Excrubulent @ Excrubulent @slrpnk.net

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2 yr. ago

Not by itself no, but it was a vector to be indoctrinated into a strong belief in a christian afterlife at a very young age.

I no longer hold any of those beliefs. I now think that existence ex-nihilo and creation by something outside of the natural universe are two equally absurd possibilities, and science is fundamentally incapable of resolving that question.

I have certainly had odd, even otherworldly experiences, but I couldn't say what any of them meant or if they mean anything at all. I am deeply suspicious of anyone that claims to have the answers.

I was going to sarcastically say, "oh, so it's gay to like nice things now?" and then I thought about it for like two seconds and I realised that actually yeah, that kinda tracks.

Yeah, this seems like a case of "it's not my job to interperet my boss's incomprehensible behaviour on their behalf".

Gonna have to tune in to Knowledge Fight to hear their take on this. I hope those boys are doing okay.

Oh I do know about that, I've had a near death experience myself, your body/brain has an uncanny sense that says "you are dangling over the precipice right now."

I just mean that until it actually happens, there is no true confirmation, and after, you can't report back, that's why it's called a mystery.

In fact from the way that person is talking it sounds like they may have had such an experience, and maybe now they're doubting that it's real.

Every single person who ever lived could use this logic and they'd never see it disproven.

It's a bit like learning that Russian cargo ships don't get boarded by pirates because they'll just start fucking shooting.

Say what you want about Russians, but that kind of rules.

It's also the smallest community unit that we can reasonably be broken up into whilst still reproducing labourers for the economy.

The more society is ground down and split apart the less we can help one another out of solidarity, and the more we have to spend on housing, transport, and every other appliance that needs to be duplicated for each separate dwelling, and the more dependent we are on money, capital and the state to provide for our needs. The lonelier we are, the more profitable we are and the less power we have.

You could argue that a lot of this was just a gradual evolution of society into a form that suits the ruling class, but also neoliberalism was a deliberate project to bring this about. Thatcher knew what she was doing when she said, "There is no such thing as society, there are individual men and women and there are families."

I know right, people hold elaborate ceremonies that cost many thousands of dollars and invite all their family and friends for sometimes a week at a time just to announce, "Hey everybody, we're fucking!" They even get small children to participate in these shameless sex rituals, they should all be locked up for child abuse.

Ban marriage.

It's honestly incredible that that's his point and the headline twists it into 'the fight is lost'. Like he's literally saying that we need to step outside of these institutions that are designed to capture and neuter our political imagination, and instead we should use our power of direct action, and the author said, "okay but my imagination is completely captured so I interpret that to mean that the fight is lost, actually".

We've seen how wildly popular it is when someone actually acts on this concept. Luigi became a folk hero, and the ruling class can't contain that no matter how hard they try. It's going to be harder to do next time because they've ramped up their security, but there is going to be a next time.

With spree shooters, there's been an effort in recent years to stop saying their names, stop giving them notoriety because it encourages people to copy. That doesn't work with Luigi because people love him. There isn't public buy-in to shame him. So there have to be copy-cats plotting how to blast their way into the history books just like he did.

Also, banger quote. The punchline is all in one syllable, it hits so hard. Also, it's literally not a call to violence. It's literally just stating two entirely uncontroversial facts in close proximity and letting the audience connect the dots. If people hear that and it sounds like a call to violence that they have to distance themselves from, that's because they know how obvious the conclusion is.

"We'll take our ball and go home, and you'll all miss out on our fabulous AI products!"

"No. Wait. Don't."

Yeah, that scans for me. It breaks up "getting ready...for a night out", but I think it works.

I think honestly it's just a reality that, if brevity is the soul of wit, then a punchy sentence needs to be compact and that means you need to get a bit funky with the grammar, so maybe the audience has to do a little work.

Maybe also "at which" is fine too, and I was just overthinking it.

One thing I won't bend on is that "to be starting to get ready" is objectively worse in every respect and is the main thing that throws people about the sentence.

This is a slightly wacky sentence. It's not wrong - it does make sense and communicates the idea, it just forces you to do a bit of work to straighten it out in your head.

I think the biggest issue is the way they unnecessarily used present continuous tense with "be starting to get".

It's convoluted and adds syllables. You could eliminate the "be" and "to" entirely and change it to "start getting". That starts with an active verb which feels stronger and more natural.

So then it would be:

"This can't possibly be the same 9pm I used to start getting ready for a night out at".

That preserves the flow & punch of the delivery but shortens & simplifies it a lot without losing anything imo.

Also ending a sentence with a preposition can be awkward. You read "at" and you need to refer it back to 9pm near the start of the sentence. Plus it comes after another preposition, which itself is not acting as a preposition but as part of the nouned phrase "night out", so you end up with "out at". Again, not wrong, but it can be awkward. I think using "at which" can move it closer to the noun it's referring to but it's not necessarily better that way.

Make that change and it's, "This can't possibly be the same 9pm at which I used to start getting ready for a night out".

It's a little easier to parse, but honestly I think it loses something, because it doesn't have a casual delivery. "At which" is evidence that the sentence was very deliberately constructed. It adds a syllable and loses some punch. I'd stick with just the first change personally.

I didn't say you should try or expect to convince them of anything. Just pointing out the error is enough to let anyone curious enough follow up for themselves. I say that about this post because the person seems to have a genuine intuition about the vague idea of collective ownership.

You can't expect to convince someone in a single argument.

For myself, when I was still in a liberal mindset, I had someone on reddit say "down with democracy!", and I called them a fascist, because that sounded pretty fashy to me and it was during trump term 1 when those guys were really stretching their assholes and letting the shit flow.

They said actually no, they were a communist, so I just dropped it. I could tell they were being sincere but also I didn't really want to take the time to unpack their point.

It did flip a switch for me though, that someone was openly declaring to be a communist. It was definitely part of my walk away from vaguely status quo liberalism towards full anarcho communism.

I still think the way they said "down with democracy!" was bad rhetoric, and I understand they probably meant "down with liberal democracy", or maybe "down with representative democracy", or maybe they were some sort of weird nazbol and they really did think democracy as a concept was bad. Doesn't matter, it moved the needle for me.

Anyway, point being a sincere answer whether it's very well articulated or even correct, is usually better than making up some bullshit in some misguided machiavelian manipulation.

They let fascist propaganda trick them into believing that corporations are socialist because they flew the wrong flags. They would let those same fascists tell them the corporations are their friends now because they fly the right flags. That's what they're paying attention to.

The correct response is, "You are describing worker ownership, which is socialist." They have to learn they're on the wrong side before they'll stop listening to the fascists. They have to be educated, and agree to change the flag in their head, because the right is fundamentally domineering. They won't accidentally make socialism happen, they'll just smash our shit because they hate our flags.

Sorry for the rant but I see this "joke" take people are making in this thread all the time and there's a reason it's a joke.

Maxwell immediately adopting an unexplained and unflappable admiration for Wealwell is such a Murph thing to do and I love it.

Well the point here is not that China is cool and based actually, but that people definitely did some lying on this point and those same people definitely think it means that any and all forms of communism are authoritarian and there is no alternative to capitalism.

There has to be some percentage of people who let this be the thing that radicalises them, and I don't want to hear any doomer takes about how these people are impossible to reach. I've heard loads of stories over the years of this or that particular moment being the moment that snapped someone out of their fascist sympathies.

"Samwell, Blanewell, Roywell, Hatwell, Wealwell, Johnwell"

https://youtu.be/Odo3F1WqO4A