lmmarsano
@lmmarsano@lemmynsfw.com
- Comment on A bit of salt makes it taste more savory 6 days ago:
Horseshoe theory
the far-left and the far-right are closer to each other than either is to the political center
are both fascists
Are closer doesn’t mean are the same: horseshoe theory doesn’t support your claim.
They’re both authoritarians that repress human rights. They’re as bad as fascists. Identifying those elements that make them as bad—authoritarianism & repression of human rights—clarifies discussion.
When we articulate problems accurately, we can criticize them in all guises.
- Comment on A bit of salt makes it taste more savory 6 days ago:
What did OP directly say or do in their post to direct a response to them rather than the image? All we have is their image in no particular context, an interpretation of the image, & a hypothetical statement I wrote?
- Comment on A bit of salt makes it taste more savory 6 days ago:
randomly criticize someone else over a meme
Someone else or the meme? Are we getting worked up over generic you?
The observation that perceived denunciation for “fighting fascists” around here may more often be someone deluding themselves, so the image rings false with self-delusion is a critique of the meme.
- Comment on A bit of salt makes it taste more savory 1 week ago:
Semantics is literal meaning, though. Words mean things.
I’m sure there are many words for left-wing authoritarians: fascist isn’t it. Instead of making fascism meaningless, can we pick a correct word?
- Comment on A bit of salt makes it taste more savory 1 week ago:
No problem: sometimes we all need a reality check when we go tilting at windmills as is custom around here.
- Comment on A bit of salt makes it taste more savory 1 week ago:
Self-satisfaction at stretching the definition of fascist.
If you’re getting downvoted here where anti-fascism thrives, and you think it’s for criticizing fascism, then there’s probably something else going on (and you’re probably being an idiot).
- Comment on A bit of salt makes it taste more savory 1 week ago:
tankie troika
Gotta admit that is way better.
- Comment on A bit of salt makes it taste more savory 1 week ago:
Tankie Triad
Are tankies the pro- or anti-fascist crowd? I thought they were far left. It’s hard to keep track of all these vying affiliations.
- Comment on Elevated 1 week ago:
Doesn’t a little fecal matter elevate everything? 😄
- Comment on You cannot learn without failing. 1 week ago:
No True Scotsman? That could be true if the image is merely descriptive of our messy reality.
I see the image as including a prescriptive message that states an ethical ideal: a real scientist should welcome their findings challenged, even refuted. Science excels by dispelling falsehoods. That seems right.
in b4 “if by whiskey” 😄
- Comment on Nice try 2 weeks ago:
Vegetables on the other hand
A dietician once explained to me that children are extra-sensitive to bitter flavors like those of vegetables, and this sensitivity grows milder with age, so their special aversion is only natural. I recall feeling extremely hostile to vegetables then at some age feeling shocked that it just vanished & I could appreciate them more.
- Comment on Petty pedantry 2 weeks ago:
After a while, thus achieving another mild infuriation. 💯
- Comment on Petty pedantry 3 weeks ago:
not how colons work
You had me scanning the image (of text without alt text: bad, OP! BAD!) for a
:pretty hard until I settled on The New York Times messageBreaking News: Susan[…]
for a while. Had me wondering how else The New York Times is supposed to write that, because it looks correct.
This is why quoting exists.
- Comment on "Meritocracy" 4 weeks ago:
image of text
no alt text
users with accessibility needs can’t read this
🤦
- Comment on "Meritocracy" 4 weeks ago:
image of text
no alt text
users with accessibility needs can’t read this
Thanks.
- Comment on Anon uses Discord 5 weeks ago:
Nah, a password authentication or anything that transmits the full secret is beyond primitive. Passkeys, client certificates, OTP never transmit the secret key. With passkeys & client certificates, the server never has the secret key, so it can’t expose it.
Problems due to phone loss indicate bad practices. Any decent password manager or vault service can manage cryptographic credentials of any kind.
- Comment on This fucking bot is still out there messaging 1 month ago:
Not Nigerian enough.
- Comment on I want to know. 2 months ago:
I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.
Source unclear, often attributed to Richard Feynman.
- Comment on How does this pic show that Elon Musk doesnt know SQL? 2 months ago:
Nah, you’re ignoring context. Context matters. I’ll show.
He’s not saying “This retard thinks the SSA uses SQL”.
Can SSA not be called “the government”?
He is saying “the government” which means all of it.
Which government? The Brazilian government? Your state government? Your local government? No? How do you know? That’s right: context.
By why stop there? There’s more context: a Social Security database was specifically mentioned.
Does “the government” always mean all of it? When a federal agent knocks someone’s door & someone gripes “The goddamn government is after me!” do they literally mean the entire government? I know from context I or anyone else can informally refer to any part of the government at any level as “the government”. I think you know this.
Likewise, when people refer to the ocean or the sky or the people, they don’t necessarily mean all of it or all of them.
Another way to check meaning is to test whether a proposition still makes sense when something obvious unstated is explicitly written out.
This retard thinks the government uses SQL. Why assume they use SQL here?
Still make sense? Yes. Could that be understood from context without explicitly writing it out? Yes.
To refrain:
Use context.
- Comment on How does this pic show that Elon Musk doesnt know SQL? 2 months ago:
Were those his exact words? When words are ambiguous, are we selecting interpretations that serve best in the contention? Does the context suggest something obvious was left unstated? Yours seems like a forced interpretation.
- He complains about 1 specific database.
- Some rando assumes it’s SQL & retorts he doesn’t know it.
- He literally writes “This retard thinks the government uses SQL.”
Always, sometimes, here? In typical Twitter fashion, it’s brief and leaves room for interpretation.
In context, always or here makes the most sense as in “This dumbass thinks the government always uses SQL.” or “This dumbass thinks the government uses SQL here.” Does it matter some other database is SQL if this one isn’t? No. With your interpretation, he pointlessly claims that it does matter for no better reason than to discredit himself. With narrower interpretations, he doesn’t. In a contention, people don’t typically make pointless claims to discredit themselves. Therefore, narrower interpretations make more sense. Use context.
All I did here was apply textbook guidelines for analyzing arguments & strawman fallacies as explained in The Power of Logic. I welcome everyone to do the same.
The fact is there’s very little information here. We don’t know which database he’s referring to exactly. We don’t know its technology. Some of us have worked enough with local government & legacy enterprise systems to know that following any sort of common industry standards is an unsafe assumption. No one here has introduced concrete information on any of that to draw clear conclusions, though there’s an awful lot of conjecture & overreading.
He seemed to use the word de-duplicated incorrectly. However, he also explained exactly what he meant by that, so the word hardly matters. Is there a good chance he’s wrong that multiple records with the same SSN indicate fraud? Without a clear explanation of the data architecture, I think so.
I despise idiocy. Therefore, I despise what Musk is doing to the government. Therefore, I despise it when everyone else does it.
Seeing this post keep popping up in the lemmy feed is annoying when it’s clear from context that there’s nothing there but weak reasoning.
We don’t have to become idiots to denounce idiocy.
- Comment on How does this pic show that Elon Musk doesnt know SQL? 2 months ago:
Some may be so old that they predate RDBMS/SQL.
I don’t follow. Wouldn’t that lend credence to his assertion that it’s incorrect to assume that everything in government is SQL?
- Comment on Does the US really have no instruments in case a newly elected president immediatelly and openly exposes he's a nazi? 2 months ago:
I mostly pointed out the different definitions one might use so that people wouldn’t read my examples of rights violations and think “what’s that got to do with democracy?”.
Yet you wrote
That’s not even true in a very minimal definition of democracy
Are you contradicting yourself later by conceding (flawed as it may be) it fit “a very minimal definition of democracy”?
Other common restrictions in ancient Greek democracies were being a male citizen (who was born to 2 citizens), a minimum age, completed military service. Still, rule wasn’t restricted to oligarchs or monarchs. I think we’d still call that a democracy in contrast to everything else.
Your writing seems inconsistent.
If it existed today it would probably not even be called a democracy by western standards.
Do good, objective definitions vary by time & culture? Seems problematic.
Seems you’re claiming something doesn’t fit a minimal definition of democracy while using a non-minimal definition of democracy. Sure, it’s a flawed democracy, but we can repudiate it on those considerations it fails and clarify them without overgeneralizing.
- Comment on Does the US really have no instruments in case a newly elected president immediatelly and openly exposes he's a nazi? 2 months ago:
So if you mean democracy in a very literal and minimal sense[…]
If you mean in it a more general sense[…]
Where would ancient Greek democracy fall in this spectrum?
