Schmoo @ Schmoo @slrpnk.net

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20

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712

Joined

2 yr. ago

Are you incapable of holding two ideas in your head simultaneously? I agree that capitalism / the relationship between employers and their employees is inherently exploitative and I'm opposed to all forms of unaccountable hierarchy. I also believe capitalism places capital owners in a position to make a lot of moral decisions and that they can make better or worse ones, even if what they are doing is morally compromising from the outset.

To give a clear and exaggerated example, imagine a slaver who owns a few slaves that they treat with backhanded politeness and allow to stay in a room of their mansion and eat with them, and a slaver who owns dozens of slaves on a plantation that they regularly abuse physically and mentally and are kept in a shitty barracks with a dirt floor and fed scraps. Both are engaging in a morally repugnant one-sided and non-consensual relationship, but one is clearly worse than the other. It doesn't make it excusable, but people in a position of power and authority over others can make better or worse moral decisions, even if the fact that they are allowed to make them unilaterally is morally wrong in itself.

It has the same vibe as referring to one person as "diverse," as if that is a quality that an individual can have and not something that only makes sense for a group of people.

Our immune system is trained how to differentiate between what is supposed to be there and what isn't only on things floating around in the blood. Certain parts of the human body - like the liquids inside our eyes - are permanently isolated from the bloodstream, and so our immune system will never have encountered anything like it. That's why if it ever enters the bloodstream it can trigger an immune response.

If our eyes can absorb oxygen from tears then they can certainly do so when submerged provided the water is sufficiently oxygenated.

I all know him.

Makes perfect sense to me. Becoming a billionaire requires making a chain of morally repugnant decisions. Beyond a certain point (which is definitely somewhere below $1B) it takes more than just having a successful business to continue growing because there are obstacles in the form of competition, market saturation, regulations, etc. There must exist some moral line which most wealthy people - having the resources and being in a position to do so - decide not to cross, and therefore don't end up becoming an oligarch. In some cases that line might be lobbying the government to weaken or remove regulations(environmental, consumer and worker protections, etc.), or colluding with others to set prices, or exploiting tax loopholes and government subsidies. Every billionaire has done something like this to get to where they are. It is impossible to reach those heights with only conventional business practices.

That isn't to say that every wealthy business owner who isn't a billionaire is a saint. They're still engaging in exploitation to get ahead, but in most cases it is the conventional and societally accepted form of exploitation that we take for granted under capitalism. Billionaires aren't just your average business owner, they're the best at capitalist exploitation, and that takes more than just doing it by the books.

Why are so many people so pompous about cooking? Making a mistake and running with it is how most recipes were invented in the first place. If you're only ever cooking by numbers then you've got no ground to stand on to be critiquing cooking.

And on that note, this attitude is what puts me off of so many cooking shows.

Where's the lie?

In those cases there is an understanding that the roomba isn't actually sentient, people are just choosing to suspend disbelief for the sake of play. The relationships people are forming with AI are far more serious, and the people engaging in them have developed an emotional dependence on the delusion that the AI is sentient.

Lmao no they gave us bags of flour that we were supposed to carry around and pretend was a baby. The metric for success was if we managed not to bust it open and spill flour everywhere.

Only reason it's so jarring is the context has people parsing the whole list as language and they weren't expecting to have to abruptly parse a mathematical expression.

My dog is very cat-like in that she enjoys her personal space. She also enjoys your personal space, and will abruptly invade it when she feels like, just don't think that gives you permission to do the same to her lol.

Once I left the bar, I told her, “fuuuck, it’s like I’m the only sex-repulsed person in the bar, and no one respects it in there, but thanks for being someone I can confide to out here.” Her flirtiness dried up almost immediately, and she insisted that she wasn’t flirting with me for the couple hours prior, like she was trying to edit the past.

It sounds like she was following your lead. You pretended out of politeness that she hadn't been the one flirting with you, so she thought she was being polite by doing the same. Or she was embarassed.

Lots of people are oblivious and don't realize when someone's flirting, so she might have assumed that's why you weren't reciprocating. There's no way she could have known you were repulsed by sex until you told her, and when you did she stopped flirting. I get that you're bothered by people flirting with you, but there isn't anything weird or rude about her behavior. Just a bit of unavoidable awkwardness that comes with socializing.

My high school in rural Kentucky was like this as well. Meanwhile nearly 1/10th of the female students were pregnant and the biology teacher was fucking students in the lab supplies closet. Hopefully not related, but given the way these things are talked about only through euphemism, who knows?

The sex education we received was the type where they just show you a bunch of gross pictures of STDs and tell you abstinence is the only guaranteed way of avoiding them.

Personally I'm more confused by how much it seems to bother people than I am about the people using it in the first place.

It's infuriating to me that so many modern American Christians interpret the story of Sodom and Gomorrah as a condemnation of homosexuality, when it was actually intended to be a condemnation of living lavishly and hedonistically while refusing hospitality to strangers, bizarre as it may be. They managed to twist a parable that calls you to help immigrants in need into a cautionary tale about gay sex.

I was taught the latter interpretation and only discovered the intended message after reading the bible myself.

The realization that much of the bible was written by and for people who kept other people as property, considered all women and children to be property by default, and was itself - at least partially - an attempt to justify this practice through religious sophistry is what led me to become an atheist when I was growing up. I started reading the bible because I was confused and wanted moral clarity, but it turned me off of Christianity entirely, even though I do still hold some fondness for the story of Jesus.

Chill with the fedposting. You know you're not actually anonymous here, right? You're putting yourself at risk. People have had the FBI knocking on their door for less.

We're all criminals one way or another, some of us get away with it and others don't. If I were a corrupt cop fishing for a reason to throw you in a cell I'd find one in short order.

Well, that is what they just voted for lol. They're purging liberal Zionists from their ranks, which is amazing considering the founder of the DSA Michael Harrington was pro-Israel. Here's a quote from him:

The basic fact is that Zionism – which I take to mean the philosophy of support for, and identification with, a Jewish homeland in Israel – is the national liberation movement of a Jewish people asserting their right to self-determination. If one preposterously charges that Zionism is racist, then so are all nationalisms which joined to condemn it at the UN. And that is to drain the concept of racism of any serious meaning.

As an anarchist my response to that would be that all nationalisms are racist, insofar as they require that the rights of the national ingroup be respected only at the expense of the rights of the outgroup. I'm glad that the DSA is moving past this phase of Zionist apologia and establishing themselves as an explicitly anti-Zionist party.