I mean you could always just wipe your ass, leave the TP in the bowl for like 48 hours, and then flush it, but then that kinda seems unsustainable unless everyone has their own toilet and only needs to poop every 48nhours which isn’t gonna be the case in a poor country I bet.
Excellent and much needed context, compared to just seeing images of contextually devoid book vandalism, and being trusted to assume a kind of naive, perhaps bad faith idiocy.
I legitimately wonder if there’s really any level of protest that people will tolerate. If you throw soup on the protective glass that covers a painting, prepare to get slammed with a 20 minute protracted conversation about whether or not soup can leak between the gaps in the fixtures that secure a painting to the wall, and whether or not that amount of soup can do damage, and how much money we’re all paying for it to be cleaned up, and how seeing a painting is a once in a lifetime thing which is now ruined for the people who went and so on and so on. If you block traffic, well, now I’ve had to spend 2 or 3 hours in delays, and there’s no cause that’s really worth a minor inconvenience. The protesting crowd should all get gunned down for that. At the very least, they all deserve to know that nothing they’re doing can every really matter or change anything ever.
Then of course, none of that’s actually related to the issue we really want to discuss, there, that’s all just tangential, complicated political issues, that we’re primed to bellyache and whine about. We can only show how much we care by donating to some nonprofit, while we go about our lives ideally uninterrupted an uninconvinienced by the protesters. I feel like I must’ve stumbled on this thread dozens of times already, and it never really gets any better.
I think what drives the root cause of this is some kind of nihilism, some sense that nothing can ever get any better, and if you think otherwise, you’re naive. That we really just exist to keep everything in a permanent deadlock. If you were to take more extreme action than this, well, no, that’s morally abhorrent, whomever will just get replaced by the institutional successor, and oh, you’re causing X amount of property destruction, which is X amount of economic value, thus, X amount of time, and thus, X amount of lifespan for someone. Then you’ve basically committed murder, if not mass murder, by wasting so many lifetimes. The many, sometimes literal, murders of the status quo otherwise need not apply, or else are assumed to be inevitable. Even if your actions here were somehow directly materially related to the conflict, right, it would be all too easy to just dismiss it out of hand as being not really effective, or as being adventurism or a waste of everyone’s time. Can’t I just get back to the perennial Big Game? I just wanna grill for God’s sake!
There are alternatives. Bad body odor is generally produced by the bacteria on your body which thrives and emits odor in the moisture of your sweat, so legitimately taking a shower or applying hand sanitizer to your armpits will help. Though, I dunno if applying like, a rubbing alcohol mixture to your pits would be a wise decision to do frequently since that’s are pretty sensitive body part.
They need like, armpit probiotics, or something. Some sort of stick full of bacteria that smells like lemons or strawberries or something, and then just outbreeds the other bacteria. Somebody should do that, sounds awesome.
Huckleberries. I never see them as a commonly available thing in stores, eaten alongside things like bananas, which sucks, because bananas are some plant grown like a thousand miles away and I can go outside and go gather my own huckleberries if I wanted. It should be really easy, I live in an area where they grow.
So, that, but also just more broadly I kind of think that after learning enough about different regional botany, we’ve both crippled basically every ecosystem with a bunch of invasive species, we’ve crushed the human experience into a very narrow square set of experiences which includes the biodiversity that you can see around wherever you are, and we’ve made food worse. Because we’re not using local plants for our food, you see, we’re just using a bunch of generic ingredients that are sort of unnaturally made out to be universal across entire hemispheres, maybe even across the globe. No regional variation outside of specialty goods, only Mcdonald’s.
The thread’s gonna be against this opinion broadly, I think, but there’s not like, it’s not just the huckleberry, you understand, there’s a lot more out there that you don’t know about, both edible and not.
One of those little steel k-cup filters. I don’t get locked into their dumbass ecosystem and I can still make a good single person cup of shitass costco joe instead of a whole pot or doing a whole pour over maneuver.
What did it look like in person?
So, you know how it’s a pretty common thing in movies, like MI:3, suicide squad, I think agents of shield, unthinkable, the belko experiment, where guys just have like, bombs in their heads?
So, you know how scientists have used wifi to see through people’s walls?
So, you know how we currently have a bunch of wifi satellites spanning the earth?
So, you know how we’ve kind of automatically selected in our political system for a bunch of mercenary politicians that only ever act out of their own self-interest and are easily manipulated with like, free lunches, lobbying, and pamphlets?
That’s kind of my like, optimal ghost in the shell style conspiracy dealio. I dunno, I’m sure you’d need some way to get around people just getting CT scans and stuff like that, and a lead case would probably still just show up like a tumor or something, and any electronics you had would look pretty obvious too, so, who knows. You’d need to put like a water based gel around it or make it out of non-metal materials or something, which sounds a lot harder.
Other plans include maybe like a nuclear killdozer spidertank. Kind of like a metal gear, but instead of just having a nuke on it, the nuke serves the dual purpose of also being a mobile power source, either in the form of a nuclear reactor, which you could maybe use the heat of to drive hydraulics and like a heat pump or something, or a nuclear battery, and then you use it for political leverage. Maybe you could have nuclear satellites sent up from like an island or something. Just a bunch of satellites with nukes on them, and then they fall and nuke things and then you can use that for leverage maybe once you have enough of them. Maybe especially if you were like a private company or like you were sending them all up in disguise as a different kind of thing, because then nobody could really like strike back at you without risking getting nuked by a nuclear satellite, and then MAD doesn’t matter at all because they’d be nuking a bunch of random bystanders. Something along those lines.
Dunno, just thinking of some stuff that you could maybe do that’s like, more interesting or better than just like “oh I run around and kill all the politicians I don’t like, like I’m shooting puppies in a gravel pit”, you know? Because then those politicians just get replaced with other, shittier politicians as a result of our political system being kind of dogshit, and even beyond that, as a result of like, a majority of the population being kind of stupid, complacent, and perhaps even actively evil, if the behavior of white america broadly for the last 200 years is anything to go by. You know, burning the collective futures of your children basically just out of spite for racial minorities and to exclude them as much as is possible. Dunno, part of me says, don’t blame them, they’ve been tricked by the rich, and the population’s critical support for those causes was helpful to actually making progress, part of me says, the real progress was made by relatively small or extremist groups in the population, and that politicians and the majority white population will use every tactic in the playbook to keep things going as much as possible contrary to whatever political will you try to cook up, which is why you see sharecropping, segregation, redlining, denial of VA loans, increased police spending, the crack epidemic, and all that only comes about into the common cultural consciousness like a decade after the damage has been done.
I dunno, in any case, I don’t think you could solve all the problem in 24 hours alone, you’d have to set something up for a longer term set of solutions.
Also begs the question of, what are “consequences”? Where does an action begin or end, really? If I steal a million dollars from the bank, am I free from the consequence of having a million dollars? I dunno, I sit on the couch, and I’m free from the negative consequence of having not become god, which, in comparison to the infinite positive consequences of becoming god, is a negative consequence. Maybe something along those lines.
All of em, really. I don’t see much of a reason why the vast majority of platforms wouldn’t benefit from it, except for maybe an argument around it allowing the creation of larger and larger echo chambers, but that’s probably fine as long as it’s managed to only be to a certain degree.
I mean, those neighbors sound awesome, for one. For two, they also keep rent low, which is pretty good.
But in any case, if you want them to move out, probably I would [redacted]. As a bonus, you won’t have new neighbors for maybe a year, unless they just throw in a manufactured home or a prebuilt or something. On the downside, you might have to deal with construction noises next door.
I’ve been tooting that horn for a while, but it’s a pretty hard point to translate into real political discourse with people. I try to weasel out of it, but at some point, people get really fed up and want you to “state your actual opinions”, or otherwise will just bully you relentlessly. Basically, I’m just saying that with any change of opinion, there’s going to be, probably, some necessary amount of discomfort. I guess my extrapolation from that would probably be that it’s a better policy as a whole if people just stop taking the slap so personally or so passionately. Better policy if your face goes numb, easier to work with, rather than handcuffing everyone, ja feel?
I dunno but there’s also definitely an amount by which that political polarization is strictly due to social media algorithms keeping people in bubbles where they’re constantly drip fed their own personalized optimal ratio of ragebait to wholesome garbage. It’s kind of inevitable that anyone starts to lose it, if they’ve been confined to their schizo microculture for long enough.
I mean I dunno, in some ways I think the fediverse might be worse, right? If I’m on reddit, then I have to intentionally go to r/the Donald or whatever, and manually block the shit from appearing on my page, if that were to happen (it probably won’t unless I seek it out, but yeah). With the drivers, after choosing your instance, you just don’t see, say, posts from hexbear or whatever. NSFW posts, whatever, whatever they decided to defederate with. So it kinda just seems like a continuation of the atomization, a continuation of the fracturing of the information landscape, the continuation of the death of the monoculture.
At the same time, Reddit also sucks. You really don’t need a complicated system to create these perverse incentive structures, anyone who’s used reddit could probably already tell you the relatively obvious set of disadvantages that are incurred by the platform, that lend themselves towards echo chambers. Downvoted posts don’t float to the top, which means they aren’t seen, certain users are given priority based on the historical consistency of their ability to get upvotes, and overall the platform is going to consistently cater towards the lowest combo dominator. Lemmy hasn’t really solved any of those problems with the inherent structure, there, of like a “pure” democratic system online. It’s only really solved, like, selecting for only privacy councious Linux tech bro libs on this instance, and then selecting for revolutionary cosplay commies on the other couple. And then Germans, also, somehow.
Even with that simple of a structure, it doesn’t work. I could spell out similar problems with the way 4chan is structured, and that site is basically just like, first come first serve, as simple as it gets. To solve these problems, you have to introduce more complicated mechanisms, but to introduce more complicated regulatory mechanisms, you introduce probably more obfuscation and probably more centralization of power.
As far as I can tell, without majorly changing the economic structure of our society, and the set of behaviors and incentives that are created as a result of that structure, nothing on the Internet is really going to change. The user behavior is shaped by the environment, usually not the other way around, so much. I dunno, I’m kind of a boomer when it comes to this stuff specifically. It’s nice to be able to not pay 50 bucks to get a manual for my car, though, so that’s not nothing.
Yeah, it’s just pretty tough to get people wormed out of those short term benefit incentive structures, and it’s also pretty hard to sort through an excessive overabundance of content. Like half the reason tiktok is so popular is because it doesn’t require that you really do much to interact with the app, it just serves you automatically as long as you scroll and watch content. It’s like a three button operation, basically. It’s pretty hard to get consumers to not act outside of their own immediate instincts when that’s what they’ve been programmed to do.
I would propose that the echo chamber has just diversified, changed, become maybe more atomized. But it hasn’t really gone away. The other guy is right, the nightly news was a huge echo chamber. America was totally hyped for the Iraq war in a post 9/11 world, if you pulled that shit nowadays, you’d probably see a pretty diversified set of opinions due to the death of the monoculture. Whether or not that’s good or bad, or is dissolving the social fabric and sense of a shared culture, is a different kind of conversation that I’d also have, but the echo chambers themselves, they’ve been around.
force antagonizing interactions between people who would avoid each other in real life because arguments mean participation means more ad revenue.
It’s not even that they necessarily would avoid each other in real life, I find. It’s that the channels through which these confrontations take place are totally constructed to promote bad faith snap judgements. It’s why short form content is becoming more popular online, I think. Human expression is sort of pushed through a pasta strainer until it becomes the homogenous goop fuel that both spurns the parasocial gears and powers the skinner’s box roulette wheel at the core of all these services.
Why would people choose to expose themselves to environments which promote something their brain interprets as actual, physical harm?
People commonly have a framework where they think of the slap as having kind of, occurred beforehand, right, and then they see themselves as slapping back whenever they respond, which is another part of why political discourse is so polarized and bad faith basically at all times.
Lack of curiosity. It’s exhausting to deal with political realities like 24/7 and perceive the world in a constant hyper politicized lens, without also becoming a schizo crazy person. The easiest way to prevent all this,but still be able to rationalize and make sense of the world in front of you, is to be able to slot yourself into a nice clean prepackaged category, where your information can be run through the filters for you, and you don’t have to really rationalize new stuff or critically think.
This even extends to spaces outside the echo chamber if you do it long enough, because your language changes so much that your opposition is basically incapable of actually communicating with you. It’s pretty easily witnessed in conservative echo chambers, where they’ll say that, this or that is woke, this or that is communism, but the same also applies in reverse where people assume academic definitions to be “true”, which is basically nonsensical as far as linguistics goes.
So, basically, it’s easy, so it’s default, and it’s totally inescapable, both existentially and just in terms of the raw media landscape being totally comprised of polarizing hackery.
Realistically, I just thought it would be slightly better, just because it was a little bit lesser known as a website, and I am consistently longing for older styles of internet engagement. The de-federated nature is nice, sure, but I really don’t tend to care about that shit too much. Reddit had their whole api debacle, I’m sure old-reddit getting canned is on the table if not for apparently necessary moderation stuff that’s still locked behind it. But I dunno, I still have browser extensions on mobile firefox that send me to a perfect libreddit redirect that works almost every time, so functionally it’s sort of identical to what I was already doing, if not more convenient, because I don’t have to deal with a reddit app substitute’s search engine when I want to find stuff, I can just look it up, click on the link, blam, redirect. Not a big issue. The biggest problem for me with the API shit is that everyone decided to throw a bitch fit and completely delete their posts, so like a quarter of the things saved to this useful compilation of internet knowledge is kinda just gone. Except for unddit, but that shit’s probably going to die at some point now that it doesn’t serve a non-archival purpose.
With that said, I think I’ve found lemmy to be basically the exact same as reddit, give or take. It is just as relentlessly annoying as reddit is, and it has less diversity in terms of subject matter, as a whole. There’s basically politics, i.e. inevitable “both-sides”-ism and vote shaming, technology stuff, i.e. stuff that is just linux, and like, assorted general posts, which are going to be comprised of either of the former two categories of thing, and gen-x pop culture references. Any other topic that comes up is a complete toss up, and will probably get commented on by a bunch of brainlets who think they know more than they do, but are actually just parroting the super standard talking points, or whatever they learned in high school.
You also get reddit posting habits, where people tend to mostly respond to the lowest effort meme posts, or horrible headlined news articles, rather than well-written posts or longer writeups. You also get that annoying thing where people just reply with sarcastic remarks that only serve their own self-satisfaction, instead of being critical of their own engagement for a half-second. I guess those are mostly just modern internet phenomenon in general, but it doesn’t make it any less annoying, for sure.
The problem you will inevitably find with any forum organized around topics is that there’s really just not that much to talk about, for most subject matters, so you either prevent communities from forming wholesale, or, more realistically, you just get insular garbage communities where people end up repeating almost the same exact conversations over and over. I think probably the unsung reasons that most old forums died isn’t because of centralization, you know, digg and reddit, but it’s because they all talked about everything already. Have a post? Oops, someone already asked that question in 2009, here’s the thread, should’ve looked in the catalogue, you should go there, looks like it also never got answered and it’s inactive, fuck you have a nice day. Reddit’s only addition to that is the ability for people to post le relevant xkcd link, and we kinda already had/have somethingawful for that, for when you want to just talk, more than you wanna actually talk about something specific.
More seriously, I think my biggest problem is just that reddit, and by extension lemmy, kinda breaks the conventional format of the forum, in favor of something that kinda works less well but is more low-rent to engage with. Used to be that you would just browse a bunch of post titles, click on one, and get greeted with likely a huge customized post, maybe a compilation of all the past posts on a topic, maybe a couple links and natively hosted images thrown in there for good measure. Most reddit posts are just like, a single article, or a single video of something stupid happening. That’s a major downgrade, imo.
to kind of sum it up, I think “not all men” tends to be kind of a red flag in the same vein as “all lives matter”. Not quite as bad, and obviously it’s contextually different as “not all men” refers to feminism rather than race relations, but I think it kind of makes the point as a metaphor.
You could try these, if they’re available in your area, seems pretty similar and I always liked em.
This is the case with many countries where toilet paper is cheap and shitty and will clog the hundred years old shared plumbing systems which probably drains into the same system as the rainwater drainage. They still have plumbing systems, though, so some form of bidet is still viable. So, wash with your left, eat with your right, as is common in india. Not too big of a problem, I’d say, so long as you have soap and water to wash your hand afterwards and you do a thorough job, and maybe also have a diet where you’re not shitting your brains out every time, and maybe also have a shaved asshole or something, but yeah.