tikitaki

I’ve been driving for about a decade and a half now, including a few years here and there working jobs with a lot of wheel time. Either pizza delivery or cable technician or driving around a box truck.

I have never gotten as much as a speeding ticket. I typically don’t speed more than 5~10 mph over the limit. If it’s a 35 or 40 in a city area though I will typically stay the speed limit. Sometimes I go a little ham on country roads in the middle of nowhere. I drove through central Florida once at like 4am and I peaked at like 120mph because I hadn’t seen another car for at least an hour.

I think it probably depends on your jurisdiction, but nobody really respects the laws. On the interstate near my house, the speed limit is 65 but it might as well be 80. Cops will pass you and people will pass the cops and nobody cares.

I think the speeding laws are just to give the cops a reason to pull you over if they want you - OR a way to get people that are really being crazy. For example if you’re going 110 in a 65 you deserve to get pulled over and given a ticket or worse, depending on context.

This is a decentralized platform meant to be a social media system without the corporate power inherent to all the others. The developers of Lemmy for example have essays on Maoist China being hosted on their Github.

By its very nature, it’s going to attract people who are trying to get away from corporate influence. It’s essentially why I’m here and not on reddit. I don’t want a company profiting off of my content.

There’s space for pro-capitalists as well though. I believe in the open market of ideas - listen to what people have to say and share your bit. Engage genuinely and you’ll learn something and maybe teach someone else something.

I live in Florida and while this summer has been unusually hot… it’s not that bad. You just get used to the heat. Also make sure you have good A/C in your home & car lol

Yes, you can use money to buy things, and it works consistently. But let us not forget that beneath this seeming functionality, money is nothing more than a piece of paper or a digital representation. Its value is not inherent but a construct, a Symbolic order as Lacan would say, imbued by our collective belief and trust in the system.

Just like how the Lacanian ‘big Other’ is a social construct that regulates our social reality, money too is a sort of ‘big Other’ - a shared illusion that maintains its power as long as we continue to believe in it. It’s not about the physical money itself, but the social contract it represents.

In the same way, religious and philosophical beliefs, such as our friend’s belief in witchcraft, are also part of the Symbolic order. They are systems of understanding and interacting with the world, constructed from collective agreement, belief, and faith. These belief systems may not align with empirical reality as we understand it, but that does not diminish their power to shape individual behavior and interaction.

So, if we are to follow Zizek’s line of thought, all ideologies - money, science, witchcraft - are like the glasses we wear to view the world. They are the fantasies we construct to veil the unbearable Real. As Zizek famously said, “We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.”

The lenses may vary from person to person, but all serve to mediate our experience of the world and give it meaning. Our friend’s belief in witchcraft is just another lens, another narrative to make sense of the chaos of existence. We may not agree with it, but it’s crucial to remember that the ‘Real’ itself is inaccessible - all we have are interpretations and narratives. In that sense, his belief system is not fundamentally different from our trust in the value of money or the validity of scientific models.

Just because money isn’t in nature and we invented it doesn’t mean it’s a societal delusion that we simply accept

the only reason a piece of paper or a pixel on a screen has any value to trade for goods and services is because we collectively agree that it has value

the belief creates the system. it’s an ideology, a religion. is it a useful construct? absolutely.

the point is that our existence is full of these beliefs. it’s a prerequisite for being a human that can interact with the world. we need these constructs otherwise the Real would not make sense and we would essentially be monkeys

We like to think that we are perfect beings that don’t believe any BS because we’re skeptical about “the supernatural world” or what have you. But ultimately, we are not too different from your friend. Lacan has the idea of the “Real”. It’s the abyss of reality which we construct our whole psyche to escape from. Reality is so soul crushing and destructive that we need to creat symbols and images in order to protect ourselves from it and create a personal narrative that lets us navigate the world.

Your friend is going with witchcraft - but secular evidence based scientists aren’t fundamentally different. Our beliefs in money, democracy, borders are more or less all collective delusions that we agree to maintain. We have a fixed idea of who we are - our sense of self - which in reality is a fragmented mess. Our scientific models of reality are simplified frameworks for which to view reality - if we look at the Newtonian model of physics it works perfectly fine for us to do a lot of useful things. But ultimately it’s a flawed framework. It doesn’t accurately represent reality.

It’s impossible to accurately represent reality. We can only try to get closer, and many times that doesn’t get us any closer at all. Just a different type of wrong.

So we go back to your friend, toying around with beliefs that are obviously false to me or you. Is it harmful? It is adaptive? It really depends. Unless he’s doing things that are going to harm him or others (starts sacrificing sheep or something) then I say let him do it. He’s really just building a framework in an attempt to understand / bare reality.

was in the article i linked

between 2009 and 2019, children being referred for transitioning treatment in the United Kingdom increased 1,000% among biological males and 4,400% among biological females.

i guess it’s too much to expect people to read things

Also, do you really think that more people identify as trans because it’s a „fad“ or maybe it’s because your can finally openly talk about it

i think it’s both. i don’t know at what ratio, but kids really do follow fads. one kid kills themselves at a school and it raises the chances for all of them to do so. ideas are contagious. a kid that may just be going through the regular teenage angst period searching for an identity might latch onto the trans label to explain their feelings when really it’s just a normal teenage thing to go through identity issues

again, i’m not trying to say kids shouldn’t transition. i view transitioning as healthcare so to block kids off from it is absurd. but i think we also need to be careful and talk about the elephant in the room - that the rate of trans kids increasing so dramatically points to some issues with the ways we are doing it. when something jumps up so dramatically we should be asking questions

we aren’t seeing a 4000% increase in kids becoming gymnasts

it’s a poignant social topic. instead of attacking my credibility, aiming to represent me as biased, you should try to attack my argument

having said that, i support kids transitioning. i’m more upset about the “wrongthink” mentality where someone can’t even share their opinion without getting pounced on. he isn’t sharing hate speech he’s just talking

You’re not their doctor, they arent your patients, what business is it of yours?

ok, so if you’re not a doctor you can have no opinion on healthcare now? ridiculous statement. i think healthcare should be free. i don’t work in healthcare or health insurance. so am i just supposed to shut the fuck up and know my place?

no, I have my opinion and I’m going to share it and @JasSmith has his opinion and he’s going to share it. that’s the whole point of having discussion boards. the last thing i want is this place to become an echo chamber

i think kids should be able to transition. but it’s also not so simple a conversation when you’re making permanent changes to teenage kids - https://nypost.com/2022/06/18/detransitioned-teens-explain-why-they-regret-changing-genders/

kids are fickle creatures and fads catch on - all of a sudden we see a dramatic rise in kids wanting to transition - like 4400% increase in girls wanting to transition to boys. is it because we are now more accepting as a society or is it social contagion? probably both and it’s a serious topic we need to address if we actually do want the best for the kids. we need to keep ideology out of healthcare and make sure each individual kid is taken care of with whatever is best for them - transitioning is not always the best option. but sometimes it is.

this is why everyone needs to edit all their comments instead of deleting them. i edited all the comments on my 14 year old account using a script. i got banned from like 5 subs in the process - but a few days later still not rolled back

remember the API is liable to change in the next few days… if someone wants to do this they need to do it now while they still can

excellent post and something I think people aren’t fully considering

there’s an argument that it’s better to know rather than not know. i understand the ideological stand against Meta and everything it stands for, but it’s easy to judge from the outside looking in. we don’t know what he knows

you reduced my comment and favorited your own. lol

look - nobody has given me a concrete mechanism by which they could do damage. neither on here nor on mastodon where I’ve had similar conversations. @thesanewriter was the only one who attempted to give some sort of method - and his was that Meta’s platform could become so popular it steals users. That to me isn’t really unique to the fediverse

I’m not gonna hop over to Meta’s platform just because it’s nice and shiny.

But look at the potential benefits of Meta investing heavily into the fediverse… we’re talking millions and millions of dollars in development. i say milk meta for all they are worth, they’re a failing company anyway, this is a desperate attempt on their part

I understand the concept of embrace extend extinguish

i just don’t see a significant chunk of fediverse user giving up on open source instances and flocking to Meta’s instance. I can’t imagine what kind of features they could add that could accomplish this. Sure, they could make a site that’s more polished but if Meta enters the game, we’re going to be seeing a huge influx of both users and development. open source alternatives will likely be very close in parity

i think when considering this whole situation we need to calculate the potential positives and calculate if it’s worth the risks - and those positives include huge amounts of money and people. this could be enough to push the fediverse to the next level of adoption… the dream of having a decentralized social media system could become the standard in such a future.

ok i’m not saying they won’t but i’ve asked this before and nobody seems to be able to provide some mechanism by which they would destroy it

is the system not federated? if meta starts acting up, can’t everyone just defederate them? this is what i’m not getting

if someone can explain to me what exactly is dangerous, i would appreciate

i have food but i still need it too

It doesn’t need to be said that Meta is purely driven by profit - that is any corporation. But Meta is incompetent and failing - yet still a behemoth. If they want to pour millions of dollars into the fediverse, then we don’t we let them? They would presumably just be another site on the fediverse.

I totally support them joining on assuming it doesn’t change the fundamental structure of the system.

debate bro and own you online

don’t worry this is the type of stuff i go on reddit for I’m glad there are people willing to go into long form discussion here

so ultimately I think we have to agree to disagree a bit here although I respect your opinion. You’re absolutely right that there are organizations out there, both governmental and billionaire funded, that astroturf the shit out of the internet ( and you didn’t mention AI like chatgpt, which will make this problem exponentially worse since it will become increasingly cheaper to astroturf).

I agree that I’m not personally going to debate a holocaust denier - they can more or less get fucked. I just don’t think they should be sent to jail or otherwise censored. And this more or less lines up with Chomsky’s beliefs. I’m a huge fan of him and I am 100% behind his free speech absolutism.

Anyhow, if you want more detail about the whole thing with Chomsky… there’s a page on Wikipedia that goes over it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faurisson_affair

Here’s what he had to say to critics of his decision to support the holocaust denier

Let me add a final remark about Faurisson’s alleged “anti-Semitism.” Note first that even if Faurisson were to be a rabid anti-Semite and fanatic pro-Nazi – such charges have been presented to me in private correspondence that it would be improper to cite in detail here – this would have no bearing whatsoever on the legitimacy of the defense of his civil rights. On the contrary, it would make it all the more imperative to defend them since, once again, it has been a truism for years, indeed centuries, that it is precisely in the case of horrendous ideas that the right of free expression must be most vigorously defended; it is easy enough to defend free expression for those who require no such defense. Putting this central issue aside, is it true that Faurisson is an anti-Semite or a neo-Nazi? As noted earlier, I do not know his work very well. But from what I have read – largely as a result of the nature of the attacks on him – I find no evidence to support either conclusion. Nor do I find credible evidence in the material that I have read concerning him, either in the public record or in private correspondence. As far as I can determine, he is a relatively apolitical liberal of some sort

I think the line that sticks out to me the most is- that it is precisely in the case of horrendous ideas that the right of free expression must be most vigorously defended

If we give up the principle, we lose everything.

“Even Nazis deserve the right to free speech” thing

I’m sure he would say this. But in this specific case it’s more of a question of not having any topic be off limits. I know there’s a lot of emotions towards the holocaust and anyone who questions it is immediately labeled some sort of neo-nazi (and 90% of the time, that’s what they are). Chomsky firmly believes in the Holocaust, because like you said, he experienced it. He’s a Jew in his 90s.

But consider a world where you canno make an academic or scientific inquiry into a topic because “the issue has been resolved”. What kind of world is that? He was defending a researcher who did an analysis into the Holocaust and came up with significantly different figures. Basically claiming the death toll was inflated. Which is, to the best of the research I’ve read, entirely incorrect. Something like 6 million people died in the Holocaust and there is plenty of evidence to show that.

But again, the point isn’t whether the researcher was wrong or right. It’s just that we can’t set the precedent that certain topics are “finished” and can’t be modified anymore. Because at that point we’re not doing science or research - we’re falling victim to ideology. Keep in mind the guy he was defending was getting charged with a crime since this was Europe and they have certain laws about Holocaust denial.

So we bring it back to the Lemmy devs. The article I read (I didn’t read them all) was an analysis of the death toll of the Mao period and claims the figures were inflated. Does someone posting a link to this or otherwise sharing it make them a “genocide denier” and a “CCP tankie”?

This immediate lashing out when experiencing “wrongthink” is something I think is so toxic and dangerous to having serious discussions about sensitive topics. The more you study these things, the more you realize things are never black and white. There aren’t good guys and there aren’t bad guys. Or rather, maybe everyone’s a bad guy. But I think you get my point.

Regardless, I appreciate your comment.