daltotron

@daltotron@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Oh jeez⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  america, home of the crybully industrial complex

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Oh jeez⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  No, I think the main point in contention is mostly just that the experience of the American GIs are always centered in these tellings of the stories to american audiences, and obviously that’s going to whitewash a lot of the history and context of a conflict and just transform it into “I got stationed in a random place I hated for a couple years and then I had to kill a bunch of people for reasons I didn’t understand while they tried to kill all my friends and then I got back home and got jack shit for it”. And then on top of that, those movies are going to be a lot about the psychological trauma that’s inflicting on those particular american GIs, and often, again, without a broader context of what system they’re placed into, it’s just sort of like, turned into sanitized hollywood melodrama, much like how they’ll sanitize any historical fiction into being oscar bait.

  Obviously that’s not gonna really be the same experience as, say, some random guerilla fighter somewhere, or some random person who just lives in one of these places. About the only movies I can think of that actually attempted to expand on that particular perspective was good morning vietnam, where that’s touched on, but not explored, and maybe the breadwinner, which is a pretty good movie but also more just adjacent to what I’m talking about rather than directly in dialogue with it. I might be wrong on that one though, it’s been a while since I’ve seen it even though that movie is fucking good and you should watch it.

  That’s my recommendation. Go watch “the breadwinner”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The justices of the supreme court ruled that Trump was immune and effectively above the law while being president. What is now stopping Biden from bringing a gun to the next debate?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean, do I have to say what you could just do to any senators which oppose you? It might be getting into coup territory, but eventually you’d probably reach a point where things just proceed as normal. Or you, as biden, could just take the L on it, make sure the newly stacked supreme court shuts it down, eat the, what, next 10 years of your life, if that, in federal prison or whatever it is, and blammo. Could probably even use the opportunity to step down but I imagine if he did some shit like that his approval rating might go through the glass dome protecting the flat earth aaaand post

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The justices of the supreme court ruled that Trump was immune and effectively above the law while being president. What is now stopping Biden from bringing a gun to the next debate?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  the dems would never go for that, though, because then they’d actually be doing something. even if you took away oh no the two senators that somehow always conveniently oppose any action they take, you can be sure that they’d pull some other poor sap up out of the bowels in order to play the villain.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The justices of the supreme court ruled that Trump was immune and effectively above the law while being president. What is now stopping Biden from bringing a gun to the next debate?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  So, what happens if the president is charged? Is he automatically ousted? I mean, apparently a felon can run for president, so does them being a state criminal actually impede them at all, or no?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Stay Mad⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  trains run on time

  I am here to regretfully inform you about the state of american rail infrastructure…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The internet connects people⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  How are you hurt by alarms? Noise, high voltage, the fear of the things they indicate, or something else? legitimately curious, never heard of this phobia before

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Objectivity⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean I feel like I’ve seen him get smeared since way way before covid was happening, like, since the 2010’s at least he’s been getting heat for no reason, I feel like

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Objectivity⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  No yeah for real. I’ve never seen him doing anything I would really consider to be annoying, or at least, more annoying than any other science communicator, and he constantly gets shit on for being like, too cocky, but then when you push back I never get any examples of things he’s actually fucked up on, just that he has bad vibes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨hotwheels sisyphus⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You know it’s kind of funny but at the same time I do think it’s somewhat dystopian to see like, a natural phenomenon, right, a creature, and a creature that we need a name for, named after a brand of toys. Whenever I see this stuff it’s funny but it’s also sad and kind of dystopian, and kind of undignified. It’s like, I dunno. Imagine a kid points to a picture of a spider in a little book and asks their parents what the name of the spider is and instead of being like “that’s a tarantula” they gotta be like “yeah, that’s the hot wheels spider”. It’s a shitpost, it’s funny, it’s existentially hilarious, but it’s also so fucking depressing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do we associate reverby electric guitar with the ocean?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surf_music

  Seems like your question contains the answer that you seek

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why Didn't Democrats Do More When They Controlled Both Houses of Legislature, The White House, and The Supreme Court During Obama's First Term?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Couldn’t the republicans just do the same thing and remove it when they get a 51% majority

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Iron⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  imagine, over the centuries of blood donation, the sword slowly grows from a knife, into an absolutely huge dragonslayer behemoth

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The second matchup of the tournament⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I thought they tried reintroducing wolves to yellowstone, no?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The second matchup of the tournament⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I think it’s established as a draw since hydrogen bomb blew themselves up

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The second matchup of the tournament⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Wolf. It’s a singular wolf, so it honestly cannot beat me if it tried. Even if we assume the other two are more docile, all they need to do is try and I would be dead.

  lol at this

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The second matchup of the tournament⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  But, like, a man could still kill you, right? Is that better than being eaten?

  I mean generally being eaten entails entrails leaking out, whereas getting killed could entail any number of things. Neck snap, choked out, slit throat, whatever. I dunno if your average idiot man is gonna be as proficient of a killer as a bear, even if they happen to be a murderer or like, just evil, right, so, I dunno. Kind of a toss up. Me personally, I would rather not have my guts spilled out, ribcage crushed, spine snapped, bones gnawed on while I’m still conscious, slowly lose blood and lose consciousness over the course of 30 minutes to an hour. I mean I guess theoretically a man could do those things too, but I dunno many men that could. Maybe like, the mike tyson of 40 years ago?

  I guess the argument I’m making hinges on the idea that humans are generally bad at killing in a physiological sense, and their need to kind of, up themselves in the game means that they tend to get filtered into a bunch of more painless and efficient approaches relative to the kind of uncaring cruelty of nature more generally. But then I dunno, humans also have a capacity for needless cruelty and torture, so I’d also be betting my chances that I don’t get shafted and stuck with like, a super jacked serial killer that can torture me with their bare hands, which there’s probably only like 2 or 3 of in the world. Maybe more if you include government contracted ones.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Funny, those guys don't usually agree on that much⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  “free” means nothing though, it’s just a substitute for other values. It’s not just free as in “if it doesn’t harm me, you’re allowed to do it”. As another commenter pointed out, one person, they would espouse the freedom to have and own and use guns for self-defense, right? I could just as easily make the argument that guns, collectively, when this right is enabled, impinge on my freedom not to live in a gun-free, potentially less violent, or at least less lethal, society. The freedom provided by publically subsidized or collective single payer healthcare, vs the freedom to "not have to pay for everyone else’s healthcare. If I just rely on freedom as a value, it indicates nothing. It’s a sock puppet ideology. There’s always another value there which is being substituted for it. Liberalism can’t just equal freedom, or else it’s just totally meaningless. While it does have a broad specific meaning as it refers to a specific school of thought, it’s not totally meaningless as it otherwise would be.

  Liberalism is a political and economic philosophy which espouses the merits of the free market as a collective decision making structure, which can allocate resources according to price signals. I.e. take resources in the economy and allocate them to where they best need to go, which is sort of what any idea of the economy has to do. It also generally espouses an idea of a naturally occurring meritocracy and rational actors, which the free market relies upon to be of real merit. At the extreme end you get shit like idiot anarcho-capitalism and the austrian school of economics, which is very resistant to government interventionism and kind of holds a religious adherence to free markets and their freedom from governance or regulation by governments. Guys like adam smith. Maybe in the middle you have more standard forms of liberalism, that still support free markets, but also support a pretty decent government and sort of see the two as being opposed to one another. Probably that would slot in a little more into neoliberalism, on the side of markets, and then classical liberalism leaning more towards government intervention. And then on the far end you get shit like nordic government and social democracy more broadly, which would try to engage in capitalism while still building out large support structures, as generally opposed to democratic socialism which seeks to basically eliminate conventional capitalism altogether. You also maybe get “market socialism” somewhere in there, inasmuch as a kind of inherently contradictory ideology like that can exist.

  None of what I said really has any commentary on general social issues. You won’t find it in there, in any of those mostly economic philosophies, you won’t find positions on gay rights or trans rights, generally, civil rights more broadly, or drug use, or crime and punishment. There’s not any position on civil rights more broadly which is specifically intrinsic to any of those philosophies. Nothing on “open-mindedness”. The same could be said of communism, or really any economic philosophy outside of like, normal fascism, which everyone kind of has a hard time defining. Libs, mostly, but I won’t elaborate on that one until you press me on it.

  In any case, that’s what liberalism as an economic philosophy all tends to mean, tends to refer to, that’s the larger, broader category. As you might intuit, it’s mostly just kind of, “capitalism”, in it’s many different forms. None of this is meaning-twisting, this is all just shit that’s existing in the academic literature for a long while. I’m not a language prescriptivist, so I’m not going to say that it’s wrongly used, when it’s not strictly conforming to academic definitions, and I will freely admit that most of the reference I see to it in colloquial conversation is kind of just like, to mean “woke”, you know, to refer more to socially progressive outlooks more broadly. But I think it’s important to question kind of why that is, why it’s seen as this thing that’s only kind of half-invisible to the population, why it’s completely divorced, colloquially, from any economic definition, and instead just refers to like, ahh, that guy, that guy’s a lib, that guy thinks black people should have rights, what a lib cuck, kind of a thing.

  Tracking the warping of language is a pretty important thing to do, because it tells you all about the intentionality with which it’s used, the broader political strategy, the core philosophies of the people using it, it tells you where they’ve come from and what they’re referring to. More specifically, these kinds of changes of meaning that take place within certain words, they serve to cordon off, or, serve as an evidence of the cordoning off, of certain populations from others. The word is transformed in such a way as to make communication between groups impossible, and is also transformed in such a way as to totally eliminate that to which it previously was in reference to.

  I don’t think using liberal to mean “socially progressive” is necessarily the wrong way to do things, but I do think that the academic definition, the academic reference, the idea there, it still has a lot of value. If one serves to obfuscate the other’s shorthand, I would find that to be kind of a tragedy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Funny, those guys don't usually agree on that much⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  added, should I begin at the beginning or are there recommended episodes I should listen to first over others?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Patriarchy⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  yeah I bet there’s a lot of weird things you’d come across huh buddy

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How come liberals dont hate conservatives the way conservatives hate liberals⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean I’d probably change my answer depending on the phrasing of the question here.

  If you mean like, classical liberalism, which includes both laissez-faire capitalism and interventionism, you’d probably find quite a lot of conservatives at this point who would define their economic ideology (if they even have any) as belonging to that kind of realm of thought, at least with laissez-faire. That shit’s pretty old, we’ve been through like multiple cycles of that, both globally, and domestically in america, and calling for a regression to a period when your specific breed of liberalism was in place is pretty possible. Which would be kind of lumped under conservative thought, despite the window dressing of like, wanting to just kind of, hedge your bets, maintain the status quo, and “conserve” things, and even the branding of “this is the way things really are, so we need to conserve the real reality”, it’s mostly actively regressive horseshit.

  So, that’s to say, you could both be a liberal and a conservative at the same time, if you’re going based on the like, actual political definitions of things. I get the sense you’re more trying to use the term “liberal” to mean “progressive”, or probably more accurately “socially progressive”. If you want a reason why I’m making this kind of stupid semantic distinction, it’s because I think it’s important to distinguish liberalism, and neoliberalism, right, which refer to economic freedom, from other more actually socially progressive ideologies. I’ll get to that later. In any case, it’s pretty much part of the intrinsic nature of the ideology that, being okay with gay people, at the least, is going to be more chill than not wanting gay people to exist. The same for trans people, the homeless, racial minorities, neurodivergent people, whatever.

  Socially progressive values are also kind of default, I think, in a vacuum (which hardly anything is), whereas nutter conservative ideology is something you have to be more actively radicalized into. If you don’t give a shit about gay people, you’re probably also fine with them just like, going about life and existing. You might also be fine with their oppression, but you’re not actively hindering things, necessarily. You have to be actively radicalized and convinced they’re bad, though, in order to call for them to be like, killed, or barred from marriage, or whatever.

  You would have to more actively want gay people to have rights, to care about them more in a positive way, and actively oppose their oppression more, in order to like, actually push for things. It’s a more active position, basically, to be actually socially progressive, or actually progressive. It necessitates caring. I think despite it just being on the surface more nice as in ideology, which helps prevent people from being like, actively hateful, I think it’s probably also sadly the case that a lot of people who would otherwise pretend to be socially progressive don’t actually give two shits about what happens or doesn’t happen, and are just mindlessly occupying what they see as kind of a default position at the time.

  If you go back to like the 2000’s, lots of people who are otherwise pretty “progressive” nowadays would’ve been pretty turbo homophobic and transphobic. That’s not really a slight against their character, right, we’re all products of our environment, but they’re just occupying kind of whatever position they think is acceptable to the mainstream.

  Put even more simply, they kind of, understand that one side is right and one is wrong, but since they don’t really understand the underlying reasoning behind either side, they’re just jumping onto whatever they get better vibes from. That used to be some more reactionary stuff, because we were kind of in both a more apathetic and callous cultural era where “not caring” was seen as cool and offering a better vibe, and we were seen as being kind of in a “post-history”, “post-racial” world, where if you were offended by racism, that was your fault, because we ended racism, and now the only real racism is you thinking racism is real, man hits bong. Just sort of like, the idea of racism as existing in a purely cultural state, just as a remnant, a cultural artifact relic which we need to move past culturally, but doesn’t affect the “real world” in any way. Those ideologies were kind of appealing to a mostly white mainstream cultural population, who could pretty easily just walk around, and make edgy jokes, and pretend still that everything’s gonna be okay because they haven’t encountered a housing market crash and the consolidation of all of the wealth in a fraction of the population and a once in a century pandemic partially accelerated by huge misinformation campaigns. Basically, because the mainstream cultural consciousness, mostly controlled by white people, was still insulated from the worst of the worst consequences, and because they were still getting treats.

  We still had a white suburban middle class, basically. We still do, but we used to, too.

  Now though, people see being socially progressive as having a better vibe. Probably this is because we’re on the long end of the economy being shit, and everyone having realized that collectively burning your children’s futures in order to further white supremacy isn’t a sustainable thing long term and just fucks you over, probably it’s also because the internet has made it easier for marginalized voices to occupy more space in the cultural consciousness, whereas before they would’ve been screened by industry gatekeepers. Probably it’s also because conservative nutters collectively lost their fucking minds and kind of went mask off with trump and gamergate shit, partially as a reaction to obama just being like, black, but also those other factors I’ve named.

  Probably it’s because the middle class that you used to see in all those 90’s movies, like fight club and office space, got automated away, outsourced, or otherwise traded for a bunch of IT and internet developers, which can mostly take their place as part of the managerial class. We go from cubicles in high rises, to open floor plan offices in mid-rises, to work-share rental spaces in low-rises, to work-from-home setups, and the amount of people allowed treats from their overlords narrows in total population because you simply don’t need as many. The amount of people who are actively fooled by corporate propaganda and bootstraps mentalities also narrows with the proliferation of the internet and with the lack of people who are now “in” on this middle class lifestyle, so your immediate social group is more likely to have people who you know are chilling but are also struggling a lot financially.

  yeah I think that’s all I got as far as this one goes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨They say your body is the only instrument that doesn't require any lessons⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  woah, that’s like advanced piss docking, I’ve only seen that in my animes. nice.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨xkcd #2929: Good and Bad Ideas⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  They’re not. If you make your car light enough, and potentially aerodynamic enough (things which should already be done to electric cars/cars in general), it makes sense, especially for the real life practical application of people who don’t have outlets they can run to their car. Aerodynamics is mostly just an efficiency increase, but decreasing weight gives a myriad of benefits, potentially including increased power to weight ratio, decreased road wear, decreased road noise at speed, increased efficiency, improved crash safety as a result of decreasing the total amount of weight you have to stop, which can actually improve the efficiency of the interior space as you can now make things like roof pillars less thick. Could also lead to increased parking space, better maneuverability, and better visibility, if you make the car itself smaller as a result of decreased weight.

  Cars should be like1/3rd of their current size. Clown cars ftw.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨rollin' coal⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  me when I am malthusian:

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨rollin' coal⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s probably just their truck being shite, without regular maintenance, and such. As you’ve pointed out, lots of them don’t own their trucks, and “rolling coal” generally refers to the practice of intentionally modifying a diesel truck to shoot out unburnt diesel fuel, usually through a straight pipe, and usually angled to be facing other cars or people they’re hazing or whatever, from what I’ve seen. It’s not unlikely that semi truckers, which is a sector that uses a particularly large amount of diesel compared to the normal car having population, would have a percentage of the fleet at any given time which is falling behind on maintenance to try to eek out more profit. Maybe their engines are just running rich, or probably more likely they have clogged air filters. Dunno what would be causing it to get past the catalytic converter and the rest of the exhaust manifold though, and just blow out straight with black smoke. That all seems like it would probably have to be modified intentionally, to see it with any frequency, ja? I dunno, hard to say.

  I dunno I also say you’ve seen it around austin and san antonio, around college campuses, and that checks out to me as a more political kind of phenomenon, then just, say, seeing people running around town and hazing bikers or whatever.

  So, I dunno. Does it count as rolling coal if your car is just shite?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"PSN isn't supported in my country. What do I do?" Arrowhead CEO: "I don't know"⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Why is this point so hard to understand?

  It’s not, they’re making a separate but contiguous point about how the market naturally incentivizes shittier tactics from it’s participants, and how Steam, Valve, and Gaben are exceptions to the rule.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"PSN isn't supported in my country. What do I do?" Arrowhead CEO: "I don't know"⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Highly recommend the Internet Historian video about no man’s sky.

  I wouldn’t, that dude’s a nazi

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Doesn't the need for a permit fundamentally contradict the US's ideals of free speech?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean maybe that would force the rest of us to actually take them as a serious threat instead of just letting them schedule big speeches on campuses that attract a bunch of out of town fans of theirs and financially organize.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨30% of Children Ages 5-7 Are on TikTok⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I dunno I’m just gonna drop a 50 minute video link on this one and bounce, 'cause if I chronically post my dogshit opinions every time one of these boomer ass articles gets posted here and gets upvoted a million times by the masturbatory elder millennial ex-redditor linux userbase, then I’m gonna be here for a fuckin eternity

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Thomas Edison was the Elon musk of his era⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I dunno man, I’m really skeptical of Steve Jobs as a big “ideas guy” and I’d probably attribute most of Apple’s success to Steve Wozniak. I’d also wager that the pocket computer + phone revolution was probably inevitable at the point where the iPod and iPhone were coming out, and more long term, Apple’s success in that domain has done a lot of damage to the market with their “trend setting” behaviors.