This is exactly why I was railing against some of the earlier protests which featured politicians openly asking protestors to take out their phones and send texts to opt-in for fundraisers. Besides all the obvious bullshit, it put those protestors who didn’t know better at serious risk.

Thankfully, I haven’t seen too much of that at the protests I’ve been to recently, but this is a good reminder that we have to keep educating people to leave their phone at home.

That can’t be a real sign…

Is that seriously what we’re calling it? The official name is Alligator Alcatraz? America is a parody of a real nation.

Y’know how things have mostly gotten worse for the past five years, with most innovation going towards corporate control, and nearly all tech services moving towards enshittification?

Yeah five more years of that.

I find suicide distasteful and seek glory.

Counterpoint: Superman is strong enough that he could raze the system to the ground.

Making the mother of all power vacuums Jack, can’t fret over each billionaire!

Condensing a rant I had on another comm with this question here: fruit belongs with meat. fullstop. Idk why we’re still having this discussion when medieval peasants were able to figure it out in like the 12th century.

I got long arms and an exfoliating luffa. I just wash every part. There’s no part of my back that I can’t reach.

The reason there isn’t any other option is because nobody puts in the effort to add other options.

There’s a Simpsons meme currently in Active on 196 rn from 1994 pointing out how ineffective both parties are. People have had longer than I have been alive to work on a third way.

America isn’t collapsing now all of a sudden. People have been passively watching it die for decades.

First time? If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that normies don’t give a fuck and just want their simple distractions, regardless of what the greater cost to society is.

Lots of countries committed colonialism, not many countries committed genocide on the native population and stole their land to create and expand their nation. The U.S. and Israel are members of a short list.

Lots of countries committed colonialism, not many countries committed genocide on the native population and stole their land to create and expand their nation. The U.S. and Israel are members of a short list.

Except now Trump is starting to play hardball with Netanyahu, and is distinctly unhappy with the the U.S. taking so much flak while being treated as a money fountain.

There is a much more real world where Trump gets sick of Bibi and pulls his support than Harris pulling support from Israel. A fully isolationist U.S. is better for Palestine.

As far as I know, we are still not quite in an Authoritarian state here in the US.

Just wanna drill into this; the United States has been an authoritarian state for as long as I’ve been alive. Deporting people without due process is not new. Supporting genocides is not new. The police state we live in is not new. The rule of law has been a joke for so long zoomers have internalized it. There is a reason why most of the governments we have overthrown have been democracies, and there is a reason the US has mostly replaced those democracies with dictatorships. We are the evil empire, and we have been for decades at this point.

Then we must agree to disagree, because there really isn’t any further to debate. My argument is that human beings are irrational and capable of making irrational decisions. Your argument is that irrationality is merely a pretense, and that there must be a confluence of factors that caused these things to happen. I think trying to constantly find a reason when one doesn’t need to exist is a path to madness, and that is why I believe in free will.

See, now we’re getting into parts that we can’t prove. My argument is that it is irrational. Your argument is that it merely seems that way. There is no reconciling our positions.

This implies that every action must have a reason behind it, which I frankly find a laughable concept. Human beings are irrational creatures; our actions don’t require a reason. We have the ability to choose chaos. Unless your argument is that the cells in my stomach have the ability to know what kind of food they want and can unconsciously pass that information to my brain, there’s no reason for me to decide at 8:00 PM tonight “Hey, I want to eat Pakistani food.”

In fact, I could choose an invalid choice! Say I chose Pakistani. I would logically need to find a Pakistani restaurant to order from. What if they all closed at 8? What if I didn’t have a Pakistani restaurant near me? I may make a decision that ultimately, I cannot act upon, and then I would have to introduce some constraints to my decision making process. The decisions that follow would have a reason, but the initial whim doesn’t require one.

This depends, because there are two different kinds of randomness. A lot of the “randomness” that people encounter is actually based upon something, and our theoretical entity with access to perfect information could predict the outcome of that randomness perfectly. I’m thinking of stuff like computer randomness, number generation, games of chance, that sort of thing.

However, true random absolutely exists; in the words of Terry Pratchett “Things just happen, what the hell.” You see it with mutations in nature; ordinarily healthy cells can spontaneously change without directed input. It is unpredictable, even for our theoretical entity.

If free will was truly non-existent, it would mean that a theoretical entity with access to perfect information would be able to perfectly predict your actions. I don’t believe that is possible; I think that human beings are too irrational. Consider a very simple decision: what am I going to have for dinner? You could know the restaurants I have access to, what food is in my home, what I have discussed in a given day, and even what my current mood is, but it can ultimately come down to a whim. I could choose something I’ve never had before, for no reason, and seek it out.

I believe that we are individual actors in a very complex system that introduces lots of constraints to our decision-making process. We may not even be consciously aware of some of the constraints; however, we are always the ones ultimately making the decisions. You always have the option of a whim.

I learned this from the reverse, as eggs are a valid substitute for human blood in sacrifices.