In the sense in which you’re framing it, it would likely be more accurate to think of it as spectrums and subspectrums, in the same sense as sets and subsets.

It’s a bit late in the game for that isn’t it?

I mean - she’s right, but the SC has already cast aside law, precedent and the Constitution at this point, and is ruling almost entirely based on opinion. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say, “preference.”

In the book, set for publication on 9 September, Barrett asserted her belief that the June 2022 ruling that struck down abortion rights nationally “respected the choice” of Americans.

Ah… so she’s not just contradicting the plain reality of the current SC, but her own statements.

Or more precisely, just spewing whatever line of bullshit might serve her current purposes.

Which is undoubtedly the reason she was nominated in the first place, and the exact thing she was expected to contribute.

Helluva timeline we’re living in here…

Yes - that’s another good example.

Even on a very simple level, that’s harmful to oneself, because all time and energy spent vainly trying to control things one cannot control is necessarily time and energy not spent on the things one can control.

Stoicism, properly understood, is in my opinion the only possibility humanity has for survival.

Unfortunately, stoicism is rarely properly understood.

Virtually every institutionalized societal evil exists at base because some number of people are stubbornly clinging to the delusion of control over others.

As but one example, while the wave of trans bigotry exists because some number pf people believe that they should have the authority to control other people’s gender identifications, at heart it exists because those people believe that they can do so. That’s the foundation upon which their ever-more aggressive attempts are built. It’s really not a matter of whether they should or not - they literally can’t.

Stoicism would’ve already informed them of that fact, and would’ve informed them of the harm that’s done - not merely to others but to themselves - by ignoring that fact.

Props to anyone who’d name a cat Ryo-Ohki.

If only it was a cabbit. Or better yet, a spaceship.

I’ve been especially impressed by the prescience of Bo Burnham’s line in Welcome to the Internet - “Obama sent the immigrants to vaccinate your kids.”

As far as I know, it hasn’t become a quote from an actual right-wing nonsense-driveler yet, but it might as well be.

I recommend just signing up for another instance or five.

IMO, there’s really no reason to “move” on Lemmy. If you see an instance that looks interesting, sign up for it. Spend some time there and poke around and see how it’s different (they’re all at least subtly different, since they all have different sets of federated instances and subscribed communities). If you see another one that interests you, sign up for it too. Keep going like that and eventually you’ll find yourself settling into one or maybe a few not because you took a guess or followed someone else’s recommendation, but because they simply turned out to be the ones you liked best.

I have no idea how many instances I’ve signed up for over the last couple of years - a couple of dozen at least. Of those, I generally have three or four that I use the most, though the specific ones have changed, as some of my earlier favorites have gone notably downhill or have shut down and new favorites have arisen.

All that said, overall I’ve been most satisfied with this account - Sopuli.xyz. I also spend a fair amount of time on dbzer0, lemm.ee and Fedia.io (which is notable because it’s not Lemmy, but mbin, which is an entirely different piece of software that offers all the same basic functionality of Lemmy, but is formatted a bit differently, and in many ways is actually better than Lemmy). I have a .world account, and in fact it’s my oldest account, but I find myself using it less all the time.

There’s a mistake in this headline.

It should read:

“Alabama profits off prisoners who work at McDonald’s, therefore deems them too dangerous for parole.”

What an hysterical little crybaby.

No shit?

He collected kickbacks in exchange for sending kids to for profit jails. If anything, 17 1/2 years was too light a sentence - it should’ve been life withour parole. Let the motherfucker rot in one of those prisons himself - it’d serve him right.

Or more precisely, Meta bought shares of Trump.

If the United States was a family, Missouri would be the creepy bachelor uncle who drives a pickup with flags, won’t set foot out of the house without a gun and has a computer with a Don’t Tread on Me wallpaper and a D drive full of bondage porn.

Meta: The whole tone of this article is weird.

It’s as if it’s written explicitly by and for some entirely separate social group that’s sort of condescendingly viewing the quaint folkways of members of a “primitive tribe.”

Which is likely pretty close to the truth, in a way.

No war but class war.

Mace actually sort of fascinates me.

Her hateful bigot piece of shit act is a bit too over-the-top, and I just don’t entirely buy it. I keep thinking at least some part of it is that she’s actually more of a greedy unethical piece of shit, and has figured out that hateful bigoted piece of shit is a profitable role to play, and she’s playing it to the hilt.

Not that it matters - she’s a piece of shit either way. It’s just an idea that wanders through my mind, a bit more solidly every time, whenever she sleazes her way into the headlines.

I’ve been posting on internet forums for almost 30 years now. It’s just a thing I like doing.

I’m here now because it’s the best place I know of at the moment.

Funny… this is actually a different account than I was originally posting from - I switched to it because the entire thread has vanished from fedia.io.

And pretty much the first thing I see here is this response, which I didn’t even know existed before.

Not a good look for fedia.io.

Anyway…

Do you believe ayn rand believed in rational self-interest?

I think she probably thought she did, but I also think she obviously didn’t even begin to understand it.

If so, why was she against all forms of welfare and socialism?

The glib answer would be because she didn’t even begin to understand rational self-interest.

The more likely answer, which somehow manages to be even more shallow, is because the USSR was nominally communist and she hated the USSR.

If not, isn’t she the inventor of the concept and thus the arbiter of what it should mean?

No.

Even if she was in fact the inventor of the concept, which she most assuredly is not, she still wouldn’t be the arbiter of its meaning.

Though she was such an egotistical authoritarian that if she were alive today, she’d undoubtedly be insisting that she was.

Doesn’t that mean you’re changing the definition to suit your needs?

Kind of.

While I really couldn’t care less what Rand envisioned, so certainly feel no desire to hew to her conception, I haven’t changed it to suit my “needs” per se. I’ve changed it as necessary so that it actually is, as far as I can see, what it appears to refer to - “rational” “self-interest.”

I think it’s a sound concept, and that Rand, blinded as she was by her emotions, her authoritarian habits and her gargantuan ego, didn’t grasp it.

Thanks for the response.

Oog - my little brother.

He’s a walking stereotype of a tech libertarian (which is to say, a shallow, bigoted, reactionary, right-wing IT guy who for some inexplicablec reason seems to think that all that’s necessary to count as “libertarian” is to rail against “the woke mob.”)

The first time I heard the term “mansplaining,” I knew exactly what it meant, because it’s his customary mode of communication. I already know that by about the third time I hear him say, " Well, what you have to understand is that…" I’m going to have to leave the room.

He likely won’t bring up politics directly - not surprisingly, he’s generally ignorant of both the philosophical side of it and the practical side of it. Instead, he’ll bloviate about whatever the right-wing/tech media bubble is bloviating about, so essentially political issues without the complication of political context.

It’s invariably awful, and it’s always a matter not of if but merely of when I’m going to have to leave the room because the only alternative is going to be a messy verbal explosion. And I presume it’s going to be worse than ever this year, since he’ll undoubtedly want to mansplain the mindless dogma he’s been fed about Trump and Musk and Ukraine and tariffs and immigrants and trans athletes and so on…

Ah, the irony.

Saying the quiet part out loud again.

They believe that us not being forced to do what they want simply because they want it is a “privilege,” and one that they can and will just arbitrarily decree to be null and void.

That says pretty much everything you meed to know about what they really think about everyone other than themselves.

And ironically enough, what they think is that they themselves are privileged.

Yeah - that’s what happens when you elect somebody who’s painfully obviously profoundly mentally ill - they make insane proposals to do insane shit.