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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: February 9th, 2025

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  • Forgive my ignorance of the condition but what are her limitations? Can she communicate? Care for house plants? Read a book? Perform any artistic expression? Can she make you laugh? Even once a week/month/year?

    I’m struggling to think of a scenario where a person has any amount of conscious agency but can’t do anything of that produces a even a minor amount of value, unless you’re unduly restricting the definition of labor.




  • you can make shoes so you make people shoes

    Here’s a hypothetical:

    I’m in a feud with the person who runs the pasture land. He won’t kill his cattle/sheep if it’s to provide leather for my shoes. Everyone else likes him and his milk and they tell me to bury the hatchet.

    But he insists on ever thicker and higher quality boots because the pasture he “works” is so overgrown and muddy from poor maintenence. This cuts into my ability to supply quality shoes for everyone else so I can’t do it.

    Of course, I stutter and don’t do well with public speaking but he has a silver tongue. I can’t even lay out half the facts before he’s convinced the town that I’m a lazy parasite and a bad shoemaker; I’m exiled. I will now die starving and alone. The town will waste time and energy wearing through low quality woven shoes, content with the thought that they’re not wasting milk cows on that shitty cobbler.

    If there was a market/bartering economy:

    • I probably never have to interact directly with the herdsman
    • The value of shoes would counterbalance the lazy herdsman, forcing him to properly maintain his field or go shoeless
    • I’m not punished for my poor social skills and the herdsman is not rewarded for his. The value of our labor is insulated from our social ability, allowing for a less biased assessment of our goods and services.


  • The majority of Party arrests in the last 5 years

    Lmfao OK so this is eating shit straight from the horse’s ass. They feed you this sound bite but then say the number of arrests and executions is a state secret. They’re talking out of both sides of their mouth and you just shut your eyes to the dissonance.

    Everything is working perfectly as expected and above board, except for when it isn’t. But even when it isn’t it actually is, source: trust me bro

    “Give me one source that I won’t arbitrarily subject to a genetic fallacy. Just one single one.”


  • Yep, there are two things that can trigger regime change: precarious drops in material conditions and concerted foreign intervention. The Ancien régime’s food and debt crisis, Czar Nicholas’ economic collapse, post-WWI German austerity and economic struggles, Cold War coups and power plays all over the world, etc… It’s the same story over and over.

    The core value of sedentary civilization is stability and predictability. No population has ever, or will ever, flip their lives upside down and plunge into an uncertain power vacuum out of the goodness of their hearts. And yet ideologues on the internet insist that they can will revolutions into existence with memes.



  • I’m not both sidesing, I’m pointing out that misinformation and biased studies have existed forever. It’s the responsibility of the media to suss that out and verify it before reporting. That’s just a plain fact of the job, nobody can offload that onto the source.

    regular polls are sometimes wrong too

    “Sometimes wrong” is an incredibly generous way to put it. If reporters had got out ahead in vetting the bullshit vaccine-autism study before amplifying it, we wouldn’t have people dying of measles today. Asking them to do the bare minimum of checking that a human poll even happened is not asking much.

    lied about everything

    The source didn’t lie about anything, they used Ai mysticism to project plausible sounding answers. Anyone can do that and it’s not that subversive. The people who believe them either fundamentally don’t understand the tech or are too lazy to look closely. Don’t condone that passivity by pretending baseline media and technical literacy are impossible to achieve (especially for professional reporters).


  • Lotta pearl clutching in this thread, as if every poll has always been rigorous and checked against bias. At least when they run a sloppy simulation you automatically have a massive grain of salt instead of requiring every reader to sniff their methods.

    Would you rather read the headline “Simulated poll implies people could love Hitler” or “Poll finds people love Hitler *poll of KKK headquarters, sample size: Kyle”?

    Seems like Axios fucked up by not properly vetting their source but it’s no better or worse than them failing to catch a dishonest pollster.






  • Democrats are shit but God what I wouldn’t give for politics to no longer be a playground for twitch streamers, failed TV actors, retired sports stars and podcasters. Anyone with a mic and inflammatory hot takes can be a political force majeure without any risk, effort or leg work.

    Even though they’re both influencers, I respect the shit out of Kat Abughazaleh for the bare minimum fact that she’s actually out there organizing and helping her community. Hassan can say similar stuff from his $2.7m mansion but that doesn’t mean he deserves the same respect.





  • “Semantics”

    My guy, they just laid out your argument and demonstrated the particular flaws in your reasoning. What you’re describing isn’t secularism, it’s wishing the state would enforce your particular world view.

    Guess what? Removing religious mysticism from the equation doesn’t make that viable or ethical. They already tried this during the French Revolution and it sucked. Giving the state powers to attack nebulous things like metaphysical beliefs is reverting back to the problems we had for thousands of years under Popes and Kings and Caliphs and Emperors.