Arms but only in the hands of the state. Specifically the American state, the heart of the dystopian global empire. What could possibly go wrong.

Problem is that well-intentioned rules with discretionary boundaries end up with unethical enforcement. See: the bill a few months ago that federally defines “anti-semitism” as including “criticism of the state of Israel”. Actually that’s not even a discretionary boundary, that’s statutory. The reasoning behind the First Amendment in the first place was to avoid authoritarian censorship, including these kinds of games where “reasonable regulation” of speech is used to shoehorn in authoritarian censorship.

Doesn’t really seem to help when it still shows their username…

I didn’t vote for Harris because she’s one of them. I also don’t use food delivery. Enjoying your feeling of superiority from pointing out the hypocrisy of random group intersections?

It’s tricky to make those distinctions when you have people who are born there to immigrants, whose parents are 1 immigrant 1 not, whose grandparents are some mix of the two statuses, etc., when you’re really trying to describe demographic shifts over time built on top of migration.

You catch the full picture just looking at broad demographic data 1800 to today. Roughly 3-4% of the population in the Palestine area is Jewish at the beginning of the 19th century - ranges from 5 to 14% Jewish by 1914 based on which source you check, by 1948 it’s up to about a third, today about 50/50 (encompassing the same area). There’s about 6 million Palestinians in diaspora now (from something like 1.5-2M fleeing in 1948, 1956, 1967, and other times). 5.7M registered with UNRWA. And we know that there were roughly 4 million Jewish immigrants since 1800 as well (primarily 1880 to today), with the large majority of those post-1948. The 1990s “post-Soviet aliyah” (migration) being the largest in the last few decades.

Were you doing any serious “devops” at the time? I didn’t struggle with “serverless” knowing that otherwise I had to manually provision servers, virtual or bare metal.

This is the straw man:

Way I see it, you have two competing overarching theories, “spontaneous order” and “orchestrated order”.

I mean “order” in the sense of “enforced form”. The shape of things, namely, a broader, shared agenda of government and major corps. And I’m not assuming it, I’m describing the content of theories.

You didn’t explain how that was inaccurate. You just said they were using a “mental model”. Why are they using that mental model, though? It’s because they need somebody to be in control.

I did explain it, actually.

This has actually been studied. Sociologists have studied conspiracy theorists, and they are often people with control issues.

Correlation and causation issue? Point to the studies, show their methods and conclusions (although IMHO don’t bother).

That should have come across as critical of the commodification.

People still love cult movies and other classics from 100 to 50 years ago, with handcrafted or minimal budget special effects, no CGI. It’s because it’s an entire art form and it can’t just be reduced solely to aesthetic appeal. That kind of approach is just a result of the commodification of art. You want to reduce a successful work of art to some quantifiable metric besides popularity/sales, so that you can create repeatable processes around producing it and selling it, and optimize them for cost, but art defies quantification. Even just basic “enjoyable gameplay” defies that.

Ironically this conversation shows the issue with the use of the word “psychichal”.

Not attacking a strawman, I asked him to clarify and then talked about the context.

“Conspiracy theorists” often look at an event that’s heavily covered by the media, that serves a perceived state interest, and investigate it further. Particularly if it receives disproportionate emphasis, like the various mass casualty events that were referenced so often they’re just referred to by dates (“9/11”, “7/7”, “Oct. 7”, etc.). Sandy Hook served a perceived state interest (popular disarmament), and people perceived “weird things about it”, so to speak, so interpretations of the event differed. Sometimes people try to explain the formation of these theories in terms of fulfillment of an emotional need (“they can’t accept this would just happen so they need to pretend someone is in control”), which is just inaccurate. They have a mental model, whether accurate in a given case or not, where there’s an antagonistic power structure of some kind orchestrating events or narratives for its own benefit, and are simply applying that lens to understand new events and narratives.

At the end of the day, it is a fact that the U.S. government does things like this in general. You look at declassified CIA documents from the past, they are very open about overthrowing governments, manipulating public perception, and all sorts of other shady behavior. But they’re not open about them as they’re doing them. So we’re left with the difficulty of figuring it out for ourselves.

“Function-based”, “image-based” would have been slightly more accurate terms.

Wireless devices aren’t actually “free of wires”, it’s that you don’t have to deal with wires (or significantly less, since you still have to charge them etc., save for wireless charging). So that’s not really new either.

Which facts. How does the world work, in your estimation.

Way I see it, you have two competing overarching theories, “spontaneous order” and “orchestrated order”. You look at the U.S./Western empire, with its totally hierarchical command structure, and a big “?” at the top above SCOTUS, Congress and the Presidency, who all inexplicably follow the same agendas opposed to the will and benefit of the people, it seems to me a perfectly reasonable conclusion that somebody is in control. I don’t think it’s the Freemasons - this was kind of an old trope throughout American history (see the early 1800s Anti-Masonic Party), but knocking out individual dumb theories for who’s in charge doesn’t disprove all of them.

IMO, “conspiracy theories” are a natural attempt to explain observed reality (inequality, mass conditioning/brainwashing, global militarism and empire, etc.). They can be informed by falsehoods and/or manipulated into harmful movements (MAGA for example), but again, doesn’t disprove the entire idea of society being controlled. The only way you get to such a disproof is by an exhaustive analysis of every social institution demonstrating it’s not being controlled. Going, “these things just happen on their own” without any further detail is hand-wavey.

Have you considered you can really accuse anyone you disagree with of “being idiots who can’t or won’t face the facts of reality”? Maybe reality is as hideous and our society as controlled as they say, and you’re the one can’t or won’t face the facts of it. That kind of discourse doesn’t get anyone anywhere.

I was thinking earlier about how fucked we are in the U.S., that the MAGA contingent, and to a degree the Dem contingent as well, have accepted mentalities that are incorrect and actively reject correction. That people (the population in general) are being trained to reject the fundamentals of logic, and associate all opposing viewpoints with an evil “other”.

Are we saying it’s an echo chamber, or a literal propaganda training ground commissioned by the Russian government?

I’m not sitting here saying that one random thread I spotted when I jumped over there totally disproves either of those. It’s more of an amusing counterexample. I would LOVE if people would stop doing this thing where they expect you to defend an argument you didn’t make, I feel like I’ve pointed out it on this site 3 times in as many days.

IDK if you’re allowed to link to lemmy.ml here or what, but the post ID is 24032724. The response to “You can’t prove that there isn’t one somewhere” - “You can, it’s literally the way the number is defined.” - is +8/-1. Plus the original guy pointing out the 10100[…] sequence is +21/-1. What are you saying is the issue? If it’s “they’ll just upvote anything that sounds right”, I think you’re gonna find that’s true on reddit, and true here, as well.

In the comments they go into why it’s not even true that an infinite non-repeating sequence must contain all other finite sequences (10100100010000[…] example not containing any other digits). So it would follow that they wouldn’t contain all infinite sequences either. I think.

Meanwhile, at .ml:

Since Pi is infinite and non-repeating, would that mean any finite sequence of non-repeating numbers should appear somewhere in Pi?

I think that’s kind of situational. They were freaking out recently about the genocide being labeled a genocide on Wikipedia, and IIRC the ADL being labeled an unreliable source.

Thinking of the most recent so-called “far left” thing I saw about Wikipedia, it was a video by BadEmpanada talking about the different portrayals of the Uyghur situation in China. A pretty balanced take btw, looking pretty impartially at all evidence and questioning the mindset of people with different perspectives on it. The discussion of WIkipedia there was that it does naturally take on some bias due to a reliance on Western media as authoritative or reliable sources. I think that is a fact. There’s a process to determine something as fact which I think is too quick, the second there’s something of a perceived consensus of experts or authoritative sources, something is stated as fact. In hard sciences, that’s typically fine, but in politics or recent history, IMHO you need a much more meticulous approach, because you’re in dangerous territory the second you start treating any propaganda narrative as fact.