jwmgregory

come on over to db0 and hang out with us! would be welcome here. good comic.

appreciate the offer king. i might check in and occasionally participate in the comm, i like the idea.

my main concern is ensuring there isn’t a weird invasion of the space by neofascists. that’s the main issue with men’s rights spaces currently. it doesn’t seem easy to prevent as every such space i come across has this problem. the exact thing we identify as hating here pervades spaces trying to tackle this problem… something of a catch 22.

i fucking adore the naming, tho. reprieve is exactly what we all need. i think you should really lean into the abandonment of identity and related identity politics for this community. it shouldn’t be about men in particular, it’s about a reprieve from this shitty contemporary world we have grown up into. after all, race or sex or whatever aren’t even real… they’re just arbitrary lines that cultures draw upon the world. important to individuals maybe, yes, but i’ve always felt it to be something of an albatross around the left’s neck. not all right-wing criticisms of “identity politics” are necessarily unwarranted… (😬 oopsie i broke the groupthink too hard that time guys o nooooos 🙈)

this sort of stuff gets downvoted incessantly in leftist spaces which is a damn shame bc i feel like a lot of these places are my home to a certain degree. it makes me feel unwelcome. ik that’s like, the fucking point and why they do it but still.

these sorts of people are just on some weird, misguided, revanchist agenda that necessitates getting “revenge” on certain groups of people instead of sticking with the core principles of the ideology which clearly state that you should kindly refrain from being an asshole. there is nothing to be gained from exacting some revenge fantasy upon straight white men. you’re exactly right, the only people who deserve to have shit flung their way over who they are is the rich and powerful.

probably not but that's because sexism against men is normalized and you're not allowed to talk about it unless you're a neonazi for some reason.

side note, this is exactly why the "young broccoli haired boy to fascist brownshirt" pipeline exists. they have real and genuine issues and instead of getting any sort of community or support virtually every facet of society is telling them their issues are fake and that they are destined to be monsters. then someone like j peterson comes along and tells them "life isn't so bad, it's okay, just clean your room and be disciplined, it'll all start to look up soon champ.. and uh... also hate the gays, black people, and other minorities - they're the woke mob that left you abandoned like this!" people making shocked pikachu face at young men being hardcore MAGAts are so sorely out of touch with what being a man is like and the kinds of trauma that can stem from the male experience. it's obvious to most of us why this issue exists, i hope. this comment chain is a great example. if you even touch the topic you get barraged with people telling you to essentially shut the fuck up and stop entertaining the idea that men are possibly people too and not some root of all fucking evil in the world.

the amount of literal hate I see towards men in casual discourse is insane. can say the most psychotic shit in most circles nowadays but if you point your malice at the "right kinds" of people most won't even bat an eye. see people frequently talking about doing unhinged shit to others solely because they are a man or [insert other group they don't like generally for some stupid fucking reason] and there is a preconceived slight, danger, or aggression. leftists think they're better people morally but we're really not. i have seen the exact same bullshit bigotry promulgate every community i know of in the past few years. the same brainrot the conservatives have had since the tea partiers has infiltrated our spaces too. everyone genuinely is dumb, angry, and hateful now.

I am not wholly convinced that our culture being the target of multiple astroturfing campaigns hasn't degraded people's capability for nuance, compassion, empathy, and ontology.

possibly.

current machines aren’t really capable of what we would consider sentience because of the von neumann bottleneck.

simply put, computers consider memory and computation separate tasks leading to an explosion in necessary system resources for tasks that would be relatively trivial for a brain-system to do, largely due to things like buffers and memory management code. lots of this is hidden from the engineer and end user these days so people aren’t really super aware of exactly how fucking complex most modern computational systems are.

this is why if, for example, i threw a ball at you you will reflexively catch it, dodge it, or parry it; and your brain will do so for an amount of energy similar to that required to power a simple LED. this is a highly complex physics calculation ran in a very short amount of time for an incredibly low amount of energy relative to the amount of information in the system. the brain is capable of this because your brain doesn’t store information in a chest and later retrieve it like contemporary computers do. brains are turing machines, they just aren’t von neumann machines. in the brain, information is stored… within the actual system itself. the mechanical operation of the brain is so highly optimized that it likely isn’t physically possible to make a much more efficient computer without venturing into the realm of strange quantum mechanics. even then, the verdict is still out on whether or not natural brains don’t do something like this to some degree as well. we know a whole lot about the brain but it seems some damnable incompleteness theorem-adjacent affect prevents us from easily comprehending the actual mechanics of our own brains from inside the brain itself in a wholistic manner.

that’s actually one of the things AI and machine learning might be great for. if it is impossible to explain the human experience from inside of the human experience… then we must build a non-human experience and ask its perspective on the matter - again, simply put.

They’ve handily proven time and time again in recent memory how they can in fact just do things and the rest of the world will sit back and take it lying down, though. That’s the problem. Anyone who thinks it’s just an America issue or something like that grievously misunderstands the tenuous house of cards that the pax americana and era of modern peace is built upon. Realistically, how far are you willing to go to prevent fascism? Would you die for it? Would you crawl through the trenches in a land many seas away from home? Some people might say yes but realistically most Westerners and others would never dare give up their creature comforts. It’s not delusional to think the world can change in the way they suggest precisely because they’ve suggested it - that is the hallmark of the fascist movement and what ties their collective ethos together, a philosophy of domination in all aspects.

Idk in short, I agree that yeah these people are certainly morally bankrupt. Lots of them are delusional. Any group of people has some like that. That doesn’t mean we should strawman them. There’s lots of idiots and they might think the US could invade Greenland without causing an international crisis. Either fortunately or unfortunately, these aren’t the people saying that the US wants to own Greenland or that we should go to war with Iran, for example.

The people who control and run this movement are not delusional. They’re dangerous.

they’re doing it very knowingly… they wrote an entire nearly 1000 page fucking document detailing exactly what they’re doing in excruciating detail.

the fascists == idiots trope needs to go bc that’s exactly what makes them dangerous. lots of these fuckers are quite intelligent and conniving. you should be weary.

haha lmfao yeah i’m kind of super busy in the mornings - i did misread you in passing, sorry. appreciate the heads up friend

often in cases like this there is no real personal responsibility involved, and your disdain stems from a lack of empathy.

nicotine is a strongly addictive chemical and lots of users have active addictions. in many locales and markets disposable vapes are increasingly becoming the cheapest or only way to scratch that itch, in addition to americans being propagandized for years into believing that vaping in general is somehow a healthier way to deal with your nicotine addiction. either way vaping is heavily pushed on nicotine addicts in america to such a point that i genuinely am not so certain personal responsibility factors into the equation anymore. it’s very similar to opium in china during the century of humiliation or the war on drugs or something - just a clearly systemic problem spurred by greedy people against the poor that is justified to other poor people through fallacious moral reasoning.

the guy you mentioned… knows the obvious point that buying disposables is contrarian to his opinion. that doesn’t invalidate his beliefs. he’s an addict, not necessarily a hypocrite. instead of being crabs in a bucket and tearing down the people who already agree with you why don’t you try and point people’s anger rightfully towards big tobacco companies who managed to swindle the world into picking up the nasty habit again in the name of avarice. those people hurt you, me, and the guy in your story. they deserve you being mad at them, not this rando you mention.

No. This line of thought concedes something to the American neofascist ideologues that I refuse to take seriously as an idea because when you see it plainly stated, not under milquetoast rhetorical wraps… the patent absurdity of the thought gleans true.

What is this idea, this concession? It’s the idea that your only true natural right is what they call the “right of feet” or some other asinine phrase. Technofascists believe you have no natural right other than the right to choose which shitty government you live in.

This isn’t true. Your espousing of the same idea is, similarly, not true. To anyone reading the original doomer comment - don’t let it get you down. You can change your home for the better and just because something doesn’t exist in the real world currently doesn’t mean it is “politically impossible”… think about how many ancient forms of government aren’t found in the world today. Do those constitute something “not politically possible” or are we starting to see the problem here?

People build a better world everyday. If you concede your ability to affect change you sacrifice the most divine nature of man.

yeah that’s definitely the boldest claim made in the OP comment. was surprised to see it hang out unchallenged for so long.

there’s been a growing trend to assign ontological primacy to information over mass/energy/space/etc. it’s a hot point for debate in computer science and physics research because, as my Kantian diction was kind of intended to imply: we can’t really empirically verify any ontological theories we have so we end up arguing over things that seem semantic from the outside in.

that means that, at least for now, “information is the noumena” is a matter of opinion. i just have strong, albeit potentially misplaced feelings - that mass, energy, and information are all different expressions of the same substrate that builds reality itself and that there is an undiscovered mechanic governing all three in a self-consistent manner.

I think without some agreement on the value of authorship / creation of original works, it's pointless to respond to the rest of your argument.

I agree, for this reason we’re unlikely to convince each other of much or find any sort of common ground. I don’t think that necessarily means there isn’t value in discourse tho. We probably agree more than you might think. I do think authors should be compensated, just for their actual labor. Art itself is functionally worthless, I think trying to make it behave like commodities that have actual economic value through means of legislation is overreach. It would be more ethical to accept the physical nature of information in the real world and legislate around that reality. You… literally can “download a car” nowadays, so to speak.

If copying someone’s work is so easily done why do you insist upon a system in which such an act is so harmful to the creators you care about?