Kratom cut my drinking by 80%. Haven’t had a single beer at home alone in years. Still go out occasionally with friends, so not a recluse or anything, just the excess stuff.
Sure it is. Let’s just pretend there is no monetary incentive for a region to have a holy relic which brings them a bunch of tourism. Ain’t nothing holy under capitalism.
Every single consecrated Catholic altar contains a relic of a saint. Usually they’re pretty small, maybe a piece of a fingerbone or something. You’re right that a good one like this would bring in lots of pilgrims (tourist dollars,) but it’s a tradition that way predates capitalism.
I’m not in the business of defending the Catholic Church or capitalism, just wanted to clarify.
Socialists don’t see a fundamental difference between a king or church owning the means of production and a merchant/capitalist/whatever owning it, because there isn’t a significant difference. Adam Smith was observing truths on the nature of property ownership and how to increase the gains from such, not describing the idea of rich and powerful people owning property that would make them money by exploiting the value of labor. That idea is as old as agriculture.
Where it might get tricky is if the gains from owning the “relic” were funding welfare programs/charity more than they were funding the excessive lifestyle of the clergy, but that’s not something Catholics are particularly known for living up to, responsible usage of tithes and actually following the precepts of ascetism in the clergy.
Why are you disappointed? What is the disappointment here? That you don’t want to sleep with random women who get those piercings? You were never entitled to do so in the first place, so I’m not sure how that could be a disappointment to you.
Save the next commenter some time, the word dissapponted implies that someone or something failed to meet an expectation the speaker has for it. In this case the someone or something is women who choose to get nipple piercings. So the implication is that the commenter has an expectation for women that is failing to be met when they get nipple piercings.
I don’t give a fuck who he does or does not want to sleep with, or what reasons he may have for doing so. I’m calling out the way he framed his opinion in that sentence, because again, it implies he has an expectation for women that is not being met if they get nipple piercings.
Don’t bother responding to me unless you’re going to tell me why it’s alright to have such an expectation for random women about their bodies.
He can say he doesn’t like them. That’s not what he said. He said he’s disappointed that so many women are getting them. I asked him why he’s disappointed that random women are choosing to get a piercing he dislikes? What do those random women have to do with him exactly?
No you went on a rant about if op is “entitled” to those women. That’s just a fucking weird take from someone talking about disappointment in a fashion choice that people choose. Don’t reframe your weird comment.
Again, what is he disappointed in? Do you not know how fucking language works? Are you unfamiliar with the use of the word “dissappointed”? For example, you might say: Your mom is disappointed when you ask her to send you another 300.00 for the 5th time this month, because in her mind “she raised you to be better than that”. She’s pissed because you asked her. But she’s disappointed because your actions do not meet her expectations for you.
So I’ll ask again, what is he disappointed in? Why is he disappointed with the choices of random women who have nothing to do with him?
Edit: clarified I wasn’t trying to make a statement on the personal life of the commenter who i don’t know. Just a snarky example.
Okay setting aside your clearly toxic and unkind attitude that is betraying what this is really about, some personal issue that is making you seeth, why is the word “disappointment” triggering YOU so hard?
I would be disappointed if my date comes home with me and takes off their shirt and they have a tattoo of Sonic the Hedgehog on their chest. Because I don’t want to look at Sonic when we’re together, does that make a lick of fucking sense? Do you understand that people have consensual relationships and preferences for their partners?
Yeah I’m toxic, you’re the one who flipped out at me for asking the commenter a question 😂 I’ll admit it was aggro but I don’t know you and was not trying to make a statement about your personal life that I have no knowledge of. I was showing the way that word functions and how it differs from other direct feelings in response to something. Disappointment is a specific emotion with a specific meaning.
He didn’t say that if someone he dated had nipple piercings he’d be dissappointed, he said he was “disappointed so many girls” are choosing to get them. Don’t try and reframe what he said. You don’t have to come up with elaborate allegories we can talk about what he said right there.
I quizzed you why you thought a normal, common expression of aesthetic taste became a sexual entitlement issue to you immediately, it was weird, it remains weird, you are weird, every comment makes you seem weirder about it, and I don’t think this is a healthy place for you to be engaging and tripling down on. I’m blocking you for your good as much as mine.
yeah, that’s your entire thing. Ripping into him for having preferences. How dare he, and how dare he have an emotional reaction to his preferences. The fact he isn’t dead inside proves he isn’t married to you. ;-)
and yet, there you go again, bitching about his preferences.
I get it. English is a weird, difficult language, and it isn’t your first. You’re probably from northern Europe, I presume? Take it from absolutely everyone here telling you you misunderstood that you misunderstood. It’s a learning experience. Being wrong isn’t the end of the world for you. Grow from it.
One minute your rambling about your engorged member and the next you’re demonstrating again that you still don’t understand what I was saying. Fuck off.
It’s not just based on the dictionary it’s literally what the word fucking means. Jesus christ. Re-read my comments. I have absolutely no desire to continue this. I’ve made my fucking point. Leave me alone.
right. The point is that you aren’t fluent in English, and so are LITERALLY using a dictionary to communicate. By using only one literal definition of a word, without considering context, subtext or how the word is used, you both don’t understand the conversation nor are you able to contribute in kind.
I never said he did. I asked him why he specifically said he’s disappointed that so many women are choosing to get those piercings. Re-read my comment. What does random women he has nothing to do with having piercings have to do with him? Why would that elicit disappointment? What is he disappointed in?
I never said there’s anything wrong with having preferences for who you sleep with lol you might want to re-read my comment
What does random women he has nothing to do with having piercings have to do with him?
Are you not a native English speaker? Do you understand that people can give opinions and critique of things they don’t like without it meaning an expectation that someone is going to DO something for them? You immediately made some random, innocuous comment about someone’s aesthetic tastes into an issue about entitlement and I assume implications about sex? Don’t you get how fucking weird that is? It betrays something on YOUR mind specifically that nobody here is talking about.
Do you think people shouldn’t have fashion preferences? Do you think humans can’t or should not have feelings about things? Every comment you make here just makes it weirder.
He used the word dissappontment holy shit do you not know what the word means??
He used that word I’m no fucking misinterpreting him lmao
I never said people shouldn’t have opinions on fashion choices omfg I was literally calling out his framing of that opinion 😂 yall are tripping omg haha
That’s not what I said. I questioned why he said he is disappointed with what random women are doing with their bodies. I can paste the definition of the word here if you don’t know what it means.
What makes my member engorged is seeing women with giant ear lobes. I am disappointed that I don’t see more of them / that more women don’t have giant ear lobes dragging on the ground.
Why I am disappointed? Because I think the world needs more beauty, and I like having my member engorged, and giant, floppy earlobes do both things.
Now, if you are going to twist my words into claiming that I think all women should have their ears flapping loosely in the wind, that is where you are having problems.
In your world, disappointment is something that must be fixed and corrected. Well, I’m sorry to say, but much like your sexual partners, disappointment is something we all have to learn to live with.
I’m not upset with the concept of disappointment. I’m calling out the fact that saying he’s disappointed with women for having piercings is a statement about how women’s bodies should be. It’s saying that women are beholden to an expectation of how their bodies should be, and that when they have nipple piercings they are failing to meet his expectations of them.
Why do you focus on the word “expectations”? The definition you yourself posted in this thread clearly mentions “hopes OR expectations”. I think the use of the term “disappointment” in this case refers to the “hopes” part. You can hope for something from someone without expecting it from them.
No I’m saying that using that term implies an expectation for those women that they are failing to meet. I am asking why he has an expectation for random women to not get those piercings. Re-read my comment omg 🙄
You also accused me of not knowing how to speak English while seemingly not understanding what the word dissappointed means.
I’ve re-read your comment dozens of times trying to understand why this concept is lost on you, that it’s FINE to be disappointed with someone’s fashion choices, be it someone you know personally, or a generalized view of trends. It’s OKAY. It doesn’t MEAN anything other than, some people like things and other people do not. I too feel a sense of disappointment when people with otherwise pretty features accessorize it in ways that distract or detract from my preference. AND THAT’S ALSO OKAY.
You know what else? You’re ALSO allowed to be disappointed with how some people dress, talk, act or just about ANYTHING else that you like or don’t like. This is called being an adult human with values, taste and self-esteem.
Whatever cartoonish picture jumped into your head of some “alpha male” casting judgement on women he wants to sleep with, which I think you’re picturing here, that shit is coming from a place of insecurity or pain inside YOU, this is not an objectifying or entitled attitude to express or hold. Disappointment with someone’s choices is a normal and healthy thing that men and women feel and express all the time and sure it can become toxic in extreme circumstances, it’s nowhere NEAR that to just express not liking a thing.
He didn’t say someone in particular. He said he was “disappointed so many girls” are getting those piercings. That doesn’t imply specific women, it implies women in general.
It’s fine for him not to like them, I’m calling out his use of language and how it implies that all women are beholden to some expectation he has for them.
The rest of your comment is genuinely bizarre and I have no idea what you’re even talking about. Read through the comment tree again. I never said anything about who the commenter was. Just calling out something he said and the implication inherent in it.
Youre mischaracterizing what I said as though I made some comment about the commenter having preferences. Which is not and never was what I said.
If you’re going to call out something I said and the implication in it, at least tell me what I said that you’re calling out and what the implication was in what I said.
If you had a preference for dark hair and many dark haired women were going blonde you might be disappointed in a general decrease in women who met your ideal aesthetic. If you aren’t shallow or are shallow but aren’t a beautiful rich Adonis you probably aren’t turning down any dates based on such criteria but mathematically trends which run contra to preference mean a decrease in average fitness according to your own accounting.
Imagine if a huge portion of men were really into boy bands and mullets. The trend would mean that if you selected men based on other more meaningful criteria like financial stability and emotional maturity that you have an increasing chance of a mullet in your future. As critical mullet mass approaches you may feel disappointed at the popularity of the trend.
That would be true, but for one, the percentage of women with nipple piercings is statistically insignificant. For two, you don’t actually have any measurable way of telling with certainty how popular those piercings are. So it’s not really as comparable to hair color, which you can ascertain at a glance. And even then, I would expect some kind of clarification that this has been obtrusive or obstructive to the speaker. “I’ve been disappointed so many times to find out that my date had their nipples pierced” or something to that effect. Just saying “some women are doing this aesthetic thing to their bodies, and it disappoints me” is not really saying the same thing.
There may be a fundamental disagreement here over whether or not it is valid to feel a sense of ownership over other people’s appearances. “Oh no, that guy would’ve been so cute if he hadn’t grown out a mullet I wish he hadn’t” would be a strange thing to think, let alone verbalize, about a stranger. It implies that by virtue of that man changing some aspect of appearance the speaker has lost something tangible. It might give the speaker pause in that situation to realize that their language kinda makes it seem like they’re entitled to “mullet-less” men. We also have to consider the emphasis that puts on men who do have mullets. The speaker in this case is collectively denigrating all of them for failing to meet their expectation of non-mullet hairstyles, despite those men not knowing the speaker and having nothing to do with them.
The original poster was denigrating all pierced women. The person you replied to merely expressed a preference. Semantically I prefer women who don’t have septum or nipple piercings and I’m disappointed so many women have one or the other is the same statement save that it expresses an emotion that the person feels not one he feels THEY should feel. Also its quite possible that more people in his dating pool have this preference than the entire US population because he is liable to encounter and date people in a comparatively small age and culture range on average. I would assume young urban women are more likely to pierce. I think you are more reacting to the negative nature of the parent post rather than the relatively mild statement made by commenter.
I’m reacting to the comment made by the commenter. Those are not semantically the same statement, though. They literally aren’t. It expresses an expectation for others’ bodies to be a certain way and a dissappointment when they aren’t. The word dissapponted is not interchangeable with preference. “I dislike nipple piercings” is not the same thing as “I am disappointed in women who get them.” You intuitively know this too because someone being angry with you implies a direct response to something you’ve done. Someone being disappointed in you implies they had an expectation for you that you failed to meet. It also takes literally nothing from the speaker to clarify this, which the commenter did not.
I have no feelings whatsoever on the subject of whether the commenter likes nipple piercings or not. I do not have nipple piercings and am entirely uninterested in what the commenter thinks about them. I object to men using language that enforces ownership over women’s bodies. As I said in my prior comment, this is an everyday occurrence for us. This happens to us all the time. My body is not your business, and the bodies of random women are not the business of the commenter.
As I said before, how would he materially know how many women have nipple piercings? It’s possible to have them and them not be visible in public. If his gripe was with how many women he’s hooked up with that have them, he would’ve said that not that he’s disappointed in women who get them.
This entire thing stemmed from a simple call out on something the commenter said. A way that his language implied that women’s bodies should be a certain way. It was never a big deal until several men immediately mischaracterized what I said and tried to imply that I am stupid, that I dont know what I’m talking about, that I’m weird, that I don’t speak English lol. One commenter rambled on about his dick. I would’ve left the comment and moved on, that was always my intent. It was the visceral response at the mere suggestion that something he said may have had a misogynistic implication that prolonged this conversation into what it became.
I do not think you are stupid. I am aware that its not exactly rare for men to be misogynists. I don’t think people put as much effort into precise choice of words as you are.
I’m not really sure who likes them other than the people who get them and other people who like those specific piercings for whatever reasons.
It’s wild how insanely defensive people get about their piercings and body modifications though, just read through this post or any post like it on reddit.
Like, chill out you freaks. If someone doesn’t like your fashion choice, unhinged rants and attacks aren’t going to make someone magically start loving metal accessories stuck in your soft parts.
This isn’t an argument about abortion or gender affirming care you nut, this is about fashion. It’s not about “women’s bodies.”
Plenty of women express “disappointment” with the fashion choices men make and it’s fine. What’s the difference?
edit: my biggest disappointment here is people who can’t separate themselves from a stranger’s opinion and have to fight about someone’s preference whom they will never see, meet or talk to. Like, it just sparks this massive insecurity in people because it reminds people that someone might reject them for their choices so the response tends to be lashing out and being unhinged. And you see this on every end of every ideological spectrum, it’s a very human thing that we need to get better about. You all need to learn to SIT with the fact that not everyone will like you, your fashion, your taste, etc. Social media and discord has made you all get way too adapted to a world where you can choose to surround yourselves with only people who accept you blindly, so that you’re losing touch with how to feel about and cope with those who don’t immediately validate everything about you.
It is about women’s bodies though, a piercing is a form of body modification.
And yeah, in a world where women’s bodies and attire weren’t policed to an extreme degree it might be the same. But it isn’t. It’s not that there’s some linguistic difference but rather that policing women’s bodies happens in millions of unique ways every day. It does happen in some ways to men too, body weight, height, body fat and hygiene those kinda things. Women are policed for those things too, in addition to a million other factors. And we suffer social consequences for those things in ways men do not. We suffer even if we do meet those expectations, because ownership over our bodies is still being taken.
It would still illicit a similar response of confusion from me if someone said they were “dissappointed so many men were getting nipple piercings”. What is the causal relationship between the speaker and the men in question? Why does the speaker feel entitled to those men’s bodies? It would still be weird and wrong to say that. I hear people making claims about women’s bodies literally every day though, and pretty uncommonly about men’s in the same way.
I do not give a single fuck about what you choose to do to your body.
But I’m also allowed personal opinions about it.
My personal opinion is that I find them extremely off-putting to a frustrating degree. Also those frustrations are not aimed at the girls getting these piercings but more towards 1) Why do they bother me so much? And 2) Why are they so popular?
Y’all can judge me all you want though it’s a little ironic when I already said I have no hate to people who get piercings. Fuck I’ve got tattoos all over. Piercings just aren’t my thing. Some I can ignore and others I can’t.
Like you I don’t give any fucks about what people choose to to with their bodies.
I don’t like it either that people’s choices are the subject of so much enragement. I really don’t have to understand why cars need loud exhausts, too. Those do annoy me.
I feel like a healthy perspective is whenever someone gets on your ‘why the fuck would you do that?’ detector is to ask those people why they do it, and not assume the reason and remain being annoyed.
The comments are pretty much all with you save one person. If I were you, I’d calmly walk away with that satisfaction before you get baited into a comment that “proves” you are what has been said of you.
I mean it’s a niche thing, people who are really into piercings really like them, and those who aren’t into them tend to really really not like them, whereas some other fashion accessories are generally more universally acceptable even if not necessarily loved.
Your experience is certainly valid but for those interested there are at least 13 Methodist denominations in the North America alone, several of which exist because they participate in more progressive leadership :)
She’s more of a Devils advocate. Just stating the wrong opinion for others to explain what’s right. There’s never any clever comeback, so I kind of think that’s the reason for her to shitpost so heavily.
I’ve blocked plenty of trolls here, but not her, yet.
Ok, so I’m not the only one who noticed that their spam has a weird taste to it. It’s got that vibe of some agreeable left-wing content but then feels likes it only there to mask authoritarian narrative building.
I’m glad I’m not the only one. That account is truly bizarre (from the point of view of how they write and express themselves). I’ve engaged with them a few times and it’s like a weird loop. I know it’s a real person, but it feels like talking to a script or dialog tree because it always goes down the same 1-2 dialog paths
Last I checked hexbear had something like 70% more total comments than lemmy.world despite only having a tiny fraction of the users. Sounds like bots to me
Hexbear has had an established and more active community for a longer time than Lemmy.world. You can visit Hexbear yourself and check, it’s not illegal or anything.
Over time Lemmy.world may overtake Hexbear, but not for a while.
I have imagined that ever since the Reddit emigration hype ended and things settled down a bit here that the vast majority of world and shit users are mostly lurkers and not terribly vocal, as is the case on a lot of other platforms.
Yep, I agree, same goes for Lemm.ee and other “generalist” instances. Those attracted the most people from Reddit as they required the least knowledge before-hand of Lemmy and aimed at replicating Reddit in some ways.
More niche communities tend to be more active per user if they are well established, with Hexbear as a prime example.
That’s very ironic given that they ban anyone further left than “Capitalist Russia is the best country in the world! Let’s support their invasion of Ukraine for no reason! Ughur genocide fake by the way! Is not so bad that Stalin banned being gay.”
Plus whenever somebody talks ill about the CCP over there they get barraged by copypasta responses. Their posts mirror popular posts on other servers, and generally lack any form of real discussion. The place looks like the bottiest of all instances and nothing can change my mind.
A lot of troll accounts are semi-automated. They run a script that detects certain keywords, and posts premade replies to them (nowadays said premade replies are being finetuned with generative AI to look less uniform), also a human is watching over them to ensure both correct operation and to overtake in case of emergency.
Source: My father’s ex-girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend was (is) a paid online troll for Fidesz. They also had Discord (later Matrix if I recall) servers for organizing mass reports, downvotes, angry/haha react campaigns, often they also did some “private doxxing”.
Idk ozma was pushing a super hard the left should protest vote or not vote before getting called out in every thread. They have been slowly evolving the shill to be less and less obvious. Even started posting memes and other content to try and get the political agenda across without posting negative articles. Now the message isnt the very obvous up front don’t vote, but they are just “critical of Biden,” yet have nothing to say about anyone else. Doesn’t seem like an edgy kid to me.
Weird how I didn’t say either of those things. Also pretty hypocritical to not like what I said, put words in my mouth, and then call me Blue MAGA. Really helps your point.
Love how you quickly diverted from the hypocrisy of putting words in my mouth and then do the exact thing you seem to be crying about of labeling me Blue MAGA because I said something you didn’t like. In the US we have a FPTP voting system. We do not have a luxury of choosing the best candidate, but the lesser of 2 evils. So pretending that protesting voting or not voting is standing for a cause is a joke and disingenuous. All it does is help the opposition party. You can be critical all you want but don’t pretend to be liberal when you know a protest vote or not vote helps the other party. The message was very clear they didn’t want people to vote. Now they are trying to be more subtle about it. But sure lets be a 1 issue voter and pretend a Trump presidency would be better for the social issues everyone crying Blue MAGA seems to care so much about.
There are still clowns who think that if they say “Blue MAGA” enough people will believe it’s real? Checks the username, oh, of course, it’s one of the regulars lol.
Hey, I’m here! I said vote for whoever you want or don’t vote, that’s democracy.
I’ve said over and over I’m a gay guy living in the Los Angeles area and far left. I keep sounding the alarm Biden will lose to Trump but nobody wants to listen to me.
And then, the debate tonight everyone is surprised Pikachu face now.
In the US it’s a spectrum combining party policy and Overton Window. As you move left, you go deeper and deeper into increasingly extreme thoughts on policy regarding what we consider classic liberal topics such as social justice, corporate power, various societal and economic reforms, etc till it hits an extreme that’s considered radical to the average, the same goes for the right and classic conservative views.
Hugging the middle/mixed gray zone are the Centrist.
Social Justice isn’t really a “Liberal” topic. It’s a topic many US Liberals generally are progressive on, but that doesn’t make it “Liberal.” Liberalism is also not about reforming the economy but maintaining “healthy” Capitalism.
Liberal views are therefore views in line with Liberalism itself, and Liberal Parties like the DNC represent Liberalism and movements towards Liberalism, not movements towards the left.
Social Democracy, ie what Scandinavian Countries have, would be centrist.
You are a liar and you keep spreading this bullshit. Both sides in the US support economic liberalism. The US exclusively uses the term “liberal” to refer to social issues.
You can argue about whether that’s a good definition or not, but you CANNOT argue about whether that’s actually how it’s used in the US, both in everyday usage and political journalism.
You are spreading this shit because you like to intentionally blur the difference between Democrats and Republicans.
Then why are you trying to push this idea that “liberal” = “fiscally liberal”? Not only is it not true, it’s not even useful, as we have words like “capitalist” to describe the similar economic thinking between Democrats and Republicans (and I’m using similar very loosely here, it’s only similar when compared to something like socialism).
Okay, so you’re saying that liberal politicians use the term differently, but they’re wrong, because “the US” doesn’t use the term differently? You’re claiming that everyday Americans say “liberal” and are referring to the economic sense of the word?
No, I’m saying liberal politicians use the word correctly but view themselves as progressive, same with liberal citizenry. Nobody calls themselves a Liberal but is actually a Socialist or anything.
World and Hexbear are both liberal cesspits. One is full of centrists who think they’re leftists, and one is full of conservatives who think they’re communists.
This just pretends democratic socialism doesn’t exist. Like there’s nothing between liberal and ML communist.
So, you are saying that if someone wants the same end goal as you, but has a differing opinion on how we accomplish that, you insult them. I’m sure you change a lot of minds and make a lot of friends with your method.
There is nothing between liberal and ML “communist”. They’re the same. Democratic socialism is to the left of both of those, and anarchist ideologies such as anarcho-communism, syndicalism, and mutualism are to the left of that. See, demsocs may not be the biggest fans of Marx, but they adhere far more closely to his ideas than Stalinists do.
I see now. Intriguing take you have. It’s different than the way everybody else classifies things, but I guess I can see where you are coming from. In my opinion, ML theory is pretty left leaning when it comes to economics and the end goal of it, but the authoritarian plan for transitioning to it does not align with most other leftist virtues and ideas.
Stalinists are just so afraid to actually pursue their supposed end goal. They always say “I want a stateless, classless moneyless society”, but if you say “Okay, let’s have a communist revolution and get rid of all that garbage right now”, they call you an idiot. “No, no, no”, they say. “You have to have a socialist revolution, and then wait two hundred years for the state to dissolve itself.” Well I’m sick of waiting. Russia never dissolved its socialist state, and China isn’t going to either. But you know who didn’t have a state, and still managed to fight bloody hard against the capitalists? Catalonia. They had the right idea, they just got rid of the state straight away. They were actually communists. I figure if the Stalinists keep saying no to communism, then they can’t be communists at all.
True leftism is when you reject reality, and anyone that doesn’t subscribe to your extremely niche, extremely online ideology is either a conservative or a centrist. Everyone who disagrees with you, whether on the basis of theory or history or material conditions or lived experience, is just too morally impure to achieve the same level of leftism as you, you are the One True Leftist, and you’re not going to let little things like what things exist or are possible get in the way of that.
Wow, a fellow soulist. You’re being a bit too evangelical, though. We actually have a discord server with over 70 members! discord.gg/nfbVVyXK. And if you don’t like that one, there are two newer servers run by different mod teams. discord.com/invite/w7tvaR6s. discord.gg/5THVKZrk. Also, many soulists come from diverse walks of life and have more lived experience of realist oppression than nearly anyone. For example, I have schizotypal personality disorder, so my experience of reality is neurodivergent to begin with. There are many otherkin and plural systems within the community. Even material conditions, which are fake and socially constructed, can radicalise someone towards soulism. Over half of soulists are transgender. Obviously, soulism is more attractive to any trans person than realism, because it offers faster and more complete transition than any realist ideology.
I am not a soulist. In fact, I consider it to be an extremely dangerous ideology. If you’re successful in undermining consensus reality, we’re going to have dragons and vampires running around terrorizing people. The moment reality becomes mutable enough for someone to turn themselves into something with mind control powers, like a mind flayer, we’re all fucked.
I am trans and neurodivergent, and I take offense at this statement:
Obviously, soulism is more attractive to any trans person than realism, because it offers faster and more complete transition than any realist ideology.
Trans identities are not a rejection of reality. I don’t find your ideology appealing in the slightest. I believe in objective science, and the science is 100% on the side of trans people.
Of course the science is in support of trans people. Realism is anti-science. The scientific method points us inexorably towards antirealism. Soulists oppose the manufactured, false consensus reality which denies trans lives experiences. Because we’re awesome. Mainstream movements say pre-transition trans women are female on the inside, but soulists say the outside body is a mental construct, and cannot be taken as fact in any sense.
I watched the whole 20 minute video, just for you. I’m not interested in reading more from him as I was not impressed.
Welcome to philosophy. These ideas are not remotely new, they’ve been discussed for literally thousands of years. Obviously there’s a difference between sensation and perception, and obviously it’s possible for senses to be fooled, and obviously optical illusions exist. No one denies these things.
One thing that he is wrong about near the end is the rather arrogant idea that reason and logic are somehow magically immune to evolutionary pressures. The whole host of cognitive biases we experience as humans are grounded in the fact that we evolved in contexts where group cohesion was important to survival. He doesn’t seem like a particularly knowledgeable cognitive scientist if he either isn’t aware of the bandwagon effect (for instance), or if he can’t see the obvious connection between that and the need to fit in with a tribal community.
But more to the point of his thesis, the reason it’s trash is because it fails it’s own test. It’s indeed possible that, contrary to all evidence and observations, we’re living in a simulation, or whatever gobbledyremoved he said about conscious beings creating reality - the problem is, so what? By definition, this theory is unfalsifiable, and it is not capable of helping us do anything at all.
There is a saying in science, “All models are wrong - but some are useful.” Physicists are well aware that when we draw a diagram of an atom on a piece of paper, it differs from an actual atom in several crucial ways. It’s very large, for instance, meaning that the drawing can absorb and emit photons without really changing. Our mental models of atoms are necessarily imperfect, the only perfect representation of an atom is the atom itself. However, we still use these imperfect drawings and mental models because they help us navigate reality and predict events. This person’s theory does none of that.
It appears that he has conjured up an imaginary, unobservable world, that does not interact with us in any way, and he has, for some bizarre reason, chosen to dub that with the moniker of “reality,” instead of the actual, you know, reality that we can sense and perceive, that is testable and verifiable, that is necessary to navigate in order to survive. Why he’s chosen to call his fantasy reality and reality an illusion, I don’t know.
Now look, this whole thing you’ve come up with seems like a fun little form of escapism, and I don’t have a problem with that in itself. The problem I have is when you start trying to interject it into actual politics, when you actively try to divert energy away from engaging with reality, the thing that actually exists and can measurably improve or harm people’s mental and physical states, and instead towards your fantasy. That’s when it starts sounding more like a cult.
Your kind of thinking is responsible for countless New Age spiritualists telling people they don’t need medicine, that they can just cure diseases, like AIDS, through the power of belief. You can indulge whatever fantasy you feel like, but when push comes to shove, medicine fucking works, the train will kill you if you step in front of it, etc. The speaker in your video at least acknowledged that, even if by doing so, he undermined everything else he said - at the end of the day, he has to submit to that which he labeled “illusory” and deny that which he labeled “real.” And so should you. And that means that you have to engage with materialist and empirically backed theories of psychology, sociology, politics, economics, etc. Which means, get your nonsense ideology out of here.
The benefit Hoffman’s theory does us is that is reveals the universe is governed not by physical laws, but by cognitive laws, of which apparent physical laws are a contextually dependent subset. And we can use that, because it means reality can be manipulated not just by physical technology, but also by psychological technology. Imagine a civilisation only using half of science! It would look to the average person like a society practicing biology and medicine without ever discovering chemistry or physics. That’s precisely the situation our civilisation now finds itself in. We are only using half the science that is available to us, and half of the technologies we could have already invented by now. Antirealists demand that the government pour more research money into developing psychological technologies that alter our perception of reality. And that the public embrace such psychological technologies as have already been invented. For example, the technology to see a trans person as their preferred gender presentation regardless of their physical form. That technology is essential to preventing suicides and many people refuse to adopt it. We are fighting an anti-science platform pushed by transphobes who want trans people dead.
The benefit Hoffman’s theory does us is that is reveals the universe is governed not by physical laws, but by cognitive laws, of which apparent physical laws are a contextually dependent subset.
This is not what he says at all, and if he has any credibility as a scientist and doesn’t want to change careers to cult leader, he would completely disavow what you just said.
And we can use that, because it means reality can be manipulated not just by physical technology, but also by psychological technology.
This is complete nonsense.
That’s precisely the situation our civilisation now finds itself in.
No it absolutely is not.
Antirealists demand that the government pour more research money into developing psychological technologies that alter our perception of reality.
Yes, I figured this was about getting high and seeing pretty colors.
Why do you need the government for this? If you need more funds, why don’t you just alter reality to manifest them into existence?
For example, the technology to see a trans person as their preferred gender presentation regardless of their physical form.
Again, respecting a trans person’s identity does not require a denial of reality or of our physical forms. If the physical form of a trans person wasn’t objectively different from that of a cis person of the same gender, then we would not need any of the medications or treatments that we do - we wouldn’t even have the terms “trans” and “cis.” Please stop talking as if trans identities are somehow a denial of reality.
We are fighting an anti-science platform
If you respond to nothing else I say, then at least answer me this: why have you chosen to term something that is anti-science as “reality?” It makes absolutely no sense. Just say that science is real, that trans identities are real, and that transphobes are pushing a false and unreal narrative.
Try to pay attention to the language we’ve all agreed on.
If you respond to nothing else I say, then at least answer me this: why have you chosen to term something that is anti-science as “reality?” It makes absolutely no sense. Just say that science is real, that trans identities are real, and that transphobes are pushing a false and unreal narrative.
I didn’t choose to term anti-science beliefs as reality. Society did, and then I went along with it so as not to be incomprehensible to you. If by “reality”, we mean “An objectively extant world”, then there’s no such thing, and I oppose belief in such a thing. But if by reality we mean “The world society thinks is objectively extant”, then that thing is anti-science.
It’s much the same language as an atheist might use to talk about the gods. The atheist would say "If by ‘the gods’, you mean ‘almighty beings’, then there’s no such thing, and I oppose belief in such a thing. But if by ‘the gods’, you mean ‘the almighty beings society believes in’, then they are anti-science.
Please don’t begrudge me for accepting your premise that consensus reality is reality. It’s just a matter of convenience. I cannot at the same time believe that reality is true, and that reality is what the realists believe in. I have to pick one or the other.
Why do you need the government for this? If you need more funds, why don’t you just alter reality to manifest them into existence?
Cause the brain doesn’t work like that, you dipshit. Didn’t I say our perceptual reality is governed by cognitive laws? Cognitive laws don’t allow me to just do that. Weren’t you paying attention, or do you just have a kindergartener’s understanding of psychology?
I didn’t choose to term anti-science beliefs as reality. Society did, and then I went along with it so as not to be incomprehensible to you. If by “reality”, we mean “An objectively extant world”, then there’s no such thing, and I oppose belief in such a thing. But if by reality we mean “The world society thinks is objectively extant”, then that thing is anti-science.
That which has the potential to smack you if you pretend it doesn’t exist is objectively real. It is nonsense to say that that is not real or that anything else is more real than that. There is no “world society thinks is objectively extant.” Society contains a lot of people who disagree on a lot of things. Scientists and supporters of trans rights are part of society.
Please don’t begrudge me for accepting your premise that consensus reality is reality.
Never said that. That’s your position, isn’t it? My position is that there is an objective reality that exists regardless of what people believe.
Cause the brain doesn’t work like that, you dipshit. Didn’t I say our perceptual reality is governed by cognitive laws? Cognitive laws don’t allow me to just do that. Weren’t you paying attention, or do you just have a kindergartener’s understanding of psychology?
Sorry, I suppose I’ve only been schooled in laws that, uh, actually exist and are observable and testable. I suppose I do have a kindergartener’s understanding of these magical psychic laws you’ve made up, I know nothing about how they supposedly work, please excuse my ignorance.
I’m familiar with psychology. Nothing about psychology suggests that it’s possible to collectively reshape the physical world through thought if enough people believe hard enough. I’d love to see some academic work that supports that claim.
They don’t want to have a communist revolution. They want to have a socialist revolution and then wait for the state to implement communism on its own. A true communist would act to bring about communism.
Have you by any chance read The Communist Manifesto or Critique of the Gotha Programme? Both are very short reads, and give some level of idea of what Marx is directly advocating for, as opposed to his general critique of Capitalism or his philosophical work on Dialectical Materialism. Marx was no Anarchist, he advocated for building Communism over time. This didn’t mean “waiting for the state to one day turn on the Communism switch,” that ignores his entire philosophy of Historical Materialism, whereby societal contradictions are worked out over time, as nothing is inherently static and everything is in motion.
None of this requires any of Lenin’s work to be read at all.
If you’re saying that a “True Communist” would somehow magically create Communism directly via revolution and not over time, then Marx was not a “True Communist.” At this point, you’re deeply silly, and simply redefining Anarchism as “True Communism” to win a game of semantics and label all non-Anarchists as conservatives.
Edit: oh, in another post you directly out yourself as a Soulist, and thus you disagree with Marx not only on his advocacy for Communism, but also his philosophy of Dialectical Materialism. At this point, you’re content to deny science and Materialism for the sake of pushing forward the idea that ideas create reality, which is deeply unserious.
Dialectical materialism is a misnomer. I’ll give you an example. Suppose Alice’s boss pays her one dollar an hour, while Bob’s boss pays him a thousand dollars an hour. A dollar is not a material object. It’s a social construct. These quantities are, material, simply numbers in a bank account. Less than that, because numbers are social constructs too. Materially, these are magnetised bits on a hard drive. There is no material sense in which Bob earns more than Alice. The fact that Bob earns a thousand times as much is purely social, not material. Yet, as a result of the exchange of social constructs, Alice lives in a slum and cannot afford medical care for the tumor that will kill her in a year’s time, and she is driven by necessity towards revolution. While Bob lives a life of privilege in a mcmansion with three healthy kids from three different ex-wives, and Bob is incentivised to maintain the status quo and oppose revolution.
If the dialectical philosophy of marxists were aptly named, it would be called dialectical determinism. Alice and Bob’s lives are governed by cause and effect, not by materials. They are governed by the cause and effect of social constructs. We can say that materially, Bob is more wealthy because he has a mansion, but why does he have a mansion when Alice does not? Because of a social construct. Not a material. It is wrong to say Alice’s desire for revolution is driven by materials. It is in fact driven by cause and effect, which is much more universal than mere matter.
Being a soulist does not make me the enemy of dialectical determinists, which is to say Marxists. But it does make me the enemy of realists, who misunderstand the lessons to be learned from Marx’s writing and fixate upon the physical to the exclusion of truth.
Oh, it appears I was wrong. You reject all of Marxism, including his critique of Capitalism via rejection of the Labor Theory of Value. Money is a representation of Exchange-Value, it doesn’t simply exist in our minds. Recognizing income differences is not an anti-Materialist take, pretending these happen for no reason is a rejection of attempting to understand Capitalism itself, and reality.
This is Idealism at its peak, and is a complete misunderstanding of what Materialists mean when referencing Social Relations. If you genuinely want to understand Dialectical Materialism, please read Elementary Principles of Philosophy by Politzer. Materialists understand social relations.
Alice’s drive towards revolution is due to her material conditions, which are caused by the material reality of Capitalism.
You are an enemy of Marxism and Marxists because you reject all 3 pillars of Marxism: Critique of Capitalism via the Labor Theory of Value, advocacy for Socialism as a way to build towards Communism, and Dialectical and Historical Materialism. Pretending to be the “One True Communist” while completely disavowing history’s most important Communist in every major manner is just anticommunism.
Yes, your beliefs about Marxist beliefs are wrong, and your beliefs about your own reality are wrong. Avoiding actually engaging with the points I made by replacing them with a “no u” and attacking me personally is again deeply unserious behavior.
The part where you completely misunderstood both Marx and my own arguments. But no, no, go ahead. I’m sure everyone at the clown college is very impressed with you.
Seems to me like you just have no way to address the arguments I raised and just resort to endless ad-hominem as a frustrated way to deflect, but whatever. Have a good day.
This is the worst thing that I have ever read, so bad that it made me make an account just to tell you how wrong you are.
First of all, if you even, for a second, thought about what you were saying this immediately crumbles. You dedicate a significant portion to talking about the material differences in the lives of those individuals, the property they own, the health care they can access, but then proceed to deny that it is the material conditions, that you have just laid out, that drive people towards certain ideas! You utterly contradict yourself.
Secondly, you just completely ignore how reality works and draw an arbitrary start line where everything just begins in a highly developed manner. The workers are not preordained to be workers, the bourgeoisie are not preordained to be such either. The people in your thought experiment would be in such a position due to a very very very very long history of subjective action arising from objective material conditions and social relationships (those relationships also arising from material conditions). So, dialectical materialism is very aptly named!
Thirdly, you have no idea what dialectical means and it is agonisingly obvious. A dialectic is the relationship between the opposite aspects inherent within a thing. So, with any morsel of philosophical thought it is readily apparent that “dialectical determinism” is an oxymoron. And I know you lack that said morsel of philosophical thought, so I’m going to explain it to you. The dialectic in question is the subject-object relationship, otherwise known as historical materialism: so if you remove subjectivity (which is a necessary consequence of a deterministic world view) you are debasing the subject to a mere object; and if there is no subject, there’s no subject-object relationship and thus no dialectic.
To wrap things up, stop trying to talk about things you’re beyond clueless about!
And large parts of .ml, which is the bridge for hexbear to all the instances which defederated with them.
It really does feel like hexbear users are probably high fiving each other over their cubicle walls in Vladivostok. The admin openly states their goal is information warfare.
I’ll start posting more content in a few days. I’ve been traveling and working a lot. But I’ve also been playing project zomboid on single player so we’ll see if I follow through with my promise.
Apple Maps doesn’t just recommend the fastest routes, it also appears to push the most popular routes as alternatives.
Here is the San Francisco area to LA in iOS 18. The longer route might seem insane if you’re not familiar with the drive, but that longer route is much prettier, and a lot of people intentionally drive in the coastal road for the views.
Edit: Weird. Lemmy isn’t loading the picture for me. All in all, this is a map of I5 to LA vs the Hyw 101 to LA. I5 is 2 hours faster, but it’s a long brown valley, it smells like cow shit, and you’re bombarded with homemade MAGA signs for several hours. It’s a drive of hate, farts, and truck stop food. 101 longer, but it’s recommended for redwoods forests and cute little beach towns.
California is ridiculous. I’m from San Francisco, was visiting LA and someone asked me where I lived. I pointed to 101 and said, turn left on that road and keep going for 8 hours.
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