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Cake day: July 16th, 2024

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  • Technically, the moment science would show an interaction between physical entities and something else, that something else would immediately be classified as a physical entity. In a very real sense, the discovery of radioactivity involved physical entities being found to interact with an as-yet unknown, invisible, intangible force.

    If ghosts existed, the same would happen as with radioactivity. They would be researched, hypotheses on their nature would be tested, and a scientific theory would arise, and then they would be a part of the “physical world” too. And then all the mystics would be bored with ghosts because they are just incorporeal noospheric echoes of old people, as boring as neurology or biochemistry or stellar fusion.


  • There is a big difference between available and normalized. Buying a tiny camera to film people without consent makes you a creep in a way buying a social media corporation’s product doesn’t. Pulling out a camera to film someone is a signal to them that they are being filmed in a way looking at them while wearing camera glasses isn’t.

    These glasses could change the landscape of our social reality. If they catch on, corporations will know your facial expressions, your location, and what you are looking at whenever you are in public, even if you have no account.

    They will learn the face you make when you are too tired to argue and tell the shops you’re heading towards that you’re an easy mark today.

    They will see a flash of defiance on your face when you hear someone say Nazi shit and change the video advertisements you walk by to ones that will make you feel powerless.

    And so the net is pulled ever-tighter. All we can do is try to cut our way out.


  • In Germany, disapproving of Israel is considered an unacceptably nuanced take on whether the holocaust was bad. That’s literally the legislative basis that feddit’s moderation is required to comply with. Germany, through it’s anti-Nazi and anti-genocide-denial policies, trapped its people in a situation where they are unable to condemn another genocide.

    Authoritarian draconic standards are bullshit. Nuance can be used to overdamp the response to wrongdoing, but its absence can also leave responses underdamped, and assholes can selectively overdamp and underdamp responses in specific categories to serve their own interests. (A clear example is how wind turbines need to go through a lot of red tape to address the concerns of everyone in a wide area while meat industry farms can poison people without issue).

    If we want justice, we have to be able to fight against these assholes in both directions - reducing the damping of overdamped systems to allow us to fight genocide effectively even when it doesn’t serve the interests of the powerful, while also increasing the damping of underdamped systems to prevent the powerful from oppressing people using fighting genocide as an excuse.

    So yes, we do need nuanced takes on “whether genocide is bad”, sometimes. Other times these “nuanced takes” are indeed ploys to hold back appropriate responses. Which is which is going to depend on the specific situation.

    In this case, feddit is complying with German law and policy to go to bat for Zionism, so their “nuance” can get fucked.