Mate the chuds and creationists are uniquely your country's fucking problem

White supremacist right-wingers are uniquely a US problem? I'd agree they're uniquely powerful in the US but that's a major reason why the US is "uniquely" the world's problem. What a strange take to read here, that chuds are only something USians need to be concerned about.

You've constructed a straw man from this

That makes no sense. I'm not attacking anything, so there is no strawman to create. You just quoted someone else who said something that Dawkins himself never said, so it seems pretty obvious where the strawman is and who is creating it.

It's been decades since I read it but the selfish gene was absolutely full of this genre supremacist shit

"Gene supremacist"? lol, what even is that? Understanding how genes replicate is not "gene supremacist shit," it's scientific consensus. "The matter of the world around us is made up of atoms and their interactions? That's just atomic supremacist shit." These sentences have no meaning.

his evo-psych trash clearly infects all his views

To the extent he believes in evo-psych, I'm sure it does effect his views, some of which I explicitly addressed. That doesn't invalidate the real science, which despite being a terrible person, he has also done and made contributions to. He's hardly the only scientist who had a lot of shit views on other topics, that's even the majority. Plenty of them think their expertise on one topic makes them an authority on others and they are wrong, and Dawkins is one of these as well. That doesn't make him wrong about how genes work or the broader biology and it certainly doesn't make the premise of The Selfish Gene wrong.

You're not misremembering because those were major misconceptions about what he was saying, especially in the premise of the book that made him famous, The Selfish Gene. But that book as well as his other ones on evolution, genetics, and biology are accurate, with Selfish Gene just being a popular-accessible explanation of the scientific consensus on the role of genes in evolutionary biology. It was misconstrued, often intentionally and said to be this nihilistic justification for human selfishness, which it's not, and I think that's what you're remembering. It's one of those instances where someone who may be an asshole and totally worthy of criticism gets criticized for mostly the wrong reasons, and those wrong reasons are what end up getting solidified in memory incorrectly as why they're an asshole.

Replicating molecules (like DNA) replicating and propagating themselves is the "reason" for the whole thing in terms of how biology at the molecular level works. It's not an answer to a "why" question, but a description of what's really going on at scales we aren't used to thinking about or readily able to see. But neither Dawkins or any other evolutionary biologist I'm aware of ever implied that DNA is all that "matters" or that or that other systems aren't at play in reality. Just like the fact that "all the matter we see, including life, is composed of interacting atoms" does not negate the presence of society or human emotion, neither does the genetic description for the foundation of life and how it evolves.

But all of that is aside from Dawkins' Islamophobia, misogyny, deep misunderstanding of systemic racism (i.e., just racism), his flippant disregard of (CW) SA victims with the justification that he was one himself and therefore had the right to extrapolate everyone else, his creepy views on human sexuality, etc. In other words, Dawkins is a shit person and absolutely should be called on all the disgusting nonsense he's said, but let's call him on what he actually got wrong and not perpetuate misconceptions about all the stuff he got totally right regarding evolution and biology, which ultimately just carries water for the chuds and creationists.

Dawkins is a piece of shit for a number of reasons, but where did he ever say anything like that?

There are certainly different people with different preferences, and most Chinese people are indeed fine with CCP. A dictatorship has an obvious need to maintain many nationalist, so it is not surprising that you can find Chinese who loves CCP.

Lol "it's no surprise the vast majority of people approve of and appreciate their government, since a dictatorship has to be maintained." Yeah, what an awful, terrible dictatorship that rules with such an iron fist that it forced the approval and support of over 90% of the population. Clearly, in any real democracy, everyone hates their government, like the in the US. You sinophobic liberals are such a transparent joke.

Many people are more than willing to turn a blind eye on all the artists, journalist, and lawyer, who were arrested, since it has nothing to do when them. This is a emotional topics for me, because one of my highschool classmate has been seperated from her father, for he was advocating more transparent laws and enforcement.

And the lead protesters in the US who advocated for... the state to stop murdering black people openly in the street were themselves murdered and disappeared. It's an emotional topic for me since people I knew in school were beaten half to death and permanently blinded by the police. The US is an infinitely more heinous dictatorship than China, violently suppressing anyone it deems a threat, while pretending they have "freedom" because they don't crack down on the ones that are of no threat.

There are plenty of Chinese mastodon instance. Go there talk to them and see what they think.

I don't need to, I can and do talk to plenty of people from and currently in China. Even a few irl!

Of course, you don't need to believe me, or people on mastodon, or journalist from all "mainstream media"; and just trust people on hexbear. But that will likely be no different from people who only believe fox news and infowars.

It's not about trusting people on hexbear, it's about trusting the population of China, which again has overwhelming support for the CPC. It's also about being able to plainly see what the CPC does both domestically and internationally. I trust the Chinese people.

OurToothbrush@lemmy.ml did. Oh wait, they didn't paste the specific numbers that are both widely known and readily available, able to be found within a few seconds using search engine, they only referenced them. My mistake, I had assumed you were capable of doing that. But since you're not:

World Incarceration Rates If Every U.S. State Were A Country

Looks like someone couldn't handle some actual statistics when presented with them.

Honestly, I am quite surprised how low tankies are willing to go to defend China. As a Chinese, it is very disheartening to me that people have never experienced or seen the suffering of living under an authoritarian government, are more willing to blindly defend it

There are literally some "tankies" on hexbear that are in China and posting from China right now. @Flyberius@hexbear.net. There are some users here who are Chinese and grew up there (not sure if they'd want to be tagged though). There are journalists who decided to go live there in part because of how much more freedom they are afforded there, people like Ben Norton, who you would probably also label a "tankie." All of whom can attest to how baseless and sinophobic all the fabricated "suffering of living under an authoritarian government" stories really are. We aren't all just clueless westerners, but your assumption that we are is also telling.

That doesn't matter you numbskull, she not only endorses but is the enforcer and overseer of the racist system that does execute black people regularly (and they do it with trials or not, it doesn't matter - it's literal state murder with racist motivations). Your position is the same as "but did HITLER pull the lever that released the zyclon b gas?"

And yes, Harris actually did convict people, including black people.

you aren't necesarily a racist for arresting a black person

Yes you are. You're racist if you enforce a deeply racist system, especially one that regularly executes black people with and without trial.

This was an extremely informative read. It answered a number of questions I've had rattling in my brain that I just never dug around enough to get good information on. Thank you for these comments.

I'm not sure if it's a different situation in Europe than where I'm at as far as things like self checkout, surveillance, how much store employees care, etc., but I'll tell you what works for, uh... some friends I know in the US. This is only for grocery stores with self checkout and using a handbasket. First, buy one of those reusable grocery bags you bring from home if you don't already have one. It should be opaque and fairly rigid. Grab a handbasket and put your normal, green-friendly grocery bag in it with the bag open. Expensive + small things go into the bag. Larger, hopefully cheaper things go in the basket but on top of the bag. You will be paying legit for the latter things. Do not put things into your bag if it would exceed 1/3 of your bag volume and don't put stuff on top that would exceed 2/3 (a little bit more is fine). Go to the self checkout. Take the things out of your basket but not out of your bag which stays in the handbasket along with its contents. Scan those items and pay for them as normal. Start loading your purchased groceries in your grocery bag on top of your unpurchased groceries that never left your bag. Casually leave the grocery store with bag in hand, along with a receipt for a bunch of stuff in your bag, right there filling the top 2/3rs of it. There's just more stuff beneath it that isn't on the receipt.

There are a few things that can go wrong and you can probably think of them. However, having known people who have done this for years and never had a problem is a pretty good indication that these things rarely do (if ever) end up going wrong, so long as you're really careful, casual, and only do it in the appropriate stores. And yes, this is done with cameras all over the store and at least one employee managing all the self checkouts. That last part is why it's better to do this when it's busy at the store, but it usually seems to work fine even when it's not.

edit: typos fixed.

The United States Empire doesn't have much time left on this earth. I think they are already into the process of ruining it for the rest of us on their way out.

It wouldn't surprise me if this were in fact true, but if you or @yogthos@lemmy.ml can point me to where you saw this, I would really appreciate being able to read about it. Regardless of what heinous crimes against humanity and all life on earth that the US would actually perpetrate in a large scale nuclear war scenario, I was under the impression that their nuclear posture and targeting strategies are "highly classified" and even though they don't have any NFU policy, they still at least pretend it's about deterrence.

Then you need to do more reading because I did work in this field and have read the science on it as well. First all, you have to take into account what time scales are being discussed. What you're reading is, I'm all but certain, just talking about the coming few decades, in which yes, millions at least will likely die. And even then the science that tends to reach the public is toned down, pacified, and doesn't represent the whole truth. You should be familiar with this as a communist trying to get an understanding of what's really going on with the world via popular journalism. Is what you're reading about "catastrophic weather events" also discussing what will be happening 1000 years from now? 10,000? Despite the longer scale, what we are doing right now and in the coming decades will have an effect on those longer scales. Climate change is so much more than simply an intensification of weather events. It is literally a rapid change to the composition of our atmosphere. An atmosphere which has, by the way, been completely altered by life in one of the most chemically fundamental ways possible, from a reducing atmosphere to an oxidizing one. This is what I mean when I say even many leftists just do not understand how extreme the risks are here. A runaway greenhouse wouldn't just kill a billion, it could well end our species and most other species of "higher lifeforms."

Well... Earth becoming more like Venus is an inevitability in the high hundreds of millions of years (and for scale, multicellular life has been around for roughly 5-600M years, with the more than 3 billion before that just being simple single-celled prokaryotic life), but that is completely independent of anthropogenic climate change, it is because of the expansion of the sun towards it's red giant phase. In terms of being habitable to life, Earth is easily past the half-way mark already, no matter what. However, that is far enough out that it doesn't bear worrying about and isn't something we can have any sort of impact on.

That said, the climate change that we as a species are causing right now could lead to a runaway greenhouse effect on much shorter time scales. The fact is, there have been times in Earth's history where it has been so hot that complex life could mostly only survive at the poles (with the equator being a death zone to all but simple, single-cellular extremophiles) and there have been times where Earth was encased almost entirely in ice except perhaps at the equators - not just our usual conception of an ice age, but "snowball earth," and this was likely caused by certain forms of simple life, fascinatingly enough. The feedback loops we are triggering right now have a potential to drastically change the composition of the atmosphere on a far shorter timescale, one in which we are talking about an end to most complex life (obviously ourselves included). It was almost certainly volcanism that caused Venus to go from a mostly habitable planet to the completely, utterly inhospitable world it is. Volcanism has also been responsible for extreme heat and mass extinctions on Earth, but obviously it never tipped over into Venus-like territory. The thing is, right now we're changing the atmosphere at a rate far faster than volcanism has in the past! And rate of change matters a lot with this kind of thing. I'm repeating myself, but again, it is not a certainty but it is a possibility that anthropogenic climate change could hit tipping points that Venus-ifies Earth on a much shorter, nearer term than anything relating to the expansion of the sun, on time scales that are worth worrying about (if we value humanity as a whole), and is the sort of thing we can have an impact on.

Both. I do believe that "communism will win" as an inevitability (with one big caveat, see below). Capitalism obviously is unsustainable and rife with internal contradictions that can only lead to its eventual demise. The obvious and broad example being that it requires infinite growth on a finite planet. But I think it can get very bad before it gets better, and expect it will further devolve into fascism (much more so than it already has) for most if not all of the western world, and the entire world will suffer as a result. Socialism, then communism will eventually emerge (since fascism is just as doomed by its contradictions as capitalism is), but before we get there, I expect there is going to be some truly unimaginably dark and horrible times on the way there. So in that sense, I am ultimately optimistic about the future of the world, but extremely pessimistic about its more immediate future.

But now for the caveat. I think that most people, even leftists, don't fully appreciate how much climate change is going to reshape the world. There is a real chance that it will get bad enough that civilization may not survive, that humanity as a species will be among the many that don't make it through the mass extinction we've only just entered. Even people fully on board with knowing climate change is bad and must be curtailed as much as possible as soon as possible still mostly don't realize how much a genuine existential threat it is on a planetary scale, on a scale of centuries and longer. It is by no means a certainty, but given the feedback loops we don't fully understand and definitely don't know how to interrupt, there is a possibility of Earth even going the way of Venus. Obviously I hope that's not the case, but it would be a mistake not to recognize the extreme potential of climate change. If we are able to mitigate it in time, I am like I said, ultimately optimistic. But I am beyond afraid that we won't be able to mitigate it in time.

In other words, it's not just "socialism or barbarism," it's socialism or annihilation.

I agree with all of that, but I think what's relevant here is that more people are becoming willing to aim the violence in the other direction, from the masses and towards the state. You are 100% right that political violence has always been normalized and accepted, but specifically (like in your example) it was the state use of violence against people that was normalized and accepted while people using violence against the state was broadly considered not just taboo but immoral.

The numbers in OP aren't just describing an increase in acceptance of all "political violence," but an acceptance for the masses to wield that political violence against the state, which is a very interesting, maybe even profound shift, a shift that is indicative of the ongoing collapse of the empire.

Yeah, I think it's really unfortunate that we can't dunk on this sort of thing on hexbear unless someone sufficiently famous says it, especially for our anarchist comrades who may not want to post their dunks on an ML-specific instance, or for people who have their feeds set to local. But since several months ago, it was inexplicably decreed that there is no place on hexbear for dunking if it's not actual politicians or someone with enough renown like Elon Musk directly, who are on the receiving end of the dunk. So for future reference, if you do want to dunk or discuss something concerning (or worse) that you found online somewhere, you now have to go to lemmygrad to do so. Thems the rules.

alcohol seems fine to me in comparison to the things that drive people to drink excessively

This is so relative and variable, it's impossible to fully agree or disagree with. Addiction and the root causes for it involve such a complex interactions of different factors that such a statement is almost meaningless.

Like, is alcohol "fine" compared to the crushing weight of a lifetime of extreme alienation due to capitalism? I don't know if "fine" is the right word, but sure, yes, alcohol is the smaller evil and the lesser detriment to society over all, in comparison. But that doesn't mean that the person who, completely understandably, drinks a bottle of vodka every night for years to deal with that alienation isn't doing damage to themselves (and likely increased pain and difficulty for their loved ones), by orders of magnitude greater than just the slow burn of alienation alone would have, even as the vodka makes the alienation vastly more bearable in the immediate short term.

And yes, almost any kind of distraction that replaces some pain of reality with a bit of dopamine can become an addiction that can potentially do great harm to the person afflicted by it. But there is still a spectrum of how bad various addictions can be to a person's over all health, and alcohol undeniably holds a place close to the far end of that spectrum of harm. For example, you aren't going to die at 40 from liver failure because of a social media addiction.

Addiction and habituation are complex. Different people are effected to different degrees by different types of addictions, but that doesn't mean all distractions that can potentially become addictions are equally dangerous or detrimental. None of that has to do with any of those addictions being at "fault" either. But it's a simple fact that continuously using alcohol as a means of coping with difficulty or pain will come with rapidly increasing costs to a person's health as well as diminishing returns on its efficacy even as a coping mechanism.

Seriously. It's the only reason I ever would have clicked the link. I feel bamboozled.