YourNetworkIsHaunted @ YourNetworkIsHaunted @awful.systems

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1 yr. ago

Thank you!

That's why I meant by talking about the differences.in citizen status. The Greek cities had a lot of variation, but usually had a variety of free noncitizens as well as actual slaves, so the line between citizen and slave was wider than the line between slave and "person who lives and works here."

Also if memory serves the Roman aesthetic sensibility actually found bigger dicks weird and vulgar, but that's not important right now.

Someone help me; I don't know who this is and don't know what to Google to decide if this is funny or not!

There's got to be a term for the rhetorical technique of "this reasonable-sounding statement is one of the conclusions I draw from my unhinged conspiracy theories, and therefore the whole structure is true!"

Before I actually read the linked post I definitely thought this was about the ethics of enslaving sentient AI as seen in The Animatrix or R.U.R.

Not gonna lie, Bret was my primary source as well, particularly his two series on the civil structure of the Greek polis and the Roman republic .

Sure, I'll bite.

What part of doing that is mutually exclusive with voting for Harris against project 2025? I'm not going to pretend electoral politics should be the be-all end-all of political participation. Yes, you should organize locally and look for opportunities to support socialist policies and leaders, but given that none of those are on the ballot, you should still use what little power electoral politics give you to try and push the system away from right-wing lunatics who have been very explicit about their plans to make everything socialists complain about significantly worse and to corrupt the democratic systems to try and make it even harder for socialists to take power in the future.

On a more considered note after actually reading the thread (poor choice on my part, I know), it's hard not to connect this to the broader line-goes-up mentality that we see so often here. As evidenced by the long history of the "live free or die" ethos, whether enslaved people were/are actually better off than had they been killed is more of an open question than our friend's argument would imply. This is especially true if you ignore all the ways that chattel slavery was deeply cruel and inhuman even in the history of unfree labor to the point where historians consider it an abberation, closer to being worked to death in Mauthausen than being a medieval serf. I'm not qualified to talk about the history of dehumanization, but even in ancient Greece and Rome there existed some legal protections for slaves, provided you could find someone with citizen standing who was willing to plead your case, and this was thousands of years before the liberal ideas of what being a full human being and a free individual meant, so we need to understand the position of unfree people in those periods differently. But even if you ignore all that context and treat slavery like a universal practice from the prehistoric "sea peoples conquered my tribe" days to the antebellum American South, the primary benefits that you get from slavery don't go to the enslaved people, obviously. Rather it comes from the conquerors having a new source of labor to work their new fields, and the economic benefit they get from that. Rather than needing to allow population growth to expand your people's farms into new lands, you have a ready-made labor force to start (or in some cases continue) working there. It makes the line go up faster, in other words. The argument relies on ignoring all the questions of justice and the impact that these practices have on people's actual lives because it makes line go up, and in that sense it fits right in with all the other ways that ostensibly-libertarian ideologies end up supporting fascism.

Sounds like what someone who's about to endorse chattel slavery would say, but okay.

Read through the whole thread. Man, I remember back when Nate Silver seemed smart and interesting and now I'm realizing that he probably was just my political Boss Baby moment.

What do you propose we do instead?

Man, that looks like ass.

Sorry, looks like an ass.

I just enjoy that masters chief is like attorneys general.

There are serious problems with how easy it is to adopt the aesthetic of serious academic work without adopting the substance. Just throw a bunch of meaningless graphs and equations and pretend some of the things you're talking about are represented by Greek letters and it's close enough for even journalists who should really know better (to say nothing of VCs who hold the purse strings) to take you seriously and adopt the "it doesn't make sense because I'm missing something* attitude.

It also fits in with the wider pattern of calling the opposition out for their weirdness and pettiness. A subtle "you all remember the tan suit thing, right?" as well as bait for another unforced error.

Non-Nazis, shockingly, are capable of recognizing "sure, they're following the rules right now; but they're still Nazis" and deciding not to associate with them. The people who are willing to associate with Nazis... well, you know.

I'm also happy if we just have a variety of rotating off-topic threads like this. Part of the benefits of the smaller platform awful.systems has is (imo) being able to be a little more community-centered and less strictly focused. Like, sneer club should never start sneering primarily at my musical tastes but I'm honestly enjoying the more personal atmosphere here.

Do you even need to be a weeaboo to love Ghibli these days? Because otherwise I need watch a lot more anime to make sure I can weeb properly.

So first off I want to share the playlist that's been stuck in my head for the last few weeks since I remembered it exists. Baby Got Back Talk, a punk outfit out of NYC, were outraged that an article in Rolling Stone or somewhere about the "philosophers of rock" didn't include any women or non-white people, so they assembled a bunch who they felt should have been featured.

If you prefer your music so-fresh-it's-undercooked, you may also enjoy the podcast Jam Mechanics . Bug from Bug Hunter and Matt from The Narcissist's Cookbook , two aggressively indie singer/songwriters, are prompted to make a song about something and then share the resulting demos ~4 hours later. A few of the songs from the first season have been actually finished into full tracks, but I like hearing the rough cuts and initial reactions because I'm that obnoxious guy.

I've been strategically misdirecting summoners for years trying to find a way to take down the big tech maesters but I only have so many fiends.

alright I'm gonna replay FFX now I'll see you all in a month.