Rottcodd

Sort of.

More it’s just the way I’ve pretty much always been. Before I was even really aware of it, I apparently figured out that I couldn’t control the outside world but I could control how I reacted to it, so that was what I focused on. One could sort of say that I did it simply because it made sense to me, but even that makes it sound more conscious than it was. It’s more that it just never occurred to me to do things any other way.

It was only much later that I discovered that there was a philosophy called “stoicism” that advocated that.

“You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this and you will find strength.” - Marcus Aurelius

I recognize that the universe is so vast that it’s likely that life forms other than us exist in it, but that’s the extent of it.

I’ve seen no verifiable evidence that they in fact do, so I don’t “believe” that they do.

Really, I don’t “believe” in much of anything for which there is no verifiable evidence. I don’t even understand how that works - how it is that other people apparently do. It’s not a conscious choice or anything - it’s just appears that there’s a set of requirements that must be met before the position of “belief” is triggered inside my mind, and one of those requirements is verifiable evidence. Without that, the state of “believing” just isn’t triggered, and it’s not as if I can somehow force it, so that’s that.

As far as I can see, governments are comprised almost entirely of psychopaths, opportunists, charlatans and fools, so I see little likelihood that they possess concealed knowledge regarding any nominal extraterrestrial life. First, and most simply, if they did possess any such knowledge, it’s near certain that somebody would’ve blabbed something by now.

Beyond that though, I think it’s exceedingly unlikely that any alien life form capable of traveling interstellar distances would, on arriving on the Earth, seek out contact with a government, much less limit its contact to a government. If they’re that advanced, it can only be the case that they, in their own development, either never bought into the flatly ludicrous and clearly destructive idea of institutionalized authority or overcame it before it inevitably destroyed them, and in either case, I don’t see any reason why they would lend any credence to our mass delusion that this one subset of humanity forms a specially qualified and empowered elite that rightly oversees everyone else’s interests. That’s our delusion - not theirs.

Right, but it’s not a paradox - it’s a conundrum. It’s not just that the person saying it is part of the first group, but that they necessarily are.

Since people want to believe that they “know better,” there’s a strong urge to count oneself among the second group, which immediately places one in the first.

There are two kinds of people in the world - those who think there are two kinds of people in the world and those who know better.

Money wins, every time.

And right there, you answered your own (presumably rhetorical) question.

The money people jumped on AI as soon as they scented the chance of profit, and that’s it. ALL other considerations are now secondary to a handful of psychopaths making as much money as possible.

Firefox.

Seriously. Every app I’ve tried has come up short in one way or another. Lemmy is best in a browser and the best browser is Firefox.

Yeah - I used to check in on it from time to time, and there were always new responses, and new people trying to argue with him, and he’d just run them in circles with hilariously overly literal (mis)interpretations of whatever they said. It went on for years.

I’m pretty sure I remember the admin deleting part of it while it was still active, and eventually deleting it entirely. It’s a shame - it should’ve been saved for posterity.

Years ago, on IMDb, a poster called rabbitmoon kept a thread going for years on the Rambo board that is still the best I’ve ever seen.

The whole thing started with him posting that he was shocked when, about a third of the way through the movie, there was a scene in which a character was shot with a bullet from a gun. Then he countered, completely earnestly and deadpan, every response he got.

The original thread is long gone, and the only thing I could find of it is an excerpt that was posted on Reddit - LINK

And not only will you make everyone’s lives better - seemingly ironically, by simply accepting the fact that you’re often wrong, you actually make it more likely that you’ll be right.

That’s the part that I think people especially need to understand, since a refusal to admit that you’re wrong is generally rooted in an ego-driven need to be right, and refusing to admit that you’re wrong guarantees that right is the one thing that you won’t be. You’ll just keep clinging to the same wrong idea and keep failing to fulfill that need to be right.

If, on the other hand, you just freely admit that you’re wrong, then you’re instantly free to move on to another, and better, position, making it that much more likely that you’ll actually be right. And if you don’t get it that time, that’s fine - just freely admit that you’re wrong again and move on again. Keep doing that and sooner or later you actually will be right, instead of just pretending to be.

So you’ll not only make everyone’s lives more pleasant - you’ll actually better serve your desire to be right. What more could you want?

Decentralization isn’t an ideal - it’s a fact. It’s the reality of the fediverse.

That was a rhetorical question.

Ah well… I didn’t have much hope that it’d work.

That’s literally the point of the federated decentralization, so people can be allowed to make their own decisions…

This is not quite accurate, and it neatly illustrates the problem.

“Allowed,” in this context, is incoherent. There can be no “allowed” unless there’s some authority empowered to, and mechanisms by which to, allow this or disallow that.

The literal point of decentralization is to move entirely away from institutionalized, hierarchical authority by arranging things so that it can neither be claimed nor exercised in the first place.

And one problem is that people tend to drag their authoritarian habits of thought along with them.

Okay - let’s pretend that everyone on this thread agrees that X is what “we” should do.

Then what?

The entire thread and the entire concept underlying it and all the other threads in which people yammer on and on about what “we” should do plainly miss the most crucial part of the fact that the fediverse is decentralized - it’s not just that you don’t have the power to decide what “we” should do, but that the power to decide what “we” should do does not and can not exist at all.

For fucks sake - which part of “decentralized” do you people not understand?

IMO, many (most?) people quite simply don’t think about things. They just have some dogmatic positions they’ve taken for some reasons, and they regurgitate them as necessary.

And that’s a lot of the reason that they so often and so brazenly misinterpret things other people say. They’re not actually reading to comprehend - they’re reading just to get enough of a feel for it to classify it, so that they’ll have some (potentially quite wrong) idea of which bit of rhetoric to trot out in response to it.

Almost never.

I used to have it a fair amount, and medicate myself to avoid it a fair amount as well, and then just about exactly 20 years ago, in the span of about three days, I started feeling sick, got more and more sick, went to the doctor and discovered I had cancer, and had emergency surgery. Then I went through about six months of really awful chemotherapy.

I definitely wouldn’t recommend having cancer as a cure for existential dread, but it worked for me.

Actually, I’ve found just the opposite - I’ve been more likely to spend more time on lemmy/kbin over the last couple of months than I spent on Reddit in years.

It got to the point that I’d just pop onto Reddit, look around, see the same basic variety of botspam, astroturfing and concern trolling, and go do something else. It wasn’t even worth posting anything, since any response I got was almost certainly going to be from a bot or a human-who-might-as-well-be-a-bot, and it was going to be the same thing either way - just some shallow bit of stock rhetoric that at best might be sort of tangentially related to what I actually said.

But then I came here and rediscovered the pleasure of reading posts written by actual people who actually think about what they’re saying, who will actually read and think about what I actually say in response, then write a response that they’ve actually thought about.

And that was it - I was hooked in a way I hadn’t been for years on Reddit.

That said, it’s nowhere near as good now as it was a few months ago, and I have been less active recently. The last big migration in particular, after the API changes went into place, led to both more bots and more humans-who-might-as-well-be-bots, and the quality here went sharply downhill.

It’s still better than Reddit though. And it’s been improving again of late.

It depends on the instance - I have multiple accounts.

Kbin.social because I like the kbin software better than the lemmy software, and because Ernest is awesome.

Lemmy.world because it’s definitive (when it’s up).

Lemmy.one because it requires people to not be assholes.

Lemmy.ninja because the admins somehow manage to be both diligent and goofy, and because ninjas are cool.

A probably too long post about an entirely different way of viewing things:

I have accounts at… I guess about eight instances. I didn’t see any reason to pick one, so I just signed up for everything that looked interesting and promising.

I expected to eventually settle on one, but as it turns out, I actually like having multiple accounts. I have four that I rotate between at the moment. Oh, and with the same username on each, though I still haven’t decided if that’s a good idea or not.

First, I have a kbin account and multiple lemmy accounts. Even though lemmy has more users, I much prefer kbin just as far as the software goes - it’s just a better UI. And Ernest is awesome.

Beyond that though, each instance is a different experience, since the federated communities on each one are different, depending on what other instances they’re federated with and which communities from which instances people have subscribed to. And I’ve amplified that by having different sets of subscriptions on different instances.

Kbin.social has a good mix of content but without most of the botfarm instances. I like that. That’s where I do virtually all of my serious posting.

Lemmy.world (when it’s up) has a wide range of content, but too much of it, even not counting the bots, is too shallow IMO. It feels too much like Reddit for my tastes. It is the best one to check in on for the most popular topics though, and it’s where I’m most likely to be subscribed to communities for memes, humor, drama, pictures - all that sort of junk.

Lemmy.one actually feels like what it is - an instance that demands that users behave themselves. It’s nice when I want to just unwind, because it’s already the case that problematic instances are defederated, and I have a limited set of feel good subs there. I almost never post from there though, since I don’t trust myself to behave.

Lemmy.ninja is my favorite. It’s just quirky little instance with terrific admins and an amusing aesthetic. It’s little though - 120 users last I heard. That shows in its all, which is fairly limited, presumably just because few people means few subscriptions so few federated communities. That’s fine though - it’s a selection that matches my interests fairly well. And ninjas are cool.

And I’m still on the lookout for a serious, scholarly sort of instance - somewhere that will be a comfortable home for subs to philosophy communities and the like.