I thought this at first as well. But then I thought he probably is that dislodged from reality that he genuinely thinks he’s discriminated against when people mention equity and stuff like that because he’s the antagonist of equity.
If everyone in the world is at least not poor and comfortable it means a lot less wealth for him; a big No No for PeElon.
The origin of that phrase is ironic, given how it’s used. It originates from a USENET post from the late 90s by what was essentially a proto-MRA referring to a woman.
I could see applying it in that direction today still, if talking about certain domains, like conscription or basically anything tied to the criminal justice system, or services for the homeless or victims of abuse.
For real. Diversity could easily be considered antithetical to racism. Inclusion could be considered antithetical to sexism. But no, Chef Elon made pseudo-intellectual word salad.
But, “Worlds grossly richest man not big on equity” feels like an Onion article title.
I feel like wokeness in general requires empathy and understanding of the plight of others. Anti-woke means being unempathetic, and folks feel that is positive? I literally can’t comprehend being for Team Sociopath, but millions of people will vote for Trump, so it’s real.
Could be, but like countries that use the words “Democratic” and/or “People’s” in their names, just because you call something by a word doesn’t necessarily mean that word is accurate.
Often “diversity, inclusion and equity” in practice means doing things that would rightly be called out as sexist and racist but targeting the “right” sex and/or race.
Without citing specific examples, it sounds like you just don’t like affirmative action programs, which is an opinion I’d be embarrassed to say out loud. When one group of people has all the money and all the connections, it’s not fair to say “just treat everyone equally!” because it maintains the unequal status quo—poorer minority groups continue getting into schools at lower rates since they live in poorer neighborhoods with poorer schools and poorer access to the funds needed for higher education, women continue getting passed up for management positions, leading to more male dominated companies hiring more men for more management positions, et cetera
Not the guy you replied to, but I’ll give you one: if you are male, it is (or at least was last federal election) impossible to be at the highest spot of any candidate list of the german green party. There was a hard rule that spot 1 had to be a woman and then it alternates. The alternation rule seems pretty alright, but blanket excluding someone from the #1 spot because of gender is pretty blatant sexism. It doesn’t matter that women were in that position and worse in the pretty recent past, 2 wrongs don’t make a right (also ironically this kind of ignores other gender identities entirely but they’d probably be given the woman treatment as they’re clearly generally disadvantaged, which seems alright). Something like having at least 45% at #1 of both men and women and then keeping the alternating rule seems a lot more sensible, or even flat out forcing 50% and flipping the genders each election.
I can also spend a very long time talking about how affirmative action in general feels more like the lazy route to achieve a somewhat better state since socioeconomic factors play a huge role in education and those heavily correlate with ethnicity, but it’s unfair to exclude people based on their skin color (almost like that’s racism by definition), but whatever. I haven’t seen any cases of it being actually abused, and overall just fast tracking more representation of all sorts of people into all kinds of jobs and social groups will likely help a lot against racism in the long run. It just feels like the inferior means to that end.
Germany has things like giving disabled people preference in job applications given otherwise equal qualifications which I think is great as they most likely have much fewer options overall, and I believe that might be considered affirmative action too? I’m not super familiar given that that’s not a term here.
To your last point, yes, affirmative action is the term the U.S. has decided on for programs such as that one. There may be newer phrases in use, I don’t know for certain.
I would agree on the ‘lazy’ argument. It certainly feels like we could do better. But that always seems to be true!
I have on a personal level had to learn to avoid letting perfection get in the way of improvement. Whether that is broadly applicable to policy is debatable—I would welcome much more radical change, but I also feel as though radical action in one direction spurs more radical opposition. For instance, Biden tried to forgive $430 billion in student debt in the U.S. and it was in the news, argued over, eventually stopped due to some absurd court cases—yet he and his administration have successfully gotten about $132 billion forgiven in other avenues, step by step, with much less fanfare and thus (in my mind) much less opposition as well.
In regards to the German Green Party, and to for the moment ignore the question of additional genders, I thought that there were currently two co-leaders, one man one woman? If that is not the case, and even if it is, I assume the argument would be along the lines of ‘women have been underrepresented for so long that it is reasonable to give them a stretch of overrepresentation in order to bring a semblance of balance around.’ Or ‘other parties are mostly led by men so we will be led by women for some semblance of balance.’ Neither concept seems crazy to me.
And on the question of alternative gender presentations I think the issue is one of how to enact the greatest good for the largest number of people. The rights and representation of trans, non-binary, etc. peoples matter very much to me, knowing several such people personally! But collectively they do at the moment make up a small portion of the population. I think they should be encouraged to do whatever it is they want with their lives. If that is to pursue office with the Green Party, so be it. Such a thing seems like it may take a change in language to ‘allow’. But it does not mean the rules are bad conceptually or that they need to be thrown out—more inclusive language seems like a small change that does not require a change in the direction of progress.
That’s the ‘affirmative’ side of affirmative action—taking an action like encouraging trans people to run for office. Temporarily banning men from holding office wouldn’t really fall under the umbrella in spirit I suppose, but isn’t the outcome the same, and thus whether or not you take offense at the concept a personal choice, or at least worthy of a philosophical debate?
Visiting again the concept of laziness: just appointing women to leadership positions does not make everything fair. For instance, the disabled may suffer more social exclusion under female leadership, because women tend to see disabled children in terms of the additional child raising work they represent (of course, mostly men’s fault for pigeonholing women as homemakers). But this is a reason to improve the course we are on. It is okay to critique, to point out the ways that things are not going the right way. For instance, feel free to complain about how the focus on social justice overshadows the larger issues of economic injustice that hold everybody down! Feel free to point out groups that are being forgotten. Individuals who benefit from affirmative action and then turn around and preach self sufficiency. Personally, I think men’s mental health will need to be a bigger focus! It’s clearly an issue, and since they’re still mostly in charge it’ll probably benefit us all if they get some help. Whatever your critique, it should be in the spirit of fostering a world where your genitals or skin color or the neighborhood you’re born in does not determine your life’s course.
But it should not critique the concept. We should not reverse course and say “we were wrong, put men back in charge of everything and don’t let brown people live here.” And that is what I think being against affirmative action means. It means “no thanks, I am okay with the deal as it stands.” The deal as it stands, where in the United States you can accurately predict someone’s income just by knowing what ZIP code they were born in; where despite Hillary Clinton’s career women are underrepresented lucrative fields like the sciences because they’re still expected to put their future on hold to raise a couple’s children; where despite Barack Obama’s success black men are more than four times as likely to have felony convictions than white, taking the community’s right to vote away. That means, whether the person saying it is part of the in-group or a well-off member of a minority group, that they have enough, and aren’t interested in helping others get enough. I’d be embarrassed to say something like that.
Sorry I rambled on so much, I am “stealing time” at my job and lost my train of thought a few times as I left and revisited this comment. :)
Sorry I rambled on so much, I am “stealing time” at my job and lost my train of thought a few times as I left and revisited this comment. :)
Totally didn’t do the same thing…
Anyway, I mostly agree with you, just fyi regarding the german green party: Annalena Baerbock was their chancellor candidate, Habeck was effectively what in the US would be a president’s running mate. A duo, but Baerbock was iirc always going to be chancellor if the greens got a majority. And yes, they have joint leadership of the party.
That policy has to do with the german voting system, where each party has to provide a list of candidates for each state. Then according to how many votes the party gets, proportionally many people from that list get into the Bundestag, the list is in order. And that’s the one that had to alternate.
The greens as of last federal election are big enough to where this effectively isn’t going to single out anyone, they will get a few candidates from every state into the Bundestag. However the principle of forcing the gender of slot 1 just left a bit of a bad taste. Still voted for them and will most likely do that again.
Just some extra detail that I think you might have been missing about the German electoral system. #1 spot doesn’t refer to the leader of the party as this comment sort of seems to imply.
Germany uses a voting system called Mixed-Member Proportional. In it, you vote for your local candidate exactly the same as you would in America or the UK—using first past the post. But then you also vote for your favourite party. And there are additional seats in the Bundestag (congress) that are not tied to a particular region, but are instead used to “top up” the total of the Bundestag so that its party representation is proportional to the wishes of the voters. So if 10% of voters want the Greens and 20% want SPD, then 20% of the seats will be SPD and 10% will be Greens. If a party wins more seats in local elections than it is owed proportionally, it gets no additional people. If it wins fewer local elections than its national party vote percentage, it gets topped up using its party list. The #1 spot on that list will be the first person elected under this system, unless they also won their local race, in which case it goes to #2 instead, etc.
MMP is a really good electoral system, and honestly it’s probably the one I would advocate for and would encourage Americans and Brits to advocate for in their respective countries. Though I would replace the party lists entirely with a “nearest loser” to eliminate the problem @LwL describes. I’d also prefer IRV be used for the local part of the election, though that might be overly complicating it for some. Having those proportional top-ups means third parties not just can earn a place (which is what IRV by itself does), it actually guarantees that they will earn a place, if any sizeable number of people want them to. No more Nader ruining it for Gore; instead, Nader’s party will actually have representatives elected.
So looking back at the example they described about Germany, if we ignore local seats for the sake of simplicity, if the Greens are owed 1 seat, that seat will always be a woman. If they’re owed 2 seats, they’ll have a woman and a man. Owed 3 seats and they’ll have two women and a man. Etc.
When one group of people has all the money and all the connections, it’s not fair to say “just treat everyone equally!” because it maintains the unequal status quo
Then targeting socioeconomic status makes more sense. Any system that categorizes people and puts poor white folks in the same “has all the money and connections” bucket as the Clintons and the Obamas in the same “has no money or connections” bucket as poor black folks is not, in any way, actually about having money or connections.
Well unfortunately, the overlap is close enough to a circle that it makes plenty of sense, especially since the issue is not purely economic, but social, as you accidentally point out by using the phrase socioeconomic. Obama has wealth that is unfathomable to the everyday person, as does Clinton—both deal with a society that belittles them because of who they are in a way that white men don’t face, rich or poor.
Surely you’ve noticed that Obama is the only black president so far, despite black people making up 10 to 20% of the population over the last few centuries.
You are also aware that Clinton would have been the first female U.S. President. She won the popular vote by a significant margin, which is a great sign for public opinion on women, but the reality is still that women, who are more than half the country, are not more than half in charge of it.
The fact these two got as far as they did is in no small part thanks to the concept of affirmative action, where we try to right past wrongs and level the playing field. Encourage women to go into nontraditional fields, encourage black students to apply for Ivy League schools and ensure there are spots for them—these things only “hurt” white men because resources are so artificially limited already, disproportionately held by the tiny percentage of [rich white men] who control the US’s giant conglomerates and obedient politicians, and regular old white men aren’t used to feeling the squeeze.
Did Obama pull the ladder up behind him somewhat by applying the same neoliberal bullshit that has destroyed the concept of compassionate social safety nets in favor of a more competitive marketplace? Can you be mad at him? Yeah. That’s beside the point. White people have been allowed to fuck over other white people for ages.
honestly what I hate the most about those quotes is that every one of those slogans actually have a quite clear meaning , especially within the context of the book .
I find myself saying “We are the dead” quite a lot when something reality bending occurs (you know, like Elon opening his pie hole), because that’s how it feels.
I do not think anyone expects Germany to say anything bad about Israel. The problem is that they went on to defend what Israel is doing. Germany did not need to speak, yet they chose to in favour of Israel.
I think it is understandable, but it is also a little sad. Germans are good people and they are carrying a pretty big bag on the back. Israel will end cleaning from palestinians gaza and in 2 years nobody will care about what happened.
After ruining copyright law and borrowing from public domain works, Disney finally loses a property to public domain. An incredible start to the new year!
Yeah voting is largely useless. But the gallows don’t happen without a revolution, which doesn’t happen without people getting in the streets (protest).
We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.
There’s little that’s legitimately out of your control. Of course, I don’t mean 1 person can topple Capitalism or anything, but 1 person can set up a union, join a protest, or set up a co-operative farm, educate others, or make meaningful grassroots change.
1 person can make a big difference in the lives of the people around them.
One person can do something, but one person can’t do everything. If you are already running a farm co-op, leading a union, or so on, you simply don’t have the time to address the hundred other things you can see in the news in a single day. The point still stands, you can’t control everything, so even if you are making change on one or two points, you have to avoid being angry about the hundred other things you cannot.
Fermi Paradox. Are there aliens? Of course. Are they in our current time and local space? Probably not. It’s it fun to think about? Yes, that’s why science fiction exists.
More importantly, are they a lifeforms that we would even recognize as alive? The chances of an alien being humanoid are even slimmer. Then there’s whether they develop intelligence, whether they care about space, and whether they survive long enough to get anywhere.
If intelligent life exists anywhere else the biggest chance we have of finding anything would be a self sustaining vehicle sent off into space by them at some point. The chances of us being alive at the same time in close enough proximity to encounter each other is almost zero.
If a vessel could wander space endlessly we have a slightly bigger (but still almost zero) chance of encountering it.
This was one of the only cool parts of the film Oblivion. Basically if an intelligence can cross that distance to us it would likely be a digital intelligence. That and if you want to fuck humanity without touching them, crack the moon.
It’s a fair point, but I guess we would recognise them, especially if carbon-based.
Think of another issue. We evolved in 6 million years. Assuming it takes 4 billion for the planet to form and organisms to form, that means there’s 8 bln years where civ can start. What’s the chance that they are at a similar tech level as us? Really small.
Counterpoint, why do dolphins and sharks look so alike when they have a completely different phylogenetic tree? They separately developed traits that were very well suited to the medium of water. Convergent evolution means that it isn’t entirely unlikely that whatever we may find has similar traits to beings on earth, because we all exist in a universe of solids, liquids, and gasses.
Counter-counterpoint: both species come from the same tree of life, several of their traits taken for granted come from previous species’ adaptation, e.g. bilateral symmetry. When you see, say, a molusk with the same bodyplan as a shark, we can talk about it being a common possibility.
While carcinisation does exist as a phenomenon, I believe all examples involve animals of the same order, i.e. it’s even less extreme than comparing a shark and a dolphin.
As a software developer, I’d recommend them to switch to semver, having three digits to separate major, minor and patch numbers. This makes it easier for customers to identify if the new version has just minor fixes (an ingredient removed), breaking changes (eg the menu changes) or major changes (all the waiters were replaced) compared to the previous one.
tbf, every actual neo-nazi is probably doing everything they can to further piss off Israel. It’s just a convenient opportunity is all, if someone is actually a hater.
They’re not anywhere close to the majority, the majority just wants to save lives. But they’re loud and sometimes clever, and good at hijacking other people’s causes.
Both anti-semitism and anti-arabism exist, and both are bigotry, because all Jews and all Arabs are not the same, and will never all be the same. Any more than all Americans are the same.
It’s a hard world though, right? Means we’re going to need something better than simple, easy tools to wrestle with it. That’s just how hard it is, and how little it cares about anyone’s wishes for it to be simpler.
Too many people see the world in black and white. You are either good or evil. Every person is both good and evil, but the media and propagandists want you to see one side as pure evil. Obviously it works because I see these kinds of posts everywhere. I don’t see it getting any better since everyone carries a handheld propaganda machine with them all the time.
I’m someone who knows that every person is both good and bad, and it’s a struggle that every one has. Looking at things as black and white, and every human struggle as being a fight against good and evil is a very misplaced, and dangerous way of thinking.
In a shitty ironic way, many neo-nazis are showing their really true colors as neo-fascists. They just want to support genocide and at this point, Jews are whiter than Palestinians, and they just want that same thing to happen against Black or Arab people around them. I’m happy to continue to use the word neo-nazi, but it’s a much broader spectrum of shittiness at this point.
Part of it is there’s at least two competing factions of crazy-talkers. One is the Book of Revelations types, I don’t know exactly how its supposed to work, but they want the second coming, and it’s supposed to happen over there and be ushered in by chaos.
Other is Jewish conspiracy theory types, who just like seeing what they perceive as the ultimate “ruling class” brought low. They don’t really need any holy book-type religions, their actual religion is just worldly power in all its forms–a depressing confluence of ignorance of what actually makes people strong, and pragmatism towards what it seems like makes people strong to them.
I always think the revelation types that think they’re definitely getting saved before the apocalypse is funny. The Bible says 144,000 will be saved, but the current estimate of Christians on earth is about 2.2 billion from what I can find. So you just gotta hit that 0.006545% chance.
While they’re at it, they can go to the casino, bet their entire life savings on a single number on the roulette wheel, do that twice in a row, and their odds of winning that are 11x higher than being picked for rapture.
I’m Jewish and the first ones, from two who talked to me years ago, either goes
“All jews must return to Isreal so the end times can happen” (she then got worse and rude when I said no thanks, so I don’t know more than that) and the second was
“The end times will only happen when jews have a kingdom in Isreal and most jews return to the holy land for the last war”
They both claimed to like me being Jewish because there needed to be jews in order for the end times to happen and I just went back to stocking groceries and ignoring them mostly
I generally agree. When I pull out the specific term neo-nazi, I’m referring to an extremely specific brand of bigot. The kind that probably has Hitler saluted themselves in the mirror before. Hardcore, not some filthy casual bigotry.
Not the guys that will bully and call names, the guys that would kill if they could. That’s their desire, murder, so long as they can get away with it.
Due to the root word Semite, the term is prone to being invoked as a misnomer by those who interpret it as referring to racist hatred directed at all “Semitic people” (i.e., those who speak Semitic languages, such as Arabs, Assyrians, and Arameans). This usage is erroneous; the compound word antisemitismus (lit. ‘antisemitism’) was first used in print in Germany in 1879[17] as a “scientific-sounding term” for Judenhass (lit. ‘Jew-hatred’),[18][19][20][21][22] and it has since been used to refer to anti-Jewish sentiment alone.
The meaning is “anti-Judaism” though. You’re the one wanting to define it differently. Be my guest, but it’s just good to know what the term means when people use it.
Anti-semitism exists, absolutely yes. But condemning the state of Israel of war crimes is not example of one, no matter how Israeli government tries to twist it.
If you support the action of Israel against the civilians of Palestine, it doesn’t matter if you’re a Jew or not - you deserve the scorn you get.
If you’re a Jew and you do not support this hell, I’m very sorry if you get any hostility directed to you, you’re a victim too. You deserve love and safety. Condemnation of the actions of Israel is in no way directed at you.
But Israeli military generals and government should face international trial for what they’ve done. It is crazy somebody in their right mind dares to support them in the 21st century.
Agreed. I was just wanting to point out that not everyone who seems to be criticizing Israel for war crimes actually cares about war crimes in the slightest, it’s more about what is actually a rare chance to simply hurt Jewish people in an actually substantial way. Since this small minority of actually severely anti-semitic people is extremely passionate about their beliefs, they are a surprisingly loud and disruptive force in what should otherwise be straightforward criticism of valid war crimes.
Many Israelis are emotionally devastated atm, which is one of the factors behind their irrational behavior imo. This makes them vulnerable to being pushed too far, by simply making them even angrier. They are not currently stable, at all. It’s a collective madness of sorts, and it should be approached with care, not trolling.
I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re refering to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.
Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called Linux, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.
There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine’s resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called Linux distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux!
It’s not even just “political”, it is politics. Deciding to collaboratively make an operating system (infrastructure, practically) which is free for everyone and asking anyone using it to help out is doing politics, at least in a world where people are politically motivated to restrict people’s ability to go and do that somehow.
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