always right either.
As a research tool it’s great at taking a basic dumb description and pointing me to the right things to look for, especially for things with a lot of technical terms and obscure areas.
And yes they can occasionally make mistakes or invent things but if you ask properly and verify what you’re told then it’s pretty reliable, far more so than a lot of humans I know.
The difference is that you can throw enough bad info at it that it will start paroting that instead of factual information because it doesn’t have the ability to criticize the information it receives whereas an human can be told that the sky is purple with orange dots a thousand times a day and it will always point at the sky and tell you “No.”
To make the analogy actually comparable the human in question would need to be learning about it for the first time (which is analogous to the training data) and in that case you absolutely could convince the small child of that. Not only would they believe it if told enough times by an authority figure, you could convince them that the colors we see are different as well, or something along the lines of giving them bad data.
A fully trained AI will tell you that you’re wrong if you told it the sky was orange, it’s not going to just believe you and start claiming it to everyone else it interacts with. It’s been trained to know the sky is blue and won’t deviate from that outside of having its training data modified. Which is like brainwashing an adult human, in which case yeah you absolutely could have them convinced the sky is orange. We’ve got plenty of information on gaslighting, high control group and POW psychology to back that up too.
Feed LLMs all new data that’s false and it will regurgitate it as being true even if it had previously been fed information that contradicts it, it doesn’t make the difference between the two because there’s no actual analysis of what’s presented. Heck, even without intentionally feeding them false info, LLMs keep inventing fake information.
Feed an adult new data that’s false and it’s able to analyse it and make deductions based on what they know already.
We don’t compare it to a child or to someone that was brainwashed because it makes no sense to do so and it’s completely disingenuous. “Compare it to the worst so it has a chance to win!” Hell no, we need to compare it to the people that are references in their field because people will now be using LLMs as a reference!
Ha ha yeah humans sure are great at not being convinced by the opinions of other people, that’s why religion and politics are so simple and society is so sane and reasonable.
Helen Keller would belive you it’s purple.
If humans didn’t have eyes they wouldn’t know the colour of the sky, if you give an ai a colour video feed of outside then it’ll be able to tell you exactly what colour the sky is using a whole range of very accurate metrics.
People do that too, actually we do it a lot more than we realise. Studies of memory for example have shown we create details that we expect to be there to fill in blanks and that we convince ourselves we remember them even when presented with evidence that refutes it.
A lot of the newer implementations use more complex methods of fact verification, it’s not easy to explain but essentially it comes down to the weight you give different layers. GPT 5 is already training and likely to be out around October but even before that we’re seeing pipelines using LLM to code task based processes - an LLM is bad at chess but could easily install stockfish in a VM and beat you every time.
This is one of the worst rebuttals I’ve seen today because you aren’t addressing the fact that the LLM has zero awareness of anything. It’s not an intelligence and never will be without additional technologies built on top of it.
Why would I rebut that? I’m simply arguing that they don’t need to be ‘intelligent’ to accurately determine the colour of the sky and that if you expect an intelligence to know the colour of the sky without ever seeing it then you’re being absurd.
The way the comment I responded to was written makes no sense to reality and I addressed that.
Again as I said in other comments you’re arguing that an LLM is not will smith in I Robot and or Scarlett Johansson playing the role of a usb stick but that’s not what anyone sane is suggesting.
A fork isn’t great for eating soup, neither is a knife required but that doesn’t mean they’re not incredibly useful eating utensils.
Try thinking of an LLM as a type of NLP or natural language processing tool which allows computers to use normal human text as input to perform a range of tasks. It’s hugely useful and unlocks a vast amount of potential but it’s not going to slap anyone for joking about it’s wife.
Even if LLM’s can’t be said to have ‘true understanding’ (however you’re choosing to define it), there is very little to suggest they should be able to understand predict the correct response to a particular context, abstract meaning, and intent with what primitive tools they were built with.
If there’s some as-yet uncrossed threshold to a bare-minimum ‘understanding’, it’s because we simply don’t have the language to describe what that threshold is or know when it has been crossed. If the assumption is that ‘understanding’ cannot be a quality granted to a transformer-based model -or even a quality granted to computers generally- then we need some other word to describe what LLM’s are doing, because ‘predicting the next-best word’ is an insufficient description for what would otherwise be a slight-of-hand trick.
There’s no doubt that there’s a lot of exaggerated hype around these models and LLM companies, but some of these advancements published in 2022 surprised a lot of people in the field, and their significance shouldn’t be slept on.
Certainly don’t trust the billion-dollar companies hawking their wares, but don’t ignore the technology they’re building, either.
Even if LLM’s can’t be said to have ‘true understanding’ (however you’re choosing to define it), there is very little to suggest they should be able to understand predict the correct response to a particular context, abstract meaning, and intent with what primitive tools they were built with.
Did you mean “shouldn’t”? Otherwise I’m very confused by your response
There’s no reason to expect a program that calculates the probability of the next most likely word in a sentence should be able to do anything more than string together an incoherent sentence, let alone correctly answer even an arbitrary question
It’s like using a description for how covalent bonds are formed as an explanation for how it is you know when you need to take a shit.
You are best off thinking of LLMs as highly advanced auto correct. They don’t know what words mean. When they output a response to your question the only process that occurred was “which words are most likely to come next”.
That’s only true on a very basic level, I understand that Turings maths is complex and unintuitive even more so than calculus but it’s a very established fact that relatively simple mathematical operations can have emergent properties when they interact to have far more complexity than initially expected.
The same way the giraffe gets its spots the same way all the hardware of our brain is built, a strand of code is converted into physical structures that interact and result in more complex behaviours - the actual reality is just math, and that math is almost entirely just probability when you get down to it. We’re all just next word guessing machines.
We don’t guess words like a Markov chain instead use a rather complex token system in our brain which then gets converted to words, LLMs do this too - that’s how they can learn about a subject in one language then explain it in another.
Calling an LLM predictive text is a fundamental misunderstanding of reality, it’s somewhat true on a technical level but only when you understand that predicting the next word can be a hugely complex operation which is the fundamental math behind all human thought also.
Plus they’re not really just predicting one word ahead anymore, they do structured generation much like how image generators do - first they get the higher level principles to a valid state then propagate down into structure and form before making word and grammar choices. You can manually change values in the different layers and see the output change, exploring the latent space like this makes it clear that it’s not simply guessing the next word but guessing the next word which will best fit into a required structure to express a desired point - I don’t know how other people are coming up with sentences but that feels a lot like what I do
LLMs don’t “learn” they literally don’t have the capacity to “learn”. We train them on an insane amount of text and then the LLMs job is to produce output that looks like that text. That’s why when you attempt to correct it nothing happens. It can’t learn, it doesn’t have the capacity to.
Humans aren’t “word guessing machines”. Humans produce language with intent and meaning. This is why you and I can communicate. We use language to represent things. When I say “Tree” you know what that is because it’s the word we use to describe an object we all know about. LLMs don’t know what a tree is. They can use “tree” in a sentence correctly but they don’t know what it means. They can even translate it to another language but they still don’t know what “tree” means. What they know is generating text that looks like what they were trained on.
It depends a lot on how we perceive “intelligence”. It’s a lot more vague of a term than most, so people have very different views of it. Some people might have the idea of it meaning the response to stimuli & the output (language or art or any other form) being indistinguishable from humans. But many people may also agree that whales/dolphins have the same level of, or superior, “intelligence” to humans. The term is too vague to really prescribe with confidence, and more importantly people often use it to mean many completely different concepts (“intelligence” as a measurable/quantifiable property of either how quickly/efficiently a being can learn or use knowledge or more vaguely its “capacity to reason”, “intelligence” as the idea of “consciousness” in general, “intelligence” to refer to amount of knowledge/experience one currently has or can memorize, etc.)
In computer science “artificial intelligence” has always simply referred to a program making decisions based on input. There was never any bar to reach for how “complex” it had to be to be considered AI. That’s why minecraft zombies or shitty FPS bots are “AI”, or a simple algorithm made to beat table games are “AI”, even though clearly they’re not all that smart and don’t even “learn”.
Even sentience is on a scale. Even cows or dogs or parrots or crows are sentient, but not as much as we are. Computers are not sentient yet, but one day they will be. And then soon after they will be more sentient than us. They’ll be able to see their own brains working, analyze their own thoughts and emotions(?) in real time and be able to achieve a level of self reflection and navel gazing undreamed of by human minds! :D
But also the people who seem to think we need a magic soul to perform useful work is way way too high.
The main problem is Idiots seem to have watched one too many movies about robots with souls and gotten confused between real life and fantasy - especially shitty journalists way out their depth.
This big gotcha ‘they don’t live upto the hype’ is 100% people who heard ‘ai’ and thought of bad Will Smith movies. LLMs absolutely live upto the actual sensible things people hoped and have exceeded those expectations, they’re also incredibly good at a huge range of very useful tasks which have traditionally been considered as requiring intelligence but they’re not magically able everything, of course they’re not that’s not how anyone actually involved in anything said they would work or expected them to work.
A social network that was formed as a fork of lemmy, before lemmy had really entered the fediverse (tho they were planning to). Both Lemmy and Hexbear had communists among their founders, but the Hexbear devs found it more… Central to their objectives. When Lemmy federated, Hexbear didn’t. It planned to initially, but ended up being pretty satisfied of being a small, yet centralized social network, basically a communist Reddit. But the idea of joining the Fediverse appeared tempting once again with the boom that happened on Mastodon when the muskrat ate the bird, and to a greater extent when Reddit changed their API policy and lost a lot of the user’s trust, causing many redditors to move to Lemmy.
Hexbear devs then worked to essentially make it a Lemmy instance, but there were always disagreements about who to federate with. They first federated with Lemmygrad and Lemmy .ml. Lemmy .world quickly blocked them. They temporarily federated with sh .itjust .works, but this wasn’t well received on either side, so this was soon undone.
Ideology wise, pretty much everyone on Hexbear is some kind of communist. However, altho the “tankie”, pro-russia type is often seen, it’s not that homogeneous (there are even anarchist channels over there), arguably less than lemmygrad.
Everything you said was accurate except the pro Russia = tankie stuff. I just want to be able to say that the kulaks deserved and such without being tied to capitalist trash like Putin…
Yeah, I didn’t mean to say that all tankies are pro current Russia, but just that there is a specific type of tankies that is, and these are often the annoying ones.
I’ve actually yet to see anybody you’d call a tankie being pro Putin or pro current Russian government. What people are pro is Russia acting as a counter to NATO and facilitating multipolarity.
I think people are thrown off by anti NATO stance. I almost don’t blame people for confusing NATO opposition for Russia support, especially during on ongoing Russian invasion, which does seem to justify NATO’s existence. Nevermind NATO’s history of imperialist action, people are very tied up in the Ukraine war and are unwilling to cede any ground to anything that may appear even a little soft on Russia.
My issue with hexbearians was that in every single thread I saw them in they would do nothing but whatabout regardless of the context. I understand they may have good points about certain things and to their credit some had very well written and informative comments but most of the time they weren’t directly relevant to the topic. It could be a loud minority but it doesn’t change the fact it’s annoying to see huge threads of whatabout arguments all the time by them.
You know whataboutism isn’t an actual logical fallacy and was originally used in defense of British colonialism “well the IRA also does bad things” right?
Again, my point was that people should focus on themselves and what their countries are doing. Your “well the IRA also does bad things” is precisely the kind of deflection I’m arguing against.
In my view, having consistent moral standards is a prerequisite for having an honest discussion on any topic. If anything, the actual whataboutism is pointing fingers at other countries while refusing to acknowledge what your own country is doing. People should focus on fixing problems at home and holding their own governments accountable first and foremost because that’s where they have most agency.
This is what people who you accuse of whataboutism point out. Focusing on countries you don’t like and talking about how bad they are when your own country does the same things simply serves to deflect attention and to create the impression that your own society is somehow better and more enlightened. This is how the west often justifies the atrocities it commits.
To be fair one country was invaded by the other. It is entirely understandable to back the party that was invaded by the other nation especially when that nation has a recent history of imperialism.
Last I checked, what actually happened was that Ukraine was plunged into a civil war after US ran a coup in 2104 that overthrew the democratically elected government.
Russia was invited into the conflict by LPR and DPR which it recognized independence of. This follows the precedent NATO set in Yugoslavia where it recognized breakaway regions and intervened on their behalf.
I don’t need to edit anything, the LPR and DPR were every bit as legitimate as the regions that broke away from Yugoslavia. What exactly are you claiming is the difference between the two scenarios?
That’s a bold claim to make given neither region were their own nation or were historically Russian or Ukrainian.
Yugoslavia was formed if multiple countries untied by socialism. The LPR and DPR as breakaway units are not the sane and seem to have been very heavily influenced by Russia. That’s the same imperialistic Russia that keeps invading foreign lands to seize them since Putin was elected.
The political entity was created by the USSR. The nation has existed for centuries. Do you know the difference between a nation and a state? Would you deny that Kurdistan exists as a nation?
Which are abstractions themselves so we are in fact discussing the concept if a nation vs a state. Before 1917 people recognized an area called Ukraine populated by Ukrainian people. LDR and DPR do not have that history in fact the Russian element is there due to the legacy of racist policies of the USSR that wanted these areas to have a Russian dominated population so they moved them there.
The LDR and DPR aren’t nations like Ukraine has been for centuries and the attempt to cast them as legitimate breakaway areas is just Kremlin propaganda to justify traditional Russian imperialism.
You’re just engaging in sophistry here. LPR and DPR are two well defined regions of the current state known as Ukraine. This is exactly the same situation as Yugoslavia. Every argument you’ve made equally applies to regions of Yugoslavia that separated. Russia just followed NATO precedent intervening on the behalf of the regions whose independence was recognized by Russia. You can keep doing mental gymnastics here all you like, but that’s the reality of the situation.
No they aren’t the same, if they were the same you could find documentation about their history. For fucks sake if they were equivalent the regions and people would have names like Serbians did while Yugoslavia existed.
There no gymnastics being done on my part. You have just uncritically accepted the imperialist propaganda from the Kremlin. Weird that you are on Lemmy.ML and are overtly supporting fascism…
What are you even talking about here, you’re saying there is no history of the people who were part of Yugoslavia?
The only one uncritically accepting imperialist propaganda here is you buddy. You’re the one who is supporting literal self described fascist. Maybe do some self reflection on that.
No Im saying the DPR and ZLPR aren’t nations with people tied to that nation like Ukranians have been for centuries. Those areas were Ukrainian until the Soviets moved ethnic Russians there to make it Russian dominant.
Im not supporting any fascists but you are backing Putin who has an undeniable history of imperialism and fascism.
You’re just showing complete and utter ignorance of Slavic history here. However, even in your ramblings you admit that people currently living in LRP and DPR (which you evidently can’t spell even), are predominantly of Russian ethnicity and hence want to be part of Russia.
Im not supporting any fascists but you are backing Putin who has an undeniable history of imperialism and fascism.
You very clearly support a fascist regime that took power in a violent coup in Ukraine in 2014. Here’s western media reporting on your friends
Tell me more how you are the educated one when you are spitting fascist propaganda. The fact that people want to be part of Russia does not give Russia the right to invade and steal children.
While both nations have far right neo nazis only one government, Russia, has granted them authority and promotes fascism abroad.
Last I checked I didn’t. I don’t support the GOP. I’m not a fan of Putin or frankly any Russian government. I’m not a fan of Ukraine’s government either but they were clearly invaded as a result of Putin’s imperialistic desires.
Now if you support the GOP or the Kremlin you might be allied with fascists. There is a weird history of fascists being supported by Marxist-Leninists
No, Ukraine was invaded because of NATO expansion. In fact, Stoltenberg has now publicly acknowledged that Putin made clear to NATO in a draft treaty before the war that it could avert it if NATO agreed not to keep enlarging. But NATO rejected the offer.
Then lastly on Sweden. First of all, it is historic that now Finland is member of the Alliance. And we have to remember the background. The background was that President Putin declared in the autumn of 2021, and actually sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement. That was what he sent us. And was a pre-condition for not invade Ukraine. Of course we didn’t sign that.
The opposite happened. He wanted us to sign that promise, never to enlarge NATO. He wanted us to remove our military infrastructure in all Allies that have joined NATO since 1997, meaning half of NATO, all the Central and Eastern Europe, we should remove NATO from that part of our Alliance, introducing some kind of B, or second class membership. We rejected that.
So he went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders.
So maybe stop lying and stop supporting the fascist regime in Ukraine that your government installed there in a violent coup.
These are the people you are allied with, and if that doesn’t give you a pause then what else is there to say about you as a person www.youtube.com/watch?v=TojapQRUhzs
You’re literally the one who is supporting actual overt fascists here. I love how you still haven’t even acknowledged this fact. You are utterly morally bankrupt. Maybe go do a bit of self reflection on the fact that your views perfectly align with people who tattoo themselves in swastikas.
You mean like the founder of The Wagner Group? He has SS logos on his neck. It’s almost as if both sides have some fascists but only Russia has one in the highest office.
Last I checked the wagner group isn’t part of the Russian government, but keep on lying since that’s all you’ve been doing here this whole time. Show me a single actual Russian government official who claims to be a fascist. Meanwhile, entire Ukrainian political elite are openly fascist as well as all your nazi friends in US who support them. I’ve provided you with plenty of sources clearly showing this to be the case. Ukraine doesn’t have some fascists, it’s run by a fascist regime, and the fact that you won’t even acknowledge this says everything I need to know about you as a person. Zelensky being Jewish doesn’t mean anything. Next, thing you’ll tell me Israel isn’t a fascist apartheid state because it’s run by Jews. You are so lost.
You are allied with literal self described fascists and you openly champion their cause.
They aren’t part of the government they just are regularly hired by them, are staffed at the top levels with Kremlin loyalists and carry out the Kremlin’s goals.
Suuuure they totally aren’t Russian.
Again Putin himself is advocating fascism and all the fascists seem allied with Russia on this issue.
Maybe you are completely confused what fascism is? After all you are mentally deficient enough to buy into Leninism.
They’re a PMC, and fascism isn’t the ideology of the PMC. Meanwhile, official battalions like azov are openly fascist, and fascists are part of the actual government in Ukraine. The fact that you keep trying to equate the two shows that you’re an utterly morally bankrupt liar.
Also, nowhere does Putin advocate for fascism. Stop lying. I know what fascism is, but either you don’t or you just lie. And I’m done talking to you nazi. Bye.
This is really a non-sequitur but I have zero idea how people choose to upvote it downvote anymore. You and I were in agreement and somehow I got upvoted and you got downvoted? I don’t get it
There was an interesting writeup from someone on hexbear as to why they opposed the war in Ukraine. It was fascinating reading such a nuanced take on the conflict that completely ignored Russia’s imperialistic attitudes that Putin displayed from the moment he took office. It was really interesting reading someone who was really well informed to a point but seemed to not see past that point.
I don’t even really think it’s that they don’t see that point, it’s that they don’t want the US intervening in any more conflicts because the US always picks that side that’s closest aligned with their own capitalist/imperial goals, and the struggle for worker solidarity is the dominant dialectical struggle they’re interested in. If the US showed any interest in assisting a socialist project be successful, they might feel more comfortable with the US’s involvement, but that’s historically not been the case (nor would that make sense in that particular dialectical materialist worldview).
They’ve beefed with a few other instances they tried federating with too such as Lemmy.ee and lemmy.blahaj.zone. Their user base tends to be a bit more abrasive than most Lemmy instances, making federation controversial even among similarly minded instances such as lemmy.blahaj.zone
Ideology wise, pretty much everyone on Hexbear is some kind of communist. However, altho the “tankie”, pro-russia type is often seen, it’s not that homogeneous (there are even anarchist channels over there), arguably less than lemmygrad.
even the anarchists are pro soviet at least lol, I love my comrades
NBCUniversal acknowledged they trimmed the trees, but they claim they trim these trees annually and it just happened to coincide with the strike:
A spokesperson for NBCUniversal confirmed to The Post that the company had pruned the trees. Universal’s confirmation was first reported by Deadline.
“We understand that the safety tree trimming of the Ficus trees we did on Barham Blvd. has created unintended challenges for demonstrators,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “That was not our intention.”
NBCUniversal is working to offer picketers shade coverage, pop-up tents and water, according to the spokesperson. The company has maintained the trees for years and prunes them annually in partnership with arborists for safety ahead of the “high-wind season,” the spokesperson said.
The city confirmed the trees are supposed to be managed by the city, the studio did not have a permit to trim them for the city, and that no permits had been issued to trim those trees in the last three years:
L.A. City Controller Kenneth Mejia said in a tweet Tuesday evening that his office is investigating the trimmings. The pruned trees are managed by the city, though businesses can obtain permits to trim trees from the city’s Bureau of Street Services, Mejia said. He added that they should be trimmed every five years.
On Wednesday morning, Mejia said the city had not issued permits for the ficus trees to be trimmed and had not issued any tree trimming permits for the location over the last three years.
The NBCUniversal spokesperson declined to comment on the controller’s statement.
Honestly they both could be lying too. People in power will harness situations for PR. It’s pretty frequently how they got into power in the first place.
Those particular trees are trimmed yearly, but NEVER in the heart of summer. It can fuck up the trees. However, they deemed the trees “salvageable” which I mean, I guess…
Not all feline vets think whisker fatigue is a real condition or cause for concern. Dr. Cathy Lund of City Kitty, a feline-only veterinary practice in Providence, R.I, questions the validity of whisker fatigue. While a cat’s whiskers do serve as very sensitive tactile sensors, she does not believe contact between whiskers and objects causes stress in cats.
Yea, me too. The article is based on inference and opinion. You actually have no idea what your cat thinks about whiskers touching the bowl.
That said, stress, for whatever reason, is a real issue of concern for cat owners and vets, Lund says.
No one is doubting this. The amount of stress this puts on that cat is what is doubted.
I can add my own anecdote to this one. One of my cat’s is fine with any bowl because he’s just very food motivated and will do anything to get to his food at feeding time. The other one, when using a more narrow bowl, would often stop eating normally and scoop out the food with a paw. Once I switched to wide flatter bowls, she scarfs it down without pause. It was clearly bothering her.
While cats vary in their preferences and tolerances, it bothers me that so many people just scoff at this idea. We’re caretakers for cats and should do our best to make their lives as reasonably comfortable and enriching as possible. And just because a cat is fine with touching things with their whiskers in some situations doesn’t mean they’re cool with it in others. Cats are often happy to have you scratch behind their ears, but only when it’s invited.
And come on, bowls are cheap. It’s not that big of an inconvenience to get them a bowl that could be more comfortable, even if they’re tolerating it now.
It happens often in media, but real scientists don’t rely on what they think animals think, instead using objective data like brain activity scans, heartbeat rates etc, often presenting pure data without a conclusion on what they think the animal feels. Those studies will then come to media, where the interviewed scientists will give their thoughts on how they interpret the results, even if it’s obvious that the animal likes/dislikes something. These also exist in media.
Edit: I also want to add that many things are straight up visibly harming the animal and you don’t even need any conclusions. For example if you house a hole-dwelling spider without enough substrate to dig, it will stop eating. This has been confirmed many times, by many owners. It doesn’t matter if it makes them uncomfortable or they feel pain from it, or they are cold, etc, because we know that they stop eating, and that’s a good enough signal that something’s bad.
So far the only actual study we have on this says it's not a real thing. Sure, some cats have different preferences but it's not like you are torturing your cat with normal bowls and need to run out and buy special ones.
If you're feeding your cat an infinite supply of dry food without a feeding schedule you have bigger things to be concerned about than whisker fatigue.
It's well documented it veterinary literature, you can believe the studies or not 🤷♀️. It's not like it kills your cat instantly, you just deal with diabetes kidney or urinary issues in the future. Not sure why someone would not try to prevent that.
In terms of parody as a whole, sure, but in cases that involve trademarks it’s huge. They completely killed the test that was set by the prior precedent case.
Yuuuup, and a lot of times the people that get parodied love it. It’s like fuck me! We made it to the point where South Park makes fun of us. Only person I know of that got pissed was Kanye but fuck that guy anyways
The best thing is he apparently actually didn’t get the fish sticks joke which, if true, makes Parker and Stone the best satirists of all time on merits.
Kanye in the show didn’t get it and thought people were calling him a gay fish. So if real Kanye didn’t get the joke, and got mad because he thought South Park was calling him a gay fish… that’s just incredible.
No. They’ve publicly said they came up with the stupid joke first, then applied it to Kanye later because he seemed like a guy that wouldn’t get the joke (and were later shown to be right).
“Do you like fish sticks?” (Pronounced like “fish dicks”)
Then, when the person said yes, they’d call them a gay fish.
The joke becomes a meme, but Kanye West doesn’t get it, despite having it explained to him. He thinks the joke is directed at him personally, and does actual scientific research to find out why people think he is a gay fish. At the end of the episode, he accepts his fate, and decides to live as a gay fish (complete with a catchy autotuned song.)
And most of the ones who arent ok with it are aware of the “Streisand effect” and know that their best course of action is to either ignore it or pretend they are ok with it and wait for everyone to move on.
The Mormon church did this when the play Book of Mormon came out! Also amazing play if you have not seen it please do!!! There is a reason it won a Tony!
If I recall, Weird Al tries to get permission for all his parodies too, just further adding to the point that people mostly are good with that kind of attention.
That he does. The only snafu he had was with Coolio for Gangster’s Paradise. Apparently the label said yes but didn’t actually check with Coolio and he wasn’t happy about it. Weird Al apologized for the mixup and they made peace with it later. Weird Al said the only star that has consistently turned him down was Prince, who didn’t find the whole parody thing funny.
Yep that one is true as well. Paul is a vegetarian and didn’t want a song about non vegetarian food. He didn’t have a problem with parody in general, just that specific instance. Geez, I know way too much trivia about Weird Al :)
George Clooney liked the show so much he wanted to be on the show but they rejected his request initially since they don’t let famous people play themselves. They in turn offered him the non-speaking role of Stan’s gay dog. Clooney showed up and gave a full performance of barks.
George Clooney was instrumental in getting the show made in the first place. He liked their second Christmas short so much that he made hundreds of copies and gave them to all his friends, which helped them pitch the show.
I take it you don’t have a brother or any close guy friends. It’s kind of what we do. We rip on each other and buy each other a beer. Same with competitive sports. At the end of the day we respect each other but can make fun of each other and live laugh and love
It should be noted that that really only applies to citizens being protected from the government (and primarily was created to protect the printing presses and media from the government). There is no legal precedent to indicate that it would apply between citizens.
There comes an issue when a private citizen seeks to use the engines of state to punish those whose speech offends them.
It’s one thing to withdraw society and business from someone who offends you, quite another to demand that the state crush them for you. Of course, most states will do that to a greater or lesser degree. No state extends an absolute freedom of speech.
But all kinds of other laws protect citizens from other citizens. You can’t hurt them, can’t slander them, etcetc so there’s really not much most people can do. The most of it is saying “they did a terrible parody of me” and not deal with them anymore.
The government can’t make laws restricting speech(with very limited exceptions) therefore other citizens can’t legally go after you for protected speech. They’re allowed to tell you you’re an asshole, they’re allowed to ignore you, but they don’t have a court case.
Plenty of MIT/Harvard types are into eugenics. Don’t be fooled by the level of education someone has, doesn’t mean anything about their morals or ethics
That was cringe but I think a better reason NOT to return to reddit is the fact that they just sold out their users to an AI company that hasn’t even been named.
Yeah, all these bots replies is copied from other comment, and there’s shit tons of r/confidentlyincorrect comment that is outright factually wrong, which then get regurgitated by other user and copied by bots, so good luck to the AI company filtering those.
AFAIK, there’s nothing stopping any company from scraping Lemmy either. The whole point pf reddit limiting API usage was so they could make money like this.
Outside of morals, there is nothing to stop anybody from training on data from Lemmy just like there’s nothing stopping me from using Wikipedia. Most conferences nowadays require a paragraph on ethics in the submission, but I and many of my colleagues would have no qualms saying we scraped our data from open source internet forums and blogs.
You’re right, anyone can scrape Lemmy. But that’s not the issue (to me anyway) - Reddit have sold user data - user generated content. None of what they’re profiting from was generated or created by them. Are Reddit users who did generate all this content getting a slice of the profits?
When I post on here I know it’s all open for anyone to access but that’s true of any non walled garden space. I’ve accepted the fact that it’s going to get fed into the hungry maw of some AI behemoth or two.
What Reddit have done is make money for doing absolutely nothing based on content others have created like some sort of technological tapeworm feeding second hand. And along the way they killed off a lot of tools that users loved, moderators found made their jobs easier and people with a visual disability found vital. And all this so u/spez can live out his mini-Musk fantasies.
Fuck Reddit, but why does this matter? Them selling internal analytics and profile information isn’t going to be nearly as valuable as post/comment history which has already been public and scraped continuously since the site’s foundings. Practically every LLM is already has already scraped the entire site! Whatever company is buying their info is probably the only ones doing it legitimately. You can also assume Lemmy is no different, it’s all public and scrapable for LLMs to freely feast on.
I think it’s quite likely they’ve learned too well about the past. If recent history (and internet-documented behavior patterns) are to be analyzed, I think it shows that people yearn for power and control over others: just look at all the karens, the reddit mods (you know which kind), the trolls, supporters of certain parties and so on.
I guess they imagine that extremist regimes will provide them with that power, without taking a moment to think “oh, wait, the chances that I’ll be the one oppressing and not the one oppressed are miniscule” (and that’s setting all other moral things aside).
I think it shows that people yearn for power and control over others:
People don’t do that as such. They search for power as a result of being under power. In a sense complaining about Nazism is like complaining that some people, when trying to get rid of their shackles, flail violently instead of using a lockpick: It’s a symptom of a symptom, by no means core nature.
I think part of that stems from a lack of control over their own lives. They feel powerless in their own situation in life, and an easy excuse fed to them to satisfy that lack of control is by stomping on somebody else. “It’s not our fault that your life sucks, it’s obviously insert minority here who’s to blame!”
I guess they imagine that extremist regimes will provide them with that power, without taking a moment to think “oh, wait, the chances that I’ll be the one oppressing and not the one oppressed are miniscule” (and that’s setting all other moral things aside).
I’m pretty sure the ones oppressing and the regimes always have something in common (race most often, then wealth). Even if there is a slight chances the regime might turn against them, the minority and the rest will be the first to bear the brunt of the force which will be cheered on. And by the time the regime turns on them (unlikely), most will have had enough of a clue to prepare or escape.
I’m honestly surprised and shocked that Nazism is rising up again
Have people not learnt about and from the past?
or have you just not been paying attention? Nazism and fascism never went anywhere, and have been openly on the rise again for a significant while now, and those of us who it already impacts have been fighting them as best we can every step of the way. So maybe instead of pointing your finger at others, you should be asking yourself how this can possibly be taking you by surprise, unless you weren't paying as much attention as you like to think you have..
I don’t know anything about the Netherlands situation, but Nazism is just one particular flavor of fascism, and all forms of fascism have been on the rise in recent years. Especially white supremacist forms.
Hitler didn’t start out with killing people either. He started out the exact same way as Trump (in fact, one of Trump’s former wives has said that he used to read Hitler’s speeches before bed, so it would be no surprise to learn that he’s straight up copying Hitler); blaming Germany’s problems on immigrants and Jews, going after the LGBTQ population in Germany, even promising to build a wall around the German border to keep out illegal immigrants if he got elected. Trump’s campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again,” came from a pro-Nazi WW2 political party called America First. There is now an “America First Foundation” that proudly declares themselves as a movement that’s an “amalgamation of traditional values, Trumpian populism, and American Nationalism” (their own words right off their website). Not only are they literally using the exact same name, but “traditional values” is one of those major red flags that means “white supremacy,” as is nationalism. They don’t call themselves Nazis, but they sure as hell share all the same values.
Wilders is fairly far removed from Nazism. He’s a populist who I don’t particularly like, but he isn’t a fascist either.
He also got a plurality of the votes (barely 25%), but not a majority. Whether or not he can govern is still unclear, and he’s going to have to do it with more moderate parties.
Is Geert Wilders rechts, populistisch, radicaal of toch extreem?
Woorden doen ertoe, en dus maakt het uit hoe de PVV van Geert Wilders wordt beschreven. Media maken hun eigen afwegingen, maar politicologen zijn eensgezind. Judith Harmsen16 december 2023
Is de PVV van Geert Wilders een radicaal-rechtse, een extreemrechtse een populistische of gewoon een rechtse partij? Nu de verkiezingswinnaar volop in het nieuws is, valt op dat de terminologie waarmee de PVV wordt beschreven nogal eens verschilt.
De trouwste Trouw-lezers hebben misschien al opgemerkt dat ook op de redactie van deze krant meningsverschillen bestaan. Zo noemde columnist Stevo Akkerman de PVV vorig weekend nadrukkelijk een extreemrechtse partij, omdat die term volgens hem van toepassing is op elke groep die onderscheid maakt tussen burgers op het gebied van etniciteit, religie ‘of wat dan ook’. Hoofdredacteur Cees van der Laan pleitte een week eerder juist nog voor de term radicaal-rechts omdat Wilders binnen de democratie opereert en geen geweld toepast.
Die laatste typering heeft ook de voorkeur van de NRC-redactie, zo weten luisteraars van de wekelijkse politieke podcast van die krant, waarin de kwestie werd besproken. RTL Nieuws kiest dan juist weer voor rechts-populistisch, al staat die aanduiding volgens de chef van de politieke redactie, Fons Lambie, niet geheel vast. De duiding kan per uitspraak of programma verschillen.“Soms schuiven partijen op naar het midden, soms worden juist steeds verregaandere uitspraken gedaan.” Geert Wilders (PVV) tijdens een debat in de Tweede Kamer over de verkiezingsuitslag en het verslag van verkenner Ronald Plasterk. Beeld ANP Geert Wilders (PVV) tijdens een debat in de Tweede Kamer over de verkiezingsuitslag en het verslag van verkenner Ronald Plasterk.Beeld ANP Term met een negatieve connotatie
Redacteuren van persdienst ANP kunnen ondertussen kiezen uit drie termen: radicaal-rechts, rechts-nationalistisch en rechts-populistisch. ‘Feitelijk en helder’, vindt hoofdredacteur Freek Staps alledrie die beschrijvingen voor de PVV.
Meer omstreden is de term ‘extreemrechts’. Deze week zei de kersverse Kamervoorzitter Martin Bosma van de PVV dat hij er moeite mee heeft als die term in het parlement wordt gebruikt. De ANP-redactie heeft afgesproken ‘extreemrechts’ niet te gebruiken voor de PVV.
Staps: “We merken dat extreemrechts voor verschillende mensen een verschillende betekenis heeft, waardoor er discussie over kan ontstaan. Dat leidt af van wat we willen, namelijk goede, feitelijke journalistiek aanbieden. Bovendien heeft de term voor sommige mensen een zeer negatieve connotatie, waardoor die emoties oproept. Daar willen we van wegblijven. We willen dat de lezer zelf kan oordelen en de journalist moet dat proces niet sturen.”
Doet het ertoe met welke woorden journalisten een politieke partij beschrijven? Ja, vindt Staps dus. “Woordkeuze telt.” Ja, zegt ook politicoloog Matthijs Rooduijn, van de Universiteit van Amsterdam. “Je gaat partijen met elkaar vergelijken en dan moet je dat wel op een zuivere manier doen.”
Over het algemeen zijn politicologen het redelijk eens waar het de definities van termen als radicaal-rechts, populistisch of extreemrechts betreft. In het kort komt hun conclusie op het volgende neer, zegt Rooduijn: de PVV is radicaal-rechts én populistisch, maar niet extreemrechts. Natie bedreigd door elementen van buitenaf
Populistisch is de PVV omdat de partij steevast spreekt over een kloof tussen het volk en de ‘elite’, een groep met macht en invloed die de zorgen van gewone mensen niet serieus neemt. Radicaal-rechts is van toepassing omdat de partij gebruik maakt van het nativisme. ‘Een exclusieve vorm van het nationalisme’, noemt Rooduijn dat. “Het is het idee dat de eigen groep, de natie, wordt bedreigd door mensen of elementen van buitenaf.” Of het daarbij gaat om migranten, of bijvoorbeeld om mensen met een bepaald geloof of een bepaalde huidskleur, verschilt per radicaal-rechtse partij.
Ook extreemrechtse partijen gebruiken die vorm van ‘wij-zij-denken’, zoals ze ook – net als radicaal-rechtse groeperingen – geloven in een strak geordende samenleving, waarbij overtredingen streng worden gestraft. Toch is er ook wezenlijk verschil tussen radicaal- en extreemrechts. Want radicaal-rechts ‘beweegt zich binnen de grenzen van de democratie’, zoals Rooduijn het uitdrukt. “Radicaal-rechts wil de democratie in stand houden en is ook tegen geweld. Extreemrechts wil het democratisch bestel omver werpen. In veel gevallen schuwen extreemrechtse groeperingen geweld daarbij niet.” ‘Ieder label schiet tekort’
Het betekent niet, zo benadrukt de politicoloog, dat een radicaal-rechtse partij als de PVV geen opvattingen heeft die strijdig zijn met de liberale democratie zoals we die in Nederland kennen. Wilders is niet tégen verkiezingen, maar doet wel voorstellen die bijvoorbeeld de rechten van minderheden beperken. Uitspraken over een ‘nepparlement’ of journalisten als ‘tuig van de richel’ zijn in strijd met de liberale democratische waarden, zegt Rooduijn. “Maar de PVV steunt wel het idee dat burgers zelf bepalen door wie ze worden bestuurd. Extreemrechts doet dat niet.”
Moeten journalisten kiezen, dan is radicaal-rechts dus een betere term dan extreemrechts, vindt ook Edwin Kreulen, ombudsman van deze krant. Al is hij eigenlijk van mening dat ieder label tekortschiet. “Journalisten zijn op de wereld om feitelijk te beschrijven hoe een partij in elkaar zat en zit”, zegt hij. “Daarom zou ik er voorstander voor zijn om te blijven benoemen dat Wilders extreme standpunten heeft op het gebied van immigratie en moslims, en is veroordeeld voor zijn minder-Marokkanen-uitspraak.”
Dat kan bijvoorbeeld door de PVV een ‘anti-migratie, of anti-islam’ partij te noemen, zoals bijvoorbeeld de BBC doet. In geen geval wil Kreulen een eventueel kabinet met daarin de PVV 'centrumrechts’ noemen, zoals VVD-leider Dilan Yesilgöz doet. “Dat is een frame van de VVD, die daarmee de indruk wil wekken dat ze een rechtse partij aan een meerderheid helpt. Maar in zo’n geval gedoogt de VVD niet zomaar een rechtse partij, men gedoogt een partij die de rechten van een minderheid wil inperken. Het is wat mij betreft goed dat te blijven benoemen.” Lees ook: Lessen uit Polen en Hongarije: juist een mildere Wilders moet je wantrouwen
Hoe moeten we omgaan met de PVV en Wilders? In Hongarije en Polen hebben ze al langer ervaring met autoritaire leiders en extreemrechts. Lees ook: Waar niemand rekening mee hield, is gebeurd: met winst PVV sluit Nederland aan bij rechts-populistische trend
De PVV is de overrompelende winnaar van de verkiezingen. Nederland sluit aan bij een Europese rechts-populistische trend.
This article is not relevant to the discussion. Just because Wilders is far right, does not mean that he is also a Nazi/fascist. I dislike him for his policies, I don’t need to wrongly attach a Nazi label to him as well.
Is it though? Or are we just calling more and more things nazi that in reality aren’t? I can only speak for myself but in my case that word has entirely lost its meaning. It’s basically calling someone stupid.
I see the huge demand for nazies but I literally never encounter them anywhere. People are calling Elon Musk a nazi for example so pardon my scepticism when I hear claims that it’s on a rise.
No, they are calling Elmo antisemite for agreeing to a post claiming all Jews hate whites.
Antisemites aren’t Nazis, but they are close.
Trump on the other hand is literally out there calling for dictatorship and throwing all his enemies into prison, while blaming migrants for everything.
You can ignore the world around you, but the rest of us see the connections.
Anyway, the only good Nazi is a dead one, this includes the people who only do so to be edgy.
I love people saying we’re just calling more things nazi when a major USA party has been actively using the American nazi party logos, slogans and ideas for years.
If you read the news there has been multiple neonazi parties getting arrested for gathering guns for some nwo shit. And conservative and borderline faschist politicam parties are on the rise in multiple european countries. So no we are not just calling stuff nazies for no reason
Sure, but I never claimed that they don’t exist. I’m just very sceptical about the claim that it’s getting more common. I don’t even remember when I last time saw a proper skinhead. Even those seemed to be way more common 15 years ago. And yes I know not all of them are nazies either.
They are not just skinheads anymore. They wear polo shirts and khakis. Did you miss the march in Charlotsville along with many other gatherings of that nature? Just because you are ignorant of this doesn’t mean it’s not happening.
That simply isn’t true unless your definition of “socialism” is an alliance of segregation era American liberals, the British Empire, the Chinese Kuomintang warlords, and Stalinists, in which case
Uh, okay bro.
Now if you want to say “socialism removes the pressures that create support for fascism instead of creating them like in capitalism,” sure, okay.
The Telecommunications Act was passed in 1996 and there have since been thousands upon thousands of radical fascist talk shows all over the US airwaves for millions upon millions of hours. This is Hitler + a PA system all over again. Nazism is rising because it is encouraged by the right and supported as free speech by liberals.
As the number of people who personally had interactions with the OG Nazis continues to reduce toward zero, the people who are following that same fascist ideology will start to slither their way into influence and the whole cycle will try to repeat.
I dunno about other countries but here in Poland (the same Poland that the nazis invaded) some teens joke about it all the time. I’m pretty sure that it’s probably some teenager tryin to be funny instead of an actual nazi
The United States was the primary source of inspiration for the German Nazis. Even as the fascist Nazi party was rising up in Germany. They were mimicking fascists in the United States. The German beer hall putch was not an isolated or unique event. The fascists here in the United States had the business plot. Which FDR almost completely dropped the ball on in exchange for short-term gains. Letting these seditious fascist escape with their lives to regroup and continue plotting. Long ago having clawed back most of the short-term gains FDR got.
Within barely a generation they were running bigoted racists like Nixon and winning. Soon followed by the rather open protofascist Reagan. Whose vice president was former head spook at the CIA. The same CIA that had spent much of the early 20th century overthrowing democracies and destabilizing the rest of the world. He also happened to be the son of the man that was most likely to have been their intended leader to install as fascist dictator. Who’s coke adult son a little over a decade later followed in his father’s footsteps.
Fascists in the US at least have never had consequences to learn from. They’ve barely had to setbacks. They just slow boiled it here. But we still arrived at poisoning the blood of our country and blood and soil. Eventually. January 6th was not even the first Republican coup plot that we know about.
And there are plenty in the UK and Europe that learned the wrong lessons from world war II as well.
Yes, how dare we acknowledge our own faults. Always weird how desperately people are to hand wave away our own guilt. Like we never turned away shiploads of fleeing Jews. And American companies didn’t help logistically to teach Jews on the way to the gas chamber. Or worse.
It’s just interesting to me how radicalized the Internet is nowadays. Any excuse to bring up a way to shit on the US is jumped at. Especially on Lemmy. I’m starting to wondering if that’s the point of Lemmy as well.
It’s not like the small communities here are surviving.
Acknowledging well documented history is being radical? That’s a hot take.
Look the fact that you cannot counterpoint or rebuff any of the claims that I made. Instead choosing to whine ineffectually like a petulant child. That’s on you. Educate yourself or stop disagreeing with reality. Those are your only two real options if you don’t want to be seen as childish and ignorant.
Communities here are surviving just fine. I’m fine with smaller more intelligent communities. If you need the noise and baseless blather of fashiverse. We aren’t holding you hostage. You are welcome to stay here. But you’re going to have a bad time as long as you try to deny or deflect on history. It’s the same thing I say to the stalinists, the maoists, and the other Bolshevik boys.
Long ago, I saw a documentary series about dictators, and it had some interesting things to say about the source of inspiration Hitler had. You see, Benito Mussolini transformed Italy and wrote the book on how to build a fascist country. Hitler took those ideas and started applying them on a larger scale.
They are intrusive thoughts, because that’s the phrase that was coined to describe these types of thoughts. Sometimes we come up with specific phrases in order to describe more specific concepts.
Right, nuance and context are infinitely important. Now what’s the functional difference between the two? Because if none exists that can be implemented by the individual then the nuanced difference between the types of thoughts becomes irrelevant to how one handles them.
I am not emotionally affected by my ‘intrusive thoughts’ because they have as much bearing on reality as whether I like the smell of burnt toast.
Thoughts == benign shit passing through your brain that cause no personal discomfort.
Obtrusive thoughts == shit that intrudes on your regular internal monologue and causes discomfort or fixation.
It’s fine to have such thoughts, and it’s also fine to acknowledge that you don’t want them. Like I’m trying to get on with my day, but now my brain is playing a vivid horror show and I just want to finish my TPS report, not walk through every moment of myself shattering Steve’s skull with the fire axe because he can’t figure out how to use the collate function on the printer.
Sure, you can embrace that shit as fictional, but it’s distracting in the moment.
I guess there are degrees of intrusive thoughts, because no, it’s not really the same. ‘Don’t think about the elephant’ causes a benign and very fleeting fixation.
Intrusive thoughts are things that linger, often in a disturbing way, long after you want them gone. They interfere with your ability to focus.
The elephant thing is like a musical ear worm whereas intrusive thoughts can be like someone blaring industrial music in your ears. I’m not explaining this well, but it’s on another level.
I’m going to copy and paste my reply from another comment thread because it better explains my philosophical stance.
I am not emotionally disturbed by my ‘intrusive thoughts’ because they have as much bearing on reality as whether I like the smell of burnt toast. They are also my thoughts, I take full ownership of them, they aren’t something that happens to me they’re something I do.
I don’t suffer their affliction, I have no personal experience with their incapacities. I don’t let my pain define me, I own my thoughts, and even when I don’t like the things I think, they are mine alone to think about.
I honestly and genuinely wish anyone who is afflicted by their own thoughts can access the tools and skills they need to improve their mental fortitude and improve their lives by learning to tolerate themselves.
I’m glad you’re so enlightened, but you should also understand that just because you have a zen-like mastery over your whole brain doesn’t mean it’s effortless for everyone.
I’d posit that rather than arguing with a definition that helps many people understand their own challenges, you might consider that the definition isn’t wrong, it’s just not meant for you. That those people are accessing the tools and skills they need, and this definition is one of those tools.
Truth be told, I don’t suffer from overly intrusive thoughts, either, but I understand and can empathise with those who do. We’re not all the same, and understanding each other’s experiences is one of our greatest strengths as humans.
Any you’re right, we all have our failings. Mine is an incapacity to enjoy seeing people afflicted by their mental anguish when I feel like adjusting their perspective to fit mine is what gives me the ability to control myself.
This results in me being unable to sympathise with those people despite empathising with them because it makes me feel like they’re actively rejecting one of those tools that will get them where they need to be.
Like being thrown a rope when you’re stuck in the well, if you reject the rope what is the person up top supposed to think?
I’d perhaps liken it more to jumping in the water to save someone who’s drowning.
You’re trying to help them and they should logically know that, but their instinct drives them to grab you everywhere and act like an anchor, drowning you both.
No matter how rational a person is, emotion and subconscious reactions can override all of that. That’s not really a failing as it’s the basis for empathy, but those same subconscious reactions can form a feedback loop that’s very difficult to escape.
I’d perhaps liken it more to jumping in the water to save someone who’s drowning.
Thank you, that’s an anology I can work with.
No matter how rational a person is, emotion and subconscious reactions can override all of that.
I wish that was the case. I’m diagnosed as high functioning autistic presenting, 100% autism free, but my natural capacity for logic obliterated my emotional development. I can and do functionally parse all my emotional thought through logic. This is my weakness and my strength.
I’m not unaware that my approaches are often mistaken for dismissal or ignorance of people’s feelings, because they are, but they’re also the tools that emotional people need to temper their emotions.
I don’t lack empathy, I lack the tools to express it, work in progress.
These people are at the bottom of the well and I don’t have a rope, but that’s not going to stop me jumping in to try save them, even if I do drown every time until I get one. I just hope I can teach some of them to climb without the rope even though they feel like they need it.
but my natural capacity for logic obliterated my emotional development. I can and do functionally parse all my emotional thought through logic. This is my weakness and my strength.
Dude, 100% same. I spent the better part of two decades developing my capacity for empathy (it was a core requirement in my chosen career), and I still have issues truly relating on an individual level.
Humans are messy, incoherent, illogical creatures. You and I are, too, whether or not we want to see it. The pitfall we face is our propensity to extrapolate our personal experience to others where that just doesn’t work. We want things to make sense, and we think our solution should just work, but people aren’t like coins with binary answers. They’re more like a fistful of dice made of slime and bees with no numbers on their faces.
We make you want to give up because we’re confusing and painful. Eventually you can figure out patterns, though they’ll change and frustrate you.
Sorry for the mini-rant. I’ve enjoyed our conversation.
Sorry for the mini-rant. I’ve enjoyed our conversation.
No need to apologise, the opportunity to feel comprehended has been far more valuable than you might realise.
I might have trouble relating and connecting on an emotional level but my belligerence to be understood is limitless. Gets me in trouble because most people feel instead of comprehend and that’s just not logical.
One of the feelings I hate the most is the feeling you get when you know someone agrees with you they just lack the capacity to know why. It’s the bane of my existance.
Lol. Guess it’s my turn to apologise for the rant.
Intrusive thoughts = the type of thoughts we don’t particularly want to think because they make us uncomfortable, but they intrude into our stream of consciousness either way.
It’s called being descriptive, and it lets people know exactly what kind of thought you’re referring to by adding a simple adjective before the word.
what you’re failing to pick up on is that no one cares about how you handle your thoughts and you can stop talking about yourself as if we should all aspire to think the way you do. this thread has largely been about the shared experience of having what we call intrusive thoughts and you coming here and trying to hijack that by telling us we are doing it wrong was never going to be well received.
we’re not suffering and you’re not a savior. stop trying to impose your way of thinking on a bunch of people. that’s one of the very first things one needs to learn in life to not be an insufferable person. i suppose the irony is that I was once like that and have learned to stop. but I can recognize it in an instant.
Never claimed to be except in metaphore, I’m not trying to impose my thinking on anyone. Making statements is not persuasion, if you want your mind changed change it, but that doesn’t change the legitimacy of my point of view.
I’m not shying away despite the downvotes because they’re irrelevant, anyone who chooses to benefit themselves with what I provide will do so. No intelligent person has ever been without detractors, I’m aware of the value of the derogatory statements towards me, it’s zero. Because anyone lacking the capacity to see past their feelings for comprehension doesn’t have an opinion worth entertaining.
the problem is that your clearly believe your way of thinking is better for everyone else. it is better FOR YOU. full stop. you are welcome to share what works FOR YOU. but your attitude that it is objectively better for everyone else is not something you could possibly know. and your insistence that it is better whether anyone accepts that or not is strong evidence of your lack of maturity and life experience.
The lack of suffering I experience at the behest of my own thoughts is objective evidence it’s better.
whether anyone accepts that or not is strong evidence of your lack of maturity and life experience.
Come now, you can be better than that. I already told you the value of your derogatory statements, but if they make you feel more secure in your wilful ignorance then more power to you.
you are welcome to share what works FOR YOU
Apparently not since everyone insists on telling me to shut up. Like you. Right now. For doing exactly that.
You’re free to not engage with my opinions, it’s even easier than typing a reply but it requires the actual self control required to rein in your ego long enough to let go of me emotionally. But I understand if you can’t given the general sense of a lack of emotional control from people in this thread.
Not all thoughts are consciously summoned, wanted, or pleasant. The term intrusive thoughts is a good way to describe those thoughts we find unpleasant. Yes, they are natural and normal, and often how we grapple with and process experiences, but that doesn't make them unobtrusive.
Additionally, many people have intrusive recollections of upsetting events from the past. Intrusive thoughts is a good descriptor that helps avoid over using terms like flashbacks or PTSD.
Clarifying such things as intrusive helps destigmatize these thoughts for people who have them and feel the weight of social expectations, like new parents as in the comic. Feeling guilty about having these thoughts isn't healthy, and properly describing them as unwanted helps people process them. I don't see what is particularly objectionable or hard to understand about the term and why being more specific in the description of one thoughts is off-putting to you.
Not all thoughts are consciously summoned, wanted, or pleasant. The term intrusive thoughts is a good way to describe those thoughts we find unpleasant.
I am not emotionally disturbed by my ‘intrusive thoughts’ because they have as much bearing on reality as whether I like the smell of burnt toast. They are also my thoughts, I take full ownership of them, they aren’t something that happens to me they’re something I do.
Clarifying such things as intrusive helps destigmatize these thoughts for people who have them and feel the weight of social expectations
I don’t see what is particularly objectionable or hard to understand about the term and why being more specific in the description of one thoughts is off-putting to you.
I’m disheartened by the fact that people feel they need to thought police themselves for the benefit of a society that will never engage with those figments of their imaginations.
That is legitimately depressing and I feel sorry for those people. I wish them the best in developing more significant and functional mental fortitude. Sorry if I offended anyone, it wasn’t my intention.
Edit: downvotes for caring, love the hypocrisy of this place sometimes.
Everyone is different, and life is path dependent. Some people don't struggle with difficult memories, and others have simply not lived an unpleasant enough life to have accrued the emotional scars.
However, being blatantly brusque in your description of others followed by "sorry if I offended" is the epitome of ringing hollow. At least be honest; you don't care if you offended others.
I wasn’t being disingenuous and I’m sorry the way I express myself makes you feel that way.
I don’t suffer their affliction, I have no personal experience with their incapacities. I don’t let my pain define me, I own my thoughts, and even when I don’t like the things I think, they are mine alone to think about.
I honestly and genuinely wish anyone who is afflicted by their own thoughts can access the tools and skills they need to improve their mental fortitude and improve their lives by learning to tolerate themselves.
If you disagree with that then you have bigger issues than intrusive thoughts.
I recognize that my intrusive thoughts are my own, but this term existing is helpful because: 1) some people incorrectly believe that thoughts imply a desired outcome, and this term helps explain and describe that this isn’t always the case and 2) it’s a meaningful and useful way of categorizing these types of thoughts for the purposes of psychology, psychiatry, understanding ourselves better, etc.
In cases like severe OCD, classifying intrusive thoughts as such could help someone understand and cope with disturbing thoughts and develop subsequent coping mechanisms. Not everyone’s the same and some terms can be helpful.
I don’t disagree with any of that. But if someone wants to take steps to not being afflicted by their own thoughts you might think it appropriate to listen to those with the experience and skill to not be afflicted by their own thoughts.
No one here has any interest in changing their thinking to improve their capacity to enjoy life, they all want to bitch that I have no idea what I’m talking about, despite apparently being the only one here with a legitimate capacity to not be disturbed by my own internal monologue, and wallow in their shared failure to have emotional control over themselves.
You’re not being downvoted for “caring”, you’re being downvoted for sounding like condescending, pompous arse. If you’re not purposefully trying to be a dick, you might want to try developing your empathy skills. And ditch the non-apologies, they just make you seem even more disingenuous.
I am a condescending pompous arse, an ego earned by being correct. I’m empathetic, but I’m not sympathetic to those who would ignore a way of thinking that is not afflicted by the same weakness as their own. And my apologies are entirely genuine and your disbelief has no bearing on that reality it just makes you look more the fool you choose to be if a little pomposity is all that’s required to keep you from knowledge and comprehension.
Can you even hear yourself?! Jesus Christ. I’ll leave you to reveal in your misplaced superiority complex, but fyi non apologies aren’t subjective and yours are a textbook case. It’s not the most pressing lesson you need to learn, but if you’re going to go through life being such an arse you should at least know how to apologise properly.
For it to be a complex my inference has to be incorrect and come from a place of lacking superiority. And yet not a single point I’ve made has been refuted. No, I’m just superior and have the ego to acknowledge that and the literary capacity to do it with airs.
You’ve also mistaken being empathetic with sympathetic and I’ve explained why I’m not the latter in several other messages including the one you just replied to. How can I not feel superior when every respondant has the reading comprehension of a 6 year old.
If intrusive thoughts legitimately affect their capacity to function then yes that would be a disorder, but not due to having them, only due to how they handle them differently from those that don’t have their capacity to function affected.
I don’t think this person believes that people are actively making up intrusive thoughts or talking about something that doesn’t happen. It seems like they’re saying that thoughts, any thoughts, are our imagination, intrusive or otherwise.
Yes. It’s basically a rephrasing of the OP which also intentionally didn’t use the words ‘intrusive thoughts’. I’m a master at being downvoted by people who have already agreed with what I’m saying, but lack the capacity to realise it.
I was not saying that this person thought the phenomenon did not exist or was made up.
My point is they are unwanted but won’t go away. That is why they are intrusive.
It is not any big mystery. It is a well known phenomenon. You try not to think of the thoughts, because they cause great pain, and the thoughts happen more.
What is the problem here? What is the great problem in calling them by a name that makes experiential sense? Nothing. There is no problem.
These intrusive thoughts often involve harming people we love. Which is like being tortured for hours daily, and months, and even years for some. We don’t want to think these thoughts, but they keep intruding on us.
Why do we not want to think of these thoughts as “our thoughts”? Because if they are our thoughts (or if they are us) then we are horrific monsters.
But through years of torture many of us have, emerged from the ruins of our life, and learned that we are not monsters. We are just being tortured by the monster of existence.
There absolutely are intrusive thoughts. Two examples:
Once in a long while, I’ll be talking to a black person and I’ll think of the N-word. It will just pop into my head for a split second and I’ll think “oh my god, no!” and it will be gone. I’ve never said that word out loud, I’ve never thought of anyone black that way, and I certainly don’t want to think of anyone that way. It’s not a thought I meant to have or even a thought that would ever represent how I felt. It isn’t even a thought that is pointed with malice at the person I was talking to. It’s literally just “N-word” and it’s gone. It’s purely unconscious and intrusive racism that I think is just part of being white.
Every so often, I’ll be talking to a couple I know and imagine them fucking. Just for a split second again. I don’t want to imagine them fucking. It’s not titillating to me. I don’t get a rise out of it. I don’t fantasize about it later. But just for a moment, I imagine what it would be like if my perceptive versions of them fucked. We won’t even be talking about anything remotely sexual. But sex is part of the human condition and sometimes we have unconscious, intrusive thoughts about sex.
I don’t think either of these will lead me to murder. In fact, in general, I don’t have violent thoughts, not even intrusive ones. But it could lead me to other atrocious behavior if I dwell on those thoughts and if I let them become more than momentarily intrusive. It’s not being afraid of thinking them, it’s not wanting to think of them and doing my best to will any such thoughts that stray out of my head as quickly as I can. Because those thoughts are not thoughts I want to have about people. I don’t care if I don’t act on them either. I don’t want to think that about any black people I ever encounter in my life. I don’t want to think that about any couples who I know. But sometimes those thoughts just pop into my head and I can’t help it. But I can help moving past them as fast as I possibly can so they don’t end up accumulating and turning me into a person I don’t want to be.
How you handle intrusive thoughts is no different to handling any other thought you have, wanted or unwanted, good or bad, if you are going to get it anyway and you can’t change the fact they exist how does defining them otherwise in the context of understanding how to not let them affect you provide any benefit?
I would argue that my way of thinking must be correct for this task because I am obviously not afflicted in the same way by my thoughts that I feel I need to define the bad subconscious ones as ‘intrusive’. They haven’t intruded on my consciousness, my consciousness found them.
It’s a perspective that removes a significant amount of emotional power from ‘intrusive thoughts’.
I think you need to make up your mind whether intrusive thoughts are a thing or not, because you start your post with talking about how to handle intrusive thoughts, then you go on to say they aren’t a thing.
It’s a perspective that doesn’t make sense is what it is.
I’m sorry if this sounds callous but I utterly disregard your notion with predjudice.
They aren’t intrusive thoughts, they’re just your thoughts, stop being afraid of thinking.
You one post ago:
I would argue that my way of thinking must be correct for this task because I am obviously not afflicted in the same way by my thoughts that I feel I need to define the bad subconscious ones as ‘intrusive’. They haven’t intruded on my consciousness, my consciousness found them.
Your incapacity to grasp my understanding is not a lack of understanding on my part.
That sentence you quoted is missing some of it, no wonder you didn’t get it’s meaning you only read half of one sentence out of a two sentence cohesive statement and a link to reference further learning.
It’s been fun devolving to belligerent banter but if you ever want to improve your cognition regarding the actual topic and my position on it I’ll be glad to respond to any questions you might posture in that exercise in self development.
It’s not part of being white anymore than dropping a baby out of a window. It’s just your brain telling you what not to do, because you know not to use that term, on account of it being rude and offensive.
It’s such a taboo term that you’d literally never say it, it’s more like internal Tourettes. I suspect this type of intrusive thought is least vaguely related to the phenomenon of cute aggression. Like, intrusive thoughts of The Thing You Absolutely Must Not Do.
It’s sad that you would assume you have some essential racist nature - I don’t know you, but being born white is not a form of original sin, it’s an arbitrary identity category and you’re most likely a decent person.
If everyone has them it’s not a phobia, it’s a condition of consciousness. The phobia is being irrationally afraid of your perfectly normal condition. Which if you think you’re own thoughts are intruding on you, you may have.
May I ask what expertise you have on this that makes you know more than doctors and psychologists who use the term intrusive thoughts, and specifically use that term to diagnose people with mental illness or neuro-divergence? Or are you just pontificating to feel smarter than everyone else? We don’t need a new word for something everyone (except you) clearly already understands and uses properly.
I understand it perfectly, this is a philosophical perspective not a medical one. My understanding of the term as used in medicine does not differ from yours.
The question is how does that change what a phobia is? Are you not aware how phobias work and are defined as according to medical literature? My statement is correct. If you have an issue with any of my other statements, reply to them directly.
Ma…ma… Marvel movies are mostly redundant bullshit without even a single relevant thought in them. Just like these mass-produced romcoms, same level. They will probably be the first movies written and produced by inferior AI soon and it won’t even make a big difference.
The worst part of Marvel movies is how they expect you to remember everything from every other Marvel movie and TV show going back to Iron Man in 2008. I gave up after a while. I can’t keep all of that in my memory and I should be able to skip the ones that are less interesting to me and not get confused in a movie that isn’t a sequel to those.
I’m a big One Piece fan. One piece has thousands of characters many with fleshed out back stories. They all feel fresh and unique and the universe is coherent. But marvel? Most if not all super heroes are interchangeable and the universe makes no sense.
Well I know nothing about One Piece, but the way they do it in Marvel is absurd. I was lucky I had Disney+ at the time and saw Wandavision or the Doctor Strange sequel would have made no sense. And it was shortly after realizing that when I gave up. I honestly don’t know why I stayed with it for so long.
That’s a perfectly valid criticism of most manga, One Piece included. Especially shonen manga. The “same-face” issue is part of the reason anime and manga have women with crazy hair colors. It’s easier to color code a character than give them a distinct face.
Ya know, I’m actually okay with that. Up to endgame it wasn’t really all that much. You had Ironman x3, GoG x2, Strange x1, Thor x3, Spiderman x1 (x2 if you want to watch the one right after endgame), Captain America x3, Avengers x3, Ant-Man x2, and Black Panther, all of which set you up for endgame. Thats… a grand total of 20 movies, plus the spiderman right after endgame.
Is that a lot? Sure, 40-50 hours. But let one company have a cool, big, tied together place in movies. I liked my invincible comic read. One book, straight through from beginning to end. I also liked when I read through the Marvel Ultimate comics, with about four or five of the serials that I was reading interweaving. I can’t think of any other setting that was tied together like that in movies. The closest you’d get would be the television types, with a few hundred episodes.
I’ll agree that the tv show styles were too much. I personally couldn’t even watch the first trial of those, the agents of shield, right? That first episode was just such terrible writing. I definitely don’t want to take that 40-50 hours (over 11 years, too, so that helps) and multiply by exponential scales.
My memory can’t handle the intimate details from 20 movies. That’s the problem. They make references to things in movies that happened a decade ago and expect people to remember them. So sure, tying them all together can be fun- if you can do it without expecting people to get the constant references. Honestly, I spend half the time in Marvel movies wondering what the fuck they’re talking about lately.
Here’s a mnemonic technique that I have found works: Nothing about Marvel movies is worth remembering.
You’re watching the dramatic equivalent of that retouched Ecce Homo painting, a mass media product constructed by Hollywood on top of the palimpsest of the creative output of young Jewish men trying to come to grips with feelings of powerlessness in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Nothing much of the original remains, and it’s not worth looking at, beyond remarking at its absurdity.
My union dues last pay? 30 dollars. My union just got the government of Ontario, the shitbag conservatives, who tried to illegally withhold raises from us, and won. My union guarantees I get a set wage because they bargain for it.
It also gave her 9 more PTO days, better healthcare, and negotiated to triple any outside-of-work calls because the company used to do a thing where they would send you home, and then call you back later. Wtf.
What’s a bureau? Am American and don’t speak foreign. Also, is “vehicles” just the same for all transportation? Like, could I get my space ship learner’s permit…you know what, never mind. Too much work.
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