I dated a girl named Password for a while. She was a lot older than me, she was born in the year 1234.

Anyway, @op the exact same thing happened to me. I gotta get smarter about opsec.

While you’re not wrong, it’s important to retain a global perspective. There are “communist” leaders that were total pieces of shit and while they did have help, that help wasn’t always capitalist. Stalin is an example here.

And then there’s pieces of shit who were supported by external forces, but not by capitalist regimes seeking to undermine them. I’m not 100% confident in this history, and there’s no way I’m going to spell his name right, but, the Romanian piece if shit, Caucescu (???) came to power riding a wave of support from the Nazis. Hitler didn’t do it to destabilize Romania, but because he was like, “there’s some good old fashioned fascist genociders down there, let’s give them more guns.” And those fascist genociders were technically communists.

What I’m getting at is that the enemies of a worker-ruled communist state are many, and many of those enemies are within their own systems. Communism, like every other system, suffers from the fact that there are humans involved. Just because a communism exists doesn’t mean it’s going to be utopia.

But that also doesn’t mean that communism can’t be good, or at least better.

Lol you just provided the simplest counter to the most common capitalist argument.

“You don’t understand capitalism, bro. The problem isn’t capitalism, it’s the regulation on capitalism. Under a true capitalist system, there can’t be monopolies because capitalism rewards competition.”

Ok so what happened to all the reddit apps

Edit: I really like the reddit app example because it’s simple: no regulation or anti-capitalist force made them to that, it was literally just a capitalist decision.

But regulatory capture is an important part of capitalism, and no matter how many ancap bullshit artists say otherwise, government is absolutely part of the capitalist plan. Giving the workers a “say” (or the illusion of one) keeps them a bit quieter, but more importantly, having a government outsources a lot of crap they would otherwise have to pay for, like infrastructure, which would be a huge strain on profits.

In fact, the ancap bullshit idea that unregulated markets would improve things is an artificial limitation on capitalist power. Total lack of regulation is a restriction on capitalism.

Tbf reddit used to be a lot more lefty. Back when Shit Reddit Says was the dominant subculture it was a lot of fun… But then Steve Bannon wanted Trump to be president and SRS lost the war against red hats and bots.

The enumeration on the losing side of that debate is probably correct. But as a person who was in my early 20s in 2000, I’d like to offer what I will characterize as The Historical Context and Definitive Conclusion to This Debate.

No one actually gave a shit about that debate. Sure, it came up, but it did not alter anyone’s party planning. We weren’t actually celebrating the changing of the millennium, we were celebrating because we had a permission slip to do so. Any attempt to withdraw that permission was unwelcome.

In Paris on December 31st, 1999, at around 11pm local time, someone threw themselves in front of a metro. The trains were free that night (because it was the 100 year anniversary of their opening iirc), but because of that suicide, at least one of the train lines was substantially delayed. The streets from the center of the city to the north side were crowded well toward dawn as everyone chose to walk home instead of wait indefinitely in a stinky train station.

That person, who chose to end their life on the tracks that night, holds the core truth of the debate within his death: it’s a ridiculous debate and those who would fight for it should just stay the hell home and let the rest of us drink a lot and dance.

We don’t do it for the purpose of increasing responsibility. I mean , I didn’t, maybe other people do. I just really wanted a couple little mini monsters following me around.

When I was like 30, I was out hiking and I saw some guy with three little kids, the kids were hopping from rock to rock, and the littlest one ran up past the siblings to hold the dad’s hand. It was super cute. My parents were kinda uninterested and afk, so I haven’t seen a lot of examples of dads just having fun with their kids.

That little family was inspiring, in the sense that it opened my mind to a new way of thinking, but also in the sense of taking in breath, it felt like I had been holding my breath and finally stopped. I realized I didn’t necessarily have to be like them, I could use their bad/mediocre parenting as a “what not to do” list, and still do some of the things that they did that were good. I could go hiking with my kids, I could teach them how to build a campsite out of nothing, or how to build a server, or how to put your thumb on the end of a house so it sprays really far.

Sure it’s more responsibility but it’s also really fun.

And, tbh, all the nice things in life are even nicer if you can share it with people. That goes double for kids, because they don’t know how shitty the world is. You just gotta make sure they understand and appreciate the fun stuff and don’t get spoiled.

Yeah I was thinking more of a paid service, I guess more like Nebula then Netflix, since Netflix just shows TV shows and movies made by big companies. I don’t mind paying for things if they’re good things, and I know the right people are getting the money for it.

So you’re saying you want a federated wiki that uses a blockchain??? Genius.

Kidding aside, you’re absolutely right. Wikipedia is one of the very few if not ONLY examples of centralized tech that ISN’T absolute toxic garbage. Is it perfect? No. From what I understand, humans are involved in it, so, no, it’s not perfect.

If you want to federate some big ol toxic shit hole, Amazon, Netflix, any of Google’s many spywares – there’s loads of way more shitty things we would benefit from ditching.

Edit: the “federated Netflix” – I know it sounds weird, but I actually think it would be really cool. Think of it more like Nebula+YouTube: “anyone” (anyone federated with other instances) can “upload” videos, and subcription fees go mostly to the creator with a little going to The Federation. Idk the payment details, that would be hard, but no one said beating Netflix would be easy.

And federated Amazon – that seems like fish in a barrel, or low hanging fruit, whichever you prefer. Complicated and probably a lot more overhead, but not conceptually challenging.

I intended to write that just as an intro paragraph to a critique of enlightenment philosophy, since I feel like, while the goal of objectifying the human experience was the natural predecessor to the eventual subjectification of the exterior universe, their confidence in their interpretations of their experience – or maybe just in the universality of their interpretations – makes their entire project a bit sus

But then life happened and I just said the thing about coffee.

Did you know that Kant used to criticize people who drank more than one cup of coffee per day. Also, he would refill his own coffee cup before it was empty, so he never had more than one cup.

You’re right, I’ll concede that – but only because BSG is an amazing show and very few characters can be reduced to “good” and “bad” – even the “antagonists” (in the traditional sense of those characters working against the stories’ progression) have pretty valid reasons for doing what they do.

Gaius (sp?) is one of the closest characters to “bad” – but not because of the bad things he does, but because of the bad things he is – ie, vain, selfish, etc – and the fact that he lets those negative characteristics drive his actions.

All the characters have flaws, but the “good” characters do their best to mitigate their flaws, and let their positive traits motivate them. For example, Adama often acts before he thinks, a trait that is awesome in combat, but can be less positive other times – and he (as best he can) seeks advice and counsel from the people he trusts (eg Saul Tigh) – he knows he can be impulsive and he knows his “instant judgement” decision making isn’t perfect.

Cavil (that’s his name I think) is close to “evil” but he does have reasons for his actions – preservation of his “species” (though really it’s just himself) – but he’s evil because of the fact that he doesn’t listen and acts with disloyalty and dishonor.

(There’s an amazing comeuppance for the titular character of the show Nathan Barley that epitomizes this idea: Barley doesn’t actually do anything wrong, but his motivations are repugnant, and his motivations are what’s revealed… Shit I should write a whole essay on that…)

Are there contemporary shows that are as good as BSG? I kind of gave up on TV after Firefly.

Cylons being manipulated by other cylons doesn’t absolve them of guilt.

BSG did have a few instances of the reverse of OP’s question tho – where the “good guys” turned out to be bad" – trying to say this without spoilers; it’s a 20 year old show but ffs of you haven’t seen it, go see it now.

• the (temporary) new admiral
• several main characters during the part where they live on the dirty planet
• a very specific set of seven main characters (wink wink) … .and more,…

And there’s one specific example of the full 360 – a character that starts good, turns bad, but turns out they were actually good all along. I won’t give the name, but they were passing messages to the resistance.

That show was awesome.

One note tho, on the topic generally: flipping character alignments is a frequent pre-shark-jump thing, and is often bad writing. In BSG, tho, all of the “flips” are pre-planned, or at least 100% true to their character (eg the 360 example above).

Yeah, they’re probably using the increased power – they weren’t running 3 instances of stable diffusion on the m1

We can beat them! The US Army, Navy, Air Force, and that other one that no one cares about, they don’t stand a chance!

Like, we can all joke about civil war and splitting up the red and blue, but, like, when it comes down to deciding who gets the nukes in the divorce, it becomes pretty obvious that it’s just super dumb to think about realistically.

Oh I pirate the shit out of everything – and partly it’s a boycott, but I think mostly it’s the convenience. “Owning” things and enjoying them on my terms (no Internet? No problem) is just better than subscriptions.

And I block ads, 100% for sure. I would literally give up most of the Internet rather than subject myself to ads – I’m “on the spectrum” and I have a very hard time with overstimulation and distraction, so ads substantially interrupt my ability to read (which I already have trouble with).

Like – I love lemmy and everything, but I’m here because Reddit disabled the ad-free app I used to use. I was a daily reddit user for like 13 years. if I could still use Relay, my ethical resolve against their anti-user practices, and my personal commitment to foss, probably wouldn’t have held up.

My feeling is, if I behave in a way that’s conducive with good mental health and life satisfaction, and what I do is also a political statement, then the universe is in harmony.

It’s really just the "voting with your wallet’ perspective I mean to illuminate and undercut – it’s a very tempting idea, but I would rather we (as a resistance movement) remain sane and comfortable than ascetic and underengaged.

Voting with your wallet is literally plutocracy – those with more dollars get more votes.

Not only is our theoretically bad, but it’s practically bad: the impact of a boycott is negligible, but the impact on the people doing the boycott is huge: not having access to the conveniences everyone else has puts us at a significant disadvantage compared to our peers.

And finally, it’s not just practically bad, it’s actually contraindicated. The executives of a corporation are legally required to maximize immediate returns to their investors. It’s literally illegal for a CEO to move a company in the direction of civic responsibility over profit. And it’s not just “profit” – it has to be increasing profit. Line has to go up; they can’t just keep it flat, even if “flat” is hugely profitable. To withdraw our financial support will just cause them to squeeze harder on everyone else.

(There’s an argument that there might be more profit in social responsibility, but unless you have numbers to back that up, and it demonstrates immediate returns in addition to long term benefits, then it’s just a guess, and a guess is never going to be more convincing to shareholders than facts.)

The only way to change this is with regulation, and a cultural shift away from “line goes up” mentality. And you can’t effect political change when you’re spend 3x as long making dinner because you’re boycotting processed food.

Suggesting that we just give up all the conveniences that our labor, our creativity, and our cultural contributions have enabled, for the sake of convincing a CEO to be nicer is just ineffectual.

I just wrote like a 10 page response to another comment on that same post I made so I don’t think I have the energy to go too deep on this - so, to keep it short:

1. I was just rebutting that person’s claim that a car and a digital object have the same relationship to value, and they don’t; physicality requires resources that “digitality” doesn’t.

2. I feel like you might’ve agreed with me in the second part? Or, if not, I think you managed to destabilize the entire data economy in like 2 sentences, so, fuck yeah.

First off, I was specifically addressing your concern about the car & it’s physicality. Value of physical objects is directly related to the scarcity of the resources; digital content pricing is skeuomorphic (sp?) at best and absolute bullshit at worst.

Surely the sale of that copy of the movie has value

Secondly (and thirdly in a sec), this is the fundamental misapprehension that surrounds piracy. Each instance of piracy does not mean one lost sale. In terms of music (I read a study about music piracy a few years ago), this is rarely the case, and in fact, it was the opposite: the study found that the albums that were pirated more resulted in more sales, since the album’s reach was extended.

Thirdly, one of the core issues with the entertainment industry at the moment is that the streaming services have no way to gauge the draw of a specific show, movie, or song, since subscribers just don’t approach their subscription that way - you don’t subscribe to Spotify because your want to hear Virtual Cold by Polvo; you subscribe because you want to have access to their entire collection, as well as all the other awesome 90s noise/math rock - even though, let’s be honest, you really just listen to Virtual Cold over and over.

As a result of this clusterfuck, streaming services can’t correctly apportion payment to their content - they do an elaborate split of the profits. So - the best way for the “content providers” (ie copyright holders) to increase profits is to reduce the amount of content on the streaming service - so the profits are spread over fewer titles.

This is massively hurting the production companies - please note none of these fuckers are getting any sympathy from me, this is just an explanation - they’re having a hard time finding a balance between how much they can spend given that half of their productions’ profits are pennies. (Oops, forgot one element: because of streaming tech, no one buys films in tape or DVD or whatever - which was half of a film’s profit.) Do they make a bunch of huge budget action movie sequels that fill the theater seats? Or do they make smaller-budget films with smaller profit margins?

It’s a shitty situation, and I don’t know what the answer is - but I know that the answer isn’t whatever the fuck this is. And, until they figure their shit out, I’m just going to step outside the market for a bit.

I’m not living in some dream world where piracy doesn’t reduce profits. I know that the underground bands that I like are usually supportive of piracy because it helps them more than it hurts - and when it comes to film and TV, when those companies complain about piracy , it’s just like those bullshit shoplifting claims - attempts to turn their “line not go up” on poor people. Piracy is a grain of sand in the Sahara - they have way bigger problems than that - though I do think increased piracy metrics might help encourage them in the right direction.

Anyway, if you got this far, I appreciate your time.

It’s got nothing to do with whether it’s physical. Cars are different from movies because the movie can be reproduced infinitely without resource cost (or, very minimal). If you steal a rental car, they have to buy a new one. If you pirate a movie, they haven’t lost anything.

I like this take - I read the refutation in the replies and I get that point, but consciousness as an illusion to rationalize stimulus response makes a lot of sense - especially because the reach of consciousness’s control is much more limited than it thinks it is. Literally copium.

When I was a teenager I read an Appleseed manga and it mentioned a tenet of Buddhism that I’ll never forget - though I’ve forgotten the name of the idea (and I’ve never heard anyone mention it in any other context, and while I’m not a Buddhist scholar, I have read a decent amount of Buddhist stuff)

There’s some concept in Japanese Buddhism that says that, while reality may be an illusion, the fact that we can agree on it, means that we can at least call it “real”

(Aka Japanese Buddhist describes copium)