immutable
@immutable@lemm.ee
- Comment on Is there any way our of the US political spiral? 4 weeks ago:
I still remember being taught about how politics is America is a pendulum.
It swings too far to the right and people get pissed and send it leftward. Then it swings too far to the left and people get pissed and send it rightward.
I have waited my entire life for the swing leftward, and I think I identified what broke America.
Let’s say that this pendulum swinging is necessary, we are a pack of goldfish swinging from left to right looking for something good with short short memories. This system can be metastable, you don’t make a ton of progress on anything but you just sorta bounce between the two sides and the status quo sticks around and you don’t slide into madness.
When 9/11 happened and Ws war on terror emerged, I worried that it would break the system. But in 2008, Obama emerged with a progressive message of hope and change. The pendulum I was told about was about to swing left. I had lived through the right swing of Ws time in office, and now I got to see what the left had to offer (which as a leftist was very exciting).
I watched two phenomenons happen concurrently that broke the system.
- Obama captured the leftward energy that should have swung us back to the left and held it solidly in the center / center-right. He ran as a progressive firebrand and then governed from the center / center right. The big hop and change we got was nationwide Romneycare, a program devised by the Heritage Foundation which has done nothing but entrench the powers of the insurance industry into law.
- Racism broke a large part of the voting public away from reality.
Obama wasn’t the first to do this, Clinton’s triangulation strategy was also a democrat governing from the center.
So we have a captured Democratic Party, beholden to the donor class and they capture the periodic leftswing energy and hold it center / center-right. Things fail to get better and the population goes “well fuck the left doesn’t have any answers, let’s swing the pendulum back the other way”
Over time the result is that the Overton window shifts and shifts and shifts until an oligarch is doing nazi salutes and the corporate media is going “oh he probably isnt really doing a nazi thing, he’s just advancing policies that nazis would love and saying things nazis would say and is excited and you know how hard it is to not do a nazi salute when you are excited.”
Our only hope now is that trump doesn’t slowly boil us into fascism and overplays and the people revolt. But Americans have proven to be willing to just take it in the ass rougher and longer than I’d ever imagine.
- Comment on Making America great! 1 month ago:
The best thing everyone can do is just tune out this bullshit.
MAGA is what happens when edge lords grow up. They love laughing at people freaking out over every dumb thing they do.
During the first trump term I watched the news, I got angry at every thing he did, his supporters lapped that outrage up.
This time fuck it. Rename the Gulf of Mexico to trumps bug boy bathtub if you want. Enjoy it MAGA people, enjoy all your epic trolls but I won’t be on the other side getting upset. And then enjoy when the tariffs make your construction business unprofitable. Enjoy when his bungling jacks up prices sky high and you can’t buy bananas anymore because he threatened to nuke the countries that grow them for reasons no one can identify.
This term they can just enjoy the fucking mess they’ve made and I’m not going to give them any satisfaction in getting upset and yelling at the village idiot to not play with fireworks. Go ahead, blow your fucking fingers off dumbass.
- Comment on ugh i wish 2 months ago:
This problem has always bugged me writ large as well. It seems nearly impossible to have any conversation that looks at the bigger picture of things in a complete and nuanced way.
Take for example employment rates. It’s just taken as a given that high employment is the goal. But stop and think about that for a second. In any other part of your life is your goal to completely saturate all time with labor? No, obviously not.
But the goals are set and we must achieve them. More money next quarter than last quarter, it doesn’t matter if every conceivable customer already has a subscription, we must grow. Make the product cheaper to make, charge more, do anything but consider that we might have picked stupid goals.
- Comment on Im flyinf to the USA from england 3 months ago:
USA USA USA
- Comment on Im flyinf to the USA from england 3 months ago:
Quick note on this one
Pedestrians are not expected to look out for traffic, but are not allowed to just cross anywhere. So it balances out.
If you end up driving, pedestrians are not allowed to cross anywhere (although some places like New York have legalized crossing anywhere) but pedestrians always have the right of way. You can’t run people over because they crossed outside a crosswalk.
So if on foot, use crosswalks or you could get a ticket for jaywalking. If in a vehicle, don’t hit pedestrians.
- Comment on Anon takes the horsepill 3 months ago:
White cows make normal milk, brown cows make chocolate milk. That’s just science
- Comment on Commie trek 3 months ago:
I like how none of the points are correct.
At best they could be a critique of the lives of the people that join up to starfleet. Really the only thing that rings true is that, like any military, they have uniforms and you have to follow the orders of the chain of command.
They show tons of citizens of the federation doing whatever the fuck they want. Doing weird science experiments, going to conferences, settling planets, running a vineyard in France, Captain Siskos dad just has a restaurant for the fun of it.
- Comment on Star Citizen Expose Paints a Fairly Bleak Picture: 'There's No Actual Focus on Getting the Game Done' 3 months ago:
Why would you complete a game when you can make a constant stream of income and increase that income stream with announcements and drip feeds.
Look at this madness robertsspaceindustries.com/funding-goals
- Comment on Anon wants a cute girlfriend. 4 months ago:
“Which are looks or an extravagant personality”
Why won’t cure girls date me, I’m ugly AND boring!
It’s so sad that these people clump together and just reinforce each other’s insecurities. Sure if you look like a thumb and only want to regurgitate 4chan memes you aren’t a very desirable partner. But there are tons of guys that are not leading man attractive that have partners. How do they do it?
Do things, when you do the things if there are women there, treat them like the human beings that they are. The more things you do the more stuff you have to talk about, when you find people that like the same stuff you do and you treat them like people, they end up liking you… it’s really that easy.
It is maddening watching so many men gather together to try to unravel the mystery of “treat women as people” and the absolutely bonkers alternatives they will come up with. Did you know that there are fitcels? These are incels that bought the propaganda and decided “I’ll become the Chad” and dedicated themselves to building fit bodies. They still have the “-cel” suffix because for all the effort, all the hours in the gym, all the supplements, all the physical pain, they never realized that women are people.
It’s fucking wild. Maybe the internet was a mistake
- Comment on Anon recommends a cast iron pan 4 months ago:
I bought a $20 cast iron pan at target, I season it like once a year. I just wash it and make sure to dry it, I’m sure this is against the rules. Seems to work fine for me though. I wouldn’t say it’s nonstick but it’s mostly fine.
A $20 Teflon pan would be flaking and unusable, so for $20 it’s a good deal.
- Comment on Anon attends school online 4 months ago:
Oh for sure, I remember anecdotes like that too, but unless the person is still a friend I’m not going to remember who exactly did it.
But that could be a me thing, my wife always tells me I’m bad at remembering details
- Comment on Anon attends school online 4 months ago:
Honestly the teacher laughing was enough, literally no one is going to give a fuck after that.
People need to realize that they are not the main character, if you want something embarrassing you did to go away just don’t bring it up. People aren’t jotting down notes to bring up later, they have full lives of their own, no one in college has time to commit this to memory any more than a funny anecdote and they won’t bother to remember who did it.
- Comment on Stay frosty 4 months ago:
American checking in, this was also how I was taught to pluralize throughout my education.
The usage in the post title seemed correct to me fwiw
- Comment on The state of Facebook Ads 5 months ago:
The heat generated by a dumpster fire would not be good for forging steel.
Forging steel requires a minimum temperature of 900F
This scam ad is also something that if you showed it to anyone that knows anything about metallurgy would get you laughed at.
- Comment on The foorprints... this was premeditated. 6 months ago:
If I can’t take things I see on the internet at face value then I’ll also have to discount your completely unsupported assertion that “someone just slapped a caption on this picture”
- Comment on The foorprints... this was premeditated. 6 months ago:
So did this guy just blast his own legs with shit to own the libs?
Very on brand for the conservative brain trust
- Comment on Need help with pico-8 6 months ago:
Pico8 carts are just a special flavor of png. I would try running it directly or if it won’t run them with the png extension just rename the file from .png -> .p8 without converting and see if that works
Relevant section of the user manual
There are three ways to share carts made in PICO-8: 1. Share the .p8 or .p8.png file directly with other PICO-8 users Type FOLDER to open the current folder in your host operating system.
Although if you are having trouble you might have more luck getting started with the built in SPLORE command
Relevant section of the user manual
This might be easier to get started with since it will all get wired up automatically for you
- Comment on [deleted] 6 months ago:
This is nowhere near the average price
- Comment on Is the Federation "Communist" or Socialist? 6 months ago:
It is interesting to consider that in the vastness of space that something like a single restaurant might be viewed similarly to a glass of water in the US.
Sure the government could come in and declare eminent domain on my glass of water, but it’s value is so low as to be effectively a nonissue.
In a future where there are tons of planets and tons of replicators, perhaps the idea of personal property has just been extended to include things like a restaurant or a vineyard.
If you use the definition that private property is the private ownership over the means of production, it could be reasoned that something like Sisko’s is not necessarily a means of production but more akin to personal property. If someone on earth wants some creole food they can use any number of replicators to produce and enjoy that. Sisko’s and Picard’s vineyard might be similar to how we would look upon historical preservation. Some people could choose to spend their lives making things the old fashioned way because they enjoy it and people enjoy experiencing it.
The economy of Star Trek is interesting, but I think there are plenty of times when the utility of storytelling ends up mucking with the clarity of the message. One example I was just thinking about the other day was the introduction of the borg queen.
I get why it’s nice for there to be a borg queen, she can embody a more nuanced thinking part of the borg collective and the audience can much more readily understand the idea of a queen ruling over her subjects (whether that be like the rulers of humanity or like the queen bee as they sometimes say). But it also kind of sucks. The borg are such a fascinating species, a collective hive mind acting to attain perfection, more a force of nature than any of the other species we encounter.
While the borg queen is a compelling character and is acted wonderfully, I can’t feel a bit sad that it’s so normal and pedestrian. It turns the borg from this almost incomprehensible force into something so regular, a bunch of drones carrying out the will of the queen. While expedient to the storytelling, I like the idea of what the borg are pre-borg-queen more than what they become post-borg-queen.
I think with the economy a similar thing happens in storylines. There are many scenes that make it clear that humanity doesn’t have money anymore, but when you are telling a story and you want to have some stakes and obstacles, money is soooooo useful. Money makes it trivial to have an obstacle, or shit we need some latinum. Money makes it trivial to introduce stakes.
Star Trek had to try to thread this needle of presenting a post scarcity society while also making a dramatic engaging show for people living in a capitalist society. Scarcity is at the heart of a lot of drama, if you can just replicate your way out of every problem it’s not a very interesting show. It also leads to a thing that once you spot it’s hard not to spot, so much of the tension is aided by the “oh no we can’t replicate that” McGuffin. It plays out in a lot of episodes because otherwise every episode would be 5 minutes of “there’s an outbreak of tallarian flu on Corso V, we emailed them the recipe for the medicine and told them to replicate it.” Then the credits roll.
- Comment on Rock Eagle Flag 7 months ago:
While I believe in common sense gun control I think that one thing people might miss when comparing America to Finland or Sweden is just how brutal America can be.
America is an interesting country, if you can stay on the gainful employment ladder you can have a lot of creature comforts and for a few people they get to go up the ladder and have a really nice life.
That ladder though is dangling over the mouth of a volcano and there are more ways to fall off then anyone wants to admit. There’s also a ton of people just barely hanging on.
Easy access to guns is a problem, but the fact that so many Americans are so crushed by the system we live under that violence and deadly violence are things people routinely turn to is also a massive problem. For a lot of working poor the system can feel a lot like running on a perpetual treadmill stuck at full speed. We retooled our economy towards service and knowledge jobs, a lot of people in that service industry make just enough money to scrape by.
There is not a single state in the nation where minimum wage affords a 2 bedroom apartment
So you have a large number of people that spend the vast majority of their time working difficult jobs rife with customer abuse. They earn just enough money to afford a place to stay and food (and a cellphone so people can sneer at them and say, oh you have a cellphone so you can’t be struggling). Mix that with a big pile of guns and violence is bound to happen.
We can take away the guns but I suspect Americans have the ingenuity to find other ways to do violence against each other.
- Comment on The American People 8 months ago:
TIL updated my post to reflect that
- Comment on The American People 8 months ago:
“Dear America: You are waking up, as Germany once did, to the awareness that 1/3 of your people would kill another 1/3 while 1/3 watches.”—Werner Herzog.
- Comment on Funny, those guys don't usually agree on that much 9 months ago:
Based on your interpretation every group could simply be redefined into illegitimate.
- We are for democracy
- Oh so you think that monarchy is bad and you want to define yourself as excluding loyal subjects of the king! That will never be legitimate.
Leftist think that democracy should extend into the economic realm as well and what we should do with the means of production should be governed by the people and not just whoever happens to own the capital. One way to word that would be anti-capitalist, but another way would be to word it as economic democracy.
So if you require an inclusive definition for something to be legitimate, there you go. Liberals in America do not seek to do away with capitalism, you would be hard pressed to find any that do. If you support capitalism, then by the fact that capitalism’s private ownership is mutually exclusive with democratic control of the economy, you don’t support a democratic control of the economy.
You can’t have a vegan meat eater, not because of any moral assessment on veganism or meat eating, but because those two terms are mutually exclusive.