It’s much healthier without constantly seeing some bad-faith, AI-crafted post that tries to get under your skin, prying open your values and baiting your outrage so you can think you’re actually achieving anything of value by biting the bait and trying to correct morons who aren’t even real humans.
I do not miss the site.
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I’m doing my part!
The only problem I’ve had with other dog owners in California or anywhere else, is owners who don’t pick up their dog’s shit. I see people bring dogs into stores all the time, they’re always fine, I never see problems with that.
Now when I step 6-inches off a popular trail to take a picture of a popular view and step in piles of dog feces that people don’t bother to clean because it’s technically not someone’s yard, that’s when I start to wonder if domestication was a good idea. (Of humans that is.)
Much of the problems we’re facing with rampant executive overreach, supreme courts packed with the worst people, and vulnerabilities in our rights being exploited have been direct products of Obama’s inaction and compromise with Republicans.
He was a great “leader” in that he kept the country and world seemingly stable, but he wasn’t the great president most people think. I would still take 30 Obamas over a half of a single Trump, but we wanna be very careful about idolatry in our political leaders.
I was raised devout and my parents wanted me to become a pastor, I know a little about religion and what it looks like out there. This is why I know the motivations of the Christian Right and the threat they pose to everyone on Earth. It’s a dangerous fucking death-cult.
I said already what your error of framing was, how you have been using the weakest, most neutral language here because you’re afraid of pushing away theists and think that being like “both sides don’t understand each other” that you will make more progress to get people to get along.
Maybe you could get a bite in a Christian forum, but it’s inappropriate in this community because most of us are not religious and see it for the threat it is. Religion is a threat to us all, it’s a scourge, a cloud of locusts that consumes the world around it. We don’t need to be told that the people who practice it are misguided and don’t understand science. We need someone to tell THEM that, because we’re the ones being attacked.
People who think Science and Religion are opposed to one another don’t understand either one.
This was your first paragraph, you are starting with the thesis that someone like me, who has defended truth from religious attacks for decades, that I simply “misunderstand” the people who are screaming that God doesn’t want us to get vaccines or learn about cosmology.
Science is on the defense against a powerful, hateful, spiteful ideology that has been wearing us all down for millenia. Religion is fucking HOSTILE so no, you need to focus your statement against the actual antagonist here. This isn’t a place to use this pathetic neutral language, we have active fucking book-burnings happening in the USA right now, as schools become defunded even more than they already are.
You are still trying to weigh these two ideas against each other like they are neck-and-neck in a race, and again, I am saying your dichotomy is bullshit, and you should feel bad.
If you think experiments with eugenics is anywhere comparable to the thousands of years of wars fought in the name of some God or another, or the constant and unending hate that religion is using right now to justify abusing children, if you think that people make some choice like “will I use science or religion to figure this out” if you think that they are anywhere close to the same thing, you are too dense to have this conversation.
You are scared of death, I get it. We all are. Religion offers comfort, but no evidence of anything other than people like to tell stories about things they’re scared of.
I have been explicitly saying that they are not the same at all.
I didn’t fucking say you’re saying they’re the same, I am saying you’re fucking EQUATING them against each other, and you’re doing it with a fervor, and if you say you’re not, you’re either lying or unaware of what you’re doing. Again, go watch some actual atheist debates and understand that you’re not treading new ground here, you’re falling into the exact same mental fallacy that many so-called “religious intellectuals” get in. You don’t need religion or God to have a better world, a better personal perspective of the universe or anything else.
Using science to “argue” against religion makes as much sense as using religion to “argue” against science: none.
Okay here is where the crux of your stupid argument is. What exactly do you think is happening? Do you think science is waging war on Christianity? Do you believe science is trying to “kill god”? Do you think people adopt science for the same reasons they adopt religion? Do you think that if “both sides just stopped fighting it would be better”? Because if you say yes to any of these questions, again, you are radically misinformed or your perspective is tainted by religion and you are not being honest with yourself.
Science is, and I say this fucking again, a system for finding truth. It’s not designed to attack religion, it’s not competing for anything, you can indeed have both spirituality and religion and science in your life without conflict. But that’s not what Christians and theists broadly do, is it? They’re the ones trying to burn textbooks and trying to get schools to teach creation. Science is not invading churches and forcing them to teach motherfucking geology.
They do not operate in the same spheres, they do not seek to answer the same questions. They do not share and of the same purposes or goals. People need to stop treating them like they have anything in common.
I’m glad you agree, now why are you doing it?
Which group is more common in this comment section?
Lemmy is a predominantly young, leftist or liberal community, religion is going to be a minority here in all regards. When you come in “both siding” religion broadly, you’re asking a lot of people who already have discarded religion to accept some part of it without giving a good reason or argument why.
You don’t need religion to come up with morality, philosophical ideas about nature or anything else religion claims to have the monopoly on. It’s fine if people want to have belief for themselves about higher powers or spirituality, but again, that shouldn’t even be placed on the same table as actual systems of reason and logic and material science.
Yah, that’s not the problem, it’s the fact that religion is designed to push itself where it isn’t, and it claims to be able to solve not just the moral problems, but the logical and societal problems as well.
If religion was just fucking “philosophy” we would all be fine with it, there would be no conflict. Science isn’t trying to invade people’s homes and tell them what they can and cannot do as consenting adults. Science isn’t trying to give people an excuse to be passive about injustice. Science doesn’t condone slavery and hate and violence and organize mass numbers of people to adopt hateful views.
There is material HARM that comes from religious ideology because it’s trying, and has BEEN trying to supplant logic and reason and the scientific process since science became a thing.
This is not a “two sides” issue and I strongly resent the framing as such. Religion is trying to drag the world down to a state of willful ignorance and subservience to magical-thinking as an entity, and science is just a word to describe a process for investigating the universe. They are not equivalent. Do better.
Edit: readers, do not pursue this, you can’t “fix” this person, they’re some kind of closet theist trying to pretend to be intellectual but they have no idea what they’re doing and will lead you in intellectual circles for hours and hours.
Wow, just TYPICAL that one of you people would just IGNORE the fact that the object is actually an accumulation of particles that were formed in a number of astronomical events over billions of years, I guess you don’t even CARE about the rich history that went into this object before your precious “geology” worked on it, and only care if it’s “well rounded.”
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That’s right, the wealthiest nation on Earth.
My sad epiphany of late is that not only are my nation’s population largely unevolved troglodytes whom would barely survive if we weren’t the richest nation and able to provide them with bare-minimum comforts or at least utilities, but so is everyone, everywhere, since before recorded history. And if anything, we’re at a HIGH POINT in human intellect and knowledge. Don’t let the current trends and localized issues trick you, objectively we’re at the highest point in human history for literacy, knowledge of the world, peace, prosperity and communication.
But there have never been nations and leaders of nations who have done all they can to immortalize the times they accidentally sent state secrets to the public journalists. Nope, they etch in stone their accomplishments and genius victories.
This tells me that most of what we know about history and leaders across the world is in fact, utter bullshit, and always has been. The reality is everyone is fantastically dumb and it’s only our creative minds working as a group that let us get this far. People like Trump and his cabinet are an unavoidable side-effect of the fact that largely, our population is very easy to manipulate, and people generally care far less about what’s true or not than they do how comfortable they are.
most LLM’s for chat, pictures and clips are magical and amazing. For about 4 - 8 hours of fiddling then they lose all entertainment value.
As for practical use, the things can’t do math so they’re useless at work. I write better Emails on my own so I can’t imagine being so lazy and socially inept that I need help writing an email asking for tech support or outlining an audit report. Sometimes the web summaries save me from clicking a result, but I usually do anyway because the things are so prone to very convincing halucinations, so yeah, utterly useless in their current state.
I usually get some angsty reply when I say this by some techbro-AI-cultist-singularity-head who starts whinging how it’s reshaped their entire lives, but in some deep niche way that is completely irrelevant to the average working adult.
I have also talked to way too many delusional maniacs who are literally planning for the day an Artificial Super Intelligence is created and the whole world becomes like Star Trek and they personally will become wealthy and have all their needs met. They think this is going to happen within the next 5 years.
I had a teller LITERALLY try to steal money from me.
A number of years back I was depositing cash from doing some side-hustle party entertainment work, I counted the cash, handed the cash to the teller and he counted it off, and it was short $100.
The thing was, I was doing magic tricks at parties, I had taught myself a bunch of very basic card tricks and slight-of-hand, not amazing but well enough to impress grade-schoolers, so I caught when the teller did a thing with his hands as he counted, he seemed to palm a bill and I felt immediate unease and wasn’t sure what to do, so I called the manager over and my partner and got the attention of another teller, I figured if I got enough people around he couldn’t pull any further tricks. I said we were “missing” a 100-dollar bill, and the teller acted really confused, pretended to look everywhere, then suddenly the missing bill “appeared” in his drawer. I let it go because I just wanted to go home.
I can even forgive that, that’s one person, not an entire institution. I wouldn’t have a gripe with Wells Fargo if that was all that ever happened. But they did things later on in my life like when I rented a car, they sent me on an overdraft-fee spiral that made my account -$5000 by the time I called the bank. They undid the erroneous charges after lots of shouting.
Later on, I had no choice but to finance a vehicle through WF, I will save the whole, long, horrible story and the shouting matches, but to give an idea how bad-faith they are, they fucking REFUNDED ME THE ENTIRE CAR with a series of “apology checks” over a period of three years after they repossessed it wrongly.
The only reason I didn’t lose tens of thousands of dollars to Wells Fargo is because I learned to fight, fight and scream and yell when they tried to scam me. This shouldn’t be on the customer to be aggressive and angry just to guarantee normal business.
Our best bet right now is acceleration.
The administration is trying to boil the frogs slowly enough that people forget their discomfort and worry, so people get used to being without services like social security or medicare slowly enough that America just keeps running but with less benefits for the citizens and more prosperity for the wealthy.
If the administration moves too fast, people will connect the dots and associate their discomforts with the presidency, and there will be popular movements to oust leadership, peaceful or otherwise.
What you’re likely going to see happen soon is an “economic stimulus” check program with Trump and Musk’s names on checks sent to every American to try to get people to associate them with wealth again. Stick everyone with a 3k - 5k check, while stripping us of tens of thousands of dollars in benefits a year. And it will likely work amazingly well, because our population has memories of goldfish.
So we want them to make more stupid moves faster, we want more people to feel the pain of losing public sector jobs and services, we want chaos and recession and consequence, that is the only way American people will move.
I would really like them to try, they are toeing a line right now because Trump and his closest people aren’t there for ideological reasons, they’re just trying to make a recession happen so they can all gobble up devalued assets and blame biden or trans kids or something. The outliers are the Millers and Bannons who tried before and will try again to assert an ideological presence to bring about the Fourth Reich, but their hold isn’t as strong as the oligarchs who just want money and security for their business empires.
You don’t sustain a business empire when popular political figures are getting jailed, much less if they’re being executed. That would signal the beginning of the actual overthrow of Democracy and if they do it too fast, that would immediately trigger massive popular uprisings and they would lose a lot of control. As it is, the donor-class is looking at the administration right now with a LOT of apprehension about current market destabilization.
Capital doesn’t want instability, and would rather go back to a country of rules and regulations than see the entire market literally burn to the ground, so we would see a sudden and dramatic tone shift in politics broadly, we would see media channels turn on Trump’s administration instantly, we would see prominent republicans in house and senate suddenly start forming opposition groups, we would see impeachment.
Let us make no mistakes about what’s happening. There are people who do indeed want to turn America into a monarchy and they have longer-term plans to do so, and may succeed, but they want it WITH the wealth and prosperity that we have now, they don’t want a banana republic, they just want a really big class-divide so they can have while we have-not.
One thing on this list will kill you a lot faster than the other things.
That’s right, sliding down a hillside on a slip-and-slide covered with crisco is by far the surest way to harm yourself, especially if you haven’t done meth beforehand.
Gen X here, and yeah… “first time?” meme.