rwhitisissle

@rwhitisissle@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Stay Mad⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This is the thing. People like to blame Berniebros and whatnot for Clinton’s loss in '16, but the reality is that the centrist Democrats that vote for the party’s corporate-backed candidate wouldn’t vote for a progressive one, so even if Bernie had won the nomination, he probably still would have lost because he would have lost the support of these DNC hardliners. I heard people literally say in '16 that if Bernie had somehow won the nomination over Hillary that they would have just stayed home. It’s wild to think how ideologically balkanized the Democratic party is, with so many people fervently belonging to the leftist minority that holds their nose every election to vote for another mediocre person whose best attributes are being “not an outright fascist” versus the people who will never vote for a truly left wing candidate because they’re fiscally conservative but socially liberal and just allergic to compromising in the same way that they’ve forced the leftists in their party to do since forever.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Stay Mad⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  What are they, 1-2% of the potential Dem voter base?

  Add a .000 in front of those numbers and you might be right. If those numbers were accurate you would expect somewhere between, what…1 and 2 million tankies in the US alone?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This will be YouTube in 2025⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  surprised to find indignation at sexual scenes in novels

  To quote Ryan Letourneau, “Gen Z is Puritan pilled.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This will be YouTube in 2025⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s episode 2. “Fifteen Million Merits.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This will be YouTube in 2025⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  How much easier is it for Google to implement the same?

  The correct question is actually “when will Google implement the same?” Because this is a “when will it happen” question, not a “will it happen” question.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨For edge lovers⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Edging is not a new thing, really. You’ve probably just never encountered the concept. Edging is the practice of bringing yourself to the edge of orgasm before backing away. The idea is that when you do finally orgasm it’s been “built up to” by the earlier edging so you get a better climax.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Just so you're clear on what we're about to watch...⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I find the movies conceptually interesting because there aren’t many movies in which humans are just explicitly the bad guys, or in terms of the most recent one just a supporting entity that exists on the periphery of the story. Avatar kinda does that, too, but the Avatar movies are also puddle deep genre fiction and the “of the Apes” movies are at least structurally and narratively competent.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Never make the mistake of visiting a community for your favorite podcasts⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  My favorite was the Chapo Traphouse subreddit because the image in this post describes the hosts and their relationship with their fans. Whenever the subreddit got banned and the hosts heard about it their response was “good, that was the right choice. We fully support the admins here and their banning of that subreddit.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Never make the mistake of visiting a community for your favorite podcasts⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Under the Dome has always been super interesting to me because Brian K. Vaughn is one of the best comic book writers of all time and a consistent criticism of UTD is how bad the writing is. I know he didn’t write many of the episodes, though, but I also wonder how his episodes rank in comparison with the others.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Never make the mistake of visiting a community for your favorite podcasts⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Anything related to a DND live play I’m going to assume will be immediately toxic by virtue of what I understand about DND’s fanbase. I love Dimension20 and I like Critical Role but I’m going to assume every other fan of the show is an insufferable idiot.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What kind of institutional gaslighting is this?⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Engagement and disengagement are effectively separate forms of labor expected of an employee, though, and they’re virtually never formally codified. If I’m a coder and my job is to write code, don’t expect me to be enthused about writing terrible medical billing software. Enthusiasm and engagement are emotional labor, which I’m not compensated for, and which, to some extent, you can’t realistically expect me to demonstrate. I’m not able to “be engaged” beyond performing my tasks and whatever technical or administrative duties I’ve been assigned. Expecting me to contribute in a way orthogonal to that requires my job to be fundamentally different from what it actually is.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Just 2 people.⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  So your assertions here are the following:

  • religion functions by 1) lying to people about the fundamental nature of reality in order to 2) manipulate them into doing bad things and that central to this is the idea that doing point 1 actively enables or facilitates point 2.
  • religion constitutes a “static model of reality” to which people are emotionally attached, which is fundamentally dangerous.
  • religion does not “determine” good or bad.
  • Religious violence is a thing that exists.
  • You’re queer and religion bothers you.

  So, point by point:

  • many religions make complex assertions about the metaphysical nature of the universe, often including the existence of supernatural phenomena, individuals, locations, etc. I’m not going to try to argue for the existence of any mystical element of any particular faith, but I will challenge the innately reductive analysis of religion you’ve provided. Most religions, particularly the very old ones, incorporate historical, philosophical, artistic, communal, and ethical traditions. You seem to center your understanding of religious faith around the metaphysical or supernatural components and have asserted that these components warp the underlying perception of reality of its participants for the express purpose of making people behave in such a way as to “do awful shit” and act against your “conscience and general interest.” In making a causal assertion of this kind, however, you really need to be able to support that assertion with something that proves a causal link between what you describe as a belief in “blatantly magical bullshit” and a specific pattern of behavior. Why is it the belief in the supernatural and not, for example, hierarchical organizations of power, something that has existed as a component of organized religion for millennia, but also in virtually all political and dominant social institutions for just as long? Perhaps people are more inclined towards mob mentality or to fall behind powerful and charismatic leaders, regardless of the institution from which they’re working. For example, the Soviet Union under Stalin was a brutally repressive society that actively criminalized both organized religion and LGBT persons. The absence of religion did not magically produce a society devoid of people unwilling to brutally oppress their fellow countrymen.
  • you seem to be working with terms that don’t really carry a lot of significance or meaning for anyone other than yourself. What, exactly, do you think constitutes a “static model of reality?” And what, exactly, is problematic about that? Because in my mind, most people operate with a fairly static understanding of reality. Not to say it’s the same understanding of reality. Ideologies are as complex and different as the people that internalize them, and they inform our personal understanding of the world we inhabit. For most people, altering these beliefs about the world is non-trivial. As a staunch leftist, someone would have a hard time selling me on the merits of laissez-faire capitalism as an effective mechanism of distributing wealth in a society. My understanding of the fundamental nature of economics, human nature, and reality itself precludes this. Am I working from an overly static and inflexible model of reality?
  • religion is deeply concerned with the nature of good and evil. Admittedly, these are things you might not actually believe in. Perhaps you’re a moral relativist. Perhaps not. If you are, I don’t have much to say to you about this. You believe good and evil are culturally determined moral concepts and nothing else, from a personal perspective, beyond socially conditioned behavior.
  • religious violence, or “Holy Wars” as you’ve put it, are virtually all fought for the same purpose as any other war: the primitive acquisition of wealth and the expansion of a nation or nations hegemony. If you think what’s going on in Palestine is not driven by Israel’s desire for Palestinian land, then I have a bridge to sell you.
  • your experiences are both tragic and common. I’ve personally been physically and emotionally abused by members of specific religious organizations, for reasons and in ways I don’t feel comfortable sharing with strangers on the internet, and by people who were sociopaths that used religion as a cudgel to bully and control others. But I’ve also been comforted and treated kindly by other people for whom their religious faith was an important part of their lives - people who were sick and in pain their entire lives, but who found serenity and comfort through their beliefs and shared that with people around them who were also suffering. History is full of people who used religion as an excuse to do terrible things, but history also has a tendency to amplify monsters and forget the decent people whose faith may have driven them to have a more positive impact on the world.

  If you want to hate religion because you’re bitter, that’s fine. You can feel about religion any way that you want. But don’t be offended when you bring it up out of nowhere and someone tells you that your comments are irrelevant to the current discussion.

  The world doesn’t revolve around your personal bitterness.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Just 2 people.⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  A lot of it probably comes from deeply negative personal experiences, combined with a general propensity for people to apply a categorical belief to particular experiences. People who were treated badly by a particular group of Christians, or people who see and hear about certain Christians advocating for some terrible politician or political goal, are applying a generalized belief to how all Christians act, and potentially to all religion in general. It’s much harder to accept that the world is a deeply complicated and messy place and that religion and religious belief is a much more complex element of human civilization, culture, and personal identity than what many people would care to acknowledge.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Just 2 people.⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I already mentioned that shoehorning criticism of religion into conversations that were unrelated came across as bitter and myopic. Your point was, essentially, that a lot of people are bitter towards Christianity, which is implied by my own observation. If you have nothing to add beyond restating what was already said by the person to whom you are replying, then I would suggest saving yourself the time in the future and just clicking the up arrow. Or doing literally nothing. Either of those are fine options.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Just 2 people.⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Sure, and that’s terrible, but from a different perspective, most of these beliefs and behaviors you’ve identified would persist without religious institutions and their proponents formalizing them as policy. Religion can give people a way to justify a lot of the terrible beliefs that they had internalized anyway, because it’s part of the dominant culture. But misogyny, racism, homophobia, transphobia, classism, and xenophobia aren’t caused by religion or religious beliefs, any more so than atheism or agnosticism causes people to be tolerant or accepting of others in spite of their differences. And that’s a foundational premise to many of the criticisms of religion I see on Lemmy. But it’s just objectively wrong. If you want to look at a historical example of the productive power of religion, look no further than the SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference), which was one of, if not the most significant, political and religious organizations of the Civil Rights movement. It helped to organize people into a fighting force for real progressive change and it did so by way of lines of communication between black congregations across the country. For even more examples of religion as a tool of social progress, I recommend the wikipedia page on Liberation Theology.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Just 2 people.⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You don’t even need to involve churches.

  There are plenty of valid complaints about (many) American religious institutions, but the constant shoe-horning in of complaints about religion in unrelated posts comes across as bitter and myopic.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Derps of Tiktok⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s a million different ways to describe someone like that. I like mine. You like yours.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Derps of Tiktok⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  For anyone wondering, Chaya Raichik is the reactionary ghoul who runs Libds of TikTok. I actually had no idea this was a semi-famous person until you actually made a comment about them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Derps of Tiktok⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m waiting for the day Jimmy Wales gets fed up and sells Wikipedia to Amazon and every page has an Amazon link to “great products matching your interests.” Can we have internet 2.0 now? One without companies and just all the weird people from the first internet who made shitty webcomics and shared waaaaaay too much about their personal lives.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Every 60 seconds in Africa, a minute passes⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This is a good example of an argument that fails by virtue of its foundational premises. Vaush’s foundational premise for age of consent is tied to socioeconomic or material factors around power. In other words, the argument is founded on the premise that a child has less power than an adult so children can’t consent to intimate relationships with adults. This ignores the much more intractable argument over psychological and emotional maturity and the significance of particular age-specific life milestones that help to shape a child into an adult - a fully self-accountable member of society. Socioeconomics have mitigating influence over those things, which implies that even under socialism or any kind of post-capitalist society, that a society would have good reason to maintain agent of consent laws. It also totalizes socioeconomic factors as the defining impetus for consent, but that is in and of itself a slippery slope because you could take it to a logical extreme and argue that people of color and white people shouldn’t be allowed to be in relationships, because a person of color has less socioeconomic power in America than a white person, or even that men and women shouldn’t be allowed to be in relationships at all because men have greater socioeconomic power than women, which would mean that everyone should only be allowed to date same-sex members of their own race.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨That gourmet luxury blend...⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This is a good question. The answer is probably: not anymore. I went hunting for the UPC code on the back label and found this website, which indicates its last recorded scan was some time in 2021. It’s likely this product is simply no longer manufactured and sold by them. Probably by virtue of a lack of demand or other considerations.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Cloudflare Employee records her final meeting where HR tries to fire her⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  HR exists to insulate people with real authority in a business from those who suffer from their whims. In a lot of companies, your job is to get yelled at so some ghoulish C level executive isn’t forced to strain their neurons processing the emotional reality of the fact that their decisions impact real people in negative ways. It might disrupt their “objectivity” and make it harder to issue layoffs next time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Also, the doors actually open.⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I didn’t read that part. So there.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Also, the doors actually open.⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Unless he wants them to have large dicks in front of a large crowd, I think you mean hanged.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Also, the doors actually open.⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Most if not all of the actual military leadership of the Confederacy also attended West Point.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Merry ChristmaX⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Hmm…that one’s probably around 150 gently used.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Aliens did a little trolling⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Why the gay one?

  Because the gay one is hella cute and I’m all about that shit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Aliens did a little trolling⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  The intent of Black Mirror is to make you think about how you use technology

  This is the intent of the vast majority of most science fiction. It doesn’t make Black Mirror’s execution good or insightful. Much of Black Mirror focuses on people “surrendering control” to technology in ways that prove self-destructive or just generally destructive. At their best, many of the stories aren’t really about technology. Technology serves as an aesthetic component, but you could still make the stories work without them. The Orville actually has a better version of Black Mirror’s Season 3, Episode 1 episode “Nosedive.” It actually engages with the underlying themes and ideological basis of a world that operates like that and suggests that the technology isn’t really the problem: it’s how people elect to perceive and judge one another and the ease with which we condemn one another from a distance. It’s not a technological problem, fundamentally, but a cultural one. Technology can facilitate bad behavior or exacerbate negative societal tendencies, but it doesn’t sit at the functional center of them. Because, functionally, it’s just a Salem Witch Trial story with additional technological flavoring on top. This is something that Black Mirror never seems to “get.”

  Which is why, and I will stand by this, the best Black Mirror episode is the gay one.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Aliens did a little trolling⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  “What if technology was…(wait for it)…bad sometimes.”

  So thought provoking.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What the hell is this shit? Instead of pushing for the return to traditional pensions, capitalism is celebrating the idea that Millennials & Gen Z may simply never be able to stop working.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  The leaders of capitalism are just “capitalists.” And they don’t read CNBC. This is an article written for middle-class office drones, because it’s one of the few websites that isn’t blocked by the company firewall that has something approximating entertainment on it.