American government: Builds concentration camps

Mexican government: Develops brand new chocolate bars

I'm happy to see there are still some governments out there who rule in the interest of the people.

In some dark corners, this killer is being hailed as a hero.

By which he means all over the fucking country, which is unfortunately so covered in darkness there are no bright corners left.

Seems like a fair bet that Amazon Web Services is having some problems?

I really appreciate that the commercial internet runs on like three service providers. Would love to see it crash and burn.

When talking about the making of Jojo Rabbit (a must see movie, in my opinion), I remember Taika Waititi making a point out wanting to represent the colourful fashion and more lively sides of Germany under the Third Reich. War movies tend to portray Nazis as dark and dull figures with no inner life other than murdering Jews and plotting for world domination. This is probably dangerous, as we won't recognize the fascists when they're in front of us. They'll be laughing and dancing as they murder the innocent.

Similar to how we study Eichmann to learn about the banality of evil, I think pictures like this one should be in every text book. This is what evil looks like — pretty much like anything else, if you're willing to ignore the atrocities.

I feel like part of the problem is that people don't expect fascism to be so goddamn pathetic. They see obvious morons like this or Trump, and they struggle to imagine how they could possibly be dangerous.

I guess the lesson from history here is that just because they're ridiculous it doesn't make them any less dangerous.

“I don’t want residents to think we’re giving a stamp of approval to Instagram and Facebook and Snapchat and all their oligarch owners,” said City Councilor Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler at Monday’s meeting. “There’s no ethical social media companies under capitalism,” he said. “We can try to use the ones that are the least bad and reach the most Cambridge residents.”

Somebody tell this guy about Mastodon.

Also worth noting that this article is about the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, not Cambridge, England nor the University of Cambridge. They still apparently thrive in the gutter.

The admins over there have some profoundly questionable views, which tends to push away reasonable people and attract bootlickers.

The problem is not the users as much as the site itself and its admins. I wish reasonable people (not bootlickers) would stop using lemmy.ml and go somewhere better. Lemmy.ml's biggest function right now is to scare away good people who would have been happy elsewhere.

To anyone unsubscribing: Remember to subscribe somewhere else instead. If not you're just helping Bezos achieve his goal of the death of journalism.

@[email protected] is one good alternative.

As others have said, if you want to hurt Bezos, target Amazon.

Existence is meaningless and we just wobble around here for a little while and then we die. There's nothing to it. Everything that happens is just a logical consequence; beauty is nothing but a tiny chemical reaction in your brain. Once you rot it's all worthless.

Science is great at giving explanations, but not so good at providing meaning. For a lot of people, meaning is probably more helpful in order to facilitate a happy life.

Nietzsche writes at length about this stuff, most famously in the anecdote about the madman coming down from the mountain to inform the villagers that God is dead and that we have killed him. Everybody knows the three words "God is dead", but I think it's worth reading at length:

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?

Nietzsche, whose father was a priest, recognizes that "God has become unbelievable", but he does not celebrate it as the progress of science. Rather, we lost something that was fundamentally important to humans, and which science cannot easily replace.

Here one could start talking about the Free Masons, who attempted learning from religious rituals without the added layer of religion. Or one could dig deeper into the works of Nietzsche, and the contrast between Apollonian and Dionysian. It's all fascinating stuff.

In short though, spirituality used to offer people a sense of meaning that is not so easily replaced by science alone. How do we bury our dead now that we know our rituals are pointless?

A lot to unpack here.

She said the people she chatted to often seemed “really nice” but were obviously lonely, making the whole process feel sad, especially as she was not the person she was pretending to be.

I feel like this summarizes the time we're living in. Some poor bastard somewhere sitting on his computer chatting with some lady he believes he is paying for attention, but in fact he is just being pitied by some unnamed underpaid worker in the Philippines. Meanwhile they're both filling the accounts of an online influencer and some onlyfans tech bro, both of whom are surely completely miserable in their own right.

Studies have shown that if you ask people to make a plan for voting, they are more likely to actually go out and vote. It's even cited in the FAQ of cards against humanity.

So we ask people to make a plan because it's an efficient way to make them more involved and more likely to actually go out and vote when the day comes. Not because it's so hard that they need a plan (unless you live in certain states of course), but because it forces you to think actively about it rather than just passively.

It's a two party system. Everybody knows if you run as a third party you're merely increasing the chances that the ones furthest from you politically will be elected.

It's impossible for a third party candidate to be running for president in the US in good faith unless they're complete fucking idiots with no idea how the political system works.

Jill Stein knows how the system works. So obviously she's not acting in good faith.

Simple as that.

If you want something that could actually be useful in real-life situations, pick up running.

five minutes later

Grok: "Heil hitler!"

Turning people into passive consumers of unthought thoughts

Interesting contrast to the church itself, which has the capacity of turning people into passive consumers of thoughts that have been painstakingly processed for centuries.

What an incredibly absurd and unpredictable situation. It's hard to say who is in the more precarious position, her or Trump.

I think we have to accept that the American electorate actually wants fascism.

"We protect your children"

Sometimes they even decorate them!

Fourteen wording pieces of shit.

While most news media keeps on endlessly reporting on what politicians say, tech and law commentators by definition focus on what is being done. In a world where what is being said is not only irrelevant, but flat-out weaponized, this is the only kind of reporting that matters.

This is a piece of alleged technology that is based on basic physics that has not been established.

That does sound like a problem.