OpenStars @ OpenStars @discuss.online Posts 44Comments 3,853Joined 1 yr. ago
And yet... how many people actually implement them, in daily life? It would be great though wouldn't it?:-D
Weirdly, it works for me from Discuss.Online, but not from slrpnk.net, where the OP post was submitted from. It also works from Lemmy.World.
I have not taken any time to properly learn about whatever’s going on in Germany lately (fwiw I did not presume that it was the entire government, just a portion of it). I edited my comment to reflect that.
Moreover perhaps I should say that it is unfair to pin all of my hopes for the future of democracy onto Germany? But thems the breaks.:-P
Brexit was a real thing that actually happened. Germany just elected a far right wing government (Edit: I have not taken any time to properly learn about whatever's going on in Germany). The amount of "we are above all that and similar things will never happen to us" seems quite high in that thread. Disinformation campaigns will be coming for every nation on earth that could make a difference to the sender's agenda, in forms custom designed to work for the target. Fortunately though, those leopards would never ever even so much as think about eating my face off...
By your definition, it seems like a gun or knife could be inherently bad, rather than its' wielder? Or scissors even, though most people would say that the context matters more: e.g. scissors are fine and quite useful tools, depending on the context i.e. in the hands of a child who is running with them they can be "bad", yet that hardly makes scissors "evil". ✂️
I would agree with a differently phrased version of that though: people cannot be TRULY good (or evil) unless they have a certain minimum amount of "character". Like if a cat or dog looked at you grumpily, you may joke about it, but who cares really? (unless it's a BIG cat like a lion, but even then, while its status may be important to us, we would hardly call it truly "good" or truly "evil"?)
And the same with a computer: like AI may end up killing us all, but do we blame it really, or rather should we blame ourselves for telling it which 1-0 bits to flip, while for itself it really has no clue what it's even doing... or more importantly, why?
You can't be truly good unless you at least have a certain capacity to be evil, and vice versa, maybe? So like (as several examples here pointed out) if you return the cart to the cart return area of the store, in the rain, and as people who did not do that drive by you and look abashed/ashamed - they themselves knew that they could have done the same, and they feel the guilt inside their own minds (regardless of external expression of such or not) bc they KNOW that they could have made the same choice, yet decided to do the opposite instead. Perhaps you yourself don't even judge them harshly... but that doesn't (fully) matter, as they actually judge themselves that way, and find their own standard of behavior wanting, i.e. they do not live up to what they wished that they would do, and that others would likewise do.
So like scissors, if a dumb person hurts you, then yeah it causes pain, but would we call that truly "evil", or the reverse of that "good"? Perhaps the jury is still out on that one.
Ah, so Canadian then? J/k... and I'm sorry!? :-P
For one thing, a greater reliance upon authority figures than critical thinking skills. That sounds bad, but really genuinely truly how many of us know better than an economics professor with a PhD and decades of experience in exactly that field, like Robert Reich? So we tend to think in like manner as well.
A big difference is that if said authority figure ever lets us down then we distrust anything that they say, while conservatives continue to offer the benefit of the doubt bc if they are in a position of authority, there must be a reason for it. Tbh, pastors telling people from behind a pulpit to watch Faux News has a lot to do with it...:-(
That is not possible - e.g. if nothing else there is entropy.
The only constant is change.
As you eloquently put there's far more going on than just that, but also... yeah.
In addition to the practical realities of a 2-party system as others are pointing out, there's the fact that the Left eats its own. Nobody is ever good enough, and compromising with "the enemy" is "bad", hence people can either keep their moral purity and lose, or else compromise their ethics in order to move forward, but not both. For example, Biden reached across the aisle and managed to get a ton of shit done - but who even cared? To anyone not on the right it wasn't enough, while to the right itself it was all (claimed to be) bad to begin with, hence the message of "BoTh SiDeS sAmE" won out and thus the puppetmasters wanting to influence the election got their desires met.
As long as people choose to remain in their ignorance, we can't influence outcomes for either better or worse.
You shut your mouth 👄, haha!:-) /s
We all lie on a spectrum somewhere, surely:-). And we can always improve - it helps to listen to statements such as this that wherever we start from, makes us better people:-).
Though some are more monstrous than others:-).
Lemmy can be a great source of news:-).
Oh wow, it works fine for me on PieFed.
Edit: also it works in Chrome but not Firefox Android, so it seems related to the method of access. Anyway thanks for bringing it to my attention!:-)
There seems to be a lot of unrest going on globally. And these weapons are so extremely capable. I don't even want to walk around with the equivalent of root access in my pocket, and I routinely remove user-write access to my files that I desire to preserve as a backup. So why carry guns somewhere that you know that you plan to get smashed-out drunk at? That just seems highly irresponsible to me.
Though the 3 that I mentioned (or possibly just 2 of them?) seemed more intentional, where someone had to prepare the incendiary explosive devices in advance prior to deployment. And if anything, that just might be worse. But yeah, they are fucked up either way.
I very much enjoyed reading the OLD scifi works, like HG Wells "Time Machine", and anything by Isaac Asimov. These present quite a different world-view - including much more realistic, and dare I say pessimistic outlooks on how the future would look (hint: virtually identical to today, just with a higher level of technical sophistication).
These are more rare to see in movie form, b/c people don't want to pay money to see such - unless that adversity only exists in the start of the movie, but is then overcome through hard work & ingenuity - although a fantastic exeption exists in Wall-E. There, the people basically simply sat down and never bothered to ever stand up again, not seeing any point to need to do so? OF COURSE that is more realistic than e.g. Star Trek where people all work together, following military levels of precision and discipline, for the nebulous goal of "the common good".
I recall the Black Fleet Crisis series of Star Wars books where Luke chases down a non-Jedi order of force users ("White Current") that chooses not to get involved in galactic politics, and therefore managed to avoid the purge that took the Jedi down along with the rest of the Old Republic as it converted into the Empire. Though the vast majority of the Star Wars universe seemed to revolve around the Jedi v. Sith dynamic, with all the mere "plebes" being relatively unimportant - much like today where the "real" people (Bezos, Musk, Trump) fly high above us in their sky castles, untouched by "laws" of society or to a large degree even physics (decay, death, disorder - all are muted at least some amount due to the influx of resources to overcome their effects, e.g. those who have health care are effected less by diseases than those who do not). And the rest of us just suffer from their fights, as shit rolls downhill. THAT may be the biggest distinction between Star Wars vs. Trek then: in the latter, everyone mattered purely based on their ability, usually more so rather than some accident of their birth (Wesley Crusher was a somewhat unusual situation, being on a starship due to his mother's assignment there, but most children did not have access to such opportunities).
Can we as a species not imagine ourselves in a world beyond all these self-destructive forms of oppression?
In a word: "no". Entropy exists, as too does inertia, and we cannot simply turn aside as if it were literally nothing the collective force that propelled us towards this point. If you are at least familiar with the religious language: to dust we came, and to dust we shall return - it is an error in philosophy to think that we can rise above it all without any difficulties as those forces work to claw and cling and force us back down into the us-vs-them, eat-or-be-eaten set of dynamics that govern the basic principles of our world, even below the subatomic level. It was naive of us (imho) to think, not that it could not be done, but that it would be so easy. Like a doctor, if we want to cure a disease, we first have to diagnose it, which means opening our eyes to see clearly the road ahead of us. That is why works such as Rules for Rulers are so upsetting to us: b/c it exposes our own hypocrisy and wishful thinking that the world could magically become like how we wish it, without any investment of effort on our part. So: are you sure that you want to have what you asked for?
Farscape and Firefly are neat shows that are a bit like you asked though:-), and within the realm of scifi. Those type of space operas though get expensive to try to produce on a TV or movie budget, so there aren't that many to begin with - that's why anime is so awesome, allowing a deeper and wider exploration of possibilities (just by virtue of making numerically more of them, the chances of one rising up that will be truly great rise, plus an author can gain experience and thereby create better and better ones over time). Like Sword Art Online: is it "pure fantasy", or is it "scifi", or both, or neither, or... something else altogether? Whatever the case, it's a great one if you haven't consumed it yet:-).
Though as CGI costs continue to lower, I wager that we'll see more of the traditional "space opera" types of ye olden times resume once again. Although... is there a difference then really, b/t "real life" people in costumes (like Worf or Data in ST:TNG), "actual puppets" like Farscape, and "full CGI" like anime? Check out a trailer for "Exception" (https://www.netflix.com/title/81002444), a sci-fi fantasy where people travel to the stars and then 3d print their bodies rather than preserve the originals in cryo-sleep, leading to an issue that forms dramatic tension as they try to resolve it. People are people, regardless of what technology they have access to. That's why I think Star Trek was "wrong" - or not wrong per se but yeah, highly stilted and unrealistic, though useful all the more deeply for serving as an aspirational goal, yet completely neglecting to touch base with the part of about to actually ARRIVE at such a far-different utopian society? I mean, we ALREADY, RIGHT NOW have the ability to feed the entire world - we could do the Star Trek stuff RIGHT NOW, even without "antimatter reactors" or "replicators" or "energy to matter converters". Instead, we choose not to. Hence why we've collectively (societally I mean) lost interest in watching the show: we've already chosen not to walk that path, so we're all just wondering which one we'll end up moving towards instead... Altered Carbon it is then, it would seem:-(.
I edited the OP to acknowledge my poor choice of title.
In the Lemmy web UI in a browser, clicking the third button from the left (from the left it's the upvote, downvote, then the page with a turned corner looking thing) will show the source code for a message. Below it's colored green after having pressed it:
The "Alt text" is the part between the straight brackets, before the URL in the parentheses. So "img1", "img2", and "img3" in the screenshot - see how original they are!?:-P
Ghost in the Shell is another fantastic one! There are different versions of it and I'm sure how readily accessible various parts are vs. are not likely varies between them. But anyway that does sound totally consistent with its premise that everything that we have now we would still have but it would be just a tiny bit better integrated in terms of the mind+body connection.
If I spoiled something for LOTR then I apologize - fwiw I think it might not be a true "spoiler" bc what I mentioned about humans going on to the next world may never have been resolved in the books? I never read them though - what I said came from Wikipedia, and I only read the porlogue to The Silmarillion. And the Elven life cycle is just "details", or at least that's how I feel but if you feel differently and do get to it later then I hope it won't ruin your enjoyment of that portion of the book:-).
Starship Troopers was just a stupid sci-fi movie, but I think you got where I was going more with the reference to Star Wars. As in there's still wars, literal slavery, enormous inequality, bureaucratic wastefulness, and in general the Yin/Yang play between aspects like "good" and "evil" where there is nothing that is wholly one or the other.
Case in point: the Jedi were such massive frauds, claiming to value non-attachment, but then propping up the corrupt establishment that ignored the socially dispossed even on the home planet of Coruscant, leaving orphans to rot in the lower levels of the city-planet while the Jedi live in their fabulous sky palace with all the money they could ever need or want. But rather than get on an elevator and go down to visit those kids that exist 10 minutes travel away, the Jedi instead are sent out to whatever planet has the most valuable commodities and engage in whatever activities work towards increasing the overall wealth of The Republic. The real twist there is: it's not the ignoring of the needs of the poor that makes the Jedi hypocrites, it's the FAILURE to ignore the "needs" of the wealthy.
Or at least that's one way to look at it, but perhaps I'm wrong - in any case that whole universe seems designed to show off those kinds of dynamics, where want and poverty are still very much reality, unlike Star Trek where The Federation at least has moved beyond that.
stories like Altered Carbon and Elysium seem far more plausible in the very near future than any of the other sci fi universes out there
Sigh... yeah:-(. It's like people are giving up on the aspirational stuff that seems too unrealistic to even be of interest, hence e.g. Altered Carbon despite the mind drive actually calls out to us as viewers as being something worth thinking about, bc it's not only likely but inevitable (IF technology could be developed to make that lifestyle a possibility).
Well we know it's not oil or the USA would have explored it already... (\s:-P)