Both of those positions are reasonable and tame compared to the majority of Their beliefs.

Love, You have an actual cult that claims to be able to alter the laws of physics through belief and that anyone who doesn’t accept that is being “authoritarian.”

I don’t really see a problem with an instance banning large numbers of users.

The ability to make exclusive spaces is part of the fediverse’s design. Suppose a queer space kept getting flooded with homophobic users, or a Muslim space got a bunch of people shitting on their religion, or something like that. Naturally, such spaces would have a higher number of bans. That doesn’t necessarily show an “echo chamber” especially since users of such communities may be federated with other communities. People complain about censorship on .ml creating an “echo chamber” but half the time I’m arguing or discussing things on other turfs like .world.

The idea that those sorts of enclaves or exclusive spaces shouldn’t exist, as is implied with the framing here, is to impose what us evil, dastardly “authoritarians” sometimes call “the tyranny of structurelessness.” No one would have a space to discuss things outside of the most prominent, hegemonic view, which would more easily sideline and overwhelm other perspectives.

As an example, I once frequented an utter cesspool on Reddit called r/CapitalismVSocialism, which was created and promoted by An-caps and where that perspective was prominent (though not exclusive). I found it was virtually impossible to have a discussion with anyone about anything, because even if you weren’t talking to an An-cap, they were always there waiting to latch on to some turn of phrase and use it against you, and everyone was too preoccupied with countering their nonsense to reach any kind of high-level discussion. I eventually got fed up with that and found that my beliefs were more challenged by going to explicitly leftist spaces because we had shared assumptions and were speaking the same language, and didn’t feel the need to be as defensive. I was never going to be convinced of anything by the An-caps and all talking to them accomplished was pissing me off.

The fediverse’s design is actually quite brilliant, because you can have a space to discuss things substantively among like-minded people while at the same time interacting with other groups.

Marxism-Leninism is by far the largest strain of Marxist thought. Like there’s Trotskyists (who are just contrarians and sometimes use terms like “Marxist and Leninist”), there’s some confused anarchists who missed the breakdown of the first international, there’s maybe a handful of confused social democrats who would be Kautskists if they knew who Kautsky was, there’s the ultraleft Maoists like Shining Path, and there’s, uh, what else? Bordigaists?

Is there any actually significant “Marxist but not Leninist” ideology?

Or Uranus being pronounced not as your-anus but urine-us. The “alternate/kid-friendly” option is just plain worse. It also teaches kids certain words are bad, which is a bad idea for a multitude of resons I won’t get into.

Look, there’s nothing wrong with the word “anus” but if you’re actually in the field of astronomy that particular pun starts to get old after about the 10 millionth time. Some people just want to be able to talk about the seventh planet without the room erupting in giggles every time they say its name.

Spare a thought for the poor astronomy student doing thesis work on the volatile gases of Uranus. They know, they get it, they just want to be able to have one serious conversation about it.

I watched Alien for the first time last week, and I was blown away. The aesthetics, the camera-work showing massive scales, the way it reveals information (or doesn’t!). Obviously it’s impossible to go into it completely blind, I knew Ripley would be the last survivor, I knew about the chestburster, I knew about the evil corporation, but the twist with the science officer caught me off guard and was amazingly executed.

Somehow it still felt very distinctive and unique, even being so old and influential.

Because:

Morally neutral and innocent civilians, of course 😇

Yes, but have you considered that you can simply buy a house on the Metaverse?

The point is to reveal the different frames of analysis people use to make the decision.

This thought process, “The decision’s already been made, either way it’s always a free $1000,” is one way of looking at it. But another way of looking at it is, “Those who choose one box tend to walk away with more money, so the evidence shows that taking one box is the better approach.” These approaches sort of “talk past each other,” because they’re looking at completely different parts of the problem in order to draw their conclusions, and those different parts indicate very opposing conclusions.

Some version of it could exist. Not with the big numbers and not with the high degree of certainty in the problem, but you could have, say, somebody who’s on average 70% accurate at reading people and the boxes are $1 and $10.

It is somewhat idealist in that it’s a contrived scenario, but it’s really just idle curiosity on my part. Maybe it could reflect something about people’s thought processes, or maybe it’s just people interpreting the question differently.

> Fires the guy whose job was assassinating heads of state

> Gets assassinated

> Guy who got fired gets on the investigative comittee which fucks up the investigation

Who could it be 🤔

The first time I played D&D it was 3.5 as a druid, and it was kind of overwhelming how much stuff I could do. My wolf was nearly as powerful as a whole other martial character, in addition to me being a full caster, in addition to being able to go into melee myself if I wanted to. And then there’s entangle which is a ridiculously OP first level spell, with a 40ft radius letting you alter the entire battlefield. Then there’s summoning and wild shape.

But clerics are crazy too (my second character was a cleric). Domain powers are basically two feats at level 1, you get to poach spells from other classes, like Druids you can wade into melee, and with the right feats you can use turn undead charges for all sorts of useful abilities even when not facing undead. Cleric 1 is so good that nearly any build that isn’t a different full spellcaster can take it. There’s also tons of flexibility (even more in PF1e) in terms of what the domains give you.

The fact that a Druid gets a free extra character at level 1 might push them over the edge, but it’s close.

Technically correct. It’s a valid comparison to Catholicism and Catholicism is, indeed, a bad faith.

This shouldn’t be misconstrued as women being less than a man it’s just that their roles are different.

Oh, I get it, they’re separate but equal!

What a load of horseshit.

Catholic and Orthodox have way less loonies comparatively than either evangelicals or the fedora wearing atheist crowd which is basically another form of protestantism.

I’ve never been religious by my little sister was. She loved helping out at Mass every Sunday, and volunteered to be an alter server. She was one of the most faithful and good-hearted Christians I’ve ever met. As long as you didn’t bring up abortion, anyway.

Then one day the priest said she wasn’t allowed to anymore, because she was a girl. He said that only boys should be allowed up in the front of church. His justification was that being an alter server was practice for being a priest, and only men were allowed to be priests.

Do you happen to know what the Catholic Church’s justification for only allowing male priests is, by the way? Well you see, God is male, obviously, and the Church is symbolically married to God, so that means that the Church must be symbolically female, and priests are symbolically married to the Church (the Church is poly?) meaning, of course, that priests have to be male.

If you get a Protestant or a fedora atheist, you’re basically rolling the dice, but if you get a Catholic, you know for a fact that they’re at minimum fine with being part of a deeply sexist, homophobic, and authoritarian institution.

Fucking Amazon would be a better moral authority than the Catholic Church because at least Amazon doesn’t explicitly descriminate based on sex. Always the last to be dragged into the future, kicking and screaming the whole time, since Galileo if not before.

WKUK - Pope Rap

The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.

There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.