Rottcodd

the other workers at the factories don’t change their opinion.

And some number of those workers have the exact same opinion that you do - they’re opposed, but they don’t think they can make a difference.

And if all of you stopped waiting around for some charismatic leader to tell you what to do and just went ahead and made the choice you prefer, you would make a difference.

No - it’s not ethical.

Very little evil is actually a direct result of evil people doing evil things. The vast majority of it comes to be through ordinary people doing banal things - things that, like building weapons, are questionable at best, but that they excuse because it’s “out of my control.”

The thing is that it’s not out of their control. Yes - if one individual makes the decision to not take part, that’s not going to have much of an effect, but if every person who feels the same way makes that same choice, that absolutely WILL have an effect.

And there’s only one way to make it so that every person who feels the same way makes that choice, and that’s for each one of them, individually, to look past that “it’s out of my control” bullshit excuse and go ahead and do it.

Everything on any significant scale is out of individual control. Individuals just possess a very limited amount of control over affairs on a national, much less global, scale. But that’s really entirely beside the point. The point is how you choose to exercise the small amount of control you have. Will you use it for good, or for evil?

I don’t think it’s worse, but that’s only because, as far as responses from trolls and bad faith actors go, I’d rather get screeds from lunatic extremists than pseudo-leftist establishment dogma boiled down to little pieces of emotive rhetoric that are just mindlessly regurgitated over and over by bots and humans-who-might-as-well-be-bots.

Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

I prefer “used-to-be-twitter.” I think it captures the context better, and it’s clunky, as it should be.

Money wins, every time.

And right there, you answered your own (presumably rhetorical) question.

The money people jumped on AI as soon as they scented the chance of profit, and that’s it. ALL other considerations are now secondary to a handful of psychopaths making as much money as possible.

A Supreme Court justice, on the other hand, costs as much as a luxury motor home.

Exactly as much as a luxury motor home in fact…

My objection to it is that it seems that its subject and its target audience are essentially the same people.

Or you could just not care so much.

If you post memes that are likely to offend someone somewhere, then there’s a risk that one of those someones is going to be a mod, and they’re going to delete it. And really, that’s just the way it goes.

Certainly you might prefer that they have explicit, precise and closely followed rules so you can accurately predict what they’ll do, but there’s really no requirement that they do so - if they want vague rules arbitrarily enforced, that’s their prerogative.

And really, what are you out if they do delete a post? It’s not like you paid for it or you have some sort of quota you have to meet. You just toss things out into the internet, and some of them float and others sink.

Like many labels people choose to self-apply (including but by no means limited to religious ones), “atheist” has a bit of an image problem, since the people who are most eager to self-apply it, and to broadcast that self-application far and wide, tend to be insecure, over-compensating, self-absorbed, obnoxious assholes.

There are a great many generally kind, decent people who identify as “atheists.” You just don’t generally know that they do, since, being generally kind and decent people, they aren’t crashing around like football hooligans, alternately screeching about their own team and atacking the opposing team.

And that’s the case with pretty much all labels. The problem is almost never with people who self-apply a particular label, but simply with noxious assholes, regardless of the label. It’s generally just our own biases that make it so that we consider the noxious assholes who wear one label to define all who do and the noxious assholes who wear another to be unfortunate exceptions to the rule.

Yeah - that arguably would be cheaper, and it definitely would be better for society as a whole.

That’s entirely irrelevant though, because it’s not going to happen.

The primary reason that decently-paying jobs have become so much less common is that, over the last few decades in particular, the money that would’ve paid decent wages has been diverted to pay truly obscene salaries to a handful of executives.

And the people drawing those obscene salaries, and making general pay decisions for corporations, tend to be, quite seriously, psychopaths.

A person who has morals, principles, integrity and empathy will exercise self-restraint - they’ll have particular choices that they simply will not make.

A person without any of those qualities - a psychopath - will not be constrained. They will be entirely free to choose any course of action that will benefit them in any way, entirely regardless of the consequences to others.

So all other things being more or less equal, paychopaths will have a strategic advantage in competitions for position in hierarchies like corporations or governments.

In a sound society, that advantage will be blunted by the simple fact that people with morals, principles, integrity and empathy find them and their tactics reprehensible. That has historically made them more the exception than the rule.

In the 80s in the US, there was a fundamental change. Society was sold the idea that “greed is good” - that winning is everything and to the victor goes the spoils and watch out for number 1 and so on - essentially psychopathic views were marketed as virtues. Successfully.

And throughout that period, enough psychopaths succeeded that theirs became the dominant viewpoint, particularly in the largest corporations (or the most rapacious, and thus most successful throughout the takeover era of corporate consolidation). And since then they’ve just grown more entrenched and more self-serving, and richer, and more powerful.

Which brings me back to the point - yours is a relatively sound viewpoint, but it’s entirely irrelevant, because the people who control the power by which such a thing might be accomplished are psychopaths, and they are not going to act in a way that might diminish by even a fraction their undeserved and destructive wealth and privilege, even if it’s not only for the good of society as a whole, but then necessarily for their own long-term good. They just aren’t psychologically or morally equipped to make that choice. And they control the power in our society, so nobody else can meaningfully make that choice.

So really, the only remaining option is the same one that eventually befell Sumer and Egypt and Athens and Rome - societal collapse. Just as was the case with them, the upper classes have become too entrenched, too self-serving and too greedy to make the choices that would save their civilization, and nobody else has the power to overcome them. And just as was the case with those civilizations, the common people, between being confused and being self-servingly manipulated and misled, blame subsets of each other instead of the people who really bear the lion’s share of the responsibility for the woes facing their civilization. So just as was the case with their societies, things will just get uglier and uglier until they finally fall apart. Like it or not.

Have a nice day anyway though, because that’s really all you can do. We can’t stop the relentless downhill slide, but we can at least try not to make each other unnecessarily miserable along the way.

Firefox.

Seriously. Every app I’ve tried has come up short in one way or another. Lemmy is best in a browser and the best browser is Firefox.

I’ve suspected it’s largely performative. I still don’t really get it though.

And I have the same reaction I have to most of these types of things - I wonder what it tastes like, and wish I could try it.

I’ve never understood why these things trigger such uproar. It’s not like it’s poison or some sort of bodily secretion or something - it’s just a somewhat unusual but entirely edible ingredient. And it could be good. So what’s the problem?

Most people seem to miss the fact that it’s a paradox, even though it’s right there in the name.

And I dream of a world in which, instead of merely wishing to oppress and murder this group of people instead of that one, people don’t wish to oppress and murder anyone.

It’s as if the people who talk about it the most don’t actually have the foggiest idea what a “ruling class” actually is or how it comes to be.

There is a lot of backwards ideas that get accepted as “leftist,” when they’re really statist.

This is my objection too.

All too many people here don’t seem to even begin to understand the inherent threats of institutionalized authority, so in their rush to head off the recreation of the Third Reich, they’re basically advocating for the recreation of the Khmer Rouge instead.

It’s something I was never actually conscious of until I stopped and thought about it yesterday because of this thread. I’ve just always moved the scroll wheel in the way that it seems like it should work, and it works the way it seems like it should.

The thing you’re apparently calling “traditional” seems natural to me.

I’ve never really stopped and thought about it before, but as far as I can figure, my brain expects the part of the system that does or would actually touch the surface to drag the screen in a particular direction through the simple workings of physics.

On a touchscreen, it’s simple - it’s my finger actually touching the screen and it drags the screen around exactly as I’d expect.

With a mouse, my finger isn’t the important part because it’s not touching the surface (or more precisely, the mousepad that substitutes for the surface). Rather, my finger is contolling the mouse, and the underside of the mouse is touching the surface. And as far as that goes, the “traditional” way it works is correct - when I move my finger downward on the mouse wheel, the bottom side of the wheel - the part that would actually be touching the surface if it was a purely mechanical system - is moving upward, so would drag the screen upward.

So to me, that’s what’s natural.