It feels so weird to see her character compared to cartoonishly evil ones like Darth Vader and the Joker. When watching the movie she is clearly a very damaged person, her character is tragic. The way she treats Gump makes sense, her culture is intensely ableist which combined with her trauma provides context to her actions. The idea that she is somehow a bigger asshole than a domestic terrorist with no concrete backstory, a serial killer, or even evil space jesus, is ridiculous. Frankly it reeks of casual sexism whenever I see people smear her, it feels like folks are either parrotting the opinions they found online, or never tried to understand her character while watching the movie.

Philanthropy is a pr scam for billionaires.

It let’s them doge taxes while feeling like they are doing good in the world, while using their money to cause more problems. That article is about Gates screwing up education systems while trying to ‘fix’ them, because he has billions of dollars while the people who actually have a clue on how to fix things do not. Look into the other actions his foundation takes and you will see similar patterns, from funding destructive agriculture to sourcing their funds from private prisons.

For the claim that Buffett is doing any good to the world, in his own words:

“There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

It’s good to see this division inside the French State’s forces. Clearly the pressure from recent protests is having an effect. Let’s hope these cops, judges, and politicians ruin their collective ability to maintain this perverse ‘order’.

Wow, this is sick! Thanks for posting your art, it’s great to see even if I’ve never played the game.

“Apolitical” is a political position.

If you claim to support trans rights, and with them the broader struggle for gender self determination, then you ought to support the people putting their bodies on the line to defend it. Specifically the antifacists and anarchists (many of them queer themselves) who fight facism on the streets. Supporting a group targetted for genocide requires supporting the kinds of tactics that can fight the facists working to exterminate that group.

I suppose it’s a slightly more accurate term. The messages here are not truly private since they are not encrypted, but since they are sent directly no one should read them in the normal course of using the platform. Calling them private might imply to people that other people cannot read them, rather than the reality that it is just very unlikely anyone will. I would also argue that if something is released to an authority it is not “private” even if it is not publicly available.

Honestly, it doesn’t really matter which you use. People will generally understand either way, so you can go ahead and keep saying PM and others will say DM and we can all just understand that they mean the same thing.

I have one of those too! Glad yours is blooming. Mine flowers sometimes, but sadly it got infected with thrips a couple years ago and I haven’t been able to kill them. It flowers less often, but does okay with regular maintenance on my end (rubbing all the surfaces with a little neem oil and soap in water).

For real, this is sobering information. I already try to avoid microwaving plastics, but I’m gonna be even more careful now, and try to spread this study. Billions of nanoplastics per square centimeter, it’s scary to think about the size of containers, number that would likely be used in a day, and the fact that infants are so small with that information in context.

I’m honestly impressed. Like, yeah, it isn’t cool to mislead people and whatnot but you know that. I hope you can find a creative writing outlet on Lemmy because I’d love to read your stories. Also, just because your stories aren’t in a book format doesn’t make them less real, if writing books is your goal then please seek it, but there are other formats that are no less “real”.

Web serials, for example, tend to be first draft work so people are about as chill about grammar as they are on reddit. Or you could take a bunch of stories you made on the internet (like you have here) and make them into a collection someday if you really want to have a book. Point is, you are actually writing, and its good writing at that. Please keep doing it, and I hope you find a place where you feel good about what you’re making, whatever that looks like to you.

They’re saying they aren’t vegetarian, so know what real chicken nuggets taste like. OP worried that people might assume they are vegetarian, and therefore might not have a good idea of what chicken nuggets taste like. That sentence is meant to avoid people assuming that.

That’s my best guess anyway.

Capitalism is inherently contradictory to my basic values, terrible at efficient economic allocation, actively destroying everything, and is built on a foundation of war and genocide.

I believe that everyone should have as much autonomy as possible. Capitalism’s basic premise is that economic allocation is determined by those who own capital, allocation of the resources communities and individuals use is an autonomy problem. Since Capitalism concentrates power among a very few, it is actively limiting the autonomy of literally billions of people for the benefit of less than a thousand.

The allocation of resources itself, the basic purpose of any economic system, is incredibly inefficient undee Capitalism. Take food, vast amounts are produced, enough to feed everyone, yet people starved to death while I was writing this. Not only that, food itself is peoduced in such a way as to maximize profit. This comes at the expense of local food systems, which have been in large part dismantled by environmental damage. It comes at the expense of vast CO2 emissions to run the machines that mine phosphorous, manufacture fertilizer and pesticides, run the various pieces of farm equipment, process food, and the planes, ships, trucks that ship it to stores. It comes at the expense of soil health, which monocropping, tilling, fallow, and agrochemicals all harm. This is just food, look at any other sphere of human activity and you will find a similar story. Meaningful measures of efficiency and system health are ignored to pump out as much profit as possible, and this gets called “efficient”.

Capitalism is the great machine that is destroying everything. Under it’s logic of endless expansion we have seen entire ecosystems bulldozed and turned into suburbs, watched millions of people be enslaved even in the present day, witnessed war and genocide on a scale never before fathomed. Both world wars happenned under Capitalism, and war has continued unabated ever since. The so-called United States is the dominant Capitalist power on Earth, and holds millions of people in legal slavery, if you don’t believe me read the 13th amendment to its constitution. Many other people are describing the results of ecosystem destruction, the Climate Catastrophe, as their primary reason for anti-capitalist beliefs.

Capitalism as a system grew under feudalism before supplanting it, and directly springboarded off of Colonialism to become the dominant economic system of this world. The horrors of colonization follow(ed) a similar logic of expansion to capital, exploiting millions of people through slavery and genocide, spreading plagues that have killed countless individuals and entire cultures, introducing poverty to places where the concept had not preciously made sense. Capitalism cannot be separated from its historical roots, if you want to learn more about this I recommend the, “A ______ People’s History of the United States” series of books. I’d prioritize the Indigenous and Black histories.

This is an indictment of Capitalism, but presents no alternatives. I will do that here.

Indigenous cultures had/have land-based economies that center care. This is not an alternative, it is thousands of them, each adapted to a local ecosystem. In order to survive we need to localize resource production, and land-based economies are the way to do that. I would recommend learning about how Indigenous people groups in your area thrived before Colonialism forcibly severed many of their connections to place, how they survive today, and how they are working to heal their relationships to the land. A related concept is that of the gift economy, a common practice for many groups world-wide, the particulars of which are as diverse as our species. Look into it, gift economies work, and operate on principles that are essentially as “anti-capitalism” as one can get.

Commons-based peer production is another, complimentary option for future economic systems. It is directly born out of the open source software movement, and imagines structuring all production around simular principles. People produce for themselves and their peers, keeping resources in common to ensure equitable allocation. If you do not believe commons can work, I would recommend looking into Ostrom’s eight principles for managing commons, just highlight that phrase and paste it into a search engine. A related concept is that of “cosmo-local production”. The idea is that physical production is localized to reduce impact on the planet (local), while information on process is shared freely with everyone (cosmo). This ties into the idea of “donut economics” which is basically the idea that we should meet human needs while staying within planetary boundaries, the inside and outside of the metaphorical donut respectively. Look up any of these terms and you will find loads of thought-provoking writing, imagining a better world. Plus many of the people doing the theorizing are programmers like you, I’m sure you’ll find ideas that resonate with you if you look for them here.

It took courage to make this post, thanks for starting some interesting discussions. I might believe you are wrong about Capitalism, but I respect your honesty and willingness to engage with other ideas here. I would strongly encourage reading further to understand these concepts on a deeper level than a Lemmy comment can give you, especially the economic alternatives, I basically just skimmed over a whole field of emerging theory.

Edit: accidentally posted before I was done, added 3 paragraphs.

Holy moly this is a wild story. I really hope people don’t get murdered, and Braxton gets a positive outcome from the legal system. But beyond the shock from reading this, I’m left with anger.

The sheer audacity of these racist clowns, and the fact that its working!? Like, courts just refuse to hear cases on a lot of the discrimination that happens surrounding elections, so even though it might be illegal its the white courts that decide that. And they BURNED DOWN LEWIS’ HOME! Holy shit is that terrifying, and we know nobody’s ever facing any consequences for it.

One thing that is truly inspiring amidst all the racism and systemic violence is the mayor himself. This guy is out here practicing mutual aid, organizing community events, and fighting to get food for his community. One of his goals with becoming mayor was to get a grocery store in town, huge respect for this guy.

Fuck White Supremacy, fuck the State, but hats off to this man. I hope he gets what he’s fighting for.

I think we gotta work on building community if we want to see people really move away from streaming services. One person with a NAS in a small apartment building could help a lot of their neighbors out with entertainment. It would be more work for the person hosting, but if the folks who benefit help their friend out too it might end up being less work overall.

I’d give someone access, teach them how to use the software, and download some of their favorite shows if they let me borrow their truck when I needed, shared dinner sometimes, or helped me clean house. I think a lot of folks would benefit from that kind of thing, but it would require us making friends with our neighbors. Which, on reflection, is actually really really hard. I imagine it would be kinda awkward to start the conversations around this, but you’d get around the step of everyone getting their own NAS at least!

It’s important to question the beliefs we’re raised with, especially when seeking truth as scientists tend to do. I’m glad to see research like this, and especially the bit at the end of the abstract about examining prior conclusions that were influenced by patriarchal cultural bias. There’s something about how hard this notion of, “men hunt, women gather and take care of children, in all human societies past and present” is to shake that has me reminded of something:

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

That heuristic is generally taken to be accurate among the scientifically literate, Carl Sagan coined it even, but it is deeply flawed. Cultural notions of ordinary define what is seen as extraordinary. An idea that is normalized in our society needs much less evidence to convince people of it, while one that goes against normality needs much more to even begin to gain traction. The concept is flawed because ‘ordinary’ is socially defined, so while it can be used to discredit obviously wrong ideas like the existence of ghosts, it can also be used to discredit obviously wrong ideas like the CIA using LSD to (try to) control peoples’ minds. Pretty extraordinary claim, but it did happen. Maybe you see the issue with this heuristic, while the idea expressed is intuitive, it hides a sneaky cultural bias.

I think something similar goes on with ideas like the one this study refutes. It seems so clear in our patriarchal society that men and women are different, suited to different roles as we’ve been told so many times growing up, that the opposite concept is extraordinary. So you get scientists coming up with truly extraordinary explanations of why women are buried with hunting tools to maintain their conception of ‘normal’, and anyone who wants to refute it needs to go above-and-beyond only to still be met with skepticism.

Yeah I have thought about it, how messed up the whole concept of borders are. They inevitably end up as dividing lines that cut people off from their territory or each other. Then the nation-states that enforce the borders work to create a reality that the borders make sense. Wars are fought, media is created, entire histories are erased!

The results are cataclysmic, as we are seeing now, with endlessly compounding crises. The politicians in this are complicit in everything, as are all the other members of the ruling class, but the real twist of the knife is that the rest of us are too. If we want any chance of survival we must give up our modern conveniences, living instead in a way that regenerates the Earth.

This is unthinkable to a great many people. So much infrastructure is built around a destructive way of life, it is hard to imagine how we could possibly live differently. Paradoxically, it is even harder to imagine how the current state of things can continue in the face of climate disater after climate disaster. We must learn to abandon existing structures of power, to think and act on smaller scales. Learning to live as part of our local environments will be the beginning of the lengthy process to restoring our planet, but it will take a great deal of work, from so very many of us.

Bathrooms. I see single person bathrooms with gendered signs all the time. It makes no sense. Not only that, I’ve experienced the single gender neutral bathroom at my local university, and it is easily one of the nicest public bathrooms I’ve ever used. There is a common area with sinks, and each toilet gets a well-ventilated little room, with doors that lock. Not only is the gendering unnecessary, it makes bathrooms actively worse than they could be.

Or, and hear me out here, we don’t actually need the politicians to act in order to make change. We can do it ourselves.

At the end of the day, existing government institutions are ways of organizing people, resources, and power. They are structured in such a way that a few are able to hold power over many, forcing all of us to go along with what the richest want out of us. There is no reason to believe these institutions are the only viable means of enacting change. In fact, the long history of inaction by those in power is strong evidence that necessary change cannot come from any existing State apparatus. If the only way to make lasting social change really were through existing institutional channels, then we would be doomed.

But we are not doomed. We can organize ourselves, in ways that do not introduce perverse incentives for a few who control all. We can topple this crumbling order, and replace it with the chaos of things actually changing. None of this will be easy, and revolution is inherently a dangerous process, but is doing nothing any less dangerous?

If you believe a different world is possible, you can be part of creating it. There are multiple points of struggle which have revolutionary potential, housing, systemic racism, youth liberation, maybe you can think of one in your community. A problem that, for it to be truly solved, requires radical change beyond what governments can offer, combined with an oppressed population that has the will to make that change. Get involved with a struggle like this if you know of one, expand your conception of what is humanely possible, or just try to get some friends together to do something. Doesn’t have to be a lot, maybe learn about your local wildflowers together, make some garden beds from pallets, just work to form and strengthen the sorts of social bonds we’ll need to survive the coming storm.

Start making real change today: learn about tenants unions then try to organize one. We don’t need politicians to live longer, we need to take control of our own power.