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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: May 4th, 2024

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  • Why would you, though? I’ve always been baffled by this idea. Art is a method of conveying something, and in that sense, I don’t see any reason not to see that similarly to the artist just describing it, sans what’s intransferable and, possibly, some beauty. If someone speaks of yearning for the world peace, it’s important context whenever they are warmonger of pacifist. Attempting to interpret any art without including the artist in it is, in my opinion, the same as if you conveniently covered parts of the artwork you didn’t like. And that’s just about the interpretation, I can’t imagine myself actually trying to enjoy any Tarantino movies knowing he’s a zionist. Or, for that matter, enjoying reading Rowling. I can attempt interpreting their works via the lens of them being pieces of shit, and that can be interesting, but that’s exact opposite of separating the artist from the art. I can’t see myself enjoying anything made by someone who’s clearly evil, and all of that is excluding the obvious argument of supporting them by paying for or recommending their art to others, just assuming you pirated the thing.


  • Few days ago a friend linked me a danish research paper and claimed it shown that higher wages for women lead to decrease in children being born, and that higher male wages led to the opposite. I don’t have the skills required to parse this kind of paper quickly nor understanding of a lot of the terminology. I told chatGPT to read it and contrast it with the arguments being made, to which it responded with pointing out that the term “marginal net-of-tax wage” meant something different from “wage”, and that this paper suggested that tax laws incentivizing working more hours led to lowered fertility rather than higher salaries for women. I was asked to point exactly where in the paper it was said like that, and again, I had to lean on LLM to get me page numbers. I eventualy convinced my friend that he got duped by right wing talking points and got him to think a bit.

    So, if I didn’t do that and just read the conclusion from the paper I’d probably have to agree with him instead, as just googling it led to the right wing trolls making those claims. Was this a good use case of LLM to get me some counter arguments, or would it have been better if I stayed true to my ideals and not to use those tools? Was I rude by arguing against the point made about a research that neither of us understood from the get go by using genAI to parse through it? While I do agree that companies developing those tools are evil and need to be stopped, there is an utility to it that I don’t think is available elsewhere. Would me losing that argument and believing that women should have lower salaries to increase fertility (because I believe in science, and this paper seemed to be referenced a lot, also if anything capitalism would be to blame, so probably not as bad) be better than normalizing the use of the devil-tech but having myself and my friend better informed? I am legitimately not sure, but I think I did the right thing? What should’ve I done? I don’t have the skills nor time nor will to read scientific papers that aren’t related to my area of expertise, especially when someone linking them didn’t do any research either. I am also genuinely exhausted from defending my left-wing points of view from the constant barrage of underhanded and often completely baseless arguments some of my coworkers and friends make to convince me I’m wrong and the default consensus is right. Is it bad to use genAI to figure out some counterpoints? Or should I give up and admit I’m not good or commited enough to make them myself? Right wing people often argue in bad faith and don’t take the counterpoints to heart, but sometimes they do, even if the original point they made was just to rile me up. So, am I the asshole? Am I wrong? I seriously don’t know.





  • Russia invaded Ukraine under a very weak pretense of de-nazification, and buldozed over a lot of privately owned means of production, including foreign owned. They had some reputation to lose back then, now the worst that could happen would be Trump getting pissed at them and threatening them to escalate the war, but never doing so, because he’s still beholden to the capital interests, and this war has been extremely lucrative for the world’s main exporter of weapons. At best(for Putin) Trump would claim that Zelensky is using private contractors as human shields and that Zelensky broke the deal because the yield of the mining operations was lower than promised, and because of that USA will help Russia deal with the terrorists that overtook the land.

    As for the nuclear war - billionaires that push this war forward for their profit aren’t interested in living in bunkers, they want to lie on beaches and be sucked off by sex trafficed slaves. The war will never escalate beyond the point where it would endanger their profits, and definitely not to the point where they might worry for their lifes. No major player in this conflict that’s capable of employing a nuclear armaments will ever do so for those reasons, not to mention the soft power they would lose if they did - not that Trump and Putin are very concerned with soft power…

    Russia doesn’t mind continuing, USA doesn’t mind either, it’s just that Trump lied in his campaign promises that he did, and now he’s making a stink about it not being possible because Zelensky is a dictator. If they can cause an election in Ukraine and do a coup once Zelensky wins, or forge some different series of events that leads to Ukraine changing it’s president to one aligned with Russia, then it would be a preferable outcome for them, but it’s going to be difficult without losing a lot of influence and power, and Trump is already very unpopular, so I feel it’s unlikely they would try, but I wouldn’t put it past them. Trump antagonized both the world and his own citizens, and the backlash is growing to a degree where he might lack means to control it. Zelensky probably saw that as his most viable way out, so he chose to argue with Trump and J. D. Vance, and hoped that the backlash will limit their further meddling. Not that he had any good option there, but out of bad ones this one at least didn’t lock all Ukrainian cards in a bad deal. At this point Ukraine can try dealing with Europe, Turkey (was it Turkey? I think so) or even China, and they still have those tasty minerals that Trump helped advertise.

    Europe in general has to rethink their means of defence, and if Ukraine has something valuable, a new military alliance with more hawkish stance against both Russia and USA, one that would include security assurances for Ukraine and other member states, is not out of question. If fascism in USA keep getting worse, then Europe will definitely need it. If the bubble bursts, they may include USA in this alliance in the future, though probably without as much sway as it had in NATO. Not saying that it will happen, just a wild shot in the dark, but there are more options for Ukraine now, than if Zelensky went along with the farce, and, I don’t know, apologized for being a dictator and promised to be a good boy.


  • The idea that any deal with Russia that wouldn’t include rock solid security guarantees would lead to stopping the killing, much less any sort of peace, is extremely naive. This issue is ongoing ever since Russia annexed Crimea, there have been many deals and all of them failed to stop Putin from breaking them. The issue is very simple - Trump can not (and absolutely doesn’t want to, from the looks of things) convince Putin to stop the war, because Putin doesn’t want the war to stop. It was shown time and time again that they aren’t willing to stop their invasion, and only thing that ever thwarted their progress was military opposition. There is no reason to believe that Russia wouldn’t just continue the invasion after the deal with USA is made. And Ukraine wouldn’t have any benefit from this kind of deal, so why would they go through with it?

    Since you watched all of it, as unbearable to watch it was, you probably also heard the comments of Trump in the interview afterwards - that he organized and prolonged this discussion to show the world that Zelensky can not be negotiated with. Whatever you might believe in, it’s hard to imagine that as anything else other than admission that Trump never expected his “deal” to go through. They jumped and insulted the president of soverign country and blamed him for the war their close friend started. If your reaction to that is “he shouldn’t have reacted to the provocation”, then you’re missing the point of why they provoked him in the first place. This way, at the very least, he made sure the world despised Trump and that all other allies of Ukraine were sympathetic. His only choice is to weather this storm until the fascist bubble in USA bursts and there is some chance for diplomacy in the future.

    As for the economic entanglements, they mean nothing in times when USA is incapable of diplomacy and Russia is unwilling of adhering to any deals. Speaking of any trades where Ukraine is giving up their minerals before USA promises to push Russia outside of Ukraine borders is meaningless, and Ukraine wouldn’t get anything out of that.


  • As an awkard person I’ll admit that it would reassure me somewhat. I mean, I wasn’t going to but I’m glad it’s an option. It’s like feeling being accepted despite messing up before potentially messing up, which allows us to skip that dreadful moment between messing up and being either forgiven or despised. And come on, imagine shitting in a closet by, uh, mistake, and not fully expecting that your entire social live is now in ruins and you need to delete all of your social media and move to different country. It could be worded better, sure, but it’s a neat gesture.


  • So, listen, I’m not making a case for all of them, but…

    Seriously though white people fucked stuff up for native americans and africans pretty hard, and just because it’s not discussed in the slightest and everyone (white people) pretend it’s not an issue, it doesn’t mean it’s not an issue. It’s less about white people though, and more about capital class that upholds the status quo, the by-product of which is the white supremacy - and that is very parrarel to the zionist claim.



  • IQ tests intentionally omit any questions related to empathy, emotional intelligence and creativity, so it can favour people from the top of the pile and act as accurate perdictor of success in ruthless capitalist society. It implicitly promotes lack of those traits in individuals and explicitly promotes the definition of intelligence that’s unrelated to them. While you don’t get lower scores if you’re highly creative or empathetic person, so it’s not directly a detrimental for society and can be a useful metric for some cases like specific jobs, it’s image as sole measure of intelect is manufactured to promote “specific kind of people”, to which group many republican businessmen would belong.

    I’m not disagreeing with what you said, just thought I’d expand on that.






  • Capitalisms’ unsustainable model of infinite growth requires something like imperialism to keep going, and even if you could point out alternative venues for capital acquisition, it’s still what people in power want, since it gives them more than just fuel for capitalism, but also more power. Countries and companies that do not rely on imperialism directly, most often rely in others that do. While it’s not entirely futile to discuss whenever that has to be the case in theorethical capitalist solution, it is the case in one we’re living under, and since it’s the ruling class of hyper-wealthy that make decisions about the worlds future and current state of affairs is result of those decisions, it is the system we have to deal with. Unless, you know, we bring out the guilottines and start over, but I don’t see much point in retrying capitalism to see if it won’t lead us down on the path to facism again.


  • But that would only work under assumption that in any group of people at least one of them has to be a ghost, or at the very least the chance that there is a ghost in a group of people is greater than 0, right? Is it something about the chance of someone being a ghost being truly unknown, and thus all possible values of probability being taken as equally rational, and with infinite number of possible values for probability of someone being a ghost for infinite number of them observing that no one in a group of people you’re in is a ghost… No, that wouldn’t work either, because it would require an assumption that this specific group of people might have a ghost among them. Assuming anyone can be a ghost with unknown probability still only works when the group you’re observing is entire population, does it not? Limiting it to specific group of people relies on it being representative of entire population, and random groups are not. Especially if you were to be a ghost, that would already make a group you’re in rather unique. Or not, depending on what’s the unknown value of probability of someone being a ghost.

    I mean, what???




  • I also have felt unburdened by what has been, as if a spell was cast on me. I had no doubt though that replacing Joe Biden with literally anyone, including his son or dog, would increase democrats chance of winning. I think in my case it was more of letting go of pent up anger towards the rotting carcass of the current president and all those who campaigned for his reelection. Including the lovely folk of lemmy, for whom I still might hold some animosity. To those that rode hard for Biden, a sincere fuck you.