We all know someone whose identity is defined by what they consume

I’d be curious to meet someone who wasn’t.

300 years ago, someone would have said this instead:

How do you have a conversation about whether or not god exists and we are all subjects to his teaching? How do you debate with someone who shows up wearing the sin of misguided faith?

And the answer, largely, was “you don’t, you burn them as a heretic”.

Again, this takes us back to the Paradox of Tolerance. We don’t want a large movement of deeply religious reactionaries burning people at the stake. So we nip the impulse in the bud by censoring individuals and organizations that propagate hysterical beliefs about The End Times and Eternal Damnation of the Human Soul, as a means of goading them into enforcing a theocratic dictatorship.

In the same vein, we (being the generic Lemmy Liberals) don’t like ICE banging down people’s doors and dragging them off to concentration camps. And I’d posit we wouldn’t be living in this moment if the anti-immigration firebrands had been isolated, muzzled, and neutered before they could propagate a bunch of reactionary misinformation to the general public.

The flip side of this is the Israeli censorship of Palestine, which we (being the generic Lemmy Liberals) generally don’t like. Not because we have some contrarian attitude towards censorship generally speaking, but because we believe propagating information about the genocide is a primary means of changing the policies around our country’s support of it.

And then there’s the flip-flip side, where we (generic Lemmy Libs) are perfectly happy with censoring Chinese/Russian media, if we believe this media is somehow being weaponized to weaken the US or turn the population against itself.

300 years from now, we will be the barbarians. We aren’t elevated beyond the issues of our past. We aren’t more “enlightened” now.

We fucking better be. The notion that modern public education, mass media, and online social discourse hasn’t granted us any new useful information is pretty bleak. Sort of raises the question of why human language exists at all, if it’s just white noise and nobody is gaining any kind of material benefit.

(Although, check out Peter Watts’s Blightsight if you want to chase that rabbit down the hole).

But part of the appeal of censorship is that you’re gating your social circle from regression. You’re not going back to re-litigate settled issues with any kind of seriousness. You certainly aren’t going to tolerate reactionary quarters of your population that try and reinstate them.

My take is that we all need to be compassionate to humans by understanding that we are all the same pallet of color, just with different mixes and strokes.

I would argue that it is cruel to indoctrinate someone else with misinformation and a kindness to spare them from delusion. Similarly, bigotry can turn verbal harm into physical harm very quickly. Even benign communication can be weaponized if it is used to drown people out or deafen them.

So I’ve got three general categorizes of communication that it would be compassionate to spare them from.

See, the priest happened to make a very human mistake: identify yourself with your ideology.

I would say the priest’s mistake wasn’t merely having (or displaying) and ideology, but associating it with mysticism disjointed from any empirical or rational inspection.

You run into this problem where now, you’re concerned with what should and shouldn’t be censored.

Every system has its gray areas and decision points.

That said, I see a lot of anti-censorship absolutists who seem zealously in favor of open debate until… they get swamped by spam posts or drowned out by monied interests or sea-lioned by people who are just being annoying.

Hell, Charlie Kirk died with a debate on his lips. And TPUSA’s love of campus debates appears to have died with him.

How do you have a conversation about whether or not the person you’re talking to is a human worthy of the dignity of discourse? How do you have a debate with someone who shows up wearing boxing gloves (much less an AR-15)? At some point, censorship is a kindness. It means ending the conversation before we hit the point of fighting words and irreconcilable differences.

The US positioned the world’s largest warship, the USS Gerald R Ford, in the Middle East to join an earlier aircraft carrier, the USS Abraham Lincoln, that had moved to the region last month.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei responded by threatening to sink the carriers.

Why can’t the boy ask his priest about his most serious doubts regarding god, and receive an honest answer back?

Why is the priest allowed to just make shit up with nothing more than a bronze aged poorly translated manuscript to back him up? The boy should be able to ask away. It’s the priest that should be censored.

There is so much fear, so much bias, so much identity tethered to ideology

Crazy factoid I learned recently. Children younger than 18 are prohibited from participating in religious activities and receiving religious education, even in schools run by religious organizations within China. If you’re too young to consent, you’re too young to be indoctrinated into a religious tradition.

And the event led to over 100,000 power outages in the region, most of which came back in a day or two. But that paled beside '21, which took out multiple major metro areas statewide.

Is this Krav Maga?

The AI companies put out a presser a few years back that said “Um, aktuly, its the humans who are bad drivers” and everyone ate that shit up with a spoon.

So now you’ve got Waymos blowing through red lights and getting stuck on train tracks, because “fuck you fuck you stop fighting the innovation we’re creatively disruptive we do what we want”.

If censorship is what’s being criticized, it’s no different.

Paradox of tolerance

I hate when censorship comes for people I do like.

I love when censorship comes for people I don’t like.

it’s just become such a nanny instance that jumps on everyone’s shit.

Admins are fighting a flood of instances and users more interested in getting attention than participating in the community. Consequently, you’ll have power users ballooning the front page with click-bait. You’ll have instances choke full of reactionary content specifically intended to bait a flame war. You’ll have spammers plugging their own brands or working on behalf of some third party. And you’ll have the odd bot-farm or other automated account that’s just probing the Fediverse for gaps.

“Ah, but the individual users can always block what they choose”

Sure. Technically. But nobody wants to wake up every morning to a front page that’s full of shit. The spammers can bloat your inbox faster than the individual can flush it out. So Admins who step in and do a little public house cleaning - the Nanny work you hate - makes the website cleaner and friendlier for lay users that pop in now and then.

Having a public energy sector would be beneficial in the long run and would reduce what we have to pay for it.

A well-run public energy sector, certainly. Idk what we’d end up with given the most recent rotation of people in charge.

The state does have an incentive to keep consumer costs low in a way the private sector does not. But state officials also traditionally do a bad job of maintaining and expanding utilities to match consumer demand.

The end result tends to be low end user prices at the expense of reliable distribution and surplus volume.

Is it easier to secure, monitor fewer, bigger reactors or thousands of* small ones?

A moot point when we don’t build new ones anymore.

But the big appeal of the molten salt reactor is that it doesn’t require continuous manual interventions.

Solar, batteries and long-range transmission infrastructure just makes too sense I guess.

Sure. Obviously.

But that’s WOKE, so we hate it.

Nuclear definitely has a role to play. Integrating SMRs into our global shipping fleet would eliminate the enormous waste and emissions of bunker fuel, for instance.

And areas that don’t have reliable sunlight or wind (far north/south regions) or that require high steady output in confined areas (large factories, urban centers, major metro arteries, etc) can see real benefits, relative to gas or coal power.

It’s a technology we should have invested more heavily in 60 years ago. Obviously, Texas will fuck it up. But that’s not an indictment of the technology, just the capitalist dipshits that run the state.

The school’s primary selling point is its “2 hour learning” philosophy which promises to give students their required education and prepare them for necessary standardized tests, AP tests, and the SATs in just just two hours of learning.

Real “Eight Minute Abs” tier pitch work.

Former Alpha School employees and internal documentation don’t disprove Alpha School students’ high test results, but show that students often have to study more than two hours a day, that they sometimes arrive at Alpha high school classes unprepared and below grade level reading skills, and that some students had to go back and fill holes in their education before they were prepared for high school level classes.

:-/

This is an enduring refrain with pilot program education systems. Your initial crop of students get bespoke treatment (to match the astronomical cost - $60k/yr is more than most colleges charge). Then their performance is tied back to the gimmick - AI, SmartBoards, School Uniforms, Montessori style teaching, Jesus classes - that’s rolled out to the hoi paloi at a cheaper price but absent all the personalized, expensive tutoring.

I think Nevada bet Texas there by about 70 years.

SMRs are a new scam needed because old nuclear scam has worn out.

Idk about that. Consider the Linglong One (ACP100): Developed by the China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC), it is the first SMR to pass an independent safety assessment by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in 2016. Construction began in 2021, and the core module was installed in 2023.

Definitely a challenge of materials sciences, but to call it a scam? Come on. Coal sticking around as long as it has is the scam.

it hasn’t been a problem since that event 5 years ago.

We’ve been spared any serious natural disasters affecting the grid during that time. No major hurricanes. No big freeze.

The worst event was the 2024 derecho, and that definitely knocked out power here and there. But it was high enough above the treeline to really wreck infrastructure at the ground level.

I’ll note that a huge increase in wind and solar capacity means we aren’t exposed to the same kind of economic pressure from five years ago, either. The '21 freeze came, in large part, due to gas power plants locking up when they were needed, because they hadn’t been weatherized. With less acute demand issues (thanks to new green energy) we haven’t been in a position where gas plants could casually wait for prices to spike before turning on.

In fairness, Trump’s DOJ has allowed Hillary to remain at large

I have information that could lead to the arrest of Hilary Clinton

~ Charlie Kirk, mere hours before his death

I’m not sure offhand what body does this normalization and what population they use, but thankfully, that knowledge doesn’t matter.

:-|

God damn, I hate you people

It really is painful to read this kind of arrogant ignorance

average IQ will increase

👏 That’s 👏 not 👏 how 👏 IQ 👏 works 👏

The average IQ is 100. It’s always 100. I hate people who talk about IQ because they are annoyingly wrong seven ways from Sunday every fucking time.

It’s a win-win situation.

Liberals stop tacitly endorsing euthenics challenge: Way Harder Than You’d Think

God fucking Damnit this county sucks. Death to Amerikkka

A lot of lefties going to complain about his support for israel, even if modest.

Really depends on who he is running against and how he positions himself along the way. If he’s out saying “Israel is our oldest and dearest friend, they just made a few mistakes” or god forbid “Anyone critical is anti-Semitic” he’s DOA. If he’s out there saying “We spend billions of dollars so Israel can have clean potable water and top tier health care, so it’s time to bring those amenities back to the US”, he can probably hurdle that criticism well enough.

he appeals to the largest swath of moderate America who are tuned out and just want to hear that someone strong and professional will keep them in their comforts

I mean, Biden appealed to these same voters by adopting half of Bernie Sanders’s platform and half of Hillary Clinton’s. Then he spent four years yelling at people for using TikTok and arguing the need to kill more brown people.

Kelly’s fine on paper, but if he opens his mouth and sounds like another “moderate Dem”… I think he’s going to have the same kind of trouble Cuomo did.

Banning something is a sure fire way to give it oxygen.

It’s a clever bit of marketing to queue this up and make a big stir and drum about being censored.

The allegations feel… thin? This is a primary race in a state that’s been sandbagged for Republicans for decades. But as a piece of campaign material, it’s par excellance. More people are going to see the clip passed around online than ever would watching it broadcast on a Monday night.

The problem Trump has in doing this type of suppression

I doubt this was anyone’s serious intent. Republicans pull this gag all the time. They deliberately try and trick the alarm for censorship and then scream ten times as loud “LOOK AT ME! I’VE BEEN CENSORED! CHECK OUT THE VIDEO THEY DON’T WANT YOU TO SEE!”

Liberals (or, at least, this one guy fighting for his life in a deep red state) finally seem to have caught up to the game.