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Cake day: January 11th, 2024

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  • Fair enough, but that’s a variation of a variation, and pretty obscure (I’d heard of the Fat Man variation, but not the Fat Villain).

    But if CEO deaths started matching school shooting numbers things would likely change.

    I mean, that’s basically what I’m saying, but that’s not really the Trolley Problem. That’s basically the French Revolution. (And, again, should any law enforcement agents happen to read this, I’m definitely not trying to incite violence against the billionaire class, no matter how badly they deserve it or how much better the world would be for it).


  • pjwestin@lemmy.worldtoShowerthoughts@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    3 months ago

    I see what you’re getting at, but this isn’t the trolley problem. The trolley problem is predicated on the idea that killing one will save many, but it’s assumed that everyone involved is innocent. It’s a philosophical question about moral choice; is inaction that allows many to die more moral than an action that directly kills one? If the one person being killed is somehow culpable for the deaths of the other people, that changes the entire equation.

    Also, that’s not even what happened here. One person was killed, but just as many people are going to die today because United Healthcare. No one was saved. Maybe if dozens of CEOs were gunned down in the streets, that would change something, but one dead CEO isn’t going to do anything.

    (And, to any moderators or FBI agents reading this, I’m of course not advocating for that. Can you even imagine? The ruling class that has been crushing the American working class for decades suddenly getting put down like rabid dogs? With the very weapons that the gun manufacturers allowed to flood our streets in order to maximize their profits? Makes me sick just to fantasize think about it.)


  • The Switch is fantastic for what it is. Sure, it’s anemic and old, but it’s a creative design that more or less created a whole product category and allows for very creative gameplay.

    This is actually their design philosophy: “Lateral thinking with withered technology,” or, “what can we do with old technology we’re really familiar with?” Nintendo was much slower to market with their 16 bit console than Sega, but they took their time to understand the new tech, and developed the first handheld cartridge console with 8 bit technology at the same time. Sega tried to emulate its success with a color handheld system, but it was large, had poor battery life, and didn’t sell very well. Instead of rushing to catch up with a color handheld, Nintendo released the Game Boy Pocket, which was very popular. and released an entirely superior product in the Game Boy Color a few years later.

    This philosophy isn’t always a benefit to them; they lost the Final Fantasy franchise because the cartridge system on the N64 wasn’t powerful enough to run it. However, it’s usually a boon; the switch has been incredibly successful despite its graphical inferiority, and despite being comically underpowered compared to its competitors, the Wii is the secon-best selling console of all time, behind only the PS2.







  • pjwestin@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlMath
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    9 months ago

    I’m American, I definitely learned this stuff in 7th or 8th grade. Granted, I didn’t use it past high school, and I forgot it before I finished college, but that’s definitely when I learned it.




  • Oh, yeah, they’re a very loud, obnoxious little group, and removing users that are only interested in picking fights is perfectly valid. But the screenshots from the original post really only seemed to be talking about China’s censorship of Tiananmen Square, and while it’s impossible to say without of context, their tone really didn’t seem to be combative. They just seemed to be expressing opinions about China that didn’t align with the .ml mods’ beliefs, and that’s troubling.

    What’s more, Dessalines gave a response that’s kinda telling about all this. A user called .ml out on censorship (in a very respectful tone), and Dessalines basically replied saying asking questions is OK when it’s done in good faith, but a lot of people only ask them to start fights. When the user replied that he was actually talking about people being censored for expressing opinions in good faith that run counter to .ml mods beliefs, Dessalines chose not to reply.

    I really seems like .ml wants to remove opinions that run contrary to the mods beliefs about communism. If that is the case, fair enough, but then maybe it does make sense for instances that don’t moderate that way to defederate. I don’t want to worry about policing myself on a bunch of the communities in my feed because I might get banned for my opinion on a news story.

    Maybe these fears are unfounded, and this whole thing is being blown out of proportion, but none of the .ml mods have addressed the original post yet. Dessalines has left several comments on the Ask Lemmy post Are You a Tankie, but he’s chosen not to reply to the censorship claim. Given the silence, I have to assume the worst.


  • I really only started to see the meaning of tankie start sliding once I got to Lemmy, and it goes in two directions; tankies who swear they aren’t tankies, they just have a lot of feelings about why the Uyghurs aren’t being mistreated, and liberals who literally think tankie is a synonym for leftist. (Seriously, if Lemmy has one unforgivable sin, it’s introducing the, “but her emails,” crowd to the word tankie.) Personally, I don’t care if I get tankies in my feed, but I’m not OK with instances that censor opinions they don’t like (I mean, assuming they’re not bigoted). Those mod logs are pretty damning, I’d like to hear from the .ml mods why they felt those weren’t legitimate discourse.

    Honestly, my real takeaway from this whole mess is that it’s really dispelled the myth of federation as a silver bullet for all of social media’s ills. Federation was sold to me as a solution to overly-large internet communities, since federation would stop single communities from becoming too powerful, and communities could simply be defederated if they didn’t get along. Meanwhile, .world is whining that .ml’s communities are too large and important to lose, while .ml is bitching that .world defederating would be egregious and unreasonable. The whole thing feels more like a flame war between some large subreddits than the glorious online utopia that I was told federation would bring us. Actually, it feels a lot like the schism that started when r/antiwork fell apart.


  • Not exactly. This started yesterday, when a user accused mods on .ml of, “tankie censorship,” (meaning censorship by tankies, not of tankies). He also came with some pretty good receipts that appear to show .ml mods removing criticism of China that, whether you agree with it or not, didn’t seem to violate any rules, and was well within the bounds of what most people would consider civil discourse. He also claims to have received bans from all of the .ml communities he’d ever participated in for pointing this bias out. It’s possible he’s presenting all of this with his own slant, but what he showed seems legit, and I’m not sure he could have provided more evidence without encouraging brigading.

    This is now starting to snowball, with users starting to call for defederating from .ml. One .world user also posted on .cafe about Dessalines previous tankie comments, while another user has posted about finding replacements for the largest .ml communities.

    So, saying what’s happing on .world is anti-communist isn’t accurate, as most the criticism has been anti-tankie. However, .world has a much higher level of liberals than most of Lemmy (they created a little echo chamber for themselves on Political Memes), and most of them are incapable or unwilling to understand the difference between a tankies and communists (or tankies and leftists…or tankies and criticism of Biden…). So, it will probably only be a matter of time before this group tries to blur the line between valid criticism of baised moderation from authoritarian apologists to general criticism of leftists.

    So, tl;dr: .world isn’t broadly anti-communist, but a large portion of the community is upset about what appears to be biased moderation from tankie .ml mods, and there is a small contingent of .world liberals who I’m sure will take this opportunity to bash anyone to their left.




  • pjwestin@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlJoker (2019)
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    11 months ago

    Because it tried and failed to say something profound about mental illness while imitating one of the most celebrated directors in American cinema. Not sure why you’re pretending this was just another superhero blockbuster when it was clearly trying to be an Arthouse film


  • pjwestin@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlJoker (2019)
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    11 months ago

    That’s the problem, it didn’t have a real message. It was aping Taxi Driver and King of Comedy, and it copied the aesthetics of those films very well, but it was all superficial. It’s a perfectly fine movie, but The Batman had deeper social commentary than Joker.