InappropriateEmote [comrade/them, undecided] @ InappropriateEmote @hexbear.net

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1

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186

Joined

4 yr. ago

TBH I don't feel like I know enough about the details to be anything but agnostic at this point, I just know I would not be surprised in the least if the U.S. military (usually via Ft. Detrick) origin theory did turn out to be real. There are some users here who I respect that do find it very plausible or even likely, and that alone is enough for me to not want it relegated to "a theory we do not entertain at hexbear." I share your suspicions. I'd also be fine to see the theory totally shot down. But I can't help but hate the idea of there being an official hexbear line of flat denial, you know?

It has already unironically been a thing here on hexbear. E.g.

It was definitely a

Reagan was the sitting US president that literally ushered in neoliberalism! He was the quintessential liberal. Just because you've been raised (I'm guessing in the US) to believe in the false dichotomy that liberals and conservatives are polar opposites, this is in fact not at all true. "Conservatives" are just one branch of liberal, not their antithesis. Reagan was a hardcore liberal, may he rest in piss.

Upvoting for the edit. It's rare to see people doing self crit and changing their position after having it explained to them why their initial position is wrong. I wish I saw it more often.

I can see where there may be some classist connotations with the insult "loser" but it is categorically not the same as a slur like the one OP was called. "Loser" just doesn't have the sort of splash damage (or history) that an actual slur does. There's a reason why this site will ban a user on the spot for calling someone else, even the most vile chud, the f-slur, but "loser" can be tossed around without much issue. But I do agree, it's always good to examine these things and even an insult that seems innocuous can have some baggage that might make it worth reconsidering its use.

While totally understandable, that just plays into the atomization feedback loop. It was good that you stopped to help people, especially strangers. I wish more people were willing to do that in this ever worsening individualist-diseased society. Next time the people who need help when you're in a position to give it may be fully deserving of it and appreciative. I hope you don't let this bigot be what keeps you from helping others who might need it. Don't let her reprehensibility erode your kindness.

resort to crude remarks about someones percieved sexuality

It's worse than that. A slur doesn't just denigrate you as the immediate target, it is a word used as a tool of oppression against an entire marginalized group. If she had just said "are you a loser?" or something like that, she'd be an asshole sure, but whatever. "Are you a [f-slur]?" makes her not just an asshole but far worse, a bigot.

It's a joke from a bit account. Don't worry about it, I'm not up on it enough to quite get it either.

What the fuck is a trick-taking game

You never played Hearts? Or Spades? Bridge is another one. Euchre. Plenty of others, all with variations. They're card games where players take turns laying down cards in rounds and the cards left over at the end of the round end up being taken by one of the players. Those taken cards and sometimes the round itself is called "the trick." Usually the game is scored depending on what the cards were that were in the trick. Like in Hearts, each heart card is worth one point, the queen of spades is worth 13, so someone who takes a trick containing 2 hearts and the QoS scores 15 points.

NATOpedia claims that the "brave Mujahideen fighters" part is an urban legend, that the dedication was always and only just to the "gallant people of Afghanistan" as Carl said. But they specifically only mention the theatrical version, not VHS. I for sure without question did see a video a few years back of someone recording their TV while playing the VHS with the "brave Mujahideen" script visible at the end, but I can't rule out that it might have been an edited video.

It would be cool if someone really could confirm whether the "Mujahideen" message was there. Not only for the obvious reasons, but also as yet another example of natopedia spreading lies, calling something an urban legend that was real.

The advantage gravity has is that it never quite goes away, no matter how far you are.

That's true of all the fundamental forces, though. They all drop off over distance with inverse square laws. Like if you had two lone electrons in an otherwise empty universe, their electromagnetic repulsion would also persist indefinitely at 1/r^2 strength, just like gravity. The difference is that our universe has near-perfect charge neutrality at large scales.

They can never connect the dots between their desired end result and the actual reality of the conflict.

What idealism does to a mf.

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.