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Cake day: September 4th, 2023

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  • Exactly. You get what you give. You give the bare minimum to society, and society will give it right back. You want more, give more. Go help your community. Take out your elderly neighbor’s recycling. Volunteer at your local shelters/soup kitchens. Attend some local events. Sit in on city council meetings. When I moved out of my small town a couple years ago, I learned that real life is a lot like online forums. You have to lurk before you can post. Learn the language, the local etiquette and taboos. Watch the people in your neighborhood, their interactions. Blend into the background, and observe. Talk little, hear and see much.



  • Religion has done something very clever, too. Christianity in particular has, through some means, found a way to divorce actions from character, as opposed to viewing one’s actions as a reflection of their character. They see good and evil as things that someone is instead of what someone does.

    You ever notice how suburban white Karens clutch their pearls when called racist? Well, consider what I just said about their view of evil. Now, make “racism” == “evil”. By calling one racist, you have effectively called them evil, and they most certainly do not view themselves as having an evil character.

    Or how, when doing evil deeds, they don’t see themselves as being evil despite their actions? Or when someone does a good deed, they accuse that person of being evil?

    It’s just intriguing how they’ve pulled off this alchemy.


  • AutistoMephisto@lemmy.worldtoPolitical Memes@lemmy.worldBoth sides!
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    2 months ago

    It’s funny. I have a blog post from Ken Arneson who talks about “The Right to be an Asshole” and here’s how he defines an asshole:

    An asshole is a selfish person whose selfishness causes foreseeable indirect collateral damage to the people around them.

    He goes on:

    Assholes take risks that provide upside to themselves, but transfer the downsides of those risks to other people.

    But the true test case for the limits of freedom is the asshole. Philosophically speaking, assholes walk the line between intentions and consequences. Assholes form the boundary between freedom and control.

    Assholes don’t intend to do direct harm. They just don’t think about, and/or care about, and/or believe, and/or comprehend, that their actions can or will have negative consequences for other people beyond their direct intentions.

    He goes on to recount the tale of COVID Patient 31 from Seoul, South Korea. Shortly after receiving her diagnosis, she decided to seek comfort at church. Hundreds of deaths and thousands of infections were traced back to her through contact tracing. So, now we come to intentions vs. consequences. Patient 31 wasn’t intending to make anyone sick or die, she was merely seeking comfort through faith. Any reasonable non-asshole could have told her and probably did tell her, that attending church while infected would cause others to be infected and possibly die. How should this asshole be judged? If we judge her by her intentions, then she’s as much a victim as anyone. But if we judge her by her consequences, then she’s a mass murderer.

    So the question we have to ask as a free society is: What the fuck do we do about assholes?

    Assholes have a very clever trick that allows them to keep being assholes.

    If you try to stop them from being an asshole, they will declare you to be an asshole who, although perhaps intending to prevent some bad thing from happening, causes harm by denying some very fine people, who have no intention of harming anyone, their freedom. So who’s the real asshole here, anyway?














  • Here’s the thing about YouTube. From the very beginning, it was a video-hosting platform. Users create content. They upload the content to YouTube’s servers. Other users view the content, and upload their own. A simple formula, no? That’s why their pre-Google slogan was “Broadcast Yourself”. The thing is, storing video data long-term is expensive. This is where Google comes into play, because, unless you’ve got Google’s money, you cannot afford to store literally 100s of Yottabytes of video data, not for very long, anyway. Even if YouTube becomes a “mostly-worthless relic”, there’s nobody who can readily replace it. I suppose someone could create a fediverse version of it where you simply upload your own content to your own server and then sell (or give) access to other users, but it would be slow to start, and small as not everyone can afford their own server to host their content on. Or, a service that aggregates videos by scraping them from from video servers that it has access to, creating a hub for users to enjoy the content made by other users that is stored on their own servers.