Gaza is happening because of US imperialism. Biden said that’s what Israel does in the region very clearly.

Joe Biden’s long history of pro-Israel statements

Anyone seriously considering prepping should listen to Robert Evans’ - of Behind the Bastards fame - podcast episodes on Worst Year Ever:

How to Save Your Community When the Government Fails

The Reasonable Person’s Guide to Prepping

TL;DL: it’s far more about food & water and building strong community ties with mutual aid than having a pile of guns and ammo

BOOOOOOOO! DOUBLE-DOWN! DOUBLE-DOWN! FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!

“This is serious mum”? I mean it kind of fits.

Eh, that only matters if they can prove it was a lie. “I don’t recall” is something everyone can get away with.

The technical term is “autocannibalism”.

Not to be confused with “autocannonballism”, which is a method of automatically loading old-timey cannon with a da Vincian mechanism of ropes & pulleys.

Yup, I’d say these instances are cover for neoliberal and/or reactionary sentiments. Honestly with the attention federation has recieved I think we’d be foolish not to consider that the biggest open sign-up instances have an agenda or at least are being influenced in some way, with or without their knowledge or permission.

If you think that’s going too far, I’d say the purpose of a system is what it does, and these large instances are systems unto themselves, and they serve this purpose whether intentionally or not.

At what point is supporting the prosecution of this assassin advocating for violence? The social murder done by the CEO is so many orders of magnitude greater, and the state will do violence to the killer to defend the industry’s right to do social violence.

Nobody was having this conversation when people rightly cheered the deposing of Assad. Guess what? That involved violence, a lot of it. That was state-backed violence too though, so I guess we’re all just fine with it.

The state calls its own violence “law” and that of the people “crime”.

I guess lemmy.world is happy to just go along with whatever the state wants. It’s just insulting that you pretend it’s about “violence” and you expect people to believe you.

People downvoted me to hell when I tried advising a newcomer to look for an instance that wasn’t lemmy.world because the open sign-up makes them a haven for reactionaries.

Are people listening now?

One whose core message you apparently completely missed.

I’m glad you appreciate it, it was as much an excuse for me to unload that rant as anything else :)

But we actually get into trouble when our models of reality are poor. Our nature isn’t self destructive at all, look at how many times we’ve been at the brink of nuclear annihilation and someone said, “actually don’t”, some of them in defiance of entrenched power structures that punished them for it.

We’ve had that world ending button for most of the last century, and we’ve never used it. If we really, on an instinctual level, were self-destructive we never would’ve evolved.

I think the real problem is the power structures that dominate us, and how we allow them to. They are aberrant, like tumours. They have an endless growth strategy, which just like in malignant tumours tend to kill the host. If they’re destroyed, the host can go on to live a complete life.

And things can change fast, these structures are tenacious but fragile. Look at the UHC assassination - claims immediately started getting approved. After decades of entrenched screwing over of people, they flipped on their back the moment they were threatened. How many other seemingly intractable problems could be cut out tomorrow if we applied the right kind of pressure?

I wouldn’t put too much stock in notions of a great filter. The “Fermi paradox” is not a paradox, it’s speculation. It misses the mark on how unbelievably unlikely life is in the first place. It relies on us being impressed by big numbers and completely forgetting about probabilities as we humans tend to do what with our gambler’s fallacies and so on.

Even the Drake equation forgets about galactic habitable zones, or the suitability of the stars themselves to support life. Did you know that our star is unusually quiet compared to what we observe? We already know that’s a very rare quality of our situation that would allow the stable environment that life would need. Then there’s chemical composition, atmosphere, magnetosphere, do we have a big Jupiter out there sweeping up most of the cataclysmic meteors that would otherwise wipe us out?

All these probabilities stack up, and the idea that a life-supporting planet is more common than one in 400 billion stars is ludicrously optimistic, given how fast probabilities can stack up. You’re about as likely to win the Lotto, and it seems to me the conditions for life would be a little more complex than that, not to mention the probability that it actually does evolve.

I think it might be possible that life only happens once in a billion galaxies, or even less frequently. There might not be another living organism within our local galactic cluster’s event horizon. Then you have to ask about how frequent intelligent life, to the point of achieving interstellar travel, is.

You know why your favourite science youtuber brushed right past the rare earth hypothesis and started talking about the dark forest? Because one of those makes for fun science-adjacent speculation, and the other one doesn’t.

It also relies on the notion that resources are scarce, completely brushing over the fact that going interstellar to accumulate resources is absolutely balls to the wall bonkers. Do you know how much material there is in our asteroid belt? Even colonising the Moon or Mars is an obscenely difficult task, and Fermi thinks going to another star system, removed from any hope of support by light years, is something we would do because we needed more stuff? It’s absurd to think we’d ever even consider the idea.

But even then, Fermi said that once a civilisation achieves interstellar travel it would colonise a galaxy in about “a million years”. Once again relying on us being impressed by big numbers and forgetting the practicalities of the situation. Our galaxy is 100,000 light years across, so this motherfucker is telling us with a straight face that we’re going to colonise the galaxy, something we already know is unfathomably hard, at approximately ten percent of the speed of light? That is an average rate of expansion in all directions. Bitch, what?

If we did it at 0.0001c, that’s an average speed of 30km/s, including the establishment of new colonies that could themselves send out new colonies, because it’s no good to just zoom through the galaxy waving at the stars as they go past. That seems amazingly generous of a speed, assuming we can even find one planet in range we could colonise. Then we could colonise the galaxy in about a billion years.

Given the universe is 14 billion years old and the complex chemistry needed for life took many billions of years to appear, and life on our rock took many billions of years to evolve, then the idea that we haven’t met any of our neighbours - assuming they even exist - doesn’t seem like a paradox at all. It doesn’t seem like a thing that needs explanation unless you’re drumming up sensational content for clicks. I mean, no judgement, people gotta eat, but that’s a better explanation for why we care so much about this non-problem.

No, the Fermi paradox is pop-science. It’s about as scientific as multiversal FTL time travel. Intelligence is domain-specific, and Fermi was good at numbers, he wasn’t an exobiologist.

I’m sorry, which part of your comment do you suppose relates to me?

This week on How to Raise an Entire Generation With an Intimate Knowledge of Counter-Surveillance: Ban Their Favourite Social Media!

Do you think bans reduced the amount of drinking & driving, or was it education?

Like you can’t just name another thing that you’re confident I disagree with and assume I’m going to suddenly support the ban.

You’re doing the thing ban advocates always do: “thing bad”. Okay, thing bad. So how do we actually, effectively, reduce it? Because bans don’t work.

If you hear David Graeber talk about it, the IMF and the World Bank’s power was shattered after occupy, countries weren’t willing to accept their terms anymore because the word was out that leaders who did that were selling out their own people. Things changed, but there are powerful hegemonic forces at work to stop us from hearing about it. They want us to believe we are powerless.

Just because you didn’t storm the bastille yet doesn’t mean nothing is being done. Most direct action is on the ground and invisible. That’s why it looks like decades pass with nothing happening, then overnight everything changes.

“Mob justice” is a boogeyman invented to distract you from the fact that the cops and the state give you no justice at all.

Gun control is fundamentally a right wing policy. Just because it aligned with *some people’s preferred right wing party on a culture war wedge issue doesn’t make it right.

Like look at California; the only reason their gun laws are so strict is because they were scared of the Black Panthers doing open carry observation of police. It was a targeted, racist attack on a political movement that was completely bipartisan, because the political class has solidarity with one another against the rest of us.

Like what do *liberals think about abortion bans? Do they reduce the number of abortions? What about drug & alcohol bans? Do they work? We know these things don’t actually stop anyone from doing anything, they just make those behaviours more dangerous.

So why do *they think gun bans will actually be effective? Do *they think the cops will actually use it to protect children? They had all the power at Uvalde and they used it to keep parents from saving their kids.

The US is an unprecedentedly violent police state with the largest military, the largest criminal population in history and a fetishistic obsession with guns, of course their children turn to guns to take out their rage. That’s what they see modelled all around them.

Edit: removed the words that assume this is the position of the person I’m replying to. I still stand by the points.

Reminds me of a partner’s childhood pastor warning them not to spend too much time questioning their faith, because in their experience it had led a lot of people away from the church. Gee, maybe think about how that sounds. Like, you basically just told them that your beliefs couldn’t withstand interrogation.