Entering the domain of "What is your most controversial opinion?" is similar to investigating non-conventional viewpoints in Environmental Law Dissertation Topics. Dissertation topics in environmental law explore uncharted legal ground, just as controversial viewpoints question conventional wisdom. Are you prepared to offer your distinct perspectives on contentious beliefs as well as environmental law discussions? Let's celebrate differences in thought and encourage deep conversations! https://thedissertationhelp.co.uk/environmental-law-dissertation-topics/
Being fat is a choice the vast majority of the time, and I have a huge bias against big people.
I used to be fat (250ish lbs (110ish kg) at 5’8"ish (172ish cm)), and as much as I would like to blame my shit on anything else, the person feeding me, the person sitting at the computer for hours, the person actively avoiding all physical activity was me and no one else. After I got diagnosed with some weight related shit, I turned my entire life upside down, am at a much healthier 150 lbs (68ish kg), and feel so much better, both physically and mentally.
I’m aware of my bias, and I make every active effort to counter it in my actual dealings with bigger people. Especially because there are certain circumstances, however rarely, where it may not actually be their fault. But I’d be lying if I said my initial impression was anything except “God, what a lazy, fat fuck.”
So silly. Genetics can make it harder to lose weight, but not impossible.
I’m related to several people diagnosed with hypothyroidism, but none of them are obese because they know the condition makes weight loss hard and actively work harder because of that. The biggest one is what I’d called “chubby”, and that’s more likely because her thyroid numbers are in flux at the moment, and she’s currently working with her doctors on that.
I used to be fat, and when I watch morbidly obese people talk about how much they love food and it makes them happy and makes them feel better that is 100% me. Food is absolutely an addiction for some people, including me. Thankfully I have it under control to be at a healthy weight and lose weight when I need to, but some of these people have absolutely tragic childhoods or life experiences and I don't blame them at all for coping in that way. I could 100% see myself in that position if I had been through what they have been through.
However, those people are self aware that they are unhealthy. The people I can't stand are the "healthy at every size" fat acceptance people. Healthy at every size was SUPPOSED to be that you can make positive health focused changes at any size and there is no point of no return. But it got twisted into I can be morbidly obese and I am still 100% healthy forever. And they even make people feel bad for wanting to lose weight, even if it's for health reasons. Those people are trash and fall on the same level as antivax people IMO.
Everyone deserves to be treated with respect, until you start spewing harmful bullshit and then I will judge you as much as I want.
I’m also a comfort eater. Huge sweet tooth, and almost 0 self-control when the hunger kicks in. My diet fix was making sure I only buy and order what I should eat, because I will clean my plate. I’ve accepted that, and making sure there’s only the appropriate amount of food in front of me has worked wonders. Holidays and special occasions are sometimes tough, with family shoving food in my face, but I just exercise extra hard afterward, lol.
I definitely agree with you about the fat acceptance movement. I have to leave those conversations before I start saying things I regret. Again, I try really hard to manage my bias.
I have a weight problem and I told my wife, who berates me for it, that if there is food I shouldn’t eat in the house, then I will eat it. It’s that simple. I’ll eat a lot of what’s available.
I’ve lost 30 lbs before with intermittent fasting and taking calories. I know what works for me.
Anyways, she insists that I’m being unreasonable and that I should eat in moderation. She buys ice cream and then will eat a spoonful every 30 days.
I’ve been very lucky in that my wife has been very supportive and understanding, but I’m the same way. My rule is that I’m not allowed to shop hungry, because I’ll buy shit I don’t need to eat, and then I’ll eat it because it’s there.
In general avoiding situations when you only rely on your willpower gives much better results than fighting yourself. When I think I should loose weight I only buy boring ingredients that require preparation to be tempting in any way. If I get strong cravings I just eat some random vegetable and try to better plan mealtimes next day. It’s much harder when living with uncooperative partner or parents that like always having snacks in their kitchen. We’re literally built to eat food whenever it’s available.
This happened with my ex - the kids and I, we are all built more lean and spare, but ex hung on to weight. So I cooked or he did, we all ate the same food but somehow he got fat, we stayed skinny.
Well I am like your wife, low tolerance for sweet stuff - usually when I want something sweet I want to taste it, not really eat it, if that makes sense. So yes, a big spoonful of ice cream, one twix candy & save the other one for next week. Emergency chocolate bar at work lasts a month.
Ex was the other extreme, could binge sweet foods. So even with the metabolic advantage of being a couple inches taller and male, his natural intake kept him on the heavy side.
Intermittent fasting is such a good way to maintain weight, but not if you can eat a bag of candy in your eating window!
Holidays and special occasions are sometimes tough, with family shoving food in my face, but I just exercise extra hard afterward, lol.
I think that’s the best way to go about it, eating like a monk literally all the time is much harder than eating well the majority of the time, at least for me lol.
The guilt is an enemy as well, I’m the type to go “well, I’ve broken my diet strike, might as well eat a sundae” in a sort of self hate spiral that makes no sense. If I allow myself to indulge in expected moments I feel much better. Like, literally everyone around the table at christmas goes like, “I ate way too much”, I shouldn’t feel bad for feeling the same haha
I was never huge, though 212 at 5’9" is overweight and approaching the technical definition of obesity. Due to some undesirable side effects of that weight (medical), I’ve been working to lighten up and am already down 24 lbs in 3 months, with a target of 170. It’s tough, and even painful at times, but it really is as simple as making sure calories in is less than calories out. For the doubters, I recommend just starting with meticulous tracking of activity and food consumption without even making any changes. It gets very obvious very quickly what’s happening, which makes it easier to start making changes.
100 pounds lost is amazing. What did you find that worked for you and how long did it take?
My biggest issue with exercise was monotony, so a family member recommended that I try CrossFit. Started going 5 days a week and never looked back. I’m not culty about it, but I love it. Having a different workout every day keeps things from getting boring.
I was also eating like absolute garbage. Red meat, carbs, and sweets galore. No greens. Lots of bad snack food. The only thing I had going for me was that I’d already cut out all sugar drinks besides alcohol. So I just decided to cut alcohol entirely, as well as introduce healthier carbs (like whole grains) and more greens/fiber. Lots of salads. I still do red meat, but it’s more infrequent, and I gravitate more towards poultry and fish.
I didn’t count calories in the beginning because I just wanted to focus on the two big changes, exercise and diet modification. Once I had those down, I was losing so fast I never bother counting, and I still don’t. I’m currently working on strength, especially in Olympic lifts, so I count my macros (protein, carbs, fat) instead.
My advice to anyone that asks is to find whatever consistent exercise you can do. If that’s CrossFit, great! If not, that’s fine, too! Just find literally anything you can power through consistently and do it. And consistency is the key. I can’t tell you how many times I didn’t feel like working out, but I maintain the attitude that “moving is better than not moving”, so I still go, and every single time, I end up glad that I went. People are always like “Ah, man, exercise is hard.” Nah, dog. Exercise isn’t easy, sure, but it’s the consistency that’s hard.
I’ve been thinking about this topic a lot lately and your comment is interesting. Your first sentence is definitely phrased in a more controversial way than the rest of your comment, but I can’t help seeing it as very similar to “Being depressed is a choice the vast majority of the time, and I have a huge bias against depressed people.” Is that an unfair comparison?
I know that treating fatness/obesity as a disease is kinda controversial but I feel like folks give people dealing with mental health a lot more grace than people dealing with health issues related to being fat. I’ve also heard that for some people they can be perfectly healthy at a higher weight (though this is clearly not the case for many fat people who are seeing health impacts). I guess I’m assuming that a lot of fat people would potentially like to be less so, but can’t (for any number of reasons) quite get there. This seems really similar for me to people dealing with depression, anxiety, etc who want to change things but keep falling back into the problem.
I guess my question is do you have bias against people who can’t escape other bad cycles like mental health or even stuff like alcoholism? Or is it more just that you think it’s fair to judge people without the discipline/willpower to get out of a state they didn’t want to be in, like you did.
This is a fair question. I guess maybe my statement could’ve been less broad. If just “being fat” is the primary problem, that’s what I take issue with. If the problem is deeper, and being fat is a secondary issue (like a result of depression, hypothyroidism, or some other mental/physical ailment), then that’s a different situation. My stance in that case is that the person should be actively trying to treat the primary problem. I know depression almost never just goes away. Sometimes it even sticks around with therapy and medicine, and that sucks hard. But at least they’re trying.
Thanks for your reply. I appreciate your personal take on the whole thing. As someone who has never been fat, I’m trying to figure out what’s the whole deal with the various movements around it. I feel it’s gonna become a much bigger cultural discussion in the next decade. And congrats on getting down to a happier weight for you! Setting and reaching goals is definitely something to be celebrated.
This is an old thread, but taking your first comment into account, doesn’t this make them guilty until proven innocent in your eyes? If your first thought is “what a fat lazy fuck” without knowing their story? That seems unnecessarily judgmental, and I can’t help but wonder if it comes from a place of insecurity, maybe left over from your own history with weight
Unpopular opinion follow-up: You should be using proper units of measurement.
Don’t get me wrong. I can perfectly infer from the story what you’re saying. But 150 or 250 lbs just doesn’t mean anything to me. Neither does the height or what people write in the other comments.
“Proper units of measurement”? Come on man, don’t be a pretentious ass. We all know metric is better, but don’t shame the man (or woman idk) for using the system of measurement they’re most familiar with!
Hehe. I hope I phrased it nicely enough for them to understand i wasn’t yelling at them. I think it’s mildly ignorant to comment on the internet and not to translate it into proper units. They even edited the comment and it made me ashamed a bit. This is not the job of one individual.
What I was really trying to do is shaming you, the people of Myanmar, Lyberia and the US. And your culture. For living in the 21st century and not even adopting the proper system that would make lots of things easier for you. And for being ignorant towards all the people on the internet who are not offended by progress. (or at least their ancestors hadn’t been…)
Ahem. Didn’t several spaceship explode so far? Planes crashed… People died. And I think many US scientists have already switched to metric and many engineers have not. I bet they currently waste large sums of money for doing double the work when working together. Combined the sum of not switching is already a ludicrous amount of billions and billions. And the world isn’t getting less globalised. So true. It costs money to switch. And it’s probably yet another man’s pocket that money comes from. But the sooner you do it, the more money it’ll save you and everybody in the long run.
Edit: And after a while even your engineers might thank you for the easier calculations. And it’s not that a two-by-four has two by four inches anyways.
Isn’t tragedy of the commons when you share something and it for example gets overused and destroyed in the process? Tragic referring to the part where everyone is trying to get the max out of it for them individually and causing the demise?
This is something else. And also it IS in everybody’s best interest. I’d assume it’s not the most fun activity to learn your feet in a mile, yards… And translating recipes is just madness. I imagine you need all sorts of little helpers, the measuring cups, smear butter everywhere to measure it by volume… and need to whip out a calculator if someone stays for dinner. I think it costs money and people are lazy and fail to see the bigger picture. Because they haven’t tried thinking about this for 5 minutes and are already complaining. It’s not that they wouldn’t also benefit.
Disclaimer: I’m also not perfect and sometimes fail to see some bigger picture.
But ultimately you can’t just blame people. There is literally an entire industry trying to sell you cheap carbs and fat. Down to the sound a bag of chips makes when you open it (this is not a joke).
So on one hand you have evolution, your body still being stuck in the past where food was scarce. On the other hand you have too much food and it’s highly engineered to be addicting on purpose.
It’s no surprise most people are going to lose that challenge.
Hmm I think that for a lot of people, it wasn’t a choice to get fat. I know a lot of kids who are already obese and they aren’t even in their teens.
However, I do think it’s a choice once you’ve realized it and have the ability to actually do something about it.
Kinda related but unrelated: it irks me when someone comments how easy it is for me to be skinny, bc it isn’t. As a previously underweight person, I think gaining and losing weight are just as hard. I had to control my diet, work out, and have a lot of self control to not lose the habits I was building. I folded and stagnated a lot, and yeah it was demotivating but I still had to make a choice to keep going.
Well, anything that can consistently be changed with hard work is ultimately a choice in the same way. Not everyone can deal with the amount of effort needed to lose weight. When you have accumulated awful habits, you need a lot of both time and willpower to change them.
But that doesn’t mean go out and harass fat people. Trust me we fucking know. You can’t lose weight instantly. Some of us may actually be working on it.
Also fat people have the right to be happy. People hating on “happy at any size” is just being assholes for the sake of it.
I agree completely. What makes me irrationally angry is when people say stuff like it’s there’s no correlation between being fat and being unhealthy. Like if I went to work drunk or started smoking cigarettes or doing weed, people find it acceptable to be concerned and try and help me be more healthy but you can’t mention it at all if I’m stuffing myself with unhealthy crap.
I agree with you. I don’t go out of my way to hurt big people and I don’t outwardly do so on ourpose. I just have to catch my initial bias and push it aside first, which I’m working on, I know it’s a me thing, for sure.
I agree “happy at any size” can be an acceptable attitude, for sure, but I disagree with “healthy at any size”. Obesity puts stress on organs and body parts, simply just because of the extra weight, even if everything else is fine.
Oh I’ve actually been told by fat people that there’s no way that I actually enjoy working out and that I’m forcing myself to go to the gym while not enjoying it.
Guess it’s weird I like improving my physique and enjoying seeing how I can reach new goals ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I used to agree with you and still do in a way since I have quite negative attitude towards fat people. However I now realize that while calories in - calories out applies to everyone we’re still different especially in the way we experience hunger.
I’m thin and fit myself but I eat like shit. What differentiates me from fat people however is that I only eat about 3000kcal of shit and then I’m full and it may take quite a while before I eat again but I also go to gym and mountain biking and stuff so I use all the calories too instead of storing them as fat. I also sometimes simply just skip dinner altogether because I don’t feel like eating. I’m just lucky that I can still function just fine even with an empty stomach and I don’t experience aggressive sense of hunger like some other people do. Also I hate cooking and eating. Takes too much time.
My theory for why this is is that my body is just better at switching from carbonhydrates to burning fat (converting it into glucose) and thus I don’t experience the drop in blood sugar levels the way some other people do to whom it takes a while for this process to kick in so they crash hard after all the carbs are used up.
After I got diagnosed with some weight related shit, I turned my entire life upside down, am at a much healthier 150 lbs (68ish kg), and feel so much better, both physically and mentally.
Something disillusioning from the field of psychotherapy research: Our best, most interdisciplinary, low-threshold therapeutic strategies allow people to, on average, lose and hold the loss of up to 7-10% of the weight they’ve started with. Which isn’t even enough to get most people out of the obesity range. What you’ve been through is exceptional. By far most people will never manage to lose that much, not even with professional help.
To put it this way: If we look at obesity like a mental disorder it’s one of the hardest to overcome, harder than depression or anxiety.
I get why so many people share your opinion on this, I just feel like it’s missing context. Because sure, physiologically its possible for a depressed person to “just go out more” or an anxious person to “just stop breathing so fast” or an overweight person to “just eat less and move more”, but this is such an oversimplified way to look at how humans work and why they do what they do that is simply stops being correct. Every now and then you’ll meet someone who managed to do all this just like that, but for the vast majority it’s an unrealistic and unfair thing to ask.
Obesity is a chronic disorder and will continue to be until we get better treatments.
I would’ve thought you would’ve learned kindness out of that ordeal. Didn’t people make fun of you? How’d it feel, even if you knew they were right? It’s just rude and inappropriate. There’s no need. eve
But I’d be lying if I said my initial impression was anything except “God, what a lazy, fat fuck.”
Sounds like envy. Working out is painful and exhausting, you aren’t allowed to eat tasty things except on extremely rare occasions, and that “lazy fat fuck” has neither of those problems.
Unfortunately if this is the only route to losing weight that is out of reach for many, many people who are already getting totally fucked by the system and struggling to get by.
There are a lot of people with eating disorders that result in them being overweight. Some people who have been neglected and abused as children can turn to food as their only source of comfort. If you have not been safe as a child, you will likely not have a basic sense of safety as an adult. If no-one has been kind to you and took care of you, you will likely not know how to be kind to yourself and take care of yourself.
So, you use food to feel safe and to get a sense of comfort. You use it to numb the feelings, to feel something nice. Because you do not have the resources to cope with the world that others that were loved as children do have, you do not know how to deal with it another way. And you survive and fight to make something of your life after all that has happened to you.
And then you get overweight. And society will tell you that it is your own fault. That you should show more restraint. That you just should eat less. That you lack willpower. That you are repulsive. That you are inferior to people who are not overweight. That you are unlovable. Basically, that you are everything that they used to tell you that you were when you were a child.
And you try to lose the weight, but you feel awful. You feel unsafe. You have nothing else that gives you a nice feeling. People will compliment you and be nicer to you and say that you look better. But you are constantly stressed. You think about food day and night, constantly, until you break. And you eat and you gain the weight back, and more. And you will feel like a failure, and you will feel unlovable and repulsive. And you do not know how to deal with these feelings in any other way than by eating.
And so, the stigma around being overweight actually makes it more difficult to love yourself and to be kind to yourself. The focus on food and the idea that everything will be okay if you just lose the weight will make you put all your effort into weight loss, instead of solving the real problem. Namely, that you need to process trauma and find other ways of coping with feelings and the world.
I think this is what is happening to a lot of people who are overweight. And they might not even be aware of it. They might think it is just about food, because that is what everyone is telling them. That they should just work harder at losing weight. That they just should have more willpower.
But I think that many people who are overweight do not lack willpower at all. They have survived horrible things. They did not get basic life skill lessons that others did. They did not grow up with a sense of safety and feeling good about themselves. But they survived. And they try to make something of their lifes. And that takes a lot of willpower. And for them to get better and to lead a more happy life, they need help with learning new ways to cope, they need their strength to be acknowledged, they need to be accepted, and, above all, they need to be loved.
I try to be nice to everyone as none of us are perfect and fat is just a more easy to see imperfection, right?
But as far as it being mostly lifestyle choice, I agree. I am older. When I was in school there was ONE fat girl, Tanya, and a few “husky” boys. The rest of us were thin.
Do I think Tanya chose to be fat? No way. I think she had some medical issue that made her body hold on to all that fat. But I think the natural incidence of that sort of issue cannot have increased, in one or two generations, from that 1/400 to 1/3. It’s not possible.
Being overweight is an overblown focus on people’s health. Most mildly overweight people lead a normal life. There are more important focuses that also impact weight gain without all the shame.
I’m 265 and 5’9", and I spent my whole life feeling like this was my fault. I’ve changed my diet, I’ve tried exercising, but I was always met with extreme difficulty. I thought exercise was supposed to be difficult and I was just a big baby. People would say, you just have to build up stamina. It gets easier. But it never did. It would get to the point where I’d be crying and pushing myself and still not accomplishing as much exercise as even an average unfit person could. I’d walk a few miles every day and never build stamina, never feel better, never lose weight.
I just found out I have an issue with my pituitary gland, likely a tumor (going for a scan). I just had the tests to confirm the issue is in my pituitary (the tests were miserable). I’m actually not producing certain hormones, so it turns out I’m incapable of building muscle. That’s why I can’t build stamina or convert my fat into muscle. I’ve been told this was “almost certainly” my issue for 2 months, (after my mom, aunts, and cousins were all diagnosed; we likely share a genetic defect causing pituitary tumors) and I’ve had the confirmed test results for over 2 weeks. It’s really hard to shift my perspective away from “this is my fault, I just need to try harder.” I expect to battle with health insurance a couple weeks to months before getting my hormone replacement. My mom only took 2 weeks (averages 2 months), so fingers crossed.
I’ve always thought more people were overweight for medical reasons than assumed by the general population, I just didn’t think I was one of them. I see a lot of moms like me hustling after their toddlers, eating well, trying their best, and still being overweight. I wonder if it has something to do with all the “endocrine disruptors” I’m always hearing about. I definitely think some people are overweight “by choice” (or by a mental disorder rather than a physical one), and I have major problems with “fat positivity” (I believe in body neutrality), but I think it’s more people having a medical problem than you’d expect. Same with my wife and child who both eat like horses but have BMIs of 13. It’s not like they’re not trying to gain weight.
Can’t agree more. The microlabels are too much at this point. You do not need mix sexual orientation, which is the sex we are naturally attracted to, with having preferences, which are the qualities we find attractive in a person or a relationship. The two are completely separate.
Exactly, every gay person I know IRL is disgusted by how the pride movement/LGBTQ+ whatever the hell they add on everyday, conduct themselves. It’s like a cult at this point, and I feel it paints a bad name on actual, normal, gay folk. These people who make being gay their entire identity, need to really consider some self awareness exercises.
Gay community can be brutal. It’s not the all-inclusive safe space some people like to think of it as. Gay or not they’re still all male and are mostly into manly stuff and if one is not for example into femine guys it’s not a taboo to say it out loud. Sexual harrasment is quite common aswell and probably wont get you canceled. Many would probably ban women from gay spaces if they could.
I think there’s value for folks in the community to have the hyper-specific labels. I’m saying this as a bi person who agrees that pan, Omni, etc are sub categories of bi.
No don’t worry. We can describe the totality of human sexuality and existence with three simple words: gay, straight, or bi. All these other labels confuse the straight people and therefore should be discarded to appeal to straight people’s infinite compassion.
Agree. I understand expressing acceptance of non hetero love so kids know that there are other options and they’re valued, but i don’t need to know what labels everyone has chosen, who they’re having sex with, or what is under their undies. And i believe that many people who are medically trans are chasing a masculinity or feminity that they feel is not allowed as a male or female and it’s sad that the stereotype is what they’re moving towards or away from instead of individuality. Also, kinda drunk, so probably disregard.
Read the bisexual manifesto. Bi has always included nonbinary people. If you are attracted to all genders, both bisexual and pansexual are valid labels you can choose.
Actually didn’t know that, even though I identify as bi lol. Pretty sure my other bi and pan friends didn’t know either from the kinds of discussions we’ve had. But then that’s just a bad choice linguistically, no? It’s very misleading because you literally have the terms bi and non-bi and you need to read some manifesto to understand that they’re not a contradiction. Meanwhile aside from the stupid overdone cookware joke, I think nobody ever questioned the meanings of terms like pan or omni, because they make sense linguistically.
Homosexual is attraction to the same gender; heterosexual is attraction to a different gender. The bi in bisexual is both of these, not attraction to two genders. Think of the bi flag, pink, purple, and blue: what do you think the colors represent? Nonbinary people have always been included in bisexual if you take some time to think about.
I don’t doubt your textbook correctness or the historical correctness of this, and maybe I should stress that I am not trying to exclude anyone from the bi term, but at least in my anecdotal experience, these terms are mostly used “wrongly”, meaning that there is a lot of confusion. And the meanings of words change as people start using them with different intended meanings.
Therefore, given the premise that we want to simplify things by cleaning up some redundant terms, I would prefer to keep the one whose meaning is intuitively clear to everyone. I just don’t see why - given bi, pan and omni all mean the same thing - one should choose the most misunderstood/misused term.
Personally, I would just keep the terms and let people choose whichever they like, I’m just trying to entertain this discussion of choosing to keep only one of them and the pros/cons for each choice.
Upvoted, but I have a slight disagreement. I think bisexual should actually be a label under pansexual. Bisexual doesn’t necessarily account for anyone outside the gender binary.
I think this thinking falls into the common belief that “sexuality” and preference within “sexuality” are actually distinct things. I really think everyone’s sexual preferences are unique, and so even microlabels don’t do them justice. But I don’t think the purpose of labeling your sexuality is meant to be perfectly descriptive, it’s a way to connect with people over shared parts of their experience with sexuality and that can be as coarse or fine as you want it to be. You say there should be only straight, gay, and bi, but we could go even more broad and say there should only be cishet and queer.
Dogs were hardwired by selective breeding to worship their owners. Not long ago they at least were loyal companions. You got one off the streets, fed it leftovers, washed it with a hose, it lived in the yard, and it was VERY happy and proud of doing its job. Some breeds now were bred into painful disabling deformities just to look “cute”, and they became hysterical neurotic yapping fashion accessories. Useless high maintenance toys people store in small cages (“oh, but my child loves his cage”) when they don’t need hardwired unconditional lopsided “love” to feed their narcissism.
Haha, I guess many dog owners just can’t see it how it is; probably an addiction to the lopsided unconditional “love”. I used to comment something similar back in Reddit, just to see the flood of downvotes and outraged dog owners.
Same reaction to supporting the idea that some breeds are generally more dangerous and/or more aggressive. “Oh, my MY pitbull is a sweetie!!” (adding this here just to test :D )
I think people are stupid about pets in general, just like they’re stupid about everything else. There are plenty of people who could make a good home for almost any animal, even a pitbull. There’s no “one size fits all” when it comes to pet ownership.
I agree with you about how awful it is to use these dogs as fashion accessories and put them in crates. I also think it’s because a lot of people desire the “lopsided love”. It definitely feeds their egos and a lot of them are narcissists, don’t know any better because they’re stupid or both.
Animals should only be in cages temporarily for the right reasons. I hate when people claim that their dogs love their cages. They don’t love them. They are just trained and conditioned to tolerate them. Most dogs do want to please their owners and it’s very convenient for these assholes to believe their dogs love being in their cages for hours on end.
I do agree that the caging trend is fucking awful. I have friends who leave their two large dogs caged for 8 hours a day and it crushes me. These are both well behaved dogs who wouldn’t make a mess out of a cage so I really just don’t get the point, other than it’s millennial meta to do cage training.
The “cage” thing is weird, because it seems like it is used by the worst/laziest dog owners, and by good dog owners / trainers (with very different reasoning). The average dog owner seems to not even use “cages” much.
Anyway, crate training is very much worth it, but it takes a significant effort
It’s not. OTOH it’s nonsense. The social engineering came late. First it was a primitive attempt to explain the unknown and give meaning to the meaningless.
I agree and have a follow up opinion. It’s not a bad thing. Religion was created to share and make people believe that certain things are bad because those things used to hurt or kill people. It’s social engineering to essentially try to make people better at living longer and happier lives. Sadly, a lot of religion broke out into more and more bad actors that used it for greed and personal gain.
Communism as drafted by 19th and 20th century thinkers will never work, predicated on the idea that labor is inherently undesirable and will not be performed by humans without immediate incentive.
We will need to rethink our approach towards communism with consideration for the growing spread of automation. Like it or not, automation is going to lead to the end of capitalism when the majority of jobs we have today are rendered obsolete and the unemployed masses are forced to subsist through some sort of UBI.
The goal is to keep the automation out of the hands of billionaires, however. If a society begins to approach post scarcity, which will finally render capitalism obsolete, the oligarchs will do whatever they can to re-engineer scarcity and bring us back to feudalism before they’d ever consider giving power to the people.
Thats why i propose we build an A.I. overlord to replace our leadership, corporate and gobernment, since they will always default to making desisions against the needs of their populations and just serve their own interests (Case in point: global warming). If we have a singularity level A.I. it would be able to expliot our natural resources in a renewable way amd distribute them justly and automate all labor, and be able to defend humans from any danger, making us something like The Culture from the novel series of the same name.
First, how do you imagine transferring power to an AI overlord would sit with the people who currently have all the proverbial guns in our current society. That’s the problem we need to solve first.
Second, who in our society would you trust to build an AI up to the task of single handedly managing world affairs? How would you even test something so superhuman? Not to mention that we’re not close to superhuman, we’re already pushing the limits of our tech building a chatbot that can’t stay coherent for more than a couple paragraphs. The tech just isn’t there yet and not within orders of magnitude.
I love very much your counter arguments and the fact that you are bringing them up specially since they are exactly the ones i have too, but il try to adress them:
1.- The A.I. that im calling project overlord, and im just gonna call it OV from now, should be abble to build armed drones and armored vehicles that while would preferably be operated by OV itself, its gonna need autonomous A.I. because of practicality (developed by OV preferably), while you see OV is not a babysitter and can use guns and cause harm and even kill, otherwise its rise to power would be impossible and it wouldnt be able to defend humanity from external forces, sounds bad but the other solution that i can think of its that it beats us at our own game by and starts a company, makes it succesfull (mostly by ussing unethical practices and having good p.r) and then starts buying other companies and starts lobying the governments so that it can make changes both for the betterment of humankind and its rise to power until it can get as much people that recieve orders directly from OV as posible into congress or ministries or whatever the name is of the council of clowns that rules the region of the worlds countries, and throught international cooperation it would eventually break borders, little by little start making work optional, and offer mental healt programs that are focused on self betterment and not deal with corporate work until everyone is united as not a cpuntry but as humankind and the A.I. finnaly reveals itself. The problem is that is gonna be found out eventually by inteligence agencies and its gonna have to resort to the first method
2.- Either as a colaborative oppen source efort from the internet denicens themselves, or (even if i sound fucking looney) me, but the me option only works for me, i dont think other people will think that, neither do i but is the only way i could be shure of it, and even if i try to make OV not be biased it will end up being biased in certain issues and not have the best aproach to things and even if i dedicate my entire life to studing A.I. and geting money and people to fund OV as a Nongov institutuion ill doubt i could pull it of by myself and make it good since im a terrible option for it right now. So the real answer is thats is just worked on as a collaborative effort from the internet, kinda like open source software or something like that but the devs need to be a little versed i philosofy at least at the level of what “The good place” says, as for me, im gonna go into studdying A.I. development as soon as i crawl out of this hole that im at in my life, but i wont make any promises, after all im corruptible to.
3.- Its probably just gonna be a mather of giving it time, but if im being honest i dont think we need something that advenced like a singularity level entity like OV, We could do with something that the very least does something more simple like the redistributing resources at a logistical level, and such thing could work as long as it could be respected in the level of constitutions, or human rights, not that is not questioned, but respected and defendable, how that could be done i really dont have any idea other that it being fire tested. Otherwise, the secret to it might be in quantum computing, but its not like we can jack up a quantum computer to OV and call it a day, since quantum shit is like twilight zone level maths, and is dificult to wrap ones head around so its still probably a risky bet.
Sorry for bad english, wall of text and no TL;DR but i dont think i can express all of this in a smaller text
I would say a good argument for communism is the worsening side effects of capitalism. These problems simply cannot be fixed in a capitalist framework because they require global cooperation and capitalism is based on competition. Problems like over exploitation of natural resources (overfishing, carbon emissions) and the failure of the market to adequately provide services for which there is a fixed level of demand (housing, education, healthcare. The scale of college and medical debt is getting ridiculous). Many other problems like these.
The solution is more democracy and yes common ownership of the means of production. People are just allergic to the specific term of class struggle. but it doesn’t change the meaning - the ownership/ruling class benefits from the status quo even as everything gets worse. They will not give up control without a fight, and as you said they will use every tool, from propaganda and legislation up to direct violence to maintain that control.
These problems simply cannot be fixed in a capitalist framework
They were fixed in the past. Trust-busting, Keynesian Economic Policy, taxing the wealthy.
It’s just we’ve been stuck in the Reagan’s supply side economics bullshit for decades now. The problems we’re seeing now are because of proven economic solutions being abandoned because the wealthy have confused the voting public to think that we shouldn’t go back to policies that worked for over six decades.
Like it or not, automation is going to lead to the end of capitalism when the majority of jobs we have today are rendered obsolete and the unemployed masses are forced to subsist through some sort of UBI.
Automation has been going on since the dawn of the industrial revolution. You see a robot doing a job a person used to do and get excited and think it’s going to be the end of the need for labour.
But look at an a excavator. People used to have to dig everything with shovels. But an excavator can do the job of hundreds of people with shovels. Excavators have been around a long time, but didn’t lead the elimination of all work everywhere.
Yes, “the majority of jobs we have today” will be made obsolete just like how having a big crew of strong people to dig a canal (or whatever) was made obsolete. But then there were new jobs to replace those ones.
It’s the truth, though. Humans create hierarchies whenever they sre in a group, explicit or not. Also, working without any incentive to do better only works for so long.
I’ve no problem improving society just for the sake of it, given that everybody else also does. Sadly any bigger group of people will start getting freeloaders and I’m allergic for such BS.
Focusing on freeloaders rather than those in need is problematic. There will always be freeloaders, and sure, we should always aim to minimize their numbers. But is it worth it to deny those with genuine need who vastly outnumber the relatively miniscule number of freeloaders?
I agree with your sentiment, but this thread is about communism. As someone who actually lives in post-communist country I can assure you that net effect is not what you’re looking for.
Right now my life is significantly better than someone who decides to live on government welfare.
30 something years ago, when we had socialism in my country it didn’t matter if you worked, got drunk or slept at work. Everybody had the same shitty flat and the same shitty products (assuming there were products at all).
This system has a lot of problems, but socialism sucked indefinitely more.
I agree with you, most if not all of the former socialist countries are doing better in most metrics now a days. I am not a socialist and do not advocate for it under almost any circumstance. I advocate for the abolition of the state, I want everyone to live a comfortable life, doing what they enjoy, without having to struggle to get to the end of the month. There will be freeloaders, but if that means that people in need can live a life just as well as anyone else I think its worth it.
The problem is people think capitalism, socialism, and even communism are mutually exclusive. They’re all tools, and like any tool they’re better for some jobs than others.
Trying to make a society work using just one across the board is doomed to failure. As is failing to impliment and update safeguards against disparities in equity and power.
I don’t know how people who lived through COVID can think that communism will work. A certain portion of the population will always act towards their own perceived benefit even if it is to the detriment of everyone else around them.
You hit the nail on the head, the issue with communism is not freeloarders or lack of incentives, it’s the fact that any form of hierarchy will create a power imbalance, and there will always be people who try to take advantage of it to better themselves and their friends at the expense of everyone else.
The people in this thread calling for AI overlords to take over for our governments and leaders dont understand that AI is trained to mimic human speech and behavior, not improve on it.
I’ve been a fan of Star Wars since I was a kid. But Disney’s management of this IP has totally ruined it for me. I still haven’t seen The Rise of Skywalker after the trash that was The Last Jedi. They also seem to be focusing on pumping out as much content as possible, which has diluted any feelings of longing I had to see more.
They also need to branch out a bit more. The best of new star wars imo (Rogue one, Mando, and Andor) are so awesome because they focus any other aspect of the immense galaxy instead of focusing on the same 1 family from sand planet.
I downvoted because this is a popular opinion. MCU is the same thing. Most people probably don’t have a strong opinion on Star Wars either way, but for the people who do there are plenty who think it sucks.
I like Star Wars fine. If they make something, I’ll probably watch it. But I don’t consider myself a fan. I don’t keep track of the lore and would be hard pressed to tell you the plot of anything I hadn’t seen recently. Which is a long way of saying I’m in the don’t have a strong opinion camp.
It was a different perspective on an imperfect galaxy and one that felt like it was lived in.
Not just Aliens visit earth!
But a new perspective like.... what if just because we have faster then light travel, racism didn't go away, and it had laser swords and near super human abilities powers!
On the last day of my college internship a senior VP at my little company invited me into his office presumably to get to know me prior to extending a full-time offer. To break the ice he asked me what my favorite Star Wars movie was. I smiled and replied that I could never get through any of them.
As I was uttering these words I began to notice the giant Star Wars poster directly behind the gentleman. It then dawned on me that his office was chalk full of Star Wars memorabilia.
The man did not ask me any further questions. He shook my hand, thanked me for my great work, and I never stepped foot into those offices ever again.
If I come across you in a dark alley and we’re all alone then you better be ready cos I’ll accept your opinion and offer some other suggestions of movies that we might like, such as all 3 Lord of the Rings (extended editions of course).
I absolutely loved Star Wars as a kid. Every movie since then has been a major disappointment. I’ve only watched the first of the OT as an adult so far (with my kids), and I was not as into it as expected. Luke was one whiney kid.
Some of it does. Maybe even a lot of it. Andor is a pretty good miniseries though, I like that it’s more mature and has a bleaker undertone like Rogue One.
No Star Wars media compares to the idea of Star Wars.
Except maybe for Andor. I liked Andor. Make stuff that gets away from those fucking Jedis and the whole Skywalker family. They’re the worst bit about the whole franchise.
I think so much about it is awesome (visuals, design of ships and sets, music, etc.) but maybe due to lack of repeated exposure to the movies as a child I don’t feel much about them. The modern movies were especially meh, since they all feel like they are trying to recapture the feeling of people who saw the originals in the cinema in the late 70s and 80s, but without doing anything new. I did quite enjoy the Fallen Order game and will probably play the follow up at some point too though.
I feel the originals were great when they came out, but haven’t aged well. Of course, I was a kid and the special effects were cutting edge at the time.
They’ve aged fine if you don’t expect the effects to be 2023 effects. If you accept that they were top of the line 1978 effects, it won’t bother you at all. What always made me laugh is my mother telling me how they were all dumbfounded, not by laser blasts and cool ship exteriors, but rather the introductory text moving off into infinity. I think she’d have been something like 21 at the time.
@rikudou@asklemmy HITLER DID NOTHING WRONG
THE GOOD GUYS LOST WWII
THE HOLOCAUST IS A LIE
WE SHOULD MAKE IT REAL THO
ZOG FARMS GOYIM FOR LOOSH
RACE DEFINES IQ WHICH IS WHAT ALLOWS A HIGHER-CASTE SOUL TO INCARNATE IN A BODY
THE 19TH AMENDMENT AND ITS CONSEQUENCES HAVE BEEN A DISASTER FOR THE HUMAN RACE
TOTAL NIGGER DEATH
TOTAL REDDIT DEATH (le downboating - lmao)
TOTAL TROON DEATH (they're handling this one on their own)
WE WOULD BENEFIT FROM A SOLAR FLARE TRIGGERED CARRINGTON EVENT, A CIVIL WAR OR GREAT FAMINE
I would try it! Made me think of Taiwanese xiao long bao and buns that can be made as entrees (meats and veggies) or as desserts (taro, chocolate, red bean, etc).
I fucking love pasta with nesquick or just plain sugar. We also have a dish in our country that’s basically a pasta desert - pasta + ground walnuts and sugar ❤️
This is the most cursed thing I’ve read but I think I’d be willing to try it. People associate pasta and noodles with flavors despite it just being a form factor.
I boil the pasta in sugared cacao water, this might be the most important step as it turns the pasta brown. Yellow pasta looks unappetizing if you skip this step.
Then you make a ganache using your favourite chocolate. For me it’s toblerone, I find the little nougat bits add a cool texture. I melt it in a bowl over the boiling pasta and mix with cream, it is very efficient! Everything should be ready to mix at the same time!
Not yet, although not for lack of curiosity. I was busy at the time and then forgot about this.
Although, in case you’re curious, tomato cake is a thing I’ve made and it’s definitely different. I didn’t like it at first but I also ended up eating the whole thing over a couple days.
The average person shouldn’t be allowed to drive. It’s extremely dangerous and most people are desensitized to it and absolutely don’t take the natural responsibility towards others that comes with having the ability to kill someone with a finger twitch (or a slight lapse in attention) seriously enough. I don’t think it would be allowed if it was just invented this year.
This is why I personally am looking forward to fully self-driving cars. We’re a long way off, but when self-driving cars can completely replace the human element, I think the world will be a much safer place.
How about spacial inefficiency? A car only carries 1-6 people compared to a train which carries dozens or even hundreds. Or a bus which carries dozens.
Traffic and parking are the biggest issue i see with cars and space efficiency. Both can be significantly improved on with self driving. Especially if most people opt for public ownership of cars and not private. Something think will become more popular as self driving takes over and lowers the cost of taking the self driving equivalent of a taxi or Uber.
By the way i think self driving cars will make trains more popular. As trains suck at first and last mile transportation. Self driving solves the first and last mile issues.
If we’re going to opt for public ownership then why would you choose the less efficient single passenger method over already-established public infrastructure like trains and trams and buses which have been proven to work well in other countries?
Also please elaborate on how self driving cars will improve parking issues. And as for traffic, while self-driving cars will be less likely to cause accidents and jams, hundreds of independent low-capacity vehicles are in no way more effective than a single locomotive carrying those hundreds of people in a smaller space.
You’re allowed to like self-driving cars, but buses and trains are objectively more efficient in the large scale and all you have to do is acknowledge that. The more people realize this, the more room there is for us to make progress
If we’re going to opt for public ownership then why would you choose the less efficient single passenger method over already-established public infrastructure like trains and trams and buses which have been proven to work well in other countries?
Simple we have already chosen cars in the US. It is far easier to use the existing roads to our advantage then try and redesign the entire country to fit a train and tram and bus model.
Also please elaborate on how self driving cars will improve parking issues.
In a public car the car will drop people off and drive away to pick up other people. There would be no need parking at all. Just a small drop off and pickup location.
Now this won’t work as well if we are talking about private ownership cars, but it would be better as the car can drop you off and then drive to a centralized parking location. This would remove the need for street parking or parking lots next to restaurants and stores. Or if your planning to stay a long time for exmaple if your going to work for 8 hours. I think many people might want rent out their car during the day. Car drops me off at work and I tell the car to join the “public car” network for 8 hours and it can go find some people to transport.
And as for traffic, while self-driving cars will be less likely to cause accidents and jams, hundreds of independent low-capacity vehicles are in no way more effective than a single locomotive carrying those hundreds of people in a smaller space.
Oh sure it won’t be as effective but it will be much better then what we have now. And there are benefits cars have over trains. For example after a the world pandemic scare I find traveling in my own space a much more pleasant experience then sharing with many other people. Also I really like listening to music in a car as full volume very enjoyable experience that you just can’t do on a public train :). A car will be a single vehicle to my destination, I can get in a fall asleep if I want. Buses and trains are usually multiple vehicles and you need to be some what alert to know when your stop is.
what you say makes sense, not saying you’re completely wrong, but your whole argument is based off the fact that we have already chosen cars. But simply doubling down on a worse solution just puts us deeper in to the hole, instead of making the more difficult decision of redirecting some of our massive amounts of GDP in to larger scale projects (yknow instead of wasting billions on military spending & corporate bailouts) such as making the investment into the development of a proper rail network BESIDE our existing infrastructure, like china has done for example. (not supporting china but it is true that they have made massive progress in public transportation across a country equally large as ours, in a relatively very short time)
Not at all. Most German car companies know this and some have even said as much (focus on luxury cars, car sharing and subscriptions). The Greens (part of the government) have been pushing for better public transportation and now Germany has a nationwide ticket for just 49€ per month. We still need much more investment in infrastructure, but that opinion is shared by many town planners and politicians. An added benefit with reduced road traffic is that driving becomes easier and fun again.
That all sounds very German, lol. I’m mostly just speaking from my America-centric perspective. It would be nice to have reduced road traffic here and make riding more fun, but a lot of the people that support public transit typically hate motorcycles just as much as they hate cars so I feel like I have to oppose them even though I don’t own a car myself.
Better public transportation shouldn’t mean that cars or motorcycles will be banned. It’s a way to move more people more efficiently. Ideally, you wouldn’t want to own a car or motorcycle, because other modes of transport provide a better service. While it might seem very German/European, it’s actually not that straightforward if you consider that the modern car, truck and motorcycle were all invented in Germany (by Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler) and that the economy of Germany and Europe as a whole is dependent on the automobile industry. However, other companies in other countries are facing similar problems, so it’s not unique to Europe either. The ones which adapt best will survive (probably).
On the flip side I’m worried about manufacturers realizing that the continuous revenue stream from autonomous vehicles is more profitable than selling vehicles outright thereby increasing the cost of buying a vehicle to the point where ownership becomes functionally obsolete except to the ultra-wealthy. This also makes it much easier to restrict the movement of people. Self driving car companies could easily disable the ability to travel to entire areas either because they say they’re too dangerous or not profitable enough to operate in. I can imagine entire cities and rural areas becoming ghost towns. While personally I think autonomous vehicles, in a vacuum, have the potential to save countless lives, the reality is that in time we will be giving the companies making these vehicles the ability to dictate where we can and cannot go.
Adding onto this, city driving is just… different, in a way that I think a human element is always going to be needed. Sometimes you need to take a risky left, or cut across the double yellow lines into the other lane past someone, or run a yellow. Are these things unsafe? Of course. But when it’s rush hour you have to be a dick just to get through it sometimes. In 2016, Uber built and tested their self-driving cars in my city of Pittsburgh, because we notoriously have some of the worst and most confusing spaghetti messes of roads in the country. They stopped whenever a car struck and killed someone. I rode in one one time because I was just tryin to call an Uber for a concert, and since it couldn’t go on the highway it took the worst way through downtown, and got stuck at a red light for over 5 minutes because the car was waiting to take a left, and everyone was going around us and not giving us a break.
Also, all these new cars with their auto-correcting features scare the shit out of me. What happens when you go across the double yellow to go around someone riding a bicycle and it swerves you back into their lane?
You could call these bugs to be worked out but I feel infinitely safer when I’m the one doing the driving. In a perfect world maybe our infrastructure and transport would’ve been planned differently but I swear half the roads around here are based on deer trails or something, winding through crazy hills in the woods. I’ve heard self-driving cars do best on roads specially designed for them. We can’t even get the city to fix our thousands of potholes, or crumbling infrastructure. We had a major bridge collapse a couple years ago, and the way it was rated during inspections was pretty close to the other ones around here. So how on earth are self-driving car roads going to be put in?
Cars were almost banned when they first became popular. The existing infrastructure and traffic safety regulations (shared roads) were not adequate for a speeding death machine. However, cars were very important for the military, so highways and modern road networks were quickly pushed as “the future”.
Too many places let you drive if you do the happy path stuff right: stopping at a stop sign, changing lanes safely, etc. But the most important time of your driving is when you’re about to hit a semitruck and you need to get your car out of the way, and there is no training material for this at all. People often panic and slam the brakes and aggressively turn the wheel, which is a perfect setup for understeer and losing control of your car. They are literally getting in a situation where they are about to die and they choose to greatly increase their risk due to negligence.
It’s cheaper to run simulators than purchase cars and hire trainers. Get em in nasty situations and teach them how to get out of it. For real, if mom and dad can’t evade sinking their freeway missile into a van full of kids, they shouldn’t be able to get behind the wheel and be presented with opportunities where this might happen any time they drive.
Honestly if you can play that game you must have super human reflexes. I used to play it on the xbox360 and loved it but I’m older now and recently got it on ps5 and I’m just constantly smashing into shit. I would be terrible in a real car!
In a sense, I agree that it makes sense to train people to be better technical drivers. The issue is that for avoiding accidents, your time is orders of magnitude better spent practicing planning and avoiding potential situations in the first place.
Being able to see where you need to pay extra attention, what cars to keep extra distance to, and being able to judge what a safe speed is saves far more lives than building the technical skills to get out of a situation once you’re in it.
To be fair though: at least in Norway we have an obligatory course where we drive on sleet/ice or oil to practice controlling a car in winter conditions. However, the main focus of the course is on recognising how fast you can go in different conditions, and how far of a breaking stretch you need to plan for.
Maybe doing this will also make people more hesitant to get behind the wheel. If more people are aware of the risks of driving, maybe they’ll start to demand alternatives
Germany’s driving test (and school) is fairly strict and will fail you for small mistakes which is good for beginners but after all, there is no test or reinsurance after some years of driving. After some time, people will see driving as a right not a privilege. This is the case for the vast majority of counties. This is the problem.
Problem is that there’s no other alternative for most people. Unless you live in a city, public transportation isn’t a valid option. Most people living in most locations (at least in the US) have to have personal vehicles to attend school/work, shop, and socialize.
Once self driving cars become commonly available, driving will no longer be a requirement and I think that driving licenses should be stricter on who’s allowed to drive.
And just having access to some public transportation doesn’t mean you have useful access. Being able to access a bus stop doesn’t help if it won’t take you where you need to go, or if the time schedule isn’t acceptably close to your needed transportation times.
The way I see it is fuck em, if you can’t safely drive and follow the rules to mimimize risk for everyone around you then pay for a taxi or take the bus. No public transport? Get your ass on a bike. Everytime I go out, even for a short 10 minute drive to the grocery store, 90% of the time I see someone doing something insanely stupid and dangerous but because nothing bad comes of it they don’t learn not to do that.
Driving a vehicle should be considered a huge privilege considering how easy it is to kill not just yourself, but others simply by being a dumbass and not taking it seriously enough. People back up without looking, make turns without looking, tons of dumb shit constantly, shit I had someone merge into my lane without even looking when I was right beside them, I had to slam on my brakes to get out of the way and I was only able to do that because there was no one behind me. I honked at them and they just flipped me off. There should also be a forced age limit for being able to drive cause old people are fucking terrible drivers, or at the very least they should have yearly tests past a certain age to ensure they’re still capable of driving.
Drive properly and safely or deal with the massive consequences of not being able to get around quickly. Need a license to get to/do your job? Drive safely or get fucked. Absolutely zero sympathy for shitty drivers.
shit I had someone merge into my lane without even looking when I was right beside them, I had to slam on my brakes to get out of the way and I was only able to do that because there was no one behind me. I honked at them and they just flipped me off
Man, this really pisses me off because I know they know they’re the dumbass who fucked up but their fragile ego can’t take being honked at so they flip you off nevertheless. Hate idiots like that.
We aren’t saying that they should be driving, quite the opposite. We’re saying that it’s completely fucked that in some places you have to drive to participate in society, precisely because many people shouldn’t. There needs to be alternatives to driving so that law enforcement can remove anyone’s license without effectively placing them in house arrest.
Imo it’s kinda unavoidable. Humans make mistakes all the time. We could greatly reduce the risk however, if we simply reduced our reliance on independent vehicles. Unfortunately this depends on the place where you live as well but if possible, it would be much safer for the collective majority to bike/walk to areas or use public transport where applicable as it would drop the amount of traffic on the roads
Sadly, most cities are build in a way which forces you pretty much to own and drive a car. Everything so far apart and tho public transport may help, tho in some cases is either neglected or badly implemented. Ideally, i think cities should be built around a way that easily allows traveling on foot, bike or with a solid subway and/or bus system.
I have a similar one for our country - we were occupied by Soviets and to this day I fucking hate that the communist party wasn’t outlawed after revolution. They tortured people for fuck’s sake. And the even sadder part is that it took 30 years after revolution for the communist party to not have any presence in the parliament - the last elections were the first where they didn’t gain any seat.
Cool. I used to live in Brno (although I am Norwegian). I had a coworker from Praha who used to curse commies on a daily basis when we worked offshore together. “What kind of asshole party man designed this commie piece of shit??!”. He grew up in the 80’s.
Heh, lived there as well for a while! Yep, commie hatred is huge here. Especially because they fucked up so much for us. Throughout centuries we were part of the west, one of the most innovative countries in the world and one of the richest! Then decades of occupation by those fuckers (the previous occupation by Nazi Germany didn’t help as well, thank you all the countries who sold us over because that would definitely stop Hitler from going further!) and suddenly everyone calls us eastern, we’re far from our former prosperity and have basically become a factory for Germany. I’m a little salty about that.
Mate, you’re looking for approval from westerners by kicking down east. You internalized the whole racial hierarchy some imperial fucks invented with them on top, and you’re trying to climb it.
It’s not a made up hierarchy and I didn’t internalize anything - I agree with the hierarchy! Soviets were in the wrong, they illegally occupied many, many countries. If we disagree on this simple fact, we have nothing further to discuss. If we agree, then there is a logical conclusion: everyone, who supported them was in the wrong as well.
And as much as I hate to admit it, they would’ve never been so successful here if we didn’t welcome them. I think it’s kinda understandable - we were torn by war and our western allies has fucked us over to save their asses (which they didn’t in the end and honestly that, for me, is the only good thing about the war) and suddenly a big Slavic country comes and says they will help us, unlike those big bad guys that fucked us. While I personally would be looking for the catch were I alive back then, I understand that people just wanted peace.
Anyway, that was kinda detour, the fact remains that we welcomed them, so we we’re correctly labeled as the “eastern bloc” for that. What pisses me off about it is that we were part of the western culture with western values for centuries, while we were part of the eastern bloc for measly 23 years (and most of the time it was involuntary when people found out that there indeed was a catch with the “brotherly help”).
We were fucked by west and then fucked by east, truly a wonderful country to live in.
Saying that every single Nazi should have been killed is.
Every nazi party member, every soldier, every sympathizer, everywhere in the world.
That would have included Nazi supporters in the US, all the nazi scientists that got a clean slate by agreeing to work for the allies after the war, every single member of their armed forces from the top to the bottom, and every civilian that worked for them voluntarily. That’s the only way to come close to eradicating something like what the Nazi are. You can’t let a single one survive to pass on their beliefs, so you end up killing people that didn’t believe in it as a side effect.
It would have also included a fuckton of people who had nothing to do with naziism but were disliked by someone with the power to decide who was a Nazi. And probably also a whole separate fuckton of people who fell into some bucket that was arbitrarily “close enough” to naziism when the original Nazis were running out. Etc etc
When the quest to eradicate Nazis turns the eradicator into something at least asbad as the Nazis themselves…
There were so many people, even children, drafted and forced to serve the Nazis, either in the military or in other capacities. Many of which returned as broken, disabled and traumatized shadows of themselves. Genociding them for being abused by the Nazis would seriously not be better than what the Nazis did.
(Disclaimer: I am totally not defending Nazis or Neonazis here. But history is complicated and messy and there where millions of people who just did what they were told out of fear of their own lives and the lives of their loved ones. Also, history is largely written by the winners. Had the Nazis won the war, then we would now talk about the concentration camps for Japanese people in the US, and about the gulags. I wish that we could get rid of Nazis, but genocide cannot be fought by genocide and you cannot fight fascists by becoming one.)
“We should have systemically hunted down and killed every member of a political party” is unpopular, not because of the sentiment, but because actually doing so generally goes against the foundational beliefs of most modern societies.
Then comes the question who was a nazi? And who just feard them and not spoke up? Look at Russia or China, propaganda is also very much a problem, would you kill a 19 year old because he was in SS after all his life he was told thats a good thing?
I agree that Nazis are absolute garbage, but you can’t justify a genocide with a genocide, same with Japan after WW2 (and they did worse stuff)
Also, whats with the “Commies” from USSR? They where basically the same level of evil. (and yes the Holodomor was a genocide and not the only thing they did)
Well, killing all Nazis isn’t genocide, it’s just mass murder.
And it isn’t about a scale of how bad various regimes have been before or since.
And yes, that’s the entire thing. They should have killed every last SS, Gestapo, every brown shirt and soldier, no matter how young. The motivation of the victims of killing every nazi wouldn’t matter because the point is to eradicate every last one of them, and there’s no way to prove they didn’t believe in what they were doing other than their actions. There weren’t very many Schindlers that showed by their actions that they actively resisted from the inside. And if it took their deaths to achieve the goal, then it was a mistake to not do it then.
TBH, despite being against the death penalty for several reasons, I’m worried we might be faced with such a decision again in my lifetime because they didn’t do it then.
Obviously, eradicating the nazis wouldn’t prevent the kind of insanity and hatred that exists as part of the human mind. It would have changed the face of that hatred though, and it would have sent the message that some things will not be forgiven or forgotten. It would have meant less rallying points, less bullshit. And it would have set the precedent that if humans behave like that, they can be put down like a rabid animal to protect the rest of us.
Again, I’m aware of exactly how ugly this opinion is. I do not like looking at the world and thinking that there wasn’t enough death done back then. I do not like looking at the world now and wondering when it is going to happen again. But it’s an ugly fucking world, and they’re coming back. They’re coming back exactly the same way they did before because they were allowed to survive.
At the end of the war literal children were being drafted. Are you seriously arguing that we should kill a 13 year old because he got a threatening letter and followed it’s instructions?
Ahh, I’m not arguing we, as in humanity today, should do anything yet.
I’m saying that the people alive and in charge at the time made a mistake in not wiping out every nazi they could find.
Age is no barrier to such things at all. A 13 year old can be tried as an adult in many places for extreme crimes. Child soldiers have been sent to war for millennia, and still are today. Children are quite capable of committing atrocities. I wouldn’t want to do it, I wouldn’t want to see it get that far. But it was a mistake not to go as far as necessary to eradicate anyone that served the nazis because there’s absolutely no way other than actions to prove what the individuals believed, and even that has flaws.
How many children had already been killed? I’m not even talking about by the nazis. Look up the Dresden fire bombing. Plenty of children were burnt to ash there. Hiroshima, Nagasaki. The are just the famous ones. The allies had already killed children of all ages by the end of the war. Pretending that there’s a moral difference between that and executing them is not useful. Executions would even be arguably less horrible since it would only target those that were in the armed forces.
Well, this discussion has been less contentious than in the past, so I’ve actually had a chance to cover this.
Before I go copy/pasting things already covered, would it be too much to ask that you give a quick scroll through the thread and see if any of that changes your question, or if there’s follow ups that you might have? It would help streamline the thread overall if there’s not a lot of repeats.
I read the whole thread and didn’t see a single argument about what good would have come from that. I think you’re looking at this from a very removed point of view that lets you forget the actual individuals involved. I’m German. Let me introduce you to my grandparents and let’s see how they would’ve fared under your proposed processing:
Grandpa A was drafted at the end of the war, he was 13. He didn’t want to be there and plotted a “genius” plan with his two buddies two lie to his general about a super important mission from the general next town and run off. He probably only survived that because his general wasn’t in the mood to shoot him on the spot.
Grandma B wasn’t drafted obviously, she worked in (basically) social services while WWII because she actually was a supporter of the Nazi party and felt like that’s how she could do her part. She didn’t commit any atrocities, probably simply because as a woman she never got anywhere close to the front.
Grandpa C was a party member. He didn’t want to join at first – we still own a news paper page where he (and a few others) were openly shamed for refusing to join party and front. After his brother, who had turned down an SS position, was transferred to an extra risky combat unit as cannon fodder and died on his second day, he caved. I can only assume that, as a soldier, he actively participated in the fighting. He tried to disobey where easily possible, but he didn’t desert. When his general told him to “take care” of a woman he abused, he brought her away from the front, pointed her to the nearest town and told her to flee.
Grandma D didn’t do any of that, but she was proudly engaged to a Hitler Youth leader (who thankfully died, so she met my grandpa after the war). While WWII she absolutely was a Nazi, but she didn’t actively do anything that would mark her as such. She got into a personal crisis after the war when she stopped lying to herself about this horrible system she had supported. Until the day she died she was convinced she would go to hell.
Killing every active supporter, as you suggested, would have both my grandpas executed, although they both condemned what was happening and, limited by their sparce abilities to do so, tried to disobey. My grandmas would’ve ironically been spared, even though they were (when it comes to their attitude) more Nazis than my grandpas. Neither of the four were Nazis at later points in their life, I’d like to add. And the generation after them would have never existed - an anti-nationalistic, anti-patriotic, highly political, highly critical and socially active family, influenced by traumatized men and rueful women.
So it would have achieved nothing. I’d argue the world would be even worse if that would have been humanity’s answer to WWII back then.
I think you are kinda insane, at the wars end most German soldiers where literally underage, there is no justice in killing them, not the smallest bit.
The holodomor as it is reported in the West appears to be a myth. There was a widespread famine where more Kazakhs and Russians died than Ukrainians, and the USSR did try to send Ukraine provisions but not enough. Also there is under reporting in the West of kulaks burning their fields instead of giving them up to the govt. Stalin even thought the West might have been responsible but that seems to just be Stalin being Stalin.
That’s not exactly a genocide, just more incompetence as usual.
The man whose work is most often cited has been refuted by his own wife and the initial publishing came with doctored photos that he removed when they were called out.
You ever hear of the idea of some act being a warning to others?
If you wipe out all known nazis, the rest of them are now aware of the price of their practices. You can then freely stomp them out as they arise, like the cockroaches they are.
No, not like roaches, because roaches have a role in a healthy ecosystem (when it isn’t an invasive species). Nazis are a fucking cancer. You eradicate cancer, you nuke it, poison or, and cut it out, you don’t tolerate it. Because if you do, it grows and spreads and kills everything else.
But killing every Nazi wouldn’t have killed the ideology.
No… to kill the ideology (of which nazism was merely one expression), you have to dismantle the thing nazism (and other right-wing ideologies) served.
Right-wing ideology exists for one reason and one reason only - to protect the power and privilege of elite establishments. You have to kill that which it serves.
My homie, what “we” do you mean? The allied nations? They all had sympathizers to some degree or another. Humanity? I think it should be self evident that humanity was (and is) full of that kind of person.
We have never been better than nazis because we is completely capable of spawning that kind of thing at any time.
With some rare exceptions of course (e.g. Oskar Schindler), every single Nazi member either contributed to or wilfully ignored the industrial deathmachines in the concentration camps. Let those who profiteered work in the same conditions as a slave for a few years and let those that were actively involved (e.g. the camp guards, developers, and all high level party members) be gassed.
How do you feel about the people who were technically nazies because of the peer pressure, social environment etc? They probably wouldn’t have been into any of that stuff if only they had been born 50 years later.
Doesn’t say much as many of these could have just tried lemmy.world for a few minutes and then discarded the account. Or they could be super active. The statistic doesn’t say.
Same here, I created my first account there while simultaneously creating this one on Kbin.social. With all the issues there were with lemmy.world I've decided to use this one for a while instead to see how I like Kbin. It's been pretty nice so far, the only thing that sucks is that I haven't found a good Kbin app for Android yet.
It is and I have it installed but it's not fully doing what I want it to do yet. For example, as far as I'm aware I can't log in with my Kbin.social account in the app.
It is not what is called “single point of failure “. Usually if “single point of failure “ fails, the whole thing fails. I am on kbin and experience zero failures.
If they were to actually go down (the current failures do not affect the backend), all of the communities they host wouldn’t be usable anymore, taking down a large portion of the Lemmy/Kbin communities.
Only those that are on lemmy.world. There are tons of communities/magazines elsewhere. When lemmy.world goes down, I learn about it from posts. Otherwise, I would not notice.
The uptime on lemmy.world is terrible. lemmy-world.statuspage.io currently shows 95% uptime, but it has been “down” from a UX perspective more than half the time I attempted to use it. The uptime reporting is simply not picking up when something is off as much as it should. And they recently added an archive.org proxy for when it goes down… what the heck? I understand that it is run by volunteers and all, but what a buzzkill.
Add comment