OpenStars

joined 2 years ago
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[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 2 points 7 months ago

I dunno... isn't that like breathing air for a Gen-Z person? Good or bad, it must be shared with everyone! 😉😜🤣

[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 2 points 7 months ago (2 children)

And yet... how many people actually implement them, in daily life? It would be great though wouldn't it?:-D

[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Weirdly, it works for me from Discuss.Online, but not from slrpnk.net, where the OP post was submitted from. It also works from Lemmy.World.

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[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I have not taken any time to properly learn about whatever’s going on in Germany lately (fwiw I did not presume that it was the entire government, just a portion of it). I edited my comment to reflect that.

Moreover perhaps I should say that it is unfair to pin all of my hopes for the future of democracy onto Germany? But thems the breaks.:-P

[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (4 children)

Brexit was a real thing that actually happened. ~~Germany just elected a far right wing government~~ (Edit: I have not taken any time to properly learn about whatever's going on in Germany). The amount of "we are above all that and similar things will never happen to us" seems quite high in that thread. Disinformation campaigns will be coming for every nation on earth that could make a difference to the sender's agenda, in forms custom designed to work for the target. Fortunately though, those leopards would never ever even so much as think about eating my face off...

[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 2 points 7 months ago

By your definition, it seems like a gun or knife could be inherently bad, rather than its' wielder? Or scissors even, though most people would say that the context matters more: e.g. scissors are fine and quite useful tools, depending on the context i.e. in the hands of a child who is running with them they can be "bad", yet that hardly makes scissors "evil". ✂️

I would agree with a differently phrased version of that though: people cannot be TRULY good (or evil) unless they have a certain minimum amount of "character". Like if a cat or dog looked at you grumpily, you may joke about it, but who cares really? (unless it's a BIG cat like a lion, but even then, while its status may be important to us, we would hardly call it truly "good" or truly "evil"?)

And the same with a computer: like AI may end up killing us all, but do we blame it really, or rather should we blame ourselves for telling it which 1-0 bits to flip, while for itself it really has no clue what it's even doing... or more importantly, why?

You can't be truly good unless you at least have a certain capacity to be evil, and vice versa, maybe? So like (as several examples here pointed out) if you return the cart to the cart return area of the store, in the rain, and as people who did not do that drive by you and look abashed/ashamed - they themselves knew that they could have done the same, and they feel the guilt inside their own minds (regardless of external expression of such or not) bc they KNOW that they could have made the same choice, yet decided to do the opposite instead. Perhaps you yourself don't even judge them harshly... but that doesn't (fully) matter, as they actually judge themselves that way, and find their own standard of behavior wanting, i.e. they do not live up to what they wished that they would do, and that others would likewise do.

So like scissors, if a dumb person hurts you, then yeah it causes pain, but would we call that truly "evil", or the reverse of that "good"? Perhaps the jury is still out on that one.

[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 4 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Ah, so Canadian then? J/k... and I'm sorry!? :-P (edit: eh?)

[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 2 points 7 months ago

For one thing, a greater reliance upon authority figures than critical thinking skills. That sounds bad, but really genuinely truly how many of us know better than an economics professor with a PhD and decades of experience in exactly that field, like Robert Reich? So we tend to think in like manner as well.

A big difference is that if said authority figure ever lets us down then we distrust anything that they say, while conservatives continue to offer the benefit of the doubt bc if they are in a position of authority, there must be a reason for it. Tbh, pastors telling people from behind a pulpit to watch Faux News has a lot to do with it...:-(

[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 2 points 7 months ago

That is not possible - e.g. if nothing else there is entropy.

The only constant is change.

[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 4 points 7 months ago

img

- source

As you eloquently put there's far more going on than just that, but also... yeah.

[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 22 points 7 months ago (1 children)

In addition to the practical realities of a 2-party system as others are pointing out, there's the fact that the Left eats its own. Nobody is ever good enough, and compromising with "the enemy" is "bad", hence people can either keep their moral purity and lose, or else compromise their ethics in order to move forward, but not both. For example, Biden reached across the aisle and managed to get a ton of shit done - but who even cared? To anyone not on the right it wasn't enough, while to the right itself it was all (claimed to be) bad to begin with, hence the message of "BoTh SiDeS sAmE" won out and thus the puppetmasters wanting to influence the election got their desires met.

As long as people choose to remain in their ignorance, we can't influence outcomes for either better or worse.

[–] OpenStars@discuss.online 1 points 7 months ago

iirc the actual amount of time dedicated to the intersection between those alternative Force-users and the rest of the Galaxy is quite small, and yet the impact of that completely changed the direction of the trilogy, literally saving the day due to their having taught Luke Skywalker a new set of powers - well, at least just one or two:-). Most of the books are dedicated to setting up this totalitarian regime that was going to overwhelm and conquor the galaxy, and on the Jedi side the search for these alternate users.

One scene that stuck in my mind was when these two people attacked Luke and his companion, and how she did not condone his having struck them down - despite it having been done entirely in self-defense, they were pacifists to such a large degree that even then they did not condone the killing. This ofc reveals them to be VERY different than the Jedi, most of whom kill without a second thought about the matter, despite how their claim is to revere "life" (their justification ofc being that they mean it on the larger scale, but the "life" of an individual or two or twenty thousand doesn't matter all that much).

I'll give you the tiniest of (really non-) spoiler for the Jedi Academy: yeah it doesn't turn out well:-). Though that's okay, b/c there's a difference between knowing the path and walking the path, and it was what he (Luke) needed to have done to get from there to where he arrived later. Perhaps the larger part of his failures there is not due to how he was trained, but that he never finished - remember when he abandonded Yoda to go rescue his friends? Yoda kindly said that he knew enough... but he could have been taught so much more. So like, enough... "for what"? Enough to destroy the Emperor's stranglehold on the galaxy? Enough to resurrect the Jedi order? Enough to train new members in the ways of using the Force? And what about when the Yuuzhan Vong show up later in the New Jedi Order to conquer everything - the Emperor had a whole society geared around defeating them, with fearsome technology like planet killers and star killers and rigidly disciplined clone armies and the ability to make as many more of them as needed, but did Luke have "enough" training to handle all that was to come?

Or perhaps things like survival of a species or even a galactic empire don't really matter, in the long run, when the entire universe will fade into dust and cease to fight against entropic forces anymore, some day. Maybe all that matters at the end of the day is how we face our ending, like did we remain true to ourselves? (and perhaps that in turn depends on how "inspiring" such scifi stories were, which correlates with how profitable they were to sell in the past and thus in turn make more of in the future...:-P)

I never consumed DBZ, in any form - it seems too old to be worthwhile, but do you think there is merit in it still? Sadly, there seems nothing at all that escapes enshittification as a result of capitalism. Doctors are overworked, as are scientists, engineers, teachers - and that is even just merely STEM, but then we can start going through the list of non-STEM too: lawyers, accountants, architects, ... and you mentioned the entire set of "creative" fields such as actors, artists, designers, etc. - yeesh!:-( But are there perhaps better publishers, which we can support and thereby encourage better practices?

Watching SWO a couple times is totally "enough" - not everything needs to be all-consuming, and while I think the story was well-implemented (as you say, it is nowhere close to being unique: I never got into :Hack//Sign but there are even more ancient series like Tron that also played up that same concept, and I am sure many fantasy concepts that pre-date modern technology like if you die in a dream then you die irl), there is a ton of irl stuff to read and learn and do about as well. e.g. when I watched Rules for Rulers by CGP Grey, it totally fucked me up for years afterwards, trying to re-think my entire worldview of how I thought the world worked - and more importantly, should work. Trigger warning: that philosophy might be too heavy to get into and so you may want to avoid it if you aren't ready to know.

I am going to specifically avoid commenting on BattleStar Galactica b/c... well, you'll see. I'll just say that it is very "interesting" how the whole series evolves - and as it does, reiterates tropes that occur irl too. But I can leave it behind and switch to StarGate instead: especially with those nanobot beings - why terraform a planet when you can just flip a switch and planetform yourself into something that can breathe that atmosphere and otherwise adapt to those conditions? As the 2001 A Space Odyssey and more pertinently its sequels show, terraforming is something that a society may do only briefly along the development of its technical capabilities - b/c it's an enormously expensive undertaking, and it's far easier to simply... not do that, and adapt ourselves instead (genetically I mean, as in not merely DNA but the "stuff" that makes us up). Those are kinds of FASCINATING thoughts that I LIVE to see/hear/read/imagine in scifi & fantasy settings!:-P

Btw zombies are an example of where that kind of thinking goes wrong, but with just a bit of tweaking... what if we had something like a T-virus that actually worked as intended, and basically gave the people that took it superpowers? Obviously, some evil mastermind would have to kill all the researchers that made any contributions to it at all, thereby preventing anyone else from having access to such, and preserving their immortality (not quite the same as total invulnerability, though getting closer to that as well) for millenia?

I think "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within" is a little bit like you are saying where people basically have to try to save the planet, or even better (so long as we aren't being picky about it being "Earth" that is attempting to be saved:-), "Avatar":-).

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