FBXL Social

@mnswpr they want everyone to think the world is about to be destroyed because then you will waste your life tilting at windmills. They want you think there’s no tomorrow because you’ll let them do anything to live another day, ignore the consequences.

There are what there always are: good times and bad times ahead, but generally getting better all the time.

Keep your eyes on the road. Make good decisions for yourself, work hard and do your best and it’s very likely if you can read this that there’s a golden future ahead.

I just read an article from a neuroscientist that basically said people were irrational for not trusting the COVID vaccines that are coming out.

When did the word "rational" get overwritten to mean "I disagree with you"?

There are a lot of people who agree with vaccines that can come up with a lot of very reasonable, rational reasons not to trust the state or megacorps when it comes to this.

Not the least of which is the fact that they've been lying through their teeth at every step of the process. Just look at Dr. Fauci's track record. Don't like his take on something? Don't worry, he's lying and he'll change his answer later based on what's politically convenient.

Then there's the blanket liability. It's totally irrational worrying that megacorps that stand to make billions off of effective vaccines have every incentive to cut corners to get their hands on that massive windfall.

To me, as someone who believes in vaccines thoroughly and has no problem taking them normally, it seems irrational to blindly believe the states and the megacorps. If you do, maybe it's time to find a license therapist because you're hopelessly naïve.

@alex @me depends on the fiat. I can send money in seconds because the banking system supports high speed transfers. The archaic clearing house system is a specific decision to keep around.

Markets have sort of destroyed cryptos as a currency.

Currency had a few purposes. It's a medium of exchange, a store of value, and a method of account. Right now cryptos fail on all counts. As a medium of exchange every crypto is garbage. It takes forever to transact and it costs a lot of money. This is made worse by the load of people not using but just buying and selling into the Ponzi scheme. As a store of value, each crypto is incredibly volatile due to the market. One month a Bitcoin might be $60,000 the next it might be $3,000. It's great if you bought low and sold high, but if you buy high and need to use your money when it's low it's terrible. Finally, as a method of account the same problem applies. I know how much a house costs this year more or less in dollars. How many bitcoins is a house? You can't say from day to day or from hour to hour. Look at Tesla selling their cars in Bitcoin: your quote is only valid for like 20 minutes because the value is in dollars and the price you pay is in Bitcoin and if they wait too long the price will deviate up or down.

So it's useless as a currency on all fronts, thus the only reason to invest is because others will invest and the price will go up, making it a classic Ponzi scheme. You don't buy it for any purpose other than to make money, nobody else buys it for any purpose but to make money, eventually it will collapse.

https://en.cdprojektred.com/news/patch-1-2-list-of-changes/

I really liked cyberpunk 2077. I wasn't really hyped for it, and so when I bought it for myself and it was a beautiful looking open world game with a really nice aesthetic that reminded me a lot of deus ex 3 and 4 I was enjoying myself a lot. I thankfully didn't hit many bugs, and in fact my recent binge of the dragon age games seemed to have a lot more problems by far.

That said, I decided to wait until the announced patches and some of the DLCs were announced before I finished up.

1.1 seemed sort of tame, but this 1.2 looks like a megapatch with all the improvements!!

I'm not a twitter. If I need more than 140 characters to express myself, I will.

@eris You're free to ignore it.

@eris Gay people had it really hard in for a really long time.

There are many sad stories about what was done to gays. Famously, Alan Turing committed suicide after being chemically castrated in the UK despite being a hero who helped win the second world war. Gay people or lesbians would get together in secret clubs so they could have a little space where they could be themselves, but it was at great risk. If the police found these clubs, they would make a great fanfare of parading the "perverts" out, making sure the press got plenty of photos, publishing their names and exactly what they were accused of. For many of those people, their lives would be ruined. There were blacklists such that if anyone even gave the slightest impression that they might secret be gay or a lesbian, their careers, their social lives, their everything would be over. They might even face prison.

In 1969 in Greenwich village, it happened yet again, but for some reason it was the bridge too far. An event that would go down in history as "The Stonewall Riots" would occur, where the gay community there would fight back against the police and took over the area. For the first time, they were liberated. They had a space they could be free, and they expressed themselves as gay as they possibly could. These riots were considered to be a turning point in gay rights.

A lot of straight people ask even today, "Why are there gay pride parades?" or "Why do they have to act so stereotypically gay in those parades?". What they don't realize is that the absurd outlandish expression of their status as a gay person is a reaction to a century of being forced underground, being silenced, being under threat of losing everything just for being themselves. Today there's a lot of younger gay and lesbian people who don't understand it either because being gay has been accepted as long as they've been alive and those younger people are much more like everyone else.

That's the answer to your question. If you want to know who to blame for freedom being used like this, blame the people who just had to make it taboo, just had to silence people, just had to make it a threat that could destroy someone's life. This is an expression of people who have been oppressed, expressing their freedom in absurd ways. I think you might be surprised to find that a lot of them aren't actually racist or sexist or homophobic or transphobic, they're just sick and tired of being held at gunpoint for year after year after year.

Now I know you're probably scoffing while reading this, going "come on, you're seriously comparing oppression for being gay to trying to make the world safer for minorities?", and if you are, the congratulations: You feel exactly like the conservative majority might have in 1969 looking at a bunch of sexual deviants who were violating the bible's teachings did. You're in the moral majority, there's no question.

The human spirit doesn't care, people want to be free no matter what that looks like, and will tend to overcorrect after a period when they are repressed. For an apolitical example, look at when kids get to live on their own for the first time after living under their parents roof, or when they turn 21 after being kept away from alcohol their entire lives. They'll drink crazy amounts and get in trouble, or they'll live in crazy ways and get in trouble to get it out of their systems, even if they're otherwise good kids who are responsible afterwards.

@graf @admin I've said before, freedoms must face a balancing test, because freedoms can conflict. If one person's freedom to say something of substance is threatened by another person using their freedom to say nonsense, then it's sensible that you restrict one person's freedom. On the other hand, that's a sliding scale, so from admin to admin and from instance to instance you could decide the point where the right to say nonsense has sufficiently transgressed upon someone else's right to speak substance is in a different spot.

Realistically, with human beings it's going to be squishy and subjective, and there isn't going to be a mathematical equation to figure out the perfect point from a moralistic point of view, but what you've just said sounds like a reasonable practical rule.

@Atlas @techwipe there was a time around 2008 that it was a really great place to be. Sort of like these new platforms there were lots of people with different ideas and some of them were on the left and some of them were on the right and some of them were not really on that spectrum and there was a lot of interesting discussion and you can take part and it was a decent place for that.

I started to notice it around 2015 that there seem to be more people who were more interested in finding out who you really were in real life so that they could hurt you for your opinions that they disagreed with. I started to specifically delete my account on a very regular basis to keep my information safe. At the same time, I tried voat out but I'm not actually a Nazi so I didn't really fit in.

By 2018 I'd completely left because the conversation was so homogeneous it wasn't even worth reading anymore. Any opinion that wasn't part of the group think would get down voted into oblivion almost immediately.

I'm chasing for a place like that 2008 Reddit, where different ideas could engage. I think the fediverse could be that place as long as we keep it decentralized.

Following up on my post environmentalism, I want to say something about social justice. Now I grew up in a progressive era, and I agreed with it then and I agree with it now. We shouldn't be holding people back based on the color of their skin or who they fell in love with or their sex or their gender or anything like that. In fact, to an extent I recognize that historically we have as a western society harmed certain groups and it is just to give those groups a little bit of a helping hand to try to make things more equitable in the future. I think that most people would actually agree with that. And overwhelming majority in fact.

The issue once again is sort of the woke industrial complex, I can't think of a better term than that at the moment. This isn't about making the world better. If it was then how come in this age of social justice we have the first generation in 100 years coming up with Gen z who are the first generation to be more conservative than their parents? If you're trying to help people how come it's backfiring so badly?

I think the fundamental reason is that even if individual activists think that they're doing the right thing, they are still acting as pawns for bad actors.

There are obvious and clear hypocrisies that work here. Nike was more than happy to stop producing Cleveland Indians merchandise, and yet they still produce all of their merchandise in a country under dictatorial control of a one-party state that has willfully implemented ethnic concentration camps.

Disney was so allegedly appalled at Gina Carano that she is being systematically erased from the history of Disney. however, they were more than happy to thank the authoritarian regime with ethnic concentration camps that helped them make their last big movie. Who cares about a little bit of organ harvesting somebody made a comparison that we really don't like on Twitter.

If you think that these companies are your allies, you are helplessly naive. They are simply reframing getting the things that they want in terms that you have to agree with.

Companies can no longer actively fight against unions, so they simply support divisions in the populace so that the people don't band together. They can't deal with the idea of having to compete for workers, so they do everything in their power to support making each individual as valueless as possible so that they can never come to the negotiating table from a place of power.

Many of the worst injustices in history were written in similar terms, though the terms change from decade to decade. At one point in history they would have used the threat of communism to get what they want. At another point in history, they would have used religion. At yet another point in history, they would have used the authority of the king or the ruling class. And everyone would just nod their heads because in spite of the self-serving nature of what they demanded, no one could possibly disagree with the political orthodoxy of the moment.

I'm going to be misunderstood. I'm not saying that racism doesn't exist, of course it does. I'm not saying that people aren't mistreated in society, of course they are. I'm not saying that Injustice doesn't exist, of course it does. What I'm saying is that these already overwhelmingly powerful entities are you using these decent causes in bad faith to get what they want.

In one of the latest shows from @rekietalaw Nick talked about the creation of internment camps for Asian Americans during world war II. One of the biggest supporters of that was the white farm lobby. using the politically expedient cause of patriotism in the face of war they had these people rounded up and put into camps and then they went ahead and bought their property up for pennies on the dollar. That's the point of what they're doing. Their actions and the hypocrisy therein prove it.

I never changed. The world changed. and now every time that I hear someone speaking out against the things that I'm against, I have a voice in my head that gets louder and louder by the year that screams "liar!" when I hear them speak because I know what's really going on here.

Far from advocating against social justice, what I'm really advocating for is using your brain, thinking for yourself, and keeping your eyes and ears open to the fact that just because someone says that they're agreeing with you doesn't mean that they are. The most common debate tactic on the planet is pretending that you agree with your opponent and then twisting their argument to get what you want.

If we're not careful, the next step isn't pretty for anybody. The Weimar Republic was a relatively free and open society and some of the same tactics that these people are using, taking common men and women and telling them that they were bad people for reasons they had no control over and that they needed to be punished and then punishing them led to the rise of Nazi Germany. Companies made a lot of money off of the Nazis

On the topic of environmentalism for a minute, we need to realize that we have been packaged something by the environmental industrial complex. this is a group of companies and organizations that take the concept of environmentalism, package it up in a pretty little box, and sell it to us. We see it all over the place. Solar panels sold in places that are eternal winter for 9 months of the year. Tiny improvements sold at massive cost, when maybe what we really needed to do was take a look at first principles.

What are those first principles? Simple. the first principle of environmentalism should always be using less. We don't need to buy as much stuff as we buy, we don't need to consume as much stuff as we consume, we don't need to eat as much food as we do and the fact that over 60% of Americans are overweight or obese is proof positive of that. We don't need to have giant vehicles. In fact, we probably don't even need small cars for the most part. I bet you any money that a carefully built electric vehicle that would be closer to an electric bicycle than a car could handle transportation needs for about 90% of the population.

It's incredible watching, the naivete of people who think that they're environmentalists while they push for advertising campaigns to consume more.

Of course there's a base level of consumption that we need in our lives, but plenty of very smart people have done the math and realized that instead of getting the latest toy with solar panels and batteries, you could probably do better for the environment by buying a crappy little yugo. Some car that gets great fuel economy that looks like crap and is 30 years old as opposed to digging up tons of materials processing them and at the end of the day getting a vehicle that is not quite as good and will put you in debt for 15 years.

I have to take issue with the idea that "big nature" doesn't exist. The fact of the matter is that companies have realized that all they have to do is reframe getting their way into some cause and they can get their way without having to explicitly say what they want.

Do you really think that all of these big businesses that seem perfectly okay doing business in China that has actual ethnic concentration camps think that black lives matter?

Do you think that the world's largest oil companies actually think that we should become carbon neutral?

It's a facade. There's a small cottage industry if people who really care about the environment and are pushing to that end, and a massive group of modern PR teams that have figured out that people don't care about a lot of things once you manage to reframe it to have a smiley face on it.

I'm not saying that the woman that you're writing about here is affiliated with any of those groups, I don't know. I just don't like it that we're becoming so naive as to shut our ears and our eyes to the obvious.

@Moon I appreciate your honesty.

I don't think the concept of a distributed encrypted digital Ledger is inherently impossible, but I think that when it does succeed it's going to be a lot quieter than the current crypto market. You're not going to see a whole lot of people getting rich off of it because it will be a boring and effective solution. if everything goes right people don't tend to get rich off of boring and effective distributed solutions.

@Moon is ether better suited as a currency than Bitcoin? My brief experience with Bitcoin conclusively proved that it was a poor currency.

Not to mention, using the report expecting me to be your dad is a direct violation of FBXL Social's TOS and grounds for an immediate ban... If I can ever figure out how to ban anyone.

(How can anyone violate a one line TOS?)

Note to the fediverse: the report button is not an "I disagree" button. If you want big daddy mountain man to erasify opinions you disagree with, go back to Twitter. They want to be your dad. I don't.

Oh no! I just got reported!

Well, I'll just have to go down and unplug the power to the server! Show's over, boys!

https://thelibertarianrepublic.com/dear-white-liberals-asians-arent-your-pawns/

Great op-ed. #stopasianhate but let's also beat the shit out of Andy Ngo or anyone who looks like him!

Hypocrisy.

@jaranta Don't worry, it just does.

Only a nazi wouldn't realize that.