porous_grey_matter
@porous_grey_matter@lemmy.ml
- Comment on Dear Faith I 8 hours ago:
This one almost certainly isn’t because of both the jocular tone and the several other “emails to Faith” posted in this comm recently, but indeed they are drawing on the true experiences of graduate students.
- Comment on many have been saying this 1 day ago:
Having lived in the UK as a (white) foreigner… You are not a whole lot better over there. “White supremacy” is a bit of a loaded term with a few different meanings. By your question, I guess you mean people who dress up in nazi cosplay? Those guys are still fairly uncommon everywhere, but the thing is that there is a porous border between your average racist prick and one of those guys. As they feel safer to express their true beliefs, they do so more often, and they want to wear the signifiers of their movement. They’re very safe in the USA right now so you see more of them. But in my opinion, “white supremacy” is better used to refer to a culture which values white people more or thinks of them as higher on some kind of natural hierarchy. That is, after all, what the words literally mean. Although it’s a broader definition, I think it’s clearer, because it removes the confusion when the average racist pricks start dressing up in fash drag when someone who lets them gets into power. Explicit racists (as opposed to your normal somewhat prejudiced person who still doesn’t believe racism is good) often talk about “hiding their power level”, i.e. not letting on. What I’m saying is, the UK is similar to the US, just a bit shyer.
- Comment on ..? 2 days ago:
Nah lol
- Comment on ..? 2 days ago:
No, I’m just accusing them of throwing around words that mean nothing
- Comment on ..? 2 days ago:
Sorry, I don’t save links to random stupid internet comments
- Comment on ..? 2 days ago:
You can see from the question that poster asked that, whatever clear definition about authoritarianism or whatever you think it has, that’s just not how people are actually using it. Centrists will use it for Mamdani supporters, DSA-types will use it for Marxist-Leninists, and anarchists will use it for almost literally anyone.
- Comment on ..? 2 days ago:
A “tankie” is just anyone to the left of you
- Comment on Current events dictate that I post this. 2 days ago:
You can just look up the numbers. 400k civilians directly killed, on the low end, millions more dead from famine and displacement. Versus like 15-20k in Ukraine
- Comment on Current events dictate that I post this. 3 days ago:
Ok, some in Yemen and Somalia too, but Wikipedia claims the cost of life of the gwot was 4.5 million, and I’ve seen credible estimates as high as 6.
- Comment on Current events dictate that I post this. 3 days ago:
Say what you want about Bush, even that war criminal didn’t go as far.
Genuinely not defending Russia here, but Dubya’s pretext for invading Iraq and Afghanistan was if anything even flimsier than the “justification” for the Ukraine invasion.
- Comment on Littering 🚯 1 week ago:
Ban lead bullets then
Are you insane? These brave Eagles are dying to protect our freedom
- Comment on Is she saying that eating ass is bourgeois decadence? 1 week ago:
It’s not that it’s fully “wrong” but it’s misleading, since society has changed so much since the definition was coined. The Wikipedia article is rather better than the dictionary definition since it provides all this context.
- Comment on thank you Boris 2 weeks ago:
Boris? Why always Boris…
- Comment on Sony-led program offers PS5 rentals starting at $13.50 a month in the UK across 12, 24, or 36-month leases — console has to be returned at the end of the contract 2 weeks ago:
Sorry, you don’t get any points for this prediction, because it already exists.
- Comment on Is she saying that eating ass is bourgeois decadence? 2 weeks ago:
The one thing I’d dispute is
The modern day “middle class,” which another commenter rightly describes as the “petit bourgeois,”
As you correctly identify in your last paragraph, class is defined by your relationship to labour and the means of production, and not strictly to how much money you have. The petit bourgeois may generally be what we commonly think of as middle class, but it more specifically identifies small business owners. People who make money from the labour of others, but still have to do real work themselves in order to maintain it. A doctor at a hospital is not petit bourgeois, but a doctor running their own clinic and employing a nurse and a secretary is, and would be even if they had less income. Even a sports player who makes tens of millions is not really petit bourgeois or bourgeois if that’s all they do - although they often go in that direction after some time.
Where it gets complicated in our financialised world is that our savings, if we have any, are often invested in corporations, and after a lifetime of working for a decent wage, some of us are fortunate enough to be able to live out our last decades or years from investment income. It feels a bit tough to describe retirees as bourgeois even though by the strict definition that would be the case.
Despite this complication, I think it’s much clearer to think of class distinction in terms of the relationship to work, as this is what mainly incentivises attitudes to political and economic policy. If you get your income from other people working for you, you’re more likely to want to drive wages down and not pay for healthcare. If you get paid for working, you’re more likely to want wages to increase, even if your wage is already high.
- Comment on Is she saying that eating ass is bourgeois decadence? 2 weeks ago:
No, it means merchant class. Capitalists and industrialists, as opposed to hereditary nobody. They are the ruling class now and have been for well over a century at least, but it’s true that they were the middle class at the time the term was coined, although rapidly gaining in power.
- Comment on me when lower category theory 3 weeks ago:
Before checking the comments I was like “wait is this real maths or just ramblings from some mentally ill tech bros” but I guess it’s real?
- Comment on smh 4 weeks ago:
If you’re used to cups and teaspoons of course you’re more likely to use binary divisions. I’m more likely to use steps of 20% for that purpose. And if you want to actually tailor your proportions to match the one egg or whatever the indivisible object in your recipe is, then you end up with 241 mL or 13.57 Tbsp anyways. Anyway, ten isn’t the magic number, it’s just the one we use for almost everything, and already did when we had imperial measurements.
- Comment on smh 4 weeks ago:
Only for data and that’s a quirk of organising binary data in bytes. Factors of whatever your base is are better. Don’t think we’re going to be moving away from base 10 for volume or distance or power.
- Comment on [troll science]: Unruh particle shower on a centrifuge 1 month ago:
Routine maybe, I don’t think it’s that boring
- Comment on Humans are part of the ecosystem. 1 month ago:
White supremacy also has nothing to do with white people actually being supreme, it’s about the narratives that shape the worldview of the people subscribing to the ideology.
- Comment on Humans are part of the ecosystem. 1 month ago:
So the Wikipedia article claims that Māori control about 30% of fisheries, with many citations, do you have real evidence which contradicts this? This includes things like Sealord which is one of the biggest quota owners, but is only half owned by iwi, so a genuine number would be quite a lot lower than that 30%. That’s not to say that there aren’t problems with the management, we agree about that.
- Comment on Humans are part of the ecosystem. 1 month ago:
That documentary is embarrassingly wrong, the overwhelming majority of companies fishing in NZ waters are huge multinationals, not owned by Māori.
- Comment on Humans are part of the ecosystem. 1 month ago:
And if he’s just a fascist I don’t think he need to take his justifications seriously by giving him a newly named ideology.
Giving an important branch of fascist ideas a name doesn’t “take his justifications seriously” in any sense of condoning them. It’s also not newly named, but been discussed in academic studies of far right tendencies for decades, at least since the 60s. It’s a useful category for describing a set of ideas which have substantial influence.
But I’ve never met one to my knowledge, not even online.
There are probably lots of ideologies you don’t hear about all the time. Instead of just rejecting their existence with a total lack of curiosity you could instead read about them. At least start with the Wikipedia page…
- Comment on Humans are part of the ecosystem. 1 month ago:
Sure, that’s the overarching category. It is a subtype of that.
- Comment on Anon thinks about wheat 1 month ago:
I see you’ve all already had the discussion but my point wasn’t really to say that they were the main source of calories or something. But a small part of the diet can still make an important contribution to nutrition, particularly when it comes to vitamins.
- Comment on Humans are part of the ecosystem. 1 month ago:
Something doesn’t have to be correct or honest to be an ideology. It’s a shared doctrine among a significant part of the far right that “protection of the environment” is their purported motivation for exterminating undesirables. That’s absolutely an ideology, even if they’re wrong about it’s effects or even dishonest about it. I don’t believe it’s all said cynically and knowingly either, and I don’t think that Michelle Chan, in that quite accurate quote, is saying that they never believe in the stories they’re telling themselves about it. Just that the deeper cause for their actions is actually white supremacy. It would be like saying a religious ideology wasn’t an ideology just because it’s motivations are not the actual existence of some supernatural entirety but instead cultural forces, bonding, the comfort of rituals etc., and I don’t think that makes much sense.
- Comment on Humans are part of the ecosystem. 1 month ago:
Some people have just “never seen” fascism. Shrug.
- Comment on Humans are part of the ecosystem. 1 month ago:
What do you mean? It certainly is. It has been, for example, an influence in several right extreme terror attacks (notably the Christchurch, NZ mass shooting in 2019 comes to mind, where the murderer explicitly described himself as such in his manifesto). Not to mention that crunchy, back-to-the land ideas are a really important part of contemporary far right propaganda.
I’d also argue that this doesn’t really sow division amongst environmentalists; just because it has ‘eco’ in the name doesn’t mean these people actually care about the environment, it’s all aesthetics.
- Comment on 1 month ago:
But I don’t want to hurt them :(