Excrubulent

Excrubulent , 2 months ago

In a dump truck.

Excrubulent , 2 months ago

It actually would be a good thing. Pariah instances are how the fediverse will have to moderate itself, and these people have shown themselves to be incapable of playing well with others. I purposely avoided joining any of their subs because I saw how toxic their influence was on reddit.

If you look at peertube, there's one instance that hosts Steven Crowder and Alex Jones and like two other people who I assume are lesser demons of some kind. I would avoid any instance that doesn't have the good sense to defederate from that one. This is a similar thing. I doubt the tankies are going to be on the popular side of the schism if it happens, they would have an echo chamber and we would be rid of them.

The thing about an echo chamber like that is that thanks to the public nature of federation status, it would be obvious who the pariah instances are, so anyone still there would be made aware that they are the minority, not the voice of the people in any way. That's something that takes longer to notice in a forum like truth social. The numbers might be there for people to see, but it's a different platform so you can say there's a slow adoption rate or something, like you can say about Lemmy. With pariah instances there is a direct and obvious comparison, and people have left because your instance fucked up. That's going to drive all but the most hardcore folks away to other instances.

Excrubulent , 2 months ago

Also, "Marxism-Leninism" as a term was coined by Stalin, but there's a reason people avoid the term "Stalinism", because even these people understand that his horrific legacy can't be revised.

So whenever you hear the term, you can understand that it's basically Stalinism papered over with the names of dead men who couldn't object to him puppeteering them and coopting their legacy to lend legitimacy to his reign of terror.

Excrubulent , 2 months ago

Obfuscation. They know lemmygrad is too obviously tankie for most people, but lemmy.ml is not so obvious. The .ml is a dogwhistle that a lot of users won't understand, so they can buy some measure of legitimacy that way. I guess they keep lemmygrad because they also want a place where they can go full mask-off.

Excrubulent , 2 months ago

I don't think that's a good solution. If I personally block an instance they can still see my comments and posts and have full conversations alongside them that everybody except me can read. I reserve blocking for genuine harrasment, not horrible ideas in general. I'd rather be part of the discussion and use that to build a case for defederation if it's really so bad I'd want to block them.

Excrubulent , 2 months ago

If your theory is correct, then why would they also keep many of their users uninformed? Referring to Lemmy.ml, of course. You claim it’s for legitimacy, but doesn’t that cease to fulfill its purpose?

Because the users that don't know what the instance is for are the ones that help lend legitimacy to it, because then people like you can believe that it's just a general instance with no political undertones. You aren't running cover for them, you are their cover.

Just think for a second about what you're suggesting. They want to make an instance that is to lend legitimacy to a fringe political ideology, and they openly tell all of their users that that's exactly what they're doing? Then all anyone would need to do to destroy that legitimacy would be to publish whatever message the users receive explaining the true purpose of the instance. The cover only works if it's deniable, and your idea would make it completely undeniable.

Is the goal to make a generalist instance, but with slightly more MLs, but also divert the MLs to Lemmygrad?

That is one of the goals, yes.

Excrubulent , 2 months ago

Is Lemmy.world a cover for Liberalism, because it’s run by liberals? Is db0 a cover for Anarchism and Libertarian Socialism, because db0 is a Libertarian Socialist?

Liberals and libertarian socialists are usually pretty open about what they believe, so there's no cover needed. They're not fringe ideologies like tankies have.

However neoliberalism is a fairly hated ideology. If the people who ran lemmy.world were literally the same people running a neoliberalism sub on that instance and they also ran thatcher.love or whatever, and they banned people for saying neoliberalism was trash, then yeah, it would be a reasonable inference that lemmy.world was some sort of entryist ploy.

It is the existence of lemmygrad combined with the behaviour of the people running lemmy.ml that makes the case to defederate. If that happens and you don't like it, you could always migrate your account, unless you like it there, in which case you're probably not the normie you first appeared to be.

Excrubulent OP , 2 months ago

Yeah, it's amazing how radicalisation continues apace regardless of who's in power, because they all obviously suck.

It's also amazing how the liberals' strategy of "VOTE!!!" turns into "don't criticise anything about us or else you'll get the fascists," the moment you say that you do vote but you think the liberals suck anyway.

I'm glad to hear you're working in your community. I am trying to get into that. It's hard with a disability but it's becoming more and more apparent to me that with my disability it is also my only viable shot at long term wellbeing.

Excrubulent OP , 2 months ago

I'm not American, but a further left party exists, it's called the green party. It just isn't a viable strategy. The Majority Report is a US podcast that are very electoralist, but from a left perspective. I don't agree with their electoralism, but one strategy they talk about a lot is primarying republicans, because both parties are vulnerable to this approach. They have flipped in the past, so there is value to the idea I guess. The problem is there's only so far you can take a strategy like that before the political machinery subsumes it. Smart people have tried electoralism for a very long time, and equally smart people have worked against them. The structures in place however reinforce the logic of hierarchy and will not allow us to vote for true liberation.

There's nothing wrong with voting, but it will never bring about the world we want. We have to do direct action.

Excrubulent , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

Black Hole: 1
Neutron Star: 0

Excrubulent OP , 2 months ago

It's Void Bastards.

Excrubulent , 2 months ago

Intelligence is domain specific. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Did you know the founders of NASA's JPL were sex majick cultists?

Excrubulent , 2 months ago

He's going to yell slurs at you.

Excrubulent , 2 months ago

I can measure the improvements in my mental health in the reduced frequency of car-screams I've had to do lately. That's if you don't count singing Tool songs of course.

Excrubulent , 2 months ago

It was allowed to happen because there are no regulations covering these submarines, especially in international waters. Safety is generally opt-in because the people who commission them intend to use them, so of course they'll listen to engineers and do it right.

Of course sometimes you'll get someone so far up their own ass that they can't hear anything except their own farts.

You can also see the move-fast-and-break-things bullshit in what he said. That mentality sort of works for software development but silicon valley is exporting it into realms where breaking things means killing people.

Excrubulent , 2 months ago

You kind of are forced to use Edge though. There are certain functions via which Edge and only Edge will always launch. F1, the help button, is bound to a function that launches Edge anywhere in Windows Explorer, so you have a hotkey that cannot be rebound ready to pop Edge into your face at any time if you happen to fat-finger it.

The only way you can prevent it from launching Edge is either to intercept the keystroke with AHK or similar, or remove Edge in an unsanctioned manner that requires deep system fuckery. There are other links within the system settings dialogues that do this too.

At that point I'd call it mandatory.

Excrubulent , 2 months ago

I... actually don't think they will remember those things about me, if I'm perfectly honest (I never let them see me doing them)

Excrubulent , 2 months ago

As someone who lives in Auscalifornia, it is kind of uncannily accurate.

Excrubulent , 2 months ago

Reverse racism is bullshit because "white" as a category is only exclusionary. It does not exist to acknowledge any culture or nationality. I am white but would lose nothing from my identity if the concept were abolished tomorrow.

It is a political category that exists purely to discriminate against those who fall outside of it. In that sense, this eugenics program was indeed "a very white way of thinking".

You don't have to identify with that if you're white. You can reject the concept of race as being valid - it is unscientific and entirely socially constructed - whilst still recognising that racial categories and racism have real consqeuences and do real harm.

Excrubulent , 2 months ago

Where did you get that definition? What is the context? And even then, the point is not to find a dictionary definition but to understand what race is and what it means.

Dictionaries describe how words are used, they are not complete academic breakdowns of concepts. Yes, some people - like you - will call reverse racism actual racism, so the dictionary captures that usage, but even it acknowledges that that is atypical.

Once you understand that white is not truly a part of anyone's identity but a political category that is imposed by a power structure, you can stop getting butthurt whenever anyone attacks the concept, because you'll realise that you don't have to take it personally.

Honestly it's pretty insulting to the racism that non-white people face every single day to apply the same word to what white people deal with. It is not in any way equivalent.

Excrubulent , 2 months ago

It's almost like white is literally different to all those other racial categories.

White is an exclusionary concept. If someone is half black, half asian or half hispanic, then they are typically treated by society as non-white unless they are white-passing, and even then their treatment will change as soon as their family is included in the picture. They are not considered non-black, non-asian or non-hispanic.

It's easy to say that you would consider them half/half, but that's just not what they experience in the world outside this comment thread, so it's meaningless.

Excrubulent , 2 months ago

It's telling that the only real example of so-called anti-white racism that anyone can come up with is about someone who is mixed-race experiencing discrimination from their family.

It sucks and I'm sorry that happens to you, but it's not anti-white. It's another form of racism that only affects non-white people. Just because it comes from non-white people doesn't make it anti-white.

Excrubulent , 2 months ago

Fine, "other members of their community."

So let me get this straight:

Denigrating someone explicitly because of their white ancestry is not anti-white.

Does it happen to and genuinely negatively affect white people? Or are they specifically targeting you as a mixed-race person?

Excrubulent , 2 months ago

Yes, white people are negatively affected by being denigrated too.

"Denigrated"? Sure. We're talking about the specific oppression you're talking about, and I don't see any examples of this kind of racism affecting white people.

And starting with "When you’re mixed-race" doesn't really create the impression that this is a form of oppression that affects other people.

Excrubulent , 2 months ago

If a black person called me a cracker it wouldn't scare me very much because I know that I have the privilege of being white, and I know that, whether I like it or not, the entire white-supremacist apparatus of the state is likely to prevent me from having to deal with any racial oppression. Those individual people could still hurt me, but so could anyone. They are still far less likely to attack me because they know how dangerous that would be for them, but a white person attacking a black person is more likely to be protected.

When you get called "cracker", you know that you don't have that apparatus behind you. You know that cops, the legal system, and myriad other racist things that you probably know better than me, are still going to treat you as non-white. So the "cracker" attack hurts because you're being excluded from the community that would otherwise protect you when the apparatus of the state won't. I'm not trying to whitesplain this to you, that's very much what you described when you called it "rage and absolute isolation".

That's why the attack hurts you as a mixed-race person, but not me as a white person. I do not experience that isolation. That's the difference.

Excrubulent , 2 months ago

You don’t experience the isolation. That doesn’t mean that denigrating you for your ancestry suddenly becomes acceptable. It is racist, and, furthermore, the prevalence of anti-white racism, even when not directed at mixed-race people, is still harmful to mixed-race people.

But it's not especially harmful to white people. That's the point. You laid it out so perfectly that I don't feel like I have much more to add to be honest.

Excrubulent , 2 months ago

Were these supposed to be trick questions?

It’s not especially harmful to white people to be denigrated for who they are…?

I already said it wasn't harmful to them, yes. But also, "White" is not an identity, as I have already said. It is a fucked up political category that serves to say, "these people are not any of the racialised categories". That's what I said at the start - it is only an exclusionary category. It does not identify any particular set of cultural or ethnic groups. There is no such thing as "white culture". There is Norwegian culture, British culture, Texan culture, etc, but no white culture. Black culture, on the other hand, very much does exist, because black people as a group have been forced to construct a culture in response to their racist oppression.

If society as a whole wasn’t horrifically anti-Black in its racism, would it then be okay to use anti-Black slurs? Because it wouldn’t be ‘especially harmful’?

Blackness as a concept was invented by racists for racist purposes. Anti-black slurs wouldn't exist without that, so you couldn't use them.

Excrubulent , 2 months ago

It was an honest answer to the question, but I'll answer in a different way: yes, in the world you imagined, anti-black slurs would be fine because they wouldn't exist. It's telling that you had to basically turn the entire world of racial politics entirely upside-down to get to that conclusion.

In contrast - and this is a very simple concept - the term "cracker" doesn't hurt me in the slightest, and I'm the pastiest white person you ever did see. The fact it hurts you so badly shows you that the anti-white sentiment that exists in the discrimination you face specifically hurts you because you are not actually white.

You're here banging on about anti-white racism and you want to pretend you're on the left? Read a book.

EDIT: Start with an article at least: https://www.vu.edu.au/about-vu/news-events/news/what-is-reverse-racism-and-whats-wrong-with-the-term

Excrubulent , 2 months ago

Oh okay, so let's listen to what other white people have to say on the matter.

According to that article that I already linked you and which you apparently didn't read:

A representative US survey, conducted by PEW in 2019, found that around 12% of respondents believed “being white hurts people’s ability to get ahead in the country nowadays”. Among white Republicans, the proportion was 22%. It was only 3% among white Democrats.

Reverse racism is such a fringe conservative belief that only a tiny minority of conservative white people even believe it, and amongst democrats it's barely more than a rounding error.

So only a tiny group of fringe reactionaries believe this bullshit, but here you are claiming it's supposed to be a leftist position.

That is fucking ridiculous.

Excrubulent , 2 months ago

Fucking hilarious. You have to be intentionally missing the point here.

Also, be careful, because apparently pointing out racism is the real racism, and you accused me of "whitesplaining", so apparently you were being anti-white racist, which I hear you really care a lot about as an issue.

*Note for the mod who inevitably gets this as a disingenuous "racism" report, I am being sarcastic.

Excrubulent , 2 months ago

You literally told me how this issue affects you as a mixed race person, and it clearly doesn't affect white people.

Either you can put that together or you can't. If you can't, it's because you don't want to. I'm done here.

Excrubulent , 2 months ago

If there's anything I got wrong about what you were saying about your own experience, I would honestly like to understand.

Excrubulent , 2 months ago

I genuinely appreciate your openness and I agree that what you've experienced is bigotry, it is othering abuse. Thanks, I understand it takes a lot to lay all that out and I don't take it lightly.

I cannot tell you that the trauma that you've experienced is lessened by who or what you are, and this is an issue that leftists should take seriously. I understand you face a unique intersection of discrimination, and that your whiteness has contributed to that.

I still have something to say about where we differ here, but I won't unless you tell me you want to hear it. I promise to be respectful regardless of what you decide.

Excrubulent , 2 months ago

Okay, thanks for being open to hearing it. If you don't reply or you take a while I won't take that to mean anything in particular.

I accept that all of the things you've talked about are real forms of oppression. The difference here is that I don't agree that it should be called racism. That may seem like a tiny, semantic difference but I think it's important. When you say that it is on another level than the racism that POC face, I agree. It is a quantitative difference that amounts to a qualitative difference. I think it deserves to be addressed as its own unique phenomenon. I'm afraid I don't know what the name for that phenomenon is. I would be surprised if someone hadn't written about it. I'll keep an eye out for that.

I also understand that you're saying that hearing a phrase like "a very white way of thinking" feels othering to you. That makes sense, but I don't agree that the solution is to stop talking about the problems with whiteness. Whiteness as a concept hurts everyone. Of course it hurts POC more than it hurts white people, but it isn't a zero-sum game. White people in general aren't helped in any way by it. That's not what privilege means in this context. It means that the boot that stomps on us is less forceful and has smaller cleats. The point of calling some people white and others not is to divide people. That doesn't mean that attacking whiteness as a concept is divisive - it is attacking a mechanism of division. The point here is that there is absolutely nothing to be gained by protecting the concept of whiteness.

We're not attacking individual people and saying they suck because they are white. It really isn't personal at all. The concept of whiteness is based on privilege, which means being able to ignore the suffering of people who were affected by genocide and who are still living. I think that's what they mean when they call it a very white way of thinking.

I don't know how to help you with your feelings on this issue. I'm sorry, I wish I had an answer for you on that but I just don't. If you're feeling hurt, that's always valid. However, dealing with and healing from that hurt requires correctly identifying its source, and it's easy to land on wrong answers to that question, and that's a large part of why I think this is important.

Excrubulent , 2 months ago

You got me interested for about 2 seconds there.

Excrubulent , 2 months ago

Remember folks, even though this person has just exposed themselves as the person being rightly mocked by OP, we shouldn't brigade their comments.

Excrubulent , 2 months ago

The buildings in the background make structural sense and everything's lined up as it should be. I don't think AI can do that.

Excrubulent , 2 months ago

I was pretty small when my friend's parents rented the VHS while we were on holiday. The main thing I remember was that Robin Williams asked a kid how many points they got for killing a person and the kid said, "A thousand," and my friend reacted like that was a huge deal. I remember thinking that was weird because we didn't know what the point scale was so it might not have been that big, but I knew how to mask my autism enough not to say that. I can also speak neurotypical enough to understand they were going for the emotional effect of a big-sounding number, so in that sense my friend had the right reaction.

As an adult I can look back and go "oooooohhh this is about the military industrial complex exploiting poor young people by dangling meagre benefits in front of them", and I think that message did seep in to my young brain in some way.

Excrubulent , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

Yup, copyright doesn't help artists. Its main purpose is to allow the hoarding of property into the hands of the wealthy, just like basically every other property relation under capitalism.

We can see with things like patreon that people love to support artists they like even if most of their work is free. We really don't need gatekeepers to make art happen.

Excrubulent , 2 months ago

People with pedagogical or medical expertise will always be needed, but not in the current format.

Teachers and doctors - as they exist currently - are the product of a factory model of education and healthcare. They are hard jobs because they are poorly fitted to the complex needs of real people, who are not products on an assembly line.

It is that structure that alienates us from our own education and caring for one another. That is what is being addressed here. There might be "teachers" and "doctors" in a world without this factory model, but they likely wouldn't be full time specialised roles.

Excrubulent , 2 months ago

Okay, unless you're going to give me an explanation as to what that means in specific, it sounds like your argument simply speaks to your lack of imagination.

Excrubulent , 2 months ago

This is an anarchism sub. Anarchism isn't just thinking 6 years into the future. If that's what you mean by "foreseeable" then sure, this won't happen on a large scale in that time frame. These things take longer. If that's all you're saying then you're not saying much.

Unless you're saying this could never happen, in which case again I would say you simply lack imagination.

Excrubulent , 2 months ago

The only reason people still work 5 days a week is because of bullshit jobs. Basically, our economy is set up in such a way that jobs increase to fill the labour market, even if those jobs really don't matter. People thought in the 50s that the 3 day work week would become standard, but it didnt happen for this reason.

If we had a society that was built by and for people rather than capital, we could eliminate a huge amount of the work we do. People would be free to have leisure or to train and reskill. We could have more medically trained people - either full doctors or nurse practitioners, OTs, physios, etc, spending less time on the job. It's obviously better for society to have more skilled people with more time on their hands. Plus they could learn other skills and do other things rather than spending all their time in one job, cross-pollinating and gaining experience in more areas.

Plus, a huge amount of doctors' time is spent in bullshit jobs, writing certificates just so a person can get time off of school or work or for welfare. This is all in service of an economy that demands that everybody be "productive" at all times, even though that just means moving imaginary tokens around. This isn't to mention the increased level of health that would exist if we weren't getting up at the crack of dawn, getting through rush hour and working for 8 hours then coming back home to collapse and do it all again for most of our lives.

Excrubulent , 2 months ago

Also, I just want to add that when I said you "lacked imagination", I wasn't trying to imply that you are essentially incapable of imagination. I've thought a bit about that phrase, and I think it's not great, and I should find a way to say that a person has not yet imagined that world, because that's what I really mean. "Lack of imagination" could mean that, but it's obviously a confrontational way to put it and I'm sorry I phrased it that way.

Excrubulent , 2 months ago

Hey, thanks for the link, your reply slipped my mind and I just came back to find it. I like the instance, but some of the videos on my youtube channel would go over the upload limit in a single hit, so I wouldn't be able to import them :/

Excrubulent , 2 months ago

Oh okay! Here you go then: https://www.youtube.com/@excrubulent

The biggest video is this one: https://youtu.be/hAxVNIlA63A

It's nearly 40 mins at 1440p. My source file is almost 20GB, but I imagine the yt would be smaller. They do some fairly aggressive compression I think.

I try to keep videos shorter than that in general, but my stuff is generally going to be a bit bigger than most, and I don't want to ask you to expand the limits beyond what your instance can handle.