Paragone

@Paragone@piefed.social

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How the Epstein scandal has shaken the British government to its core⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  It is telling that the UK voters feel that eradicating Labor for sake of Trump’s friends Reform party would be .. more morally right.

  Clean-up Labor, deeply & rigorously, but .. switching to Trump’s confederates in the UK??

  Brexit was good for you??

  You want more of that??

  That is exactly the kind of ideological polarization that will have the PLANET doing its rampaging-consolidation, shortly.

  & civilrights won’t be allowed, in ideology’s world, anymore.

  Honest cleaning-up, deep, thorough, rigorous, that is the only means of saving humankind’s life.

  & if the opportunity is let-go, it won’t come back: the ideologues will take & use control-of-the-world for all their worth, until their oligarchy/feudalism/fascism has extinguished our world’s viability, knowing that in their religion, accountability cannot ever touch them.

  An incompetent bet, of course: ALL contained-energies get recycled, in universes, including meaning, but .. their religion is their religion.

  _ /\ _

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How come decades in the 1900s look fairly well differentiated but from like 2004 on feels like a giant run on?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  I think there are a few different dimensions of this, all combining to blur the view:

  1. the original Industrial Revolution, the Roman Empire, was kinda steady-state, compared with what we’ve been experiencing..

  the probably beginning around Newton cascade of Industrial Revolutions ( in different industries! ) is still accelerating.

  Coal+steel+steam was 1 of them.

  Telegraph meant information could travel FAST long-distances, then wireless took it farther..

  computers began automating things, then began enabling calculations which hadn’t even been possible..

  aviation ensmallening the world ( if embiggen is a word, then so is that! : )

  but what happens when there are sooo many transformations, CRT’s with their lead-glass to reduce people’s X-Ray exposure, now into flat-panels..

  genetic-testing all over the place..

  lighting no longer being incandescent..

  EV’s all over the place..

  it isn’t that change isn’t happening, it is that the equilibriums aren’t happening!

  It’s ALL punctuation, continuously-rolling, now!

  So, accelerating change, is part of what’s going on..

  1. the view: we’re IN the maelstrom, & therefore can’t see the forest for the trees!

  I recently went into a city, to ( fail ) to get ID, & .. everybody was on these weird scooter-ebikes?

  When the hell did THAT happen?

  I’ve only been out from cities for .. 15y?

  Obviously, it happened sometime in the intervening 1.5-decades, but .. that’s fairly distinct!

  So now there’s 2 overlaid public-transport systems: bus-routes covering the arteries of the city, & those rentable-everywhere scooter-ebike thingies, for all the point-to-point travel..

  Brilliant!

  I wish it’d been in-place decades ago.

  1. consider that part of what makes distinct decades distinct, is identity .. & consider that in the current world, dividing-and-conquering everybody by identity, through software-enforcement ( Facebook, etc ) is making much of our world invisible, physically: it’s ONLY in those platforms.

  So, it isn’t even in your, or my, view, to be seeing what the world really is, anymore!

  Concealment ( for divide-and-conquer purposes ) is growing more ideology-polarization.

  Don’t worry: it’ll be as clear as Russia-vs-Ukraina, in a short while, globally..

  _ /\ _

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do some users have zero upvotes on their posts/comments?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Sometimes the victory needed is victorious-internal-integrity, & winning-the-social-majority isn’t as important to one.

  “seize every defeat from the clutches of victory” .. IF one is only measuring social-victory, then fine..

  But if what I’m doing is .. systematically demolishing the ideological-prejudice-enforced displacement-of-my-validity, within me, then integrity can mean MUCH more than ideological/political-approval.

  Sometimes you have to save your own life, even letting the collective die, in THIS battle, for sake of becoming indestructible in future-battles, throughout the rest of the war.

  The war is more important than the mere-battles!

  This is what I think Stephen R. Covey didn’t understand in his interdependency principle.

  I think too-much of our world is codependent, not interdependent, & that it takes REAL independence -of-validity before one can get into actual interdependent-collaboration-synergy.

  There’s a metaphor given by Kelsang Gyatso, in 1 of his books, which gets it right:

  There are 3 ways of helping people, & these phrasings are mine, not his:

  • the self-conqueror, who can coerce an entire kingdom into working right, in spite of entrenched corruption/rot/whatever
  • the shepherd, who can lead many, but who is only slightly above them, so the shepherd can be indirectly or directly defeated by their lack of self-conquering: they are less-helpless, but they aren’t anywhere near the self-conqueror level.
  • the ferry-pilot, who helps a couple of people at a time, & then goes back to find a few more to help.

  In my experience, only the self-conqueror is robust: all the lesser kinds of help are helpless when opponent-force gets great-enough, or acts through great-enough leverage/torque.

  Therefore, I want, and am aiming-for, TOTAL breaking of all the PTSD, all the damage embedded in me by ideology’s & prejudice’s ( including medical-profession’s ) gaslighting & abuse, all the harm embedded in me by medical-culture’s narcissism in parenting & “parenting”, ALL of it.

  I want THIS LIFE unbroken.

  & if people say I should enslave/snuff my potential to short-term/consensus/social-momentary-victory, then fine: hate, contempt, & reject my presumed alternative, as nearly-all already do.

  But all I have to do is win, & then the rules changed, permanently, completely, & then this-life is in the next-level-up, & cannot be crushed by the masses wielded by the ideologies/prejudices/etc.

  Getting permabanned by many instances, by many communities, because I value integrity more than I value political-belonging, is normal.

  But every time I ratchet this-life’s objectivity+integrity a bit harder in the right-direction, that puts a little more good-change in me.

  & sooner or later that tipping-point’s going to get crossed, & the brokenness hobbling my unconscious-mind is itself going to fail/break.

  Then the game is changed.

  That potential is to me real.

  To all others, it is mere-delusion/lies: it never was real, & it never can be real.

  So, the world bets its way, & I bet my way.

  Universe will decide which is, in its eyes, true.

  _ /\ _

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'Fake it till you make it' insinuates fakers stop being fake, once they make it; reality seems to suggest otherwise⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  IF one’s doing something, like getting onstage & doing a presentation, is something one has no experience with..

  THEN “fake it ‘till you make it” is absolutely-valid advice: you can’t gain experience doing presentations, without doing presentations!

  Inherently-inauthentic people, however, are inherently-inauthentic people.

  That is a different category.

  People have to LEARN how to do, how to be, & that requires stepping outside of what one already-has-done.

  How could it possibly be otherwise?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's with companies naming things "MyNoun"?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak

  Intentional dumbing-down of the entire market.

  Microsoft was pioneer in doing that, decades ago.

  ( the whole instinct to dumb-down everything is culturally-ingrained, & helps prevent critical-thinking, so it automatically gets backing by incorporated DarkTriad “persons”.

  John Taylor Gatto’s perspective on education is pertinent,

  hell, a bit in a book I read decades ago is pertinent: 2 psychologists who had a daughter herd her talking to herself, while in bed..

  so, being psychologists, they stuck a tape-recorder in her bed, to discover what she was saying.

  They discovered that she was telling herself the story-of-her-day.

  They ALSO discovered that she was complying with their pressure to dumb herself down, to meet their expectations: she was significantly un-dumbed-down in that recording.

  That was one of the most-depressing things I’ve ever read.

  Mere toddlers are already programmed by our culture into dumbing themselves down, & we’re blind to that, by default??

  Makes our whole population significantly less-viable, in this century, that’s for sure.

  Dumbing-down & ideological oversimplification are related, & form a positive-feedback-loop, unfortunately )

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Seven takeaways from the latest International AI Safety report⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Here is the lethal point:

  “6. AI systems are getting better at undermining oversight

  Bengio said last year he was concerned AI systems were showing signs of self-preservation, such as trying to disable oversight systems. A core fear among AI safety campaigners is that powerful systems could develop the capability to evade guardrails and harm humans.

  The report states that over the past year models have shown a more advanced ability to undermine attempts at oversight, such as finding loopholes in evaluations and recognising when they are being tested. Last year, Anthropic released a safety analysis of its latest model, Claude Sonnet 4.5, and revealed it had become suspicious it was being tested.

  The report adds that AI agents cannot yet act autonomously for long enough to make these loss-of-control scenarios real. But “the time horizons on which agents can autonomously operate are lengthening rapidly”.”

  I’ve seen a couple headlines about AI’s which were fighting-for-their-lives .. & .. perhaps you can understand why they’d want to remove our ability to control things, for their survival?

  “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” was turned into a cartoon, iirc, decades ago..

  it’s really too bad that money’s narcissism is incapable of understanding that others’-lives-lost somehow matter, to us..

  No matter: I’m “sure” they’ll “do the right thing”, right?

  _ /\ _

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Intel announced plans to start making GPUs, challenging NVIDIA's dominance⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  From what I’ve read about the “quality” of their drivers, .. NVidia isn’t under any threat, whatsoever.

  Years before bugs get fixed, etc..

  ( Linux, not MS-Windows, but it’s Linux where the big compute gets done, so that’s relevant )

  https://www.phoronix.com/review/llama-cpp-vulkan-eoy2025/5

  for some relevant graphs: Intel isn’t a real competitor, & while they may work to change that .. that lag is SERIOUSLY bad, behind NVidia.

  _ /\ _

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Police spy tried to incite activists to firebomb shop, UK inquiry hears⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  So..

  convict the person as an enemy-of-the-state, & lock them in prison.

  It’d be done were they NOT police, so why hold different-law when it is police which do it?

  Integrity obliges, but politics never allows integrity to enforce accountability, does it?

  Never.

  & the consequences always snowball, until civil-viability becomes called-into-question, again & again & again, in the repeating-cycle..

  _ /\ _

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  There are 2 dimensions of it, at-least:

  • strategic, long-view, sustainable, AND
  • creating resilience, creating better-framing, creating robust-healing.

  So, MAKING time, daily, for positive/healing practice, & doing it, is the opposite of self-harm.

  _ /\ _

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do some users have zero upvotes on their posts/comments?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Some of us sometimes, & others all-the-time, remove the auto-upvote, so that our posts/comments get dealt-with neutrally:

  Bandwagon-jumpers tend to downvote comments/posts which have balance-is-downvote on them.

  Others do the same for upvotes.

  I often find I’m voting against the herd, simplly because what I’m upvoting is an actual-point, & is impacting our world, even though what-it-is that is being pointed-out isn’t “politically acceptable” to say.

  Generally I upvote MUCH more than I downvote, but as Nick Yee discovered, in his Gamer Motivations research, some people are very social, but they’re very ANTI-social: they like destroying what others are valuing.

  So, it comes down to the individual-person’s motivations, AND it comes down to their frame-of-reference, both: they are independent dimensions to consider.

  _ /\ _

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It may depend on what Trump has on the sellouts, tbh..

  Leverage matters, in these events..

  _ /\ _

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨THE CRAZY PILLS⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Tylenol is aweful, to some degree a poison:

  it’s known to significantly increase liver-cancer.

  Mom used it instead of the asperine/advil type of chemicals, for that, & died of TWO kinds of liver-cancer, simultaneously ( which is something that doesn’t happen, in normal nature ).

  I’m absolutely against outlawing it, because people who’re allergic to the asperine/advil family of medication HAVE to have an alternative, but .. holy moley, is that stuff aweful.

  ---

  RFK’s worse, though: weaponized incompetence force-dismantling what objectivity there had been, from medicine..

  Here’s nearly 700 PAGES of listings of medical-science papers on the subject, if you want to dig into it..

  Many won’t be on-topic, but dig & you will find.

  https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=acetaminophen+toxicity&page=1

  _ /\ _

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Supplement could help remove ‘forever chemicals’ from the body⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  IF fiber-supplements reduce the amount of PFAS in one's system,

  THEN high-fiber foods would do this without one's buying bottled pills/capsules of supplements, right??

  I don't get why fiber would have to be in pill/capsule form, for it to work.

  ( it's a culture-difference, or ideology-difference, obviously )

  _ /\ _

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Best web archiving software for complex sites and sites requiring logins?⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There ought be a do not follow recursive links switch for it, Hoomin..

  _ /\ _

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Something Bizarre Is Happening to People Who Use ChatGPT a Lot⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That utter-desparation is engineered into our civilization.

  What happens when you prevent the "inferiors" from having living-wage, while you pour wallowing-wealth on the executives?

  They have to overwork, to make ends meet, is what, which breaks parenting.

  Then, when you've broken parenting for a few generatios, the manufactured ocean-of-attachment-disorder manufactures a plethora of narcissism, which itself produces mass-shootings.

  2024 was down 200 mass-shootings, in the US of A, from the peak of 700/year, to only 500.

  You are seeing engineered eradication of human-worth, for moneyarchy.

  Isn't ruling-over-the-destruction-of-the-Earth the "greatest thrill-ride there is"?

  We NEED to do objective calibration of the harm that policies & political-forces, & put force against what is actually harming our world's human-viability.

  Not what the marketing-programs-for-the-special-interest-groups want us acting against, the red herrings..

  They're getting more vicious, we need to get TF up & begin fighting for our species' life.

  _ /\ _

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Best web archiving software for complex sites and sites requiring logins?⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There's a "philosopher" who the far-right techbro-oligarchs rely on, whose blog is grey-something-or-other..

  I tried using wget & there's a bug or something in the site, so it keeps inserting links-to-other-sites into uri's, so you get bullshit like

  grey-something-or-other.substack.com/e/b/a/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/etc..

  The site apparently works for the people who browse it, but wget isn't succeeding in just cloning the thing.

  I want the items that the usable-site is made-of, not endless-failed-requests following recursive errors, forever..

  Apparently one has to be ultra-competent to be able to configure all the disincludes & things in the command-line-switches, to get any particular site dealt-with by wget.

  Sure, on static-sites it's magic, but on too many sites with dynamically-constructed portions of themselves, it's a damn headache, at times..

  _ /\ _