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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Or conversely, a Christian apologist coming to an atheist community and saying “if god isn’t real why do good things” as if declaring you are a poorly educated sociopath is a good way to challenge people’s well formed ideas.

    I’ve spent quite a bit of time trying to explain to some people why “woke leftists” are so quick to shut them up that they feel like they aren’t given a right to speak their minds. “Woke” ideas are generally more developed and complex than “common sense” ideas, which requires some thought being put into them while they evolve from basic to their current level, so when you challenge a person’s developed idea with a superficial, usually knee jerk level question or critique, you’re most likely engaging in a line of thinking they were done with quite early in their evolution of the idea you’re trying to challenge.








  • We want to discuss topics. This is a place to do that.

    Simple need, simple solution.

    You don’t need an extra incentive to make people talk about things if people talking about things is the thing you want. You don’t want to incentivize people who don’t want to talk about things to be active somewhere you want people to talk about things because then those people will start doing the thing your’e incentivizing them for instead of talk about things.

    I personally only want people who want to talk about things here, and don’t want people who don’t want to talk about things.


  • Not the same misconception, though it’s a poor choice of wording.

    Type II diabetes cases are actually increasing around the world, due to factors another comment summarizes very well, but it’s not obviously “spreading” like a contagious disease.

    It’s not an issue of doctors starting to diagnose something that always existed but went undiagnosed due to ignorance/bias like the case with autistic women.


  • The extreme profit oriented business culture of the US combined with the human nature of bandwagons make these sort of disgusting practices possible.

    Corporations are justified, by default, in anything they can do to increase profit, and will do so until there’s enough public backlash to negate the amount of profit that practice makes.

    The public backlash is tied to the social momentum the idea has. Because profitability is the default idea to be promoted, you can’t say something like “don’t do this obviously profitable thing because it’s bad for people” unless there’s enough people around you who’ll get on the bandwagon. If suddenly some influential person or a critical number of schmucks say the opposite, then everyone is defending the corporation’s, not only the right, but the duty to be profitable.

    It’s an unpleasant way to live, really, but people are creatures of habit and won’t easily go against the culture they grow up in.




  • I just preemptively blocked the community for my account. I’d recommend everyone do the same until, and if they prove to be a problem.
    I think instead of calling for pre-blocks or defederation of entire instances, we have to be vigilant and keep a close eye on the discussions going on around us.

    I’m saying this not because I’m an “enlightened centrist” living in a delusion of tolerance or a fascist in disguise. I am as left leaning, antifascist, and antiauthoritarian as they get. I’m just saying this as I know from experience that there’s no real way to eliminate people with bigoted views from our communities other than on an individual basis.

    Ban an entire instance, you’ll still have to block the individuals if they come one by one to stir shit up on your turf. Just skip the first part and go for the individual communities and users. They will simply find each other and form groups, as instances or otherwise anyway.

    I know it’s not ideal, but there’s no real way to prevent these fascist groups from forming anywhere there’s a large enough number of people. We can only block our own interaction with them and form counter groups, and actively fight against their bigotry.

    I believe this is the sad truth we all have to live with, at least for the time being, because I can’t see defederation as an effective tool.