paris

@paris@lemmy.blahaj.zone

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. For a complete list of posts, browse on the original instance.

paris ,

“Regrettably, the number of mortalities reached 1,301, with 83% being unauthorised to perform hajj and having walked long distances under direct sunlight, without adequate shelter or comfort,” the official Saudi Press Agency (SPA) reported.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/23/hajj-pilgrimage-death-toll-extreme-heat-mecca-saudi-arabia

That's still 200+ deaths who were registered. And my understanding of Saudia Arabia in this context is that they don't always permit Muslims from certain countries, so they have no choice if they want to make their pilgrimage. This is a once in a lifetime event that some people may plan out years in advance. I don't think it's fair to blame them for not registering, especially when in some cases they can't.

paris ,

That's the point though. They've done other protest work "the proper way" and nobody knows about it because it doesn't get reported on. They want the message "just stop oil" to be in the news, so they do what gets them in the news.

If they go for the "right" attention, they're barely reported on by two local outlets. If they go for public outcry, they're global news in hours. Their goal isn't to get you to support their organization. It's to keep you talking about and thinking about and caring about climate change.

paris ,

This is the argument I see to defend use of the word and I've never understood it. Where I am (west coast-ish of the US), the word is used very specifically to mean autistic. If you ask someone not to say retard, they say autistic instead. If you ask them not to say autistic, they say special education. If not that, slow. If not that, someone who takes the short bus. Unambiguously the people here use the r slur as a slur against autistic people. They use it as an insult towards allistic people to degrade them as lesser. Same as calling a straight person the f slur. Maybe it's different in other parts of the country, but the r slur is absolutely used as a slur against autistic people where I am.

paris ,

There's possibly some relation there, but I have hypnic jerks almost every night and EHS every now and then and as far as I'm aware I do not have synesthesia.

paris ,

https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2907:_Schwa

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qu4zyRqILYM

paris ,

"Protecting" the less populous states from what?

paris ,

While we're talking about asymmetric encryption, can someone explain to me why you can't decrypt information with the same public key that encrypted it? I understand the analogies (locks on a briefcase, unmixing paint, etc), but I can't "un-analogize" them to understand what's actually going on. Encryption keys aren't physical locks or paint. They're numbers(?). So why can I encrypt something by multiplying by a known public encryption key, but I can't decrypt it by dividing by that same known public key?

paris ,

Anti-government protests on a massive scale don't just happen. They are organized. They are backed by mutual aid networks. It's easy to sit back and say "I'm not voting for either option because this whole system is bad," but have you done literally any work at all to make the system less bad? Or to build up real alternatives? If the entire American voting system is undemocratic, what have you done in your local community to make your community's voice heard outside of that system?

I see so many people who are terminally online say they don't want to participate in a broken system, and exactly zero of them do any work outside of (not) voting to fix the problems they see in their community. If you're not gonna do the bare minimum and vote every four years for the least bad option, you better be doing literally any other real-world political work. Otherwise you're just as complicit in the system you have such an issue with.

Tldr: the revolution is not right around the corner; you will not be saved. Do some actual political legwork instead of sitting on your ass complaining the whole time. Complaining is easy. Fixing is hard.

paris ,

And since they're travelling along predetermined routes without human intervention, we could even give them their own dedicated lane that's more direct. That would free up traffic for normal people and streamline deliveries for these trucks.

And while we're at it, if they're already going on dedicated roads, why not make those roads more efficient? Rubber on asphalt damage is expensive to repair. Steel wheels on steel tracks are even more efficient and better to maintain.

And since steel tracks can handle so much more wear, we could actually make the trucks super duper overpowered and have them tow like 100 boxes at a time instead of just one or two.

And since steel tracks are conductive, we could actually electrify those rails to power the super duper overpowered track truck so it doesn't have to stop to refill for gas. Now we're combatting climate change at the same time.

At scale, humans are a lot like cargo actually. We could have dedicated track trucks to move large amounts of people from core parts of cities to other core parts of the same or other cities. Then we could reduce car and plane usage too.

Track trucks is a bit of a dumb name though, so maybe we should call it something more relevant. There's an Old French word "trahiner" that means "to pull/draw" so maybe something like that? Trainer? Or maybe just train? I think train sounds cool.

Too bad nothing like this exists or will ever exist 😔

paris ,

Leftist wall of text incoming

In my experience, a lot of tankies are former conservatives who grew up brainwashed by their evangelical parents. When you realize everything you've ever been taught is a lie, you search for something to anchor yourself to. Lefties who properly shed their right-wing tendencies tend to anchor to data. It's a lot harder to slip back into right-wing tendencies when you follow the data.

But brains like shortcuts. They're just built like that. And when you're searching for something to anchor to, sometimes you find a shortcut there too. I think a lot of tankies anchor to the shortcut "america and its allies bad, everyone against them good." It's a comically simplistic worldview, but it'll get you surprisingly far, especially when you look to history and our involvement in Latin America.

But being a shortcut, it doesn't always work. That worldview breaks down (or rather, leads you to draw bad conclusions) whenever America & allies aren't the bad guys (Ukraine) or even sometimes when they are (Israel).

Brains like to understand stuff. Sometimes they find it easier to pretend they do than to actually understand something. We see this in religion and astrology — abstract the world into something that's easier to grasp. Doing that and dealing with the resulting cognitive dissonance is often easier than properly getting your head around something. There's no moral condemnation here; brains just work like that.

Anecdote time

When I started becoming a tankie at 17, the cognitive dissonance was pretty heavy. Tankies were the first leftists I could interact with when I was shedding my conservative evangelical upbringing. It felt like I was learning how the world actually worked but part of me was reserved about the way things were presented by them. Overall I was genuinely learning and understanding the world more though, so I kept listening to tankies.

That part of me that was reserved decided to start watching Vaush since they seemed to really hate him for reasons that I felt didn't scale well to how vitriolic they were. The way he presented things felt a lot more grounded in reality and I didn't have to upend as much of my existing knowledge or worldview to "make it make sense." I was worried at the time that that might be me taking a mental shortcut, so I still mostly listened to the tankies I hung out with online.

The thing that really shattered the illusion for me was realizing how detached tankies actually are when they called me a pedo for not denouncing Vaush and calling him one. I had been watching him for a little bit at that point and had gone through the Vaush Bad Masterlist™; he didn't seem at all like the picture they painted of him. I realized that they were just as dogmatic as the religion I was trying to shed, just less absurdly wrong about some key stuff — but still absurdly wrong about other key stuff.

I left the discord server then and there and haven't looked back.

Conclusion/tldr:

These people are real, and the cognitive dissonance does hurt. I think the best way to help tankies escape is to offer alternative narratives grounded in reality and let the people who can get out find their way out. Don't waste your time debating tankies all day. Plant some seeds and let them grow. You can't force progress.

Also a lot of tankies are just teenagers who haven't finished growing up. "You're arguing with a minor online" became a meme for a reason.

Introducing Bitmagnet: A self-hosted BitTorrent indexer, DHT crawler, content classifier and torrent search engine with web UI, GraphQL API and Servarr stack integration ( bitmagnet.io )

I'm excited to announce the first alpha preview of this project that I've been working on for the past 4 months. I'm initially posting about this in a few small communities, and hoping to get some input from early adopters and beta testers....

paris ,

Golang v1.0 was released in March of 2012. Not sure I would consider it a new language.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • random
  • test
  • worldmews
  • mews
  • All magazines
    •