Even in your made up scenario it doesn’t prove the negative. Maybe your mind reading didn’t work because Apple has a mind wiping device that made them forget. Maybe the crystal ball didn’t work because Apple made an even more powerful “crystal ball blocking” device. You can’t prove that’s not what’s really happening.

So no, you in fact can’t prove a negative.

How many fascists have you killed? Genuine question. Cause if the answer is zero, you have stopped short of killing fascists. Saying you would is no different than the person who says they would care about politics but doesn’t.

I don’t mean that as an attack. I simply am pointing out that everyone draws the line differently. A Ted Kaczynski would say a person who really cares about these issues would already be sending mail bombs.

I disagree with that (as do you I imagine, as I don’t think you’ve started mail bombing people, as that would’ve been in the news), but he was just as sure of his line as you are. Why do you not go that far?

To be very clear. Don’t mail bomb people. Don’t take this as a challenge. I’m just genuinely curious how that falls against the line you are drawing.

Also, back to the original topic, you said earlier that you can’t go to events solo due to your social anxiety, which is understandably difficult, but could you not bring your partner along? Why can’t you have that security blanket as you go out to meet new people? Having a partner makes making new friends a thousand times easier!

I do think there’s an element of privilege here. Just because you have the luxury of time and space to be involved in politics and spend a lot of emotional energy in that area doesn’t mean that everyone else has that luxury. For the single mother of three, working two jobs to provide for her kids, she probably doesn’t have the bandwidth to be super “educated” politically.

But what would you have that PTA soccer mom do? The bar is always arbitrary. I could choose to set it higher or lower than you. Why is your spot for the bar what it is? I could claim anyone who isn’t vegan, or uses toilet paper, or doesn’t drive an EV, or isn’t growing their own food, or isn’t chaining themselves to government buildings in protest isn’t doing their part and is actively “contributing to the destruction of humanity.” You have defined your threshold of acceptable somewhere short of actively murdering fascists (I assume), so why is that? And what makes your choice of threshold the correct one?

I think we have a tendency to say, “what I’m doing is the correct standard,” in order to make us feel justified in our outlook and superior to the people around us. Is it that others are actually “contributing to the destruction of humanity” more than you, or is that something that you tell yourself to help maintain an emotional wall of protection?

And, literally all that aside, I think your assumption that there aren’t plenty of people around you who feel similarly to you is unfounded. You could make friends by getting involved in a political campaign. I did that a number of years ago, and met a lot of great people. Helped a lady get elected into the House of Representatives. Had a great time and met a lot of cool people along the way. And surely those people would meet your thresholds of “good enough,” no?

I couldn’t source the 48.5 billion for personnel number. I’m seeing a total budget increase for ICE to 30 billion. But still a large number for sure. But that’s total budget, not just personnel.

But look, I agree with the sentiment. I’d rather this money be spent on teachers too. I’m just not convinced that the numbers, as presented in the meme, are meaningful.

It does sound like you’ve let doom scrolling negatively impact your life.

I won’t argue things are bad, but the reality is that most people are generally decent.

Sure, there’s a lot of dicks out there, but they’re very much the minority. They are just overrepresented in the Lemmy echo chamber (and other online platforms too of course).

Obviously it’s hard to say if you’re being “too picky” as it were without knowing exactly what lines you’re drawing, but it sounds like you might be projecting your negative expectations onto people as opposed to people actually not living up to those expectations.

I don’t agree with the guy, but it is worth noting that there are around 21k ICE agents, vs 3.8 million teachers.

That extra funding would probably spread a little thin when you’re sharing it with over 100x the number of people.

Fair enough on all counts.

I would point out that if everyone only made friends with people better than them, no one would have any friends. It’s important to pour into others as well as to get poured into. It’s how we make the world better. And just because someone is “worse” than you doesn’t mean they don’t have value. And it doesn’t mean there isn’t something you could gain from having them as a friend. I’ve had friends who are “better” than me and “worse” than me make positive change in my life.

And I know you say you’re not in a place to work on this, and I can respect that, but I would say that it’s never a bad time to continue leaning forward in a positive direction. And if this is something that’s negatively impacting your life, the sooner you work on it, the sooner you’ll be less impacted by it. No time like the present and all that.

I have friends with crippling social anxiety. It’s a lot of work, and they have their ups and downs for sure. But it’s something that they’re working on in therapy and making strides on. It is possible to improve and for things to get better.

I mean, it’s hard to say without knowing exactly what you’re talking about, but universally condemned likely seems strong. But regardless, you said that you don’t value the same people I do. Does that mean you can’t value someone with different beliefs than you?

You say that there aren’t any groups in your area that would interest you. What kind of group would interest you? What group, if you saw it was starting up in your area, would motivate you to go out and meet people?

I mean, I think you may be overselling the word “suffering.” I wouldn’t put “working so I don’t starve” in the same category as “starving to death.”

If “suffering” just means “anything I don’t 100% love,” then it’s effectively meaningless, no?

I know mental health issues complicate things, but that’s something to work on, not an obstacle that can’t be surmounted. I have tons of friends with mental health struggles of all kinds.

But you say that you don’t value the same people I do, but what makes you think so?

As I say, I was at a local boardgame meetup this past weekend. Not exactly a “party” crowd. And to be clear, there’s local meetups for everything under the sun. What do you value in people that you don’t think you could find a social group for? What makes you think finding a group you would vibe with is particularly hard?

Fair. The OP you were responding to was about how people cope with loneliness IRL with pseudo-real online interactions, and you responded with how it’s difficult to find relationships in person.

I agree it’s not necessarily related, but I the guy above was wildly afeild taking your statement as an excuse for why finding relational fulfillment online is an acceptable cope. It was kind of the topic at hand.

But, aside from that, I think making new connections is really just about going out there and doing it. I’m 33 and constantly meet new people, so it’s definitely achievable in your 30’s. Just go to things. Open up Eventbrite or whatever and find something going on that looks like fun, and then just go. There’s a whole world of opportunities out there to meet new people.

He’s just saying that using Lemmy as a cope for not having IRL friends is healthy.

But, to your point, making friends is easier than you think. Join groups. They’re everywhere. I literally went to a “boardgame play testing” event today and met a lot of cool people.

Things like that are everywhere. You just got a look for them.

Look, rawstory is a rag, no question. But they literally embedded the video of the sermon. Literally a video of the events in question.

You can hardly argue they’re misrepresenting things when you can literally see the thing yourself.

Like, what better source than the actual video of the event could you possibly want?

There isn’t, because the source is his ass.

This was a pastor in Indiana during a sermon that was live-streamed on Facebook. So, like, funded by a PAC in what way exactly?

No PAC is mentioned in the article at all, much less a Chick-fil-A backed one. And this isn’t even tied to anything that would require any funding anyway.

I’m no Chick-fil-A apologist, but like, the idea that this is some secretive super-PAC that Chick-fil-A is using to fund pastors calling for the death of gay people is some Q-Anon level nonsense.

Are you a vegan by chance?

I feel like that’s the next big moral shift. People lionize dogs and cats, and harming one makes you literally Hitler. But there’s not a lick of difference between a dog and a cow.

I think that an objective ethicist would absolutely say veganism is the only moral choice, and that anyone who isn’t a vegan is knowingly participating in unimaginable cruelty.

But in our current context, only a small fraction of people care. Including a lot of people who look down on people of the past for not being as amazingly moral as they are.

I do think the situation is more complicated than Lemmy would have you believe.

Both Iran and Hamas have been geopolitical issues for a long time. And it’s worth remembering that all of this was kicked off by a large scale terrorist attack perpetrated by Hamas.

It’s also worth noting that Iran is a Russian puppet, and Europe obviously has some “neighbor problems” with Russia at the moment, so there’s a sort of baked in desire to oppose their vassal states.

And, while I think everyone would agree that the loss of civilian life is terrible, there is a huge amount of misinformation that makes it hard to be sure what’s going on. Hamas does have a long history of screwing over the civilian Palestinian population to further it’s political goals, and so people are willing to give Israel a little more credence than they deserve when they claim things like “Hamas was hiding in that hospital” or “we’re blocking aid because Hamas is hoarding it all to drive up tensions” or “it was Hamas who shot those civilians,” because it actually wouldn’t be the first time any of that had credibly happened. Something of a boy-cried-wolf scenario.

Add into that genuine desire to combat real anti-Semitism that’s been a fallout of this whole situation (a problem that hits pretty close to home in Europe due to events of the past century), and you can see why some people might be a bit over-eager to support Israel in this conflict.

It’s worth noting there are no good guys here. Israel is obviously in the wrong, and are committing horrible atrocities. I think that much is plain on its face. But Hamas and Iran have both had “the destruction of the state of Israel” as stated policy goals for the past 80 years. The reason Israel has the Iron Dome is because they’ve been getting missiles lobbed at them non-stop for decades.

And when there are no good guys, people tend to just align themselves with who they like more, or who they owe more to.

Just because it’s generally possible for the bladder to rupture before the muscles give out, it’s certainly not impossible. A myriad of conditions or even just genetics can lead to a physically weaker bladder.

I think it’s a bit bold to say that absolutely 100%, no exceptions, that the muscles will always fail first. Even if that’s true 99.99% of the time, there’s just far to much variance in human bodies to rule it out, I would think.

Sorry, iirc this conversation started with the question about what does free trade look like in a non-capitalistic system, and you pointed to mercantilism. You then seemed to say that the main difference between capitalism and mercantilism is the complexity of the marketplace. Which, if true, seems like a poor example of free trade without capitalism, as they’re largely the same system.

But I do understand your point. When trade is controlled by the state (a la mercantilism), I don’t know that I’d call it free trade, but, really, I’m not too hung up on this point, as I think the real blurring of the line is on the micro vs macro scale. You can have local free trade without large scale free trade (e.g I can sell leather goods, but not be involved in the import and export of animal products which remains the purview of the “government”). I might argue that this is localized capitalism in a non-capitalist system, but typically when we talk about capitalism we are talking about governmental economic organization.

I also really feel like this breakdown is due to trying to map this into the modern economy. Does the definition of the “means of production” breaks down in a service economy like the US? The amount of total jobs involved in any part of cloth production (or other manufacturing sector jobs) is a minority. What does “seizing the means of production” look like when what’s being “produced” are services not goods?

I think, if nothing else, it makes it hard to distinguish the “leather worker” from the “animal products exporter” as those are only different in scale not kind when there is no immutable aspect of nature or industry under control. The difference between my local burger joint and McDonalds is of scale, not kind, so how do I seize the means of production from one and not the other?

Can you provide a source for that definition of capitalism?

Genuinely asking, as it’s not the definition I have historically heard, and while I can find things that argue that what you are saying is an inevitable byproduct of unregulated capitalism, I can’t find anywhere that says those problems are a requirement for a system to be called capitalism.

As far as I can tell, if there is free trade and money/capital is owned and managed by private citizens, then that meets every formal definition of capitalism I have been able to find.

“Late stage capitalism” I think carries the connotations that you have outlined, but not capitalism in general.

I don’t think it’s possible to have a system without some form of legitimized power, as people will always fill that vacuum. There will be a village elder or judge or peacekeeper or something, as those all fulfill necessary elements to a functioning society, and they will all come with some amount of legitimate authority.

Now, I suppose it might be fair to say that those “legitimate authorities” aren’t prescribed by the system, and therefore any corruption that follows is not the fault of the system. That seems a bit squishy to me, as those “legitimate authorities” are a natural outflow of society, and if the system does not have built in controls on those positions it is tacitly approving of any corruption.

But I’ll grant there may be a purely semantic argument that the system itself is immune to corruption, in the same way that a starving person doesn’t have to worry about food poisoning.