Thesis: Nuking your reddit account is good for your mental health

Antithesis: If everyone nuked their reddit accounts, a lot of invaluable information (especially in niche communities) would be lost, and this would primarily hurt average people and not reddit as a corporation

Synthesis: Nuking all reddit accounts is good for society’s health. Reddit is a trash website. In the short-term it will hurt, but long-term we are better off moving these communities to decentralized platforms. There are ways to archive the important information from reddit. Reddit thrives off the free contributions of countless users who are paid nothing, and reddit claims ownership and monetizes all content freely published to it. If you don’t like reddit, simply stop posting to it, no matter how juicy the bait

A channel I subscribe to just posted an explainer on spin, for anyone interested

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYeRS5a3HbE

It is a good demonstration of the limitations of our own thought. We understand new concepts in terms of familiar concepts. If there is no direct analogy to something familiar, the human mind is utterly lost and has to trust in rigorous analysis while only half believing what it proves.

are they adding extra ethanol or something?

Yes. 88 has up to 15% ethanol. You should check your manual before using it.

Ok, use Android then. Millions of people don’t care about those things because they have different priorities for their phone which Apple accounts for when they decide which features to roll out.

It’s in beta 1. Some apps look kinda bad if you’re trying to pick a horrid color. Hopefully they do something to improve contrast before release.

Every new Android version adds features that have been on iOS forever. Both OSes have different priorities.

Android will often add new features but they are poorly integrated or thought out. iOS tends to add features with a much higher level of refinement the first time around.

Not fully automated luxury gay space enough

Mmmm, Naegleria fowleri 🤤

Insane drip ngl, you should be proud

Agreed

The free market has spoken and found party balloons to maximize utility

I think he’s trying to say that every man is capable of violence, so people take that into account more or less consciously when interacting with men. So violence already being given, the essential struggle is against improper or “dumb” violence and not violence per se.

Maybe I’m being too charitable

I completely agree that it’s not an accident that China in particular is the US State Dept’s chosen enemy. But that is only one half of it, the other half that I’m considering is why the public is receptive to it. There is a degree of information control in the US, but it is still easy to hear alternative viewpoints through the internet.

I don’t believe it is as simple as brainwashing, or Chomsky’s manufacturing consent, or Parenti’s inventing reality, or any other top-down approach on a totally passive population.

There’s a good article on RedSails about this topic, in which the author argues (convincingly IMO) in favor of licensing, rather than brainwashing. In summary it argues that people are not merely duped by propaganda, they often choose to believe it for whatever reasons corresponding to their real conditions of life.

Edit: Ok I’ve been re-reading this article and it turns out they talk about the Uiguhr-genocide narrative, so it’s even more fitting to this dicussion:

Let us look at a specific example. A claim like “There’s cultural genocide of Uyghurs in Xinjiang” is simply unreal to most Westerners, close to pure gibberish. The words really refer to existing entities and geographies, but Westerners aren’t familiar with them. The actual content of the utterance as it spills out is no more complex or nuanced than “China Bad,” and the elementary mistakes people make when they write out statements of “solidarity” make that much clear. This is not a complaint that these people have not studied China enough — there’s no reason to expect them to study China, and retrospectively I think to some extent it was a mistake to personally have spent so much time trying to teach them. It’s instead an acknowledgment that they are eagerly wielding the accusation like a club, that they are in reality unconcerned with its truth-content, because it serves a social purpose.

What is this social purpose? Westerners want to believe that other places are worse off, exactly how Americans and Canadians perennially flatter themselves by attacking each others’ decaying health-care systems, or how a divorcee might fantasize that their ex-lover’s blooming love-life is secretly miserable. This kind of “crab mentality” is actually a sophisticated coping mechanism suitable for an environment in which no other course of action seems viable. Cognitive dissonance, the kind that eventually spurs one into becoming intolerant of the status quo and into action, is initially unpleasant and scary for everybody. In this way, we can begin to understand the benefit that “victims” of propaganda derive from carelessly “spreading awareness.” Their efforts feed an ambient propaganda haze of controversy and scandal and wariness that suffocates any painful optimism (or jealousy) and ensuing sense of duty one might otherwise feel from a casual glance at the amazing things happening elsewhere. People aren’t “falling” for atrocity propaganda; they’re eagerly seeking it out, like a soothing balm.

That is kinda what I mean though. It is not necessarily a conscious guilt. There is a reason that people feel compelled to believe China is horrific. Fascists cannot allow nuance, therefore self-criticism is the highest of all sins. Demonization of enemies is the direct reflection of the fascist need to venerate one’s homeland.

In spite of itself, got this part right

But do you condemn Hamas?

“They banned me for amplifying propaganda that I’m too oblivious to realize makes me a hypocrite.”

Americans don’t give a shit about the problems of the Uighurs, or any minority really.

Instead of acknowledging their own hypocrisy they invent le secret Soviet tactic of wHaTaBoUtIsM as the ultimate defense against accusations of hypocrisy.

Pretending to care so much about the Uighurs is a projection of their own guilt for living on stolen indigenous land, ignoring the violence of their own country in an actual ongoing genocide in Palestine, and ignoring the everyday violence on their own turf against nonwhite, 🏳️‍🌈, 🏳️‍⚧️, etc.

People don’t want to be rich just to have nice things. It is an admission that capitalism is so fucking shit for 99% of people that it is worth grinding for half a lifetime just to claw your way to a respectable way of life.

All of this is the subconscious desire for a pre-capitalist society where everything wasn’t commodified

I have found, through discussing politics and world events with friends and family, that most people have a similar idea of what a fair and good world looks like.

Most people want their neighborhood to look like the Hallmark cards, not asphalt carbrain dystopias.

Most people think it is wrong to live off the work of others.

Most people want their work to have meaning, to be part of a greater purpose; to advance humanity in the abstract, as one species and not as individuals.

Ironically on this latter point, the military actually sort of offers this. If you join the military you won’t be rich, but you will be taken care of in a quasi-socialist fashion. You work toward a greater common purpose. Yet most in the military do not realize this, how the “real” economy is far more precarious for most workers.

Saturn Devouring His Son [NSFW]