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Cake day: July 18th, 2024

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  • there’s nothing the state could do to prevent it

    Whoever wrote this needs to go back and read Thomas Jefferson or pretty much any history of any collapsing authoritarian regime in history.

    They could obey the orders. Or, they could say “lol no”. What’s he going to do, activate their remote-control collars?

    The US military, National Guard included, goes through training that heavily emphasizes support for the constitution and what to do about illegal or unconstitutional orders.

    It’s actually pretty dangerous to start to bend the knee to an authoritarian despot in this way. By presenting Trump’s illegal bullshit as some kind of pre-ordained structure that other people will have to follow, of course, because that’s the system, they are normalizing it. Even if he were following US law, which he isn’t, they’d have the option to tell him to go fuck himself, and they’d be in some excellent historical company in doing so.


  • If you read this collection and say science believes animals feel no pain you are either misinformed or lieing.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pain_in_animals#History

    The idea that animals might not experience pain or suffering as humans do traces back at least to the 17th-century French philosopher, René Descartes, who argued that animals lack consciousness.[14][15][16] Researchers remained unsure into the 1980s as to whether animals experience pain, and veterinarians trained in the U.S. before 1989 were simply taught to ignore animal pain.[17]

    I was clearly referring to the past view, which is why I said we’re not in those days anymore. I was indicating the pretty benighted attitude that science used to have about animal pain, and that some scientists apparently still do about ToM.

    As of this moment there is no clearly accepted theoretical model on how animals or human consciousness works. Just lots of open to debate hypotheses. Because for all we understand about neurons and processing of the mind.

    You’re tangling up separate issues. The computational process which indicates that a creature’s mental model includes other entities which are doing their own processing has nothing to do with consciousness. Even AIs can have a “theory of mind” about other entities or not.

    You seem really committed to the idea of lecturing me on this. Not sure why. Anyway, I’ve sent you enough citations that you can educate yourself on the topic if you feel like, I’m pretty much done with talking about it.



  • If only I’d sent you an article which referenced peer reviewed studies, things like:

    1. Academic Journals in Psychology/Neuroscience:
    • Heyes (2015) in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review
    • Premack & Woodruff (1978) in Behavioral and Brain Sciences - This is actually a seminal paper that first proposed the concept of “theory of mind”
    • Calarge et al. (2003) in American Journal of Psychiatry
    • Horowitz (2011) in Learning & Behavior

     

    1. Animal Cognition/Behavior Journals:
    • Elgier et al. (2012) in Animal Cognition
    • Hare et al. (2000) in Animal Behaviour
    • Whiten (2013) in Animal Behaviour
    • Penn & Povinelli (2007) in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
    • Call & Tomasello’s various papers in Journal of Comparative Psychology
    • Bugnyar’s papers in Animal Cognition and Proceedings of the Royal Society
    • Dally et al. (2006) in Science
    • Maginnity & Grace (2014) in Animal Cognition

     

    1. Major Scientific Journals:
    • Several papers in Science (like Warneken & Tomasello 2006, Herrmann et al. 2007)
    • Papers in Current Biology (like Flombaum & Santos 2005)
    • Papers in Nature Communications (like Bugnyar et al. 2016)

     

    Alas, if I wasn’t stuck in the trap of referencing only media, I might have sent you something like that. In a comment.


  • If you didn’t want an argument, accusing anyone opposed to Trump of being “people that want to continue rationalizing their tacit, frequently racist support for genocide,” and saying they’re only cloaking it in a deceptive framework of being anti-Trump, was not a strategic move 🙂.

    Like I said, the fact that there are places on Lemmy where you can say shit like that and it doesn’t cause an argument, says a lot more about the culture and nature of the conversations in those places than it does anything about the wider Lemmy community where you chose to post this. I do get what you mean, though. We good. It’s good to talk.


  • The “lesser of two evils” thing necessarily implies that you are supporting evil.

    Absolutely, yes. Paying taxes in the US is supporting evil. Buying an iPhone is supporting evil. Eating meat is supporting evil. Voting for Biden would have been supporting evil. Voting for Harris, I’m a little less sure about, but I feel like even saying that is going to get me accused of some kind of rationalizing.

    But yes, someone can say that they want to buy an Android instead of an iPhone, because of whatever reasons, without someone else having an absolute meltdown and accusing them of supporting abusive mining in the Congo, making excuses for functional or actual slavery in China, and so on. But for some reason when it is geopolitical, saying that you’re going to vote for X candidate for reasons of creating less suffering in the world somehow gets transmuted into this “blatant support” for that candidate and everything they do, or denial of their numerous crimes, or implying that you’re okay with suffering in the world, that to me has nothing to do with why I would make that decision.


  • Hm… I mean, I’m not sure I would say that. I think it’s good to be able to talk about it. You raised a common perception, and I and some other people wanted to disagree with the perception because it’s offensive to us yes, and we got to talk about it. In my book, that’s a good thing. It’s part of how people get to understand each other.

    It might sound like I’m super-irritated at points during the conversation, but I’m really not heated about it. I’m just being vocal, in part because I’m being accused of being racist and supporting genocide and then lying about it. I do think this type of conversation is a good thing. The metaphor where disagreement is “violence” and certain spaces have to be “protected” against it, or against people being harsh when they disagree, because that’s hostile and awful, doesn’t make sense to me. I think disagreeing and being able to clash a little bit is a good thing. Like I said, it’s part of how people get to understand each other. For my side I’m very glad we had this whole conversation about it.



  • You folks, however, seem to beat around the bush about it to avoid admitting what you did. You decided that the continued genocide of Palestinians was worth it to keep Trump out of office. That’s valid- that was the only choice you felt you had. You don’t need to rationalize it away.

    Absolutely false. Try again. We started this conversation by me addressing this exact point. If I explain clearly what I mean, and you decide that I am “avoiding admitting” some different thing, then there’s not a lot of point to us talking to each other.

    A badguy tells you to kill someone else, or they’ll kill you and your family, and also probably someone else too. Your choice, I assume, would be the utilitarian one- to kill someone else. This is the so-called “logical” answer to the trolley problem folks love to bring up with this topic, because less deaths = good, and the ‘someone else’ was probably gonna die either way.

    If a badguy is running around town killing children and families, and the only two possible sheriffs that might win the election include a guy who’s friends with the badguy and has been selling him guns and covering for his crimes, that’s sure as fuck not great. However, if the other sheriff is someone who is also a serial killer himself, personally, plans to use the office of sheriff to accelerate his own killing as well as the killing of the badguy, and has a tendency to egg the badguy on and imprison anyone who tries to say it’s a problem that he’s killing, I think it’s fair for me to say that the first sheriff is the better outcome. While also, obviously, pushing for some kind of change to this fucked-up situation that we’ve been placed in by the absurd farce that is American “democracy.”

    If someone says that the whole situation is fucked and wants to accelerate the process that will get rid of it entirely, that’s absolutely great in my book. Pretty much the only aspect I have a problem with is when people who are terrified of the serial killer, both for themselves and also on behalf of their victims and the victims of the badguy, and so are trying to make sure at least the first guy is in charge while we’re dealing with the rest of the problem, get painted as “rationalizing” or “beating around the bush” about some kind of secret love for serial-killing that must be at heart of their reaction to the whole situation.

    The whole thing where Trump was a “roll of the dice”, but Kamala Harris who wasn’t making any of the war-criminal decisions that Biden was, was somehow preordained to definitely be a continuing disaster for the Palestinians, is just icing on the cake.




  • What?

    The thing that “is not happening” is people on Lemmy who support genocide or deny that it’s happening in Gaza. That is vanishingly rare on Lemmy, although there are a scattered handful of Zionist accounts around.

    Those outliers aside, everyone on Lemmy is against the genocide in Palestine. What happens is that people say “Yes but Trump is going to do turbo-genocide” and other people say “AHA! I KNEW you were in favor of Biden Harris committing genocide!” which isn’t at all what the first person said. I would defy you to find anyone from the past week who ever tried to say that what’s happening in Gaza is anything other than complete erasure of the Palestinians with full American support, without needing to insert “tacitly” or “sounds like you are trying to say” or some other type of alchemy by which “not wanting Trump to kill even faster” becomes “being okay with Biden assisting with the killing so far.”


  • So I said:

    people who lost loved ones in Gaza thanks to American aid and weapons, with [Harris’s] agreement and approval

    "everyday Palestinians demanding the end of genocide [weapons for which are supplied by] the Biden-Harris administration,” which of course makes perfect sense and is something I wholeheartedly support

    And then, having explicitly acknowledged the genocide, and Harris’s agreement and approval for it, and the devastating betrayal it would be for someone to have American weapons killing their family and then for the administration that’s doing it to turn around and ask for their vote, I got a long lecture about how the US and Biden actually are enabling genocide, and it is a genocide, and similar virtue-signaling things.

    This is precisely the kind of thing I was talking about. I’m saying, Biden’s administration was already committing war crimes, but Trump is so much worse that it will be enabling a disaster not to vote to try to keep him out of power. And OOP responded:

    It sounds like you are trying to say you don’t think the Biden-Harris regime is committing genocide and that it should be more restrictiveky stated as " supplying weapons". Unfortunately, this would be both false and misleading.

    Maybe I triggered them by editing the quote. I was trying to agree with it, but they literally said that the genocide was “carried out” by the Biden administration, which is factually wrong but was a common thing for people to blur the lines of at the time, so I edited it to the actual facts, which is “supplying weapons” in addition to the background of aid, agreement, and approval. The IDF are the ones actually carrying it out. And he seized on that edit to paint me as someone who needed to receive a lecture about how genocide actually is happening, and is bad, and we’re helping make it happen, as if I needed to hear any of that. The picking out of what I am “sounds like trying to say” so they can disagree with it, is very much precisely what I am picking out as a hostile and bad-faith way to enter into this entire process, in my original comment here.

    I was also pretty disgusted by the way they took a pretty impassioned letter, from Palestinians, begging the Americans not to let Trump come to power, and used some variety of slimy accusations (“it is the same all over” “You will recognize the type”) to make it sound like obviously a pack of self-serving lies. I looked up a bit of information about the listed names, and I asked if they had specific knowledge about any of these specific people that would justify throwing their impassioned plea in the garbage and replacing it with their own stuff, and they did not.

    Basically it sounded like they had no interest in what I was saying, but just wanted to create as much of a disagreement as possible so they could be in as superior a position to lecture me about how genocide was happening and Biden was enabling it. While explicitly rejecting what some actual Palestinians had to say about it. After a short time of trying to explain myself, I decided my time would be better spent elsewhere.


  • The guy certainly did, who said “Don’t bring anything with a modem and you’re good to go,” ignoring quite a bit of additional advice that the article gives that could really help some people out and explicitly implying that they don’t need to read it as long as they don’t bring their phone.

    Maybe it’s not fair for me to ascribe that to all of lemmy.ml just because that one person did it. There are plenty of people in all corners of the internet who are sure they’re instant experts on everything, y’all don’t have a monopoly. What I was actually trying to say was that “being a community of privacy enthuiasts” and a history of communism doesn’t give anyone a pass on ignoring advice from the EFF and instead offering their own 2-second take on it as an expert opinion. I think that’s a foolish habit of thought to get into.

    If you had responded with, “Hey, don’t blame this guy on lemmy.ml, we’re concerned with US state power and of course we take seriously what the EFF has to say about this topic” then I probably wouldn’t have been snarky about it. But I do apologize about being snarky about it, I think it was a little un called for.


  • The EFF might know a thing or two about OPSEC as pertains to activities against US state power. They know more than you do.

    You don’t automatically absorb all the knowledge of “communists” and a century of real-world experience simply because you’re on lemmy.ml. Again: EFF knows more than you do, on this topic. If that kind of thing is a confusing concept, you need to get out more, and stop looking at lemmy.ml as conferring a special type of power that the EFF isn’t privy to.


  • I looked up OOP. It turns out I’ve talked with them a few times before.

    I’m just going to present this, without comment. I think it speaks for itself and the frustration I’ve experienced specifically with OOP, talking to them about this kind of thing:

    https://ponder.cat/post/484521/715793

    Edit: To answer the specific question, I agree with varyk up until “how old are you, eight?” I don’t think anyone who didn’t vote for Harris necessarily needs to feel bad, and I don’t think it’s productive to start slinging insults around. However people look at it, and whatever they choose to do, I think we can talk about it and it’s already going to be difficult to come to understanding without getting angry and making it more difficult. I do get the frustration though. And the part before that, I’m completely in agreement with.


  • Yes, precisely. With a handful of rare exceptions I strongly dislike the Democrats. I voted third party for over ten years, and only stopped once the Republicans became so dangerous to make it an urgent matter to try to keep them out of power. I definitely support voting reforms which will make it more realistic to get third parties into power. Really, I think the answer is to get rid of political parties as the unit of political organization, and replace them with politically active unions as used to be the case back when this country wasn’t so fucked. I frequently post stories which accuse the Biden administration of war crimes in their support for Israel.

    Often when I have this conversation, someone tells me some variety of “No you don’t. You’re clearly a liberal. I already know everything about you, and you ❤️ Democrats, and you’re lying about it to try to trick me. So I can safely ignore everything you say. Who knows, Trump actually might be better.”

    I really am not, and he isn’t, and I think OOP’s type of viewpoint on people like me and what we had to say before and after the election is childish and insulting.


  • Uh yeah, I can’t argue against what y’all say on .ml because anything beyond the prevailing opinion will just get scrubbed away

    I think it’s easy not to realize how profound an impact this has. I tried looking at the same comment threads, on Hexbear and then on some other instances, and it’s really remarkable how distorted a picture you’ll see of reality and consensus when it’s being artificially manipulated to look some particular way. I was surprised by how compelling an alternate reality was created by banning everyone who disagrees.

    I’m not surprised to hear someone say “you cannot actually argue against” it, because if you spend all your time in .ml spaces, you may never have heard the counterarguments or had a chance to see a sustained conversation about it. Or maybe a handful of times, with each one being met with ten angry counterpoints which meld into an overall picture of the first thing having no merit at all. I think a lot of times, they form their picture of the counterarguments based on what other .ml people say the counterarguments are. Which is usually pretty different.

    When people talk about needing to “protect” their spaces against invasion from some kind of outside force which is going to comment them to death, which is tedious and “debatebro” and they don’t need it, that’s the outcome they are bending things towards. I have no idea if it’s on purpose or just an accidental product of trying to make a friendly space for people with some particular belief. But that’s the outcome. It’s why they have so much trouble talking with people from “outside” and so little frame of reference as to what the people “outside” actually think and say and believe.


  • The ‘roll of the dice’ thing a silly/uninformed thing to say/believe

    Agreed.

    that was a minor throwaway part of the what OOP was saying, and they only said it to stress that it was a rare thing

    Okay, sure. I definitely still encountered it a lot. I’m still encountering it.

    And none of that really excuses their persistent habit of reframing “Trump is so CATASTROPHICALLY worse that it makes no difference if the Democrats are bad, which they are” into the persistently wrong but easier-to-argue-against “I ❤️ Democrats” terms that I very often encountered, which OOP repeats above.

    I do understand disagreeing with someone who is saying Trump is so much worse that it doesn’t matter. I talked not that long ago about how I can understand how Rashida Tlaib for example could just throw the whole premise in the bin because it’s just not what’s important to her. What I don’t understand is pretending that the person using that logic is actually saying something else (“tacitly”, as OOP claims), so you can argue against the much easier thing that isn’t what they’re saying.