Really though, academia is horribly infected with Great Man Theory. It socializes you in such a way that you inevitably compare yourself to fictionalized versions of Einstein or Turing or Leaky or Heidegger or whoever else. Since the measuring stick you're using isn't real, you'll never measure up.
Unless you're comparing yourself to Heidegger since, if you aren't a Nazi, you already have a big leg up.
But isn't it such a weird coincidence that "apolitical" always happens to be the same as "whatever is best for moneyed interests?" Like being able to take free software and repackage it for sale?
I don't really like driving, but it is necessary. My (main) car is a 1993 Mazda Miata, which is currently being repainted bright yellow, and I'm gonna put a new top on it next. It isn't fast, but it handles extremely well and it's fun to drive. Or at least, it makes driving as fun as it can be.
Free as in freedom has been political since, like, the 1970s. I think the more important question is, when did people come to believe that free as in beer is apolitical?
When an NT interacts with another person, I have to try and make sense of what they say and do. For the most part, this'll instinctively be done by imagining that they're basically like me. This leads to some hilariously wrong judgments, because the line of thinking goes something like—if my imaginary version of myself were doing or saying this thing, what would have to be going on in my/their head for their words/actions to make sense?
People tend to have pretty poor imaginations, so it's pretty easy for someone to get to, what they're saying/doing must be malicious. I think this is also what people mean when they say "projection," that projection isn't always intended as an attack, but it is almost always a failure of imagination.
It's said, "when someone shows you who they are, believe them." What's fascinating is that this needs to be said; it should be obvious. But this is basically my point: in my experience, people don't have a great conception of the reality of others, and laziness makes people fall back on just imagining (their concept of) themselves but for being a woman, being black, being ND, being trans...
But remember, for the NT, this is all done automatically, this is just the baseline NT social perception. Or at least my understanding of it. So for example, when you ask someone, are you competing in a beauty contest? who cares what people think? many an NT will take that as an accusation of frivolity; after all, why is that the thing you focused on? What's going on in your head, or rather, what would have to be going on in my head for me to ask someone that? I must not like them very much, so they must not like me very much. And so on and so forth.
I'm (probably) NT and I find this incredibly tedious, I can't imagine what it's like for NDs.
When I was looking at conspiracy theories about the submarine, this was basically the metatheory. That they've so heavily brainwashed us that we can read something like this and go, yeah that seems realistic.
I think there's a more important question here... There are people who do access the room? Why? Who are they? That leads to the actually relevant question, how would those people secure a room?
If nobody needs to access the room, then the room shouldn't be accessible. By that I mean, it should be underground with no points of access, just an inaccessible underground chamber.
This whole academic desire to separate Heidegger the philosopher (or rather, Heidegger the second-rate Husserl) from Heidegger the Nazi is fuckin' wild.
We'd need to see their financials, which is tricky since they aren't public yet. There's also the issue, Steve lies about everything, so should we believe he's telling the truth?
But my guesses would go like this:
Since they've been spending other people's money, they probably haven't been watching expenses closely. Their P&L is probably dominated by payroll and rent. I can't help but feel that programmers are drastically overpaid, which is a symptom of the same issues, that there's a lot of other people's money chasing a finite supply of techbros.
The reason I think programmers are probably overpaid, by the way, is the number of man-hours they allegedly put in, versus the quality of their output. Reddit is a particularly shocking example of this.
In any case, the other people's money doctrine is to grow into profitability, which means burning money on spurious shit until some magic happens. Not exactly a winning business model.
Individual instance owners can block Meta instances from federating (exchanging data), and they absolutely, 100% should do so. If enough instances block Meta, it'll be like they don't even exist.
The bigger issue is that corporations can present a united front, while federations cannot. This is why hegemonic forces tend to win; as the author says, there's already division among kbin/Lemmy users about whether blocking Meta is a good idea. You can be damn sure there isn't similar division among Facebook leadership about whether to destroy kbin/Lemmy.
There is a kind of subtle technical problem with karma, which is (technical) problem of trust. I haven't looked at the Lemmy spec, much less the source, but decentralized systems always have an issue of, who can you trust?
Let's say I want to have a user account with inflated karma for some reason. I can spin up an instance and simply assert what my karma is—and if I need to, I can create a bunch of fake accounts on my instance and create a bunch of fake posts and comments and assign fake karma scores to them, so that it can be audited.
Now if other instance owners get wise to what I'm up to, they can defederate me. But this creates a few immediate problems, including the problem of adding more administrative load to instance owners generally. The bigger problem is the witch hunting that could ensue, if a culture of karma were to develop as it has on Reddit.
The castles are renovated into gaudy commercial establishments—one is a café, one is a privately-owned museum, one is a residential condominium, and one is torn down to make way for a strip mall.
You should read the full essay. Bertrand Russell was not a socialist, and he doesn't speak kindly of the USSR—or of the czar for that matter.
The basic problem is that the morality of work is so heavily ingrained that, even when progress is made, it pales in comparison to the magnitude of the problem. The Soviets had to propagandize people on the nobility of work to get their Five-Year Plans to fruition, and that's a bell that isn't easy to unring. Which meant that the Soviet system was still one of overwork and exhaustion, just with different structuring.
At the same time, we shouldn't believe US propaganda that labor organization is ineffective—it's tremendously effective. They want us to believe it doesn't work precisely because it does work. And you echoed some of this propaganda, that "everything devolves to labor representatives" line. Even that devolution was not really caused by the unions themselves, but by the federal government, FBI infiltration and Pinkerton murder and so forth.
The nineteenth and twentieth centuries followed a sort of oscillation: oligarchs push workers too far, workers push back and score some modest concessions, this makes workers complacent, oligarchs regroup and claw back the concessions they made before and start pushing too hard. We do seem to be getting back into the labor activism phase of this, which is good at least.
As a final point, the US government is not very oppressive. Its problem is that it's an enabler of other forms of oppression. Most of the heinous things it's done domestically have been done in the name of enabling private sector oppression.
fiasco @ fiasco @possumpat.io Posts 0Comments 101Joined 2 yr. ago
So we've moved from implosions to explosions.