Stuck a wire in a power outlet.
I have a few. I’m not the kind of person that says controversial things to attract attention, but I also don’t refrain from putting them out there.
A selection of the ones I use in my political activity:
- knowing things doesn’t change things
- work should be abolished
- atheism and rationalism are a scourge on the ability of the Left to reach people
- hacker culture is intrinsically gnostic and reactionary
Some others:
- suicidal and self-harming people should be listened to by understanding and validating the motivations behind their desire to hurt or kill themselves, even entertaining with them their own plans. Anything else would likely put a wedge between the two of you that will prevent from addressing the causes and ultimately do what’s good for them.
- mathematics is just narrative with rules/arbitrary opinions with rules
- nurses, doctors, teachers and other professions of care attract the worst psychopaths because they are put in charge of vulnerable people. On top of that they are by default perceived as caregivers, so it’s harder for them to raise suspicion of doing fucked up stuff.
Edit: people down voting in a thread about controversial opinions must be very very intelligent
You probably want to replace “atheism” with “antitheism” in that context. I would disagree either way, but I think you’d have a point with antitheism.
Work should be abolished in favour of what?
hacker culture is intrinsically gnostic and reactionary
Do you nind elaborating a bit?
It would be quite a long argument, but I suggest TechGnosis by Erik Davis and this article: https://www.are.na/block/24206425
tl;dr: hacker culture is grounded in gnostic, individualistic californian hippie culture, and shares root with what is now the dominant, reactionary ideology of big tech moguls, ketamine cryptocolonialists, business white supremacists. One key tenet of hacker culture is the power of the individual super-human brain power to reshape entire societies through the production of disruptive technology. Mr. Robot tv series is one such example of said mindset. It preaches the superiority of the world of minds and the virtual over the material. The material is subject to the virtual and the virtual is where the real stuff is happening, where there’s a real confrontation of power (the hacker vs the system, disruptors vs established businesses, out-of-the-box thinkers vs corporate drones). This mimics gnostic beliefs very closely. It is reactionary because it is individualistic, because it erases material conditions and collective action, but it also just operates from such a simplified worldview that it is impossible to adhere to if you have a very basic understanding of disciplines like sociology, history or politics. It’s just not how the world works.
Interesting, thank you for the reply. I am not a hacker nor a gnostic but I have a slight fascination with the latter. But on hacking: while there’s merit to your position that hacker culture is reactionary I have to ask what do you think of hacker collectives like the one that leaked Project 2025 or other noble computer nerd activities? It seems to me like a hacker is exercizing another avenue of power over her world like jumping or singing. Thinking the online world is seperate and intangible from our non-online experience seems to be making the mistake of dualism in upholding one sphere of reality over the other/s.
Gnosticism is by definition the epitome of duality. That said, conflict with a reactionary entity doesn’t imply you’re not reactionary. Russia and Ukraine are at war with each other and they are both very reactionary, becoming even worse due to the needs produced by such conflict.
Also, hackers tend to hold libertarian (in the European sense) values and that’s how they pick their targets for direct action. When I say they are reactionary, they are reactionary in effect, not in intent. That makes them even more problematic, because it’s not immediately obvious what’s the problem.
I was hanging with a group consisting of mostly older millennial gay men who don’t like that trans people are being included alongside them in conversations about human rights, sexuality, and gender. They think it takes away from the fight their community has gone through over the past few generations.
I chewed them out. Like, a lot. I am usually not at all confrontational but I pretty much stunned them into silence. Now I’m waiting to let them process, expecting a couple to reach out to me to step back from some of the shit they were saying. If that doesn’t happen, I guess I’m not really welcome in that group anymore and I’m ok with that.
There are no trans people in this group. I’m not a gay man nor am I trans. But when I hear shit like that, I hear echos of gay men activists not being willing to work with lesbian women activists, white feminists not includig black women, male laborers trying to keep women out of labor rights movements. It’s stupid. It’s tribal and hateful. It undercuts the strength the movement could have if we weren’t asshats about it.
Rights campaigning 101, strength in unity. This is basic ass shit.
While I do agree that unity is the way to go in the fight for rights, I can understand why one would want to separate the T from the LGB. It’s an issue of consistency - L, G, and B all describe sexuality, while T describes gender. The two are related, but ultimately separate concepts - one does not inform the other, and grouping them can hypothetically lead ignorant people to think that they are directly related, which could hypothetically lead to non-straight cisfolk experiencing more oppression than they would have otherwise experienced due to the perceived association with transfolk, as non-conforming sexuality is more generally accepted today than non-conforming gender.
That being said, it’s all hypothetical, and what matters is the reality that people from all spectra of nonconformity are regularly oppressed, and in many places, the oppressors treat anyone LGBT+ with the same disdain. So grouping them is vital for the sake of the most oppressed.
one does not inform the other
Me omw to be a lesbian man
I mean, you could similarly reason that bisexuals aren’t welcome (both gays and lesbians are solely attracted to the same sex, after all), or that asexuals aren’t welcome (you can be asexual and heteroromantic, after all), and so on. I think, ultimately, that unity between us is important, and allowing the umbrella to protect all members of gender, romantic, and sexual minorities strengthens the overall cause rather than weakening it.
Hell yeah. Concern silos divide the people.
Trans rights are human rights
Women’s rights are human rights
Workers rights are human rights.
If it were supposed to be pronounced “jif” it would have been spelled that way.
This is a jem of a response, but by jeneralizing pronunciations of acronyms only by the way they are spelt, you are opening a jigantic can of worms on etymology and linguistics.
The jist of it is that English is a weird language, jenerally descriptive, and there can be many correct answers to the same pronunciation problem.
As for me? I’m a choosy developer, and I choose jif.
jigantic
I read that as Jig-antic. I would have to turn it into jygantik for it to sound the same.
The creator of the format is documented as having confirmed the pronunciation is “jif”, but I don’t care. Once he created it and put it into the world, he relinquished his control.
I honestly believe he was just trolling when he said that and he probably giggles to himself everytime someone says (shudder) ‘jif’. It’s a hard G from graphics so I don’t know how else is could be reasonably pronounced.
This is why literary analysis created death of the author.
Laser is an acronym for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation, and yet we all pronounce it “lay-Zer” not “lay-Ser”
The A in amplification and E in emission are pronounced differently too, so the “correct” pronunciation would be “lah-seer”.
So how do you pronounce giraffe?
If there’s ever a Giraffe Interchange Format, I’ll pronounce it the same as giraffe. And unlike some people, I’ll be able to tell the two apart.
In the meantime, there is a Joint Photographics Experts Group. I love me some deep fried jfegs!
It’s a gift, not a jift.
Yeah and it’s giraffe, not jiraffe. See how that gets us nowhere?
Jood gob indeed (just kidding, no malice intended)
GIF is an acronym. Giraffe is not. The Giraffe response has been debunked for decades.
Graphical is a hard G.
Debunked? Its a counterpoint to the fact that it’s pronounced that way because it’s spelled with a g. If that poor argument wasn’t used, the giraffe one wouldn’t have to come up. It’s not evidence of anything other than that letters can be pronounced in more than one way.
For the graphical thing, imagine pronouncing NASA wrong because of the way aeronautical is pronounce. Or underwater in scuba. World in WHO? The I in AIDS isn’t pronounced anything like immunodeficiency.
Your argument doesn’t work either.
Thank you for providing me all new ways to pronounce things in horribly cursed ways, magic internet man.
Also “laser” as lah-seer
The argument holds up.
deleted by creator
How do you pronounce github? GIMP? GNU? GPU? Javascript?
Oh Geremy, it’s time to jo to the jocery store! We need some jrape gelly.
Geoff is a gentle German giant with ginger hair. He’s also a germaphobe, though generally he’s still a genuine gentleman. You get the gist.
Wait they’re supposed to be pronounced with J? Except JS obviously I pronounced them all with G
How do you pronounce gift?
Yes, but “GIF” is not etymologically Germanic. 😉
With the other pronunciation. Some letters have more than one. Your statement is nonsense lol
How do you pronounce ghoti?
And clearly based on the intense response you win the controversial statement award
Pedophiles aren’t the problem.
Rapists are the problem.
Just a fact. A pedophile who never acts on it is just some guy.
Or woman
just wish people understood the difference between a paraphilia and a crime.
Saying that my favorite cli editor is
nanoThe only CLI editors I’ve used are VI and Nano. So my favourite CLI editor is Nano too.
Based
I preferred pico.
I prefer micro
In a discussion about whether liking trans women is gay or not I said that they are all missing the point. Even if it was the gayest thing on earth, being gay should never be this big of a deal. And it just shows how hard it is for some to overcome the stigma of being gay, even if they are super tolerant in general.
That started a group discussion with a lot of different opinions on that matter.
That’s a good one I need to remember that
Marxism is correct and more relevant than ever.
I’m curious what makes you say that. What evidence is there to support Marxism? Isn’t Marxism just communism? Just genuinely curious. I always thought that communism has been proven not to work multiple times throughout history. Not trying to say I think Capitalism is perfect. I definitely agree that Capitalism that is unrestrained and companies that are allowed to reign free is bad for the common people.
I always thought that communism has been proven not to work multiple times throughout history.
The more accurate lesson would be that communist nations have been defeated by capitalist hegemony multiple times throughout history, mainly during the Cold War; the countries didn’t just implode of their own accord. Now, it’s fair to criticize them for this, if you have an ideology all about material conditions and then you aren’t able to survive those conditions, you probably messed up, but I think that’s a very different assertion from “communism doesn’t work”.
communist nations have been defeated by capitalist hegemony multiple times throughout history, mainly during the Cold War
You are aware of the many attempts in different countries to leave the USSR, right?
All of them were violently shut down, that’s why the system was able to keep going, but without violence against their own population the USSR would’ve collapsed much earlier.
I’m unimpressed. The US has crushed rebellions from its inception, famously including the civil war but also many other attempts, and I would say that the patterns of what some call the New Afrikan nation within the US to revolt, going solidly up to the 1980s or further depending on your interpretation, are perhaps the most important.
As some guy said, “Revolution is not a dinner party” and establishing and maintaining a revolutionary state requires its own violence. No Marxist says otherwise, as it is the famous quote of Engels: “The proletariat uses the State not in the interests of freedom but in order to hold down its adversaries, and as soon as it becomes possible to speak of freedom the State as such ceases to exist.”
Marxism is Communism, yes. Communism has been proven to work multiple times, and does to this day.
I suggest reading Blackshirts and Reds if that goes against what you believe to be true, though if you have specific questions I can do my best to answer.
Serious question, are there any true communist/Marxist nations today that would be examples of your statement?
Sorry about terribad formatting, old phone is old
Historically there have been more, such as the USSR, but currently the DPRK, PRC, Cuba, Vietnam, and Laos are explicitly Marxist. There’s a lot of misinformation surrounding them, but they retain Marxism.
Is it your stance that every nominally Marxist country is actually Marxist? That there are no revisionist countries even though, for example, the USSR spent most of its existence being revisionist?
I wouldn’t say there are any “orthodox” Marxist countries, most have taken some fair bit of revisionism, but are still Socialist and practice Marxism.
Fair enough, I mostly agree. I can imagine that China, Vietnam, and Laos are on the list because of, uh, capitalist roading, and the DPRK is nationalist to a reactionary degree and kind of culty, but what criticism would you apply to Cuba? Do they do capitalist roading too? I don’t hear much about them in that regard.
Doesn’t the DPRK operate under the Juche political concept?
Juche is basically Marxism-Leninism, but with a focus on self-reliance.
I guess in real life that’s polarising…
On here it’s just preaching to the choir, thus the upvotes.
Depends on the audience. It’s polarizing, hence the downvotes as well.
All 4 of them, as of posting, compared to the 25 upvotes.
Spaces
Tabs!
Insisting that all tabs should be the same length as eight spaces.
Open up notepad, and compare. Eight spaces = 1 tab.
8 space tabs is incredibly stupid
And yet, that is its default definition regardless of operating system.
That’s also why almost every IDE out there has tabs auto-set to 4 spaces, and/or gives the user to change it away from 8 spaces.
And yet, that is its default definition regardless of operating system.
Defined by what? When does the os, rather than a program, determine how many spaces a tab is?
Its funny that the argument against tabs is purely because someone once opened a file in a shitty editor.
I am not arguing against tabs. I actually find them a lot cleaner than spaces. But the default definition of a tab has it being eight spaces long, regardless of operating system.
It’s just that “tab = 4 spaces” is either the default in a number of IDEs, and in those which it isn’t, almost everyone changes it to that anyhow.
I didn’t think that you were. I was criticising Notepad as a really shitty “editor”.
I personally set tabs to 2 spaces, but then thats the beauty of tabs over spaces. You can have two or four, or even eight if you hate yourself without impacting anyone else.
People who demand spaces are Republicans, they want to force their 2/4/8 space rule on you even if it is inconsequential.
White colored words that insult the reader.
This is one of those coders’ beefs, isn’t it?
School is where the passion for learning goes to die and the desire to cheat is born
In this day and age, hobbies are the last bastions of passion and curiosity. One who is engaged in a hobby is intrinsically motivated to learn and apply what has been learned in novel ways, just as the scholars of old have done. School, reviled by many a student, has earned its reputation by perverting the concept of learning and exploiting students’ passions. The desire to cheat is most unnatural among students, a telltale sign that one’s passion and curiosity for the topic at hand has been extinguished, replaced with a desire to rid oneself of a burden, the burden of learning only for the sake of becoming learned.
also, we need 20h/week, 4 days/week schools.
What do parents do then when they’re working since childcare in the US is fucked
That’s only half the plan. We cut school hours so kids can work in the mines.
Yep. Sadly, I’m not sure there’s another way for most people. On Lemmy we’re mostly nerds, but would most people have learned even basic math if they didn’t have to?
In some ways, the most motivated or talented students are just as ill-fitted to the production line system of education as the disabled ones.
The American public school system as it currently exists is largely a joke.
Always has been we just seeing for what it is after generations of failure
People should be free to vote for those who best represent them, secure in the knowledge their vote will still be counted against those they don’t want in office.
That only works with non-first past the post voting systems.
For Lemmy specifically, I don’t think police need to be abolished.
are you saying you don’t want to defund the police as a public service and have some sort of for-profit peace keeper mafia instead? what type of anarchism is this
People considered woke often only focus on institutional racism and make every other form of racism seem unimportant, including those targeting so called “whites” / Europeans. (And I’m not trying to victimize perpetrators here, I’m aware of the current and historical situation in Western countries.)
I see that institutional racism is a huge problem, especially in the West, but that doesn’t make any other form less important or significant.
For comparison: just because in sub-saharan Africa people starve on a daily basis due to extreme poverty caused by Imperialism doesn’t mean that poverty inside industrial nations with less harsh effects is less of a problem, especially to the individual.
Telling 8th grade content teachers that they must modify their assignments to accommodate migrant students and English learners, and that just directly translating those documents forever wasn’t going to cut it. Gosh there was a lot of grumbling in the room.
I get it, we’re short staffed and overwhelmed, but it doesn’t make it go away.
