Purple is a fine color to use while employing alternative methods of holding people accountable when they control the courts and the senate
Objection
joined 1 year ago
“In fact, we don’t want them to make cars for us. We want to make our own cars. We don’t need their lumber. We don’t need their energy. We don’t need anything from Canada. And I say the only way this thing really works is for Canada to become a state.”
Article 1, Section 9 of the US Constitution:
No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State.
Trying to remove any and all trade barriers in order to prevent trade.
A man rubs a lamp and a genie comes out and says, "I will grant you one wish, anything you ask for, whatever you can imagine, your wish is my command."
The man shouts, "I want a dragon!"
The genie responds, "I'm sorry, but a dragon is just too much, it's just not possible for that to exist. Can you think of something else?"
The man thinks for a minute and says, "Well, in that case, I guess I wish for the rich and powerful to face significant legal consequences within the existing system for the harm they do to regular people."
The genie sighs and says, "What color did you want that dragon?"
didn’t immediately solve all problems
I love how liberals constantly downplay shit like this. If you're upset about your friends and family being shoveled into a pointless meat grinder and you're experiencing mass death and oppression, then you're just upset that "democracy didn't immediately solve all problems." In the same way that opposition to genocide is frequently framed as, "throwing a fit because you don't get your way," and such.
It's literally just the Joker speech from The Dark Knight, as long as there's a plan, it's fine, even if the plan is horrible, the only thing that matters is that the norms are respected and the proper procedure is followed. You and everyone you care about can be sent to concentration camps, just so long as the decision is made by a legislative body following proper procedure. Systemic violence, like dragging people from their homes to die in a trench en masse, is perfectly acceptable, just so long as it isn't disruptive, just so long as everything is going according to plan. The only problem y'all have with fascism is that it's so rude and blunt, if it persued the same goals respectfully you'd be completely fine with it.
Yes, it did benefit the people immensely to get out of the war. Aside from the horrors of WWI, with the benefit of hindsight, we can say that if they hadn't dropped out and focused on rebuilding and industrial development at that point, there's a fair chance that they lose to the Nazis in WWII and we'd all be speaking German right now. Besides, in the chaos of this period the so-called "democracy" wasn't some kind of established, functional system, we're talking about a provensional government, and one that completely failed to address ongoing crises (which is kinda the point of having a provisional government). Under the conditions of the time, sensible people radicalize, and then they force things to change and get rid of those conditions, and then people 100 years later to whom the conditions are utterly foreign waggle their fingers about it, but they don't care because they're no longer dying in a ditch.
One easy trick that makes you immune to propaganda - simply respond "not sure" to every question you're ever asked. It doesn't really even save you though because they'll just lump you in with the people who chose the wrong answer. The site repeatedly uses the phrase, "failed to identify as false" to group the "not sures" in with the incorrect responses.
There's an almost endless way to present poll numbers and survey results to support whatever conclusion you like, you could say that "fewer than half the respondents were able to identify this claim as false," or you could say, "80% of respondents avoided incorrectly labeling this claim as true," depending on what narrative you prefer. And that's assuming that the raw data itself, which comes from an internet survey, is reliable and representative.
In 2020 the democrats were calling the border wall racist and they won, then in 2024 it was "we're the ones who are actually gonna build the wall, Trump's all talk." They literally tried to position themselves to the right of Republicans on the issue in order to win over the mythical centrists, and predictably what happened was that their support among Latinos broke down.
A lot of these people are religious and conservative, but were willing to vote for Democrats as long as there was substantial differences on race/immigration. But even if they were the "lesser evil" on immigration from a pro-immigrant perspective - something which they denied as hard as they could, by the way - if the difference didn't appear substantial any more, if it was framed in technical arguments about how to do it rather than moral arguments about what to do, then many of them no longer saw it as damning and voted based on other issues where they're more aligned with Republicans.
This is often what swing voters actually look like, by the way, and why pivoting to the right to capture them is often counterproductive. It turns out pivoting right on an issue where doing so directly harms millions of people so you can appeal to the dozen or so people who like Dick Cheney loses elections. Swing voters are a lot more complex than the idiotic "conventional wisdom" that just has everyone at a different point on a one dimensional left-right scale.
Their methodology involves asking people a bunch of questions and then if they don’t get 100% correct they’re counted as believing misinformation. Putting aside the unreliability of online polls, that’s a pretty misleading way of framing it, if you ask me.
If you asked people 10 questions about just about anything, you’d probably find a substantial number of people who don’t get every one right. In fact, they did do this under the heading, “Disinformation Nation: Americans Widely Believe False Claims on a Range of Topics.” That’s probably why they found that, “Respondents identifying as Democrats were about as likely (82 percent) to believe at least one of the 10 false claims as those identifying as Republicans (81 percent).”
Many of the people responding to the poll may not have ever encountered the claims they were asked about. If you are first encountering a claim in that context, you pretty much just have to guess whether you think it’s true based on vibes. And you can easily set up misleading vibes, like, “Conservative initiative Project 2025 proposes cutting or eliminating Social Security” which is false because it’s not explicitly stated, but it does explicitly state a whole bunch of other horrible shit, so like, if you get got by that one it doesn’t really show that you believe in an inaccurate picture of the world, just that you got tripped up by details. But that claim dings you for “believing misinformation” just as much as " COVID-19 vaccines killed 15 million people worldwide."
So like it doesn’t really tell us very much about how far reaching disinformation really is, the results are more of a reflection of their methodology.
[Reposted from the last time this study was posted]
If you define everyone you feel like doing violence towards as "an other church" then sure, but then the distinction is completely meaningless. Plenty of the examples I mentioned such as the inquisitions were used against people who were longtime, faithful members of the church. No one was safe.
To be historically accurate, the catholic church only liked to kill its popes and other churches.
What the fuck is this shit. The church conducted brutal campaigns of terror hunting down religious minorities or those accused of heresy and tortured them to extract confessions which they then used to justify more torture. Jews were frequently criminalized and forced out of countries in mass deportations at their own expense. And then there were, oh yeah, the Crusades military campaigns that brought death and destruction even to their own lands as crusaders looted and pillaged wherever they went, in one case even sacking Constantinople who they were supposed to be protecting.
Like yeah I guess "Believe everything we say and defer to our authority and we probably won't kill you" is technically better than just killing people, but that's not exactly a high bar.
Hope you get banned harder next time 👍
This is the same as saying that we can't say animals want to avoid pain unless we can prove that they're capable of conceptualizing pain in the abstract, it's spurious bullshit.
52
https://lemmy.ml/post/28111691/17749466
This is actually insane. Another user was criticizing the New Deal era and brought up a bunch of points, I commented refuting a bunch of their points but describing two of of them, Japanese Internment and the Red Scare, simply as "legitimate criticism."
@[email protected] responded "No they’re not. Those two things were caused by far greater international factors. Like, you know, the 2nd World War."
I cited a commission that found that internment was not caused by a legitimate threat posed by the Japanese but was rather caused by racism and hysteria, and that even Reagan agreed with that conclusion and signed a bill paying reparations to the victims.
Well then the mod responded that I was jumping to "inflammatory conclusions" and "personal attacks" because I assumed that when they said that criticism of internment is not legitimate it meant that they were defending internment. They continued to refuse to explain how else I was possibly supposed to interpret such a claim. I still have no idea. Apparently their stance is, "It's not legitimate to criticize the thing I oppose." If anyone can make sense of that, please enlighten me.
Since they refused to explain, I took a guess that maybe the misunderstanding was that they were interpreting "legitimate criticism" as "damning criticism," like that because a bad thing happened during that era, nothing good came of it at all. I made it clear that this was speculation and that any criticism of interpreting it that way only applied if that's what was happening.
The mod responded by permabanning me, removing all of my comments so they don't show in the modlog, and adding this:
Edit: the other commenter essentially proved that they were just baiting people into inflammatory discussion. They kept resorting to personal attacks and flip-flopped on their position solely to continue arguing. This behavior is not tolerated here. Please report such trolls in the future.
At literally no point did I "flip-flop" my position of "internment was bad, actually." Nor did I "bait" them, unless "criticizing internment is legitimate," is somehow "baiting" someone into saying "no it isn't." By far the most "inflammatory" thing that was said was when they said that criticism of internment was "not legitimate." The "personal attacks" I made were stating the fact that the position they had expressed was to the right of Reagan on the issue, and also making a quip about a .world mod defending the Red scare and Joseph McCarthy.
This seems to be a case of a clear case of PTB, the mod apparently misspoke but because they're a mod they can just ban people for calling them out instead of owning up to it.
Edit: My comments are still visible on kbin.earth (thank you @[email protected]) so I can provide screenshots:
:::spoiler screenshots
transcript
DISRUPT INTERNATIONAL SHIPPING NOW!!
OGEY
Niche ocean carrier Atlantic Container Line is warning the fines the U.S. government is considering hitting Chinese-built freight vessels with would force it to leave the United States and throw the global supply chain out of balance, potentially fueling freight rates not seen since Covid.
“This hits American exporters and importers worse than anybody else,” said Andrew Abbott, CEO of ACL. “If this happens, we’re out of business and we’re going to have to shut down.”
[...] U.S. is no position to win an economic war that places ocean carriers using Chinese-made vessels in the middle. Soon, Chinese-made vessels will represents 98% of the trade ships on the world’s oceans.
Hey, Abdul-Malik Badr Al-Din Al-Houthi, how'd I do?
Thank you Mr. President, that's exactly what I meant. But why-
Another day, another banger
:::spoiler spoiler
Context:
This comes from a game called "Queen's Wish: The Conqueror," a retro indie RPG. In the game, you play as the third child of the queen of Haven, a large and powerful nation, but up until now you've lived an idle live with little power and few responsibilities. The queen decides to send you off to reestablish control of lost vassals in a remote continent which were abandoned following a major magical disaster.
There are three vassal states and each has two factions who you can choose to support into power, usually one side being more aristocratic and the other being poorer. You also have the choice of how much you actually follow through with your assignment, you can just run around doing your own thing regardless of what the queen wants. But you can navigate a route where you side with the poor while still negotiating agreements as expected of you and feel like it's a "good guy" route. Although the queen would rather you work with the aristocrats, she's satisfied as long as you get either side to win and cooperate, just so long as somebody's keeping the spice flowing, so to speak.
This conversation occurs with a sage/scholar working in one of your forts in that region, who refers to "The Theory of Inevitable Decay." It's missable, but it's a crucial line of dialogue that recontextualizes everything that you're doing. From the beginning, you see a lot of the mess that was left behind and the power vacuum from when the kingdom pulled out before, but then, it sorta seems like you're fixing things, getting rid of bandits and warlords and establishing order, traditional fantasy hero stuff, and with a kinder, gentler hand, even. But even if you as an individual have the best intentions, you're still kind of setting things up in a way that's dependent on a great power a long way away. Haven has its own stuff going on and it probably isn't going to be knowledgeable about the region, interested in it's long-term well-being, or accountable to the people who live there. Sooner or later, it'll get a ruler who doesn't give a shit about a given vassal, and the vassal will fall to ruin - or so the sage suggests.
Anyway sorry I posted this in the wrong comm, this is just an interesting bit of dialogue from a video game with absolutely no relevance to modern day politics 😇
3
"We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings." - Ursula Le Guin
Lots of things are impossible until they happen and become inevitable. The human mind has a tendency to place things in that box that don't really belong there. We can see it in people's personal lives, "Oh, I could never possibly stand up to my parents!" and then they do, and the chips fall where they may. "I could never leave everything behind and move to another country/city" but you take a leap of faith and you make it work. "Oh, I could never become a soldier," but then you find yourself in the trenches and you become one. Humans are far more adaptable than we give ourselves credit for.
But the things that need to happen are things that we have determined rationally. The bias that exists in our minds when there is such a conflict is to ignore reason and evidence and think that we have to follow our self-imposed restraints and limitations, and if that's not enough, well, too bad, maybe it'll still be fine somehow. It is easier to simply pretend a physical problem doesn't exist then it is to confront a psychological barrier - but the physical problem remains whether we acknowledge it or shove it aside.
It is abundantly clear that there is a mismatch between what the US political reality is capable of delivering on and what actually needs to happen, on an increasingly large number of issues. Wealth inequality increases every year, and there is no path to stopping it. Every year we get closer to ecological collapse, heading towards tipping points that will spiral out of control. And of course, the military-industrial complex gets larger and larger, now fueling a genocide with overwhelming bipartisan support.
All of these things need to change, but it is also impossible for them to change. So we have no choice but to do the impossible (see the invisible, row, row, fight the powah). It is impossible that we could convince the democrats to change, they are too attached to their corporate donors. Too bad, we'll get them change anyway. It is impossible that we could build a third party, it isn't viable in FPTP. Too bad, we will build it and make it viable anyway. It is impossible that we could resist the strength of the military and police. It is impossible to organize a general strike. Boycotts can never work. The king would never allow us to have a constitution. Too bad.
The limits of existing political systems have been overcome in the past even when they seemed impossible, and the desperate need for change means that the limits of this one will be too. Shit is headed towards the fan, and things will change, for better or worse. The longer we wait, the more shit will build up. Only by finding a breach in "impossibility" can we start to address any of these problems.
Where will that breach be found? Who knows? All we can do is search for cracks and hit them as hard as we can until we find a way to break the limitations. We can discuss where to focus our efforts and that's a valid and important discussion to have. But we cannot allow the functions of the existing system to limit our efforts to break out of it. You cannot be so concerned about damaging an already sinking ship that you won't rip off a plank to hold on to.
I don't really care who you vote for or don't vote for. Follow your conscience. What's important is that you have your head in the game. What matters is recognizing the the things that what needs to happen is a function of immutable natural laws while what can happen is a function of mortal laws and conventional wisdom. When there is a mismatch, to uphold the ideas of "what can happen" is to reject that "what needs to happen" is actually real, which is no different from thinking you can change the laws of physics by passing a bill in the senate. The "reason" of conventional wisdom must be kicked to the curb in favor of actual reason that says things need to change, and that it's necessary to go beyond the impossible to make it happen.
1
Add "Havana Syndrome" to the list of fake stories that you're not allowed to question on .world
(lemmy.ml)
The first sentence on the Wikipedia page for it calls it "a disputed medical condition." Even the CIA itself has admitted that cases are not caused by "a sustained global campaign by a hostile power." The State Department similarly released a report that it was highly unlikely the symptoms were caused by any sort of directed energy weapon. In fact, seven different US intelligence agencies released a consensus statement saying, "available intelligence consistently points against the involvement of US adversaries in causing the reported incidents."
But the clowns on .world don't care about things like truth or evidence, or even direct statements from the people who's boots they have in their mouths. If it makes an enemy of the US look bad, then it is absolute truth, and anything short of complete faith and loyalty must be purged from conversation.
Rare video clip of a .world mod
:::spoiler Offending post
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If you wanna play chess, use your head.