GreenBeard

@GreenBeard@lemmy.ca

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What effect did COVID have on the minds of the ultra-wealthy?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  It spooked them. Think of them like stunted teenagers who think they’ll live forever and have no concept of consequences. Suddenly being faced with the potential consequences of their largess, and the potential for coordinated, distributed, non-hierarchical response, as well as the recognition of their own mortality sent them into a state of existential panic. Their retrenchment and consolidation in response to this panic has only accelerated the damage they’re doing. They fully expect a mad-max style social collapse, and want to be sitting on a little slice of Eden when it happens.

  The fact that we could avoid all of the necessity for recreating the most horrific dystopias mankind has ever envisioned by them simply… not being so damn greedy seems to have missed them entirely.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is the world more volatile now or is it just the abundance of news?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Have you considered the possibility it’s both? Yes the world is becoming less stable and less safe, but also, the immediacy of information has also made it all seem much more urgent and close? We don’t live in a closed test environment. Two variables can be moving simultaneously.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do americans living in Red States really despise american living in Blue States?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  You make a good point. I remember when I was about to start school, my parents moved us to a rural area because they felt it was safer for raising children. The house we moved into was two doors down from a meth lab on one side and a pedo on the other. That was in the '80s.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do americans living in Red States really despise american living in Blue States?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Many do. Many people living in blue states despise their neighbours too. I’ve always found it odd that people who hate half or more of their countrymen call themselves “Patriots.” It’s bad enough that they rationalize hate, but to somehow twist that into a caricature of love, it’s just very contradictory.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's your excuse for the current state of affairs?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  No, I’ve been “Green Beard” since 2005, but I heard it was a great game.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's your excuse for the current state of affairs?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh, well in that case, Alexa play “I’m Only Human.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's your excuse for the current state of affairs?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Why would I need excuses? I’ve been trying to stop this for 20 years. Political movements, organizing, writing and sharing useful information. I don’t need excuses. If you want an explanation, I can give you my perspective, but I don’t regret not doing more. I did as much as I could and paid dearly for it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How bad were the asylums that Reagan closed in his tenure? Were they really that bad? Did no one take a look at the staff and bed side manner? Or was it really like Born On The Fourth of July?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  They were legitimately that bad for the most part. Some were better than others of course, but the best of them were closer to a bad nursing home. The worst were legitimate atrocities. You didn’t put someone there to get better. Those who did were the rarest of exceptions, and were people whose problems had more to do with unhealthy environments. You put people in an asylum to keep them contained.

  It’s important to remember, psychology is a relatively young discipline. Historically the best mental counseling was folk wisdom and religion. People had all kinds of ideas, often grounded more in superstition than any kind of demonstrable, repeatable evidence (a problem which unfortunately persists in the field, though it’s getting better). Asylums were more like dubious research labs than medical facilities and the mentally ill were closer to lab rats. Caged lab rats.

  The field still has a long way to go, there’s still a lot we don’t know that’s out there to learn, but the methods and techniques are a lot better than they used to be. A lot better.

  There’s a lot of reasons not to like Regan, but he did get some things right. That was one of them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Just got arrested for a supposed DWI even though I blew a 0.0000000. Don't cops need to read your Miranda rights to you? I asked for a blood or hair follicle test and I was denied. WTH is happening?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Just wait until they start screaming “Stop Resisting” for no reason. That’s when you’re either going to end up in a hospital or a grave. Get a lawyer and good luck.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Where do I go for unbiased news in the world without it having an ulterior motive or kissing ass to the establishment of said country?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  All news is biased. Every time someone writes something down, it has a perspective to it that provides a selective view of the truth. There’s no such thing as purely objective. The closest you can get is to aggregate multiple sources on any news worth your time. I find Ground News useful for this because it makes it convenient to look at multiple sources sorted by bias and then draw your own conclusion. Rather than trusting people not to make a straw-man out of opposing views it helps to hear what people actually think in their own words. You might even learn something, although I know no one really enjoys finding out their opponent actually has a point.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do we see Oil as always being here for humans? Isn't drilling like taking water out of a swimming pool? Sooner or later your going to run out of water.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, this has been discussed extensively, since coal was the fuel of the day. Non-renewable fuel is by definition finite. It’s one of many issues with fossil fuels.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How old is the "world's oldest profession"?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I guess technically it’s slightly more than half, but the real limiting factor in the market is that regardless of species, most female primates won’t buy sexual favours. That’s not to say there isn’t a market for male “prostitutes”, just that their target demographic is a bit… niche, as is the demographic of those who would be willing to offer those services.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How old is the "world's oldest profession"?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean, it sort of is, in that only half the population can do it. What he’s referring to though is an experiment where they tried teaching chimps the concept of “money” by giving them tokens they could exchange for food.

  The very first thing that they started doing was exchanging food tokens for… mating activities.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's becoming widely accepted that it's not safe to put pictures of your children on social media... (cont. in post)⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes. Like sexual predators they’re more common than people like to admit and I’ve had the displeasure of knowing a few. Also like sexual predators, living like they’re ubiquitous instead of taking out the trash is not the best way to deal with them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's becoming widely accepted that it's not safe to put pictures of your children on social media... (cont. in post)⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ll grant it’s an automation issue. Age verification is always identity verification when it’s automated. It doesn’t matter how much you try to scrub the data. If it has to be done algorithmically, there’s no possible circumstance where an unaccountable third party should have that data.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's becoming widely accepted that it's not safe to put pictures of your children on social media... (cont. in post)⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  A government that’s that untrustworthy, doesn’t deserve to exist.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's becoming widely accepted that it's not safe to put pictures of your children on social media... (cont. in post)⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  At what cost? How many have lost hope and worse because the only thing they found in the noise of the internet was hate? Or worse, someone profiteering or exploiting their isolation?

  At what ratio do we acknowledge that the “cure” is at least as bad as the disease. Could we even get reliable numbers on that given it’s all on private platforms that have every reason to lie? Facebook is responsible for igniting at least one genocide. How many more before it’s too many?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's becoming widely accepted that it's not safe to put pictures of your children on social media... (cont. in post)⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Quite frankly yes. Proof of identity is kind of one of the core roles of government. Handing it off to private corporations is like entrusting a nation’s military to private militias and policing to gangs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's becoming widely accepted that it's not safe to put pictures of your children on social media... (cont. in post)⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s a lot of “Likely would have” comments when this subject comes up, and a lot of second-hand anecdotes that don’t constitute a good basis for decision making. While I’m sure at some point, such support networks have formed, and stayed a major part of an individual’s life, in most cases, without a real grounded, in person network, most of these groups end up collapsing into isolated fragments again or turning into just another ad funnel for garbage that doesn’t actually help anyone, it just monetizes suffering.

  Net good to net harm? There’s a strong case to be made that the marginal benefits of these platforms are deeply outweighed by the enormous suffering they cause.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Could heating oil subsidies be reduced or replaced with subsidies for installing electric heating and houses.?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Functionally, yes. I mean, it needs to be the kind that have the reverse switch so you can switch it to heating in the winter, but it’s effectively the same power use.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Could heating oil subsidies be reduced or replaced with subsidies for installing electric heating and houses.?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  If you’re installing the right sized heat pump for the space you’re heating, they’re great. If you try to heat Buckingham Palace with a space heater, you’re going to have a bad time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Could heating oil subsidies be reduced or replaced with subsidies for installing electric heating and houses.?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, actually. Up here in Canada we’ve been running subsidies for electric heat-exchangers (think like an air conditioner that can work in the opposite direction when it’s cold) for a couple years now. It is absolutely possible to offset oil subsidies with electric subsidies.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is a black hole spherical? How come it looks different each way you view it like on it's side or up and down?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Can you clarify what you mean by “Black Hole”? If you’re talking the accretion disk, it’s more of a pancake shape, if you mean the event horizon, then yes, roughly spherical, if you’re talking about the singularity at the centre, then trying to describe it using math and geometry is just going to make your head hurt because your brain isn’t designed to process reality that alien to your experience that laughs in the face of the limitations of human comprehension.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How come in America Cunt is such a egregious word but not the same in Europe?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Because conservative cancel culture and racism. Also the weird American Heresy that came out of the Third Reformation.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What does "Woke" mean to you?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Depends on who is using it. It’s either “Aware of structural institutional and social conditions that affect outcomes absent individual intent” or “Everything I personally feel is bad or makes me uncomfortable.” Most people use it to mean the latter these days, and it’s a meaningless shibboleth that describes everything in general and nothing in particular. Trans is woke, LGBT+ is woke, race is woke, education is woke, government is woke, private companies are woke, my stove is woke, beer is woke, whiskey is woke, Christianity is woke, Atheism is woke, everything is woke, and nothing is woke, and no one knows or cares what it means but they’re very mad about it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do other countries view American super hero movie's always putting the threat in new york or whatever? Instead of their own country and have their own superheroes?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Ok, but have you considered the fact that those numbers are actually pretty small for the international market considering that the US represents only about 4% of the global population? Even if you limit it to the English speaking world it’s only about a 5th of the global population, and of the movies mentioned only Avengers even came close to having the kind of market penetration it did in the US (discounting how much of that international market number is made up of non-English dubs and subs).

  Suggesting no one watches them is a bit of a stretch, but there are certainly a lot of people outside the US who just don’t.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can an Swedish style draft work in the US?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  To add to what others have pointed out, there’s also the fact that American unity is precarious. Most young Americans don’t really feel much sympathy for the institutional framework of the US, don’t have any incentive to maintain it, and lack any kind of unified social or cultural framework to form an attachment with. The problem with implementing something like Totalförsvar in the US is the fact that most Americans don’t actually like or want to protect their fellow Americans in this era. Why would young people want to participate in a civil or military defence schema to defend a paper-country that doesn’t benefit them in any coherent way? People absolutely will serve to protect their own clan or tribe, but the idea of sacrificing for the sake of “Those People” (for whatever flavour of “Those People” that individual resents the most) would create such a spectacular backlash any such proposal would be dead on arrival without some kind of massive financial incentive.

  National Service schemes only work in the context of effective social welfare systems, and there’s nothing the US hates more than the idea of effective social welfare systems. Desperation is an essential part of their economy, as very few of their current crop of corporate “leaders” would be able to employ anyone at all if the alternative weren’t starving in the street.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨America and it's racism and Israel?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  American Christians have always had a complex relationship with Judaism. On the one hand the American sentiment toward racial, ethnic, and religious purity is deeply ingrained and an important control mechanism for the corporate aristocracy. On the other hand it’s very clear that textually they don’t get heaven if Jews don’t control Jeruselem and rebuild the Jewish temple… again. How they square this tension is individual. Most don’t know or care that it’s a self-contradictory position. Of those who know, most do the “God works in mysterious ways” thing, and there’s also a menagerie of different smaller attempts to rationalize it, only a few of which include actually discarding racism. Ultimately it almost always boils down to a contradiction though, so yes, fundamentally, their answer is hypocrisy, or just ignoring the conflict altogether.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Just to get this straight Odysseus angered the gods by just trying to survive the only way he could at the time?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, neural tissue is largely salty fat, with a vague meaty flavour. As for how I know that… I plead the 5th.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Just to get this straight Odysseus angered the gods by just trying to survive the only way he could at the time?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The idea of omni-benevolent gods is relatively new. The gods were always right because reality conformed to their will and the only thing that could argue with them was an equal or superior god. That didn’t mean they were always “good.”

  Think of it this way. Most of us were raised around at least someone who loved to remind you “Life isn’t fair.” And they’re right. That doesn’t mean that’s a good thing, but it is a true thing. We can choose to be fair, or not, that’s in our power, but life doesn’t know or give a damn about what human morality thinks are good or bad. Such are the gods. You can bitch about them, chafe at their injustice, but you, mortal, are one irrelevant lump of bacon flavoured jello with anxiety piloting a bone-mech with meat armor. Their will is their will, adapt or die.