If you had the power to administer small but mildly unpleasant electrical shocks to a user whenever they used a specific word, phrase, or rhetorical tactic on the internet, what would you target?
My practical answer would be, of course, right wing shit, period. It wouldn't stop them but might slow their spread.
My fun/funny/unserious answer would be commission an algorithm to monitor Reddit so I don't have to that keeps track of exceedingly popular passive-aggressive and smug ways to start and end sentences and takes the top percentiles of them and makes them the shockers of the week. It would make Lemmyverse liberals a lot less redundant as a side effect, too.
"Umm, I'm sorry, honestly, but let's be honest here. It's almost as if..."
I would just shock people when they're lying online. That's it.
They can do it to people in person, but no more sock puppets or disingenuous BS on the internet. No more people taking credit or talking about their cousin who for real died from a mote of fentanyl dust.
In America they have no trains, so the people must organize their bodies into the shape of a train and pretend to magnetically levitate to their destination
The "human nature" argument. Idk why this line of argument pisses me off more than others. It just feels disingenuous on too many layers maybe.
Anyways I feel like I've seen it come up a lot in the last few days. It would be funny to see if the ones arguing it can be classically trained into abandoning it
Lots of things are "natural" that don't have to happen and in the contemporary world don't happen anyway. People dying of preventable diseases by drinking from the same water that they bathe and wash in is natural. People having uncorrected vision or being left to die because they are unable to walk when they're injured is natural. Besides, love and compassion and group solidarity is natural but the libertarian fucks want to lean on "everyone is an insatiable glutton just like me" excuses.
My first philosophy paper I started with an appeal to human nature and rightfully the prof did destroy that with big bold red markings. I did use the snappy start since I learned from the Economist and the big newspapers, be it Die Zeit or some Anglosphere ones that it is interesting and intellectual to do it.
It is mostly used to strengthen hegemonic ideology, it isn't scientific and many people using it have no clue about what "natural" is and neither do they have concepts about what did happen in pre-history, but they think they do - as I did, too. It is a scourge.
Surely there is a middle ground where the Adults In The Room that Make The Hard Decisions can Get Shit Done by doing only half of the atrocities for a marginally lower increased rate of profit.
Whenever someone says CCP... extra volts to the balls if they say "the international community", "regime" or any other geopolitical buzzwords they've pulled out their ass...
Whenever someone misuses the word "logic" to mean "reason(albe/ing) because they don't know what logic is, which would make the word almost unused. Would be so nice.
I would make it some random very uncommon word that everyone knew, then people who like being shocked could say it whenever they want. This would be my great gift to humanity.
My work email address. Everytime someone composes an email to me they'd have to decide "is this question worth the mild electrical shock or could I just Google this?" and I'd honestly take a pay cut to make this happen.