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Cake day: May 25th, 2024

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  • isn’t a slur more than that?

    Not really. I could provide actual specific examples, but I don’t really want to start saying like, slurs, so. I think maybe if you think that you couldn’t make a slur out of almost any word, then you’re not being creative enough, or, you haven’t acclimated to how creative some of these other guys can be.

    Here, I’ll come up with a theoretical example. You could probably make a slur out of, say, calling someone a banana-eater, right. I can even imagine two ways to do that.

    You could have it be, okay, well, monkeys eat bananas, so, the banana eater is like a monkey, and then obviously comparing people to monkeys is gonna be a little bit of a red flag, is maybe racist, especially depending on whether or not you’re using it to be racist, or applying it disproportionately to one group of people. I’ve seen people just throwing out, like, the specific lego number piece of the mass produced lego monkey, whenever they see a black guy online. I think, at that point, that’s basically a slur, in how they’re using it, and that’s like, just a sequence of numbers.

    Or, you could say, okay, well, bananas are kind of a phallic type of food, right, like hot dogs, or whatever, so, people eating bananas are gay, as a kind of substitute for a cock. So, it could also be a homophobic thing.

    This is all dependent on the context of use, too. If you’re exclusively calling one group “banana-eaters” based on their intrinsic traits, that’s gonna turn that expression into a slur more. It could also be a statement of fact, right, oh, chuck over there, he’s a banana-eater, he eats bananas, sure. It depends entirely on use. If you need evidence for how this shit can progress then you need only look at websites like 4chan or some other such nonsense.

    On top of all this you kind of have the complications of, say, slurs only really applying to particular intrinsic traits that people have rather than others. Slurs can apply to black people, but calling someone a “cracker”, despite being still based on an intrinsic trait, of white skin, isn’t really a slur. Neither is, as upthread, calling someone a “boomer”, because we all age over time, where it’s sort of used generically just to refer to anyone older than you, or because it’s usually applied as a reference to a very specific class of people that have a specific socioeconomic context, more than just being based on their age. You’ll usually only hear people call, say, american boomers “boomers”, in that context, but you won’t hear that in, say, china, or africa, or most of south america, or whatever. It’s a reference to the post-war boom years, explicitly.

    There are also certain subcultures which re-appropriate slurs, which basically means that those words aren’t really slurs in how they’re being used in that subculture. I’m sure you can think of examples of that.


  • Who comes out ahead after all of this? Who benefits in the long run? I’m having a hard time finding any winners.

    Nobody ever really wins here. In either the short term, or the long term, with or without violence. If the clap back of oct 7th hadn’t happened, then the state of affairs would’ve remained exactly as horrible as they’ve always been, and probably would’ve slowly decomposed even further, and the population probably would’ve just died slower deaths over the course of several years. Certainly in retrospect, that maybe seems better than the alternative, but nobody knows the future, really. It could be just as likely the oct 7th was exactly the kind of pressure that started a chain of events that ultimately leads to the deconstruction of the state of israel. It’s completely impossible to know the future, completely, anything else is kind of just armchair speculation.

    We have to place oct 7th into context, and to place it into context, we have to have a chain of causality. That eliminates the sort of responsibility that people like to attribute to everything. It doesn’t eliminate tactics, or the decision making process, it actually enhances it, if anything, but we do have to look at, say, how the state of affairs in gaza lead to such an attack. Both in how such a sorry state led to such an attack, obviously, and also in how Hamas was funded as their government in part by israel in order to ensure a more violent opposing force that would be more willing to mutually escalate with them, especially when that force is locked in to a specific location and can only really fight on israel’s terms, unlike most of israel’s other actors, which can fight more on the terms of the international political stage. Obviously still a deck which is heavily stacked against them, but slightly less so.

    What I mean by all of this is that israel manufactured the conditions to enact their genocide, and that escalation would’ve happened either way because they’re not able to be bargained with. Under that framework, any tactic the gazans, specifically, could’ve taken, was pretty much doomed to failure from the start. Or rather, was doomed to not really have a positive outcome in the immediate short term, for them specifically. I’m not saying oct 7th was really a wise decision, right, I’m just saying that we don’t really know. Maybe attribute to me analysis paralysis, then, I’m not quite sure, ironically, but I think it’s easier to have a hindsight-accurate armchair QB backseat approach to this than to make those decisions of what to do in the moment.


  • Depends on context, which I think is missed in basically all these discussions. Solar, wind, and hydropower are obviously contextually dependent technologies, that are well suited to particular environments. They have to line up with energy demand curves, or else impose expensive and inefficient battery solutions. They don’t have a whole lot of efficiency in terms of land use, which there are some proposed solutions for, but they’re pretty efficient both economically, and are pretty ecologically contentious as long as recycling is being done adequately. Nuclear solves a different problem. It provides base load, which is somewhat important, it’s potentially not as flexible as a technology, but it’s easier to build infrastructure for because it’s more consistent. It can also be somewhat land-use agnostic, though things like water use for cooling towers and tradeoffs such as that are definitely a consideration. It’s also much denser in terms of land use, meaning it’s potentially more efficient for larger cities.

    They’re both just different technologies, with different applications, and they both have a place in any sensible structuring of the world. I don’t understand why people become so split along the obvious astroturfed and petrol-funded propaganda that floats around for both sides. You have pro-nuclear people that are saying solar panels like, require exotic materials mines, which is insanely ironic, and you have solar people who are fearmongering about solved problems like nuclear waste and safety concerns and efficiency in terms of economic cost, which is also insanely ironic. The fact that this conflict comes up every time strikes me as kind of horrendously stupid and obviously favorable to petrol lobbies.


  • Because for the majority of the world, the average American is a selfish bourgeois with a big house and two cars, who thinks oppression is when the gas price rise.

    I mean I fucking live here and that’s pretty much my assessment as well to be honest. Maybe not your average american if we’re working on like, who’s right just based on home ownership statistics, but certainly, that’s not really an invalid perception.


  • this also, yeah, there’s plenty of people china could drop bombs on, or, opposition groups they could fund in proxy wars or civil wars, probably to their strategic advantage, and they mostly don’t do it. they’ve taken a much softer strain in terms of geopolitics, I think.


  • I don’t think China would drop bombs as soon as possible. I think they’ll start dropping bombs as soon as that is the best or easiest way of achieving some goal.

    See, now that’s totally different, as a claim, slightly more reasonable, glad you clarified.

    I also, I dunno, I think I just dispute that the disposition of the US empire would immediately lead to some sort of mass arms race, or struggle. I think at most you’d expect to see some more minor movement on china’s other political objectives, like just, taking control of taiwan, which I imagine would be a pretty much instantaneous and relatively bloodless kind of move, since they’re most of the way there already. But militaries, and military spending, isn’t infinite, it’s a direct drain on the economy in real terms, especially with modern warfare, as we’ve seen with ukraine, and especially with the threat of nukes.

    We’re able to produce all that military shit because we just dump a frankly massive and insane portion of our economy (and especially our extractive economy) into it, in a kind of constant feedback loop where people in power pay themselves. People who work at lockheed martin get hired from positions as US military personnel, where the FAANG is a revolving door with the CIA, that sort of shit. All as sort of a massive sunk cost, that would be pretty hard to disentangle from while maintaining the US economy, since the US economy is so tied to the US empire. We can look at the sort of, landscape that emerged out of the slow dissolution of the new deal, and post new deal government projects, as being less a sort of desert where everything just fell into ruins, and more being a morph kind of slow and incestuous merge between government organizations and private companies, since the “necessity” of those organizations still existed.

    I think there’s also definitely some extent to which we’re getting cooked by china more than we realize with this kind of stuff because our economic metrics are so fucked as to be almost certainly useless.

    If you can get your objective without draining massive portions of your economy, then there’s really no reason to, and I don’t think china would have many problems taking really any soft power objective they set their eyes on. Obviously I’m not a soothsayer, so I can’t say what the landscape would form into given this hypothetical, but I don’t see a whole lot of geopolitical conflicts of interest, or uncrossable roads, so far as china is concerned in terms of their longer term economic growth or outlook.

    I think there’s also something to note there about how like, I dunno. I think it’s naive to think that military conflicts purely arise out of a latent cultural xenophobia. I think it would be naive to say that plays no role, either, but I don’t think it’s as nearly shaping a factor as people make it out to be. Certainly, if your nation’s finding itself in such a position where someone so idealistic and delusional is making your higher level decisions, and especially your military decisions, as the US currently finds themselves in, you’d probably be cooked like, whatever that person’s position is. Probably there’s some sort of back and forth here also about china’s interactions with their uyghur population, perhaps, as an example of how they’ve responded to that kinda stuff, and I don’t think they have a bad track record.


  • Why are you proposing that human nature is fundamentally different now?

    Because I don’t think it’s human nature that people just inevitably drop bombs on on another as soon as they’re given the opportunity to do so, and I think that’s an extremely oversimplified view of both human nature and history, to think that’s the case. I think, broadly, it depends on a lot of factors. Economic factors, normal economic realities, and the ability of the economic systems to self-regulate and feed information from the bottom to the top, and vice versa, as a result of their political structures. Cultural factors, like the base level of xenophobia present in a culture for other cultures, you know, to what degree that xenophobia shapes the economic realities or is shaped by the economic reality.

    I think saying, oh, well, if china was the world hegemon tomorrow, they’d drop bombs as soon as they could, I don’t even really think that passes the smell test. They’d still have to deal with the EU, with Russia, with the militaries of basically every force they’d want to contend with, and with their lack of as nearly of a well-funded military industrial complex. They’ve shown a much higher tendency to approach geopolitical situations with their huge amounts of economic leverage as a result of their manufacturing base rather than just using a big stick to get everything they want.

    I don’t see any reason why that would majorly change if the US were gone. If they were to pivot to military industrial capacity, there’s a certain cost-opportunity there in terms of what it would take out of their economic capacity, and it wouldn’t really be the same cost-opportunity that we have (or, mostly, used to have histrorically) in the US, since their public and private sectors are more fused than ours, so they’re not benefiting from the natural efficiency of a large government organization in terms of overall savings, when that’s basically what every corporation over there is, or, is more than over here. Why would they risk their position bombing the shit out of other nations when they could basically just not?

    The belt and road initiative has already showcased their geopolitical approach. It’s still something they use a military to protect in terms of infrastructural investments, but those infrastructural investments seem to me to be more significant than those of most western occupying forces, and seem to take a different fundamental stance in terms of technology. China’s economy doesn’t revolve, to the same extent as the US, around the extraction, control, and importation of cheap, sour, heavy, crude oil, from other nations, which can then be refined into much more valuable petroleum products in terms of shipping while the US positions itself as a middle-man between this extractive base and the rest of the world’s energy market. China’s built like 50 nuclear plants since like 2014-ish, we’ve built 2 new plants since the year 2000. That’s obviously shaped by necessity, but that’s also just a vastly different approach.


  • China is just like any other country comprised of humans that has existed ever, and would do the same things the US is doing now if they could.

    Yeah, except they’re different countries, made up of different people, with a different culture, with a pretty much fundamentally different kind of organizational structure governing them. I don’t think “well, they’d probably do it too, if the US were gone” is a super convincing argument in favor of the US dropping bombs on people.






  • daltotron@lemmy.mltoFuck Cars@lemmy.worldBoth is good
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    4 months ago

    Yeah, i would empower monsters to do heinous things to my citizens, like forcing them to live in a rural village where someone will care for them when they’re old, and their utilities layouts will make sense, and their cost of living and lifestyle footprint will massively decrease. Oh no! The horror!

    Also, I dunno. ahh, they’ll go to war, how horrifying! whatever shall we do! How many of these people will actually go to war, though? That’s some shit that floats around a lot, but I realistically think that if you just kick someone into some situation that’s realistically better than what they were previously hucking, then they’d probably just take it. IF you really wanted to swing it, though, then you could just swing it all through the markets and then fuck them over that way, just like they’re already being fucked. Not many people actually have that killdozer gene in them, though, and they wouldn’t really have a good target. There’s no amount of “blowing stuff up” or “going to war” that can realistically bring back a, by it’s nature, highly vulnerable, detached development style like that, and blowing stuff up doesn’t really help you contest with whatever your current standards of living are.

    Lemme ask you this, though. How do you think we should solve the problem of the suburbs? Do you think a market solution is going to operate fast enough? Do you think those solutions are going to solve the broader problems with the housing crisis popping up in every major city? Do you think they will be enacted fast enough to mitigate climate problems?




  • daltotron@lemmy.mltoFuck Cars@lemmy.worldBoth is good
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    4 months ago

    Money’s just an object. Just do maybe 3 or 4 five year plans, and you’d probably be able to get there. If they don’t like it, eminent domain their asses. I dunno. It’s not a real obstacle, to me, that they’re deciding to intentionally be obstinate and intentionally deciding to make all their neighbor’s QoL worse. Just an slightly smaller version of the problem where some iowan baron decides it’s their right to dump their 84 million people’s worth of pig shit into a massive pig shit lagoon, tainting 70 something percent of the water supply. Except in this case, people aren’t getting malaria and we’re not having water quality issues. Instead, they’re getting heart disease and increased risks of lung cancer from needing to drive everywhere, they’re having to work fruitlessly on road and utilities maintenance jobs for longer, and grandma dies maybe 10 years earlier than she would’ve cause she was 5 miles away and nobody was able to notice that she wasn’t coming out of the house.


  • daltotron@lemmy.mltoFuck Cars@lemmy.worldBoth is good
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    4 months ago

    I mean, my answer doesn’t make any of those people happy, but it’s basically just, fuck those people, if there’s a correct way to do something, we should do things in said correct way, rather than capitulating to everyone’s half-baked propagandized idiot desires


  • daltotron@lemmy.mltoFuck Cars@lemmy.worldBoth is good
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    4 months ago

    However, in most case, each of those steps resulted in a useful service or product.

    I dunno if I’d say that, really. “useful service or product” is inferring a lot about the context in which these transactions are done, it doesn’t really open up the box, there. Is gambling a useful service to have access to, for instance? What about, say, setting everyone about buying a big suburban house, a car, running out a ton of asphalt to these places, putting out utilities to them that are both financially insolvent in the abstract and also take up too many resources for what they are? Like, I dunno, if we’re considering the alternatives, there, which incur much less consumption, and thus, much less trade, the alternatives that cost a whole lot less, I would say that the idea that this is a useful measurement really at all begins to totally fall apart. I dunno. I maybe wonder if, say, free healthcare might be thought to decrease the GDP of a country simply because less money is being thrown around.



  • daltotron@lemmy.mltoFuck Cars@lemmy.worldBoth is good
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    4 months ago

    You eliminate the rural area with 5 minute drives between homes. Japan has a much higher population density more generally, granted, and they do occasionally get older, offset, single homes that are miles from anything else. But they also have extremely rural villages with maybe 2000 people that are still about as rural as you can get and still go in for farming. Many other places (I would say, basically all of them?) do this as well, and not all of them have high population density. I think, almost definitionally, the land use I’m proposing has a higher pop density, but the style of development generally, you’d be hard pressed not to classify it as rural.

    The solution here is to orient the land use radially. Also probably to use less land generally, but that’s a separate issue. Most land use in america looks like having 20 different farms, that are each like 3 or 4 miles across, sometimes with multiple plots, with each house being positioned as far away from the other houses as possible, usually somewhere along the edge of a plot, and then running roads out to each of them, sometimes dirt roads, sometimes paved, usually some combination of the two for higher use vs lower use vs private.

    Instead of that, you do what people have been doing for centuries. You clump the 20 different houses together in one contiguous strip that’s placed along some sort of rail line or higher traffic road, and then you disconnect all the plots of land from the particular houses. Ownership doesn’t necessarily have to correlate with one plot of land vs another. Then you gain all of the benefits that entails, and if everything is laid out sensibly, then you’re only about 3 miles from your specific plot. Utilities become cheaper to maintain, emergencies like fires, medical problems, natural disasters, become much easier to deal with, you can start building some actual infrastructure, like, say, a rail line.

    That becomes much easier to justify if you only gotta send that shit to like one concentration of 20 or 30 or houses instead of sending it to those 20 or 30 houses individually, most especially if that line is just passing through before heading somewhere else, which should generally be the case. Maintenance of that rail line also becomes less problematic compared to that of a road if we’re considering that this rural area is probably mostly going to be farmland that demands larger industrial equipment shipments, and is going to be shipping back and forth things like grain, bulk goods which would do much better to be shipped by train compared to most other forms of transit. Slap that together with a multi-daily passenger rail line that passes through it as a stop and you’re pretty much set.