https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYyARMqiaag&list=PLF797E961509B4EB5
This math teacher is jacked! Holy crap!
This math teacher is jacked! Holy crap!
I'd tend to agree with that. Something needs to be done (I've written a lot about that in the past 24 hours), but not the Greta Thunberg "SHUT IT DOWN RIGHT NOW!!!" temper tantrum.
@alex when you add groups to soapbox, please do what you can to make it compatible with lemmy and lotide communities. That would be really cool being able to participate in those communities right from the one website!
As long as I've been alive, more poor people have died from the effects of obesity than starvation. Poor people have televisions, smart phones, electricity, running water, sewage. They can go to elementary school and high school and have a chance of going to college. As long as I've been alive, people haven't had to worry about agricultural output, they were going to eat. They didn't need to worry about how many houses were being built, they'd have a place to stay. they didn't need to worry about how much wood was being cut, they'd have enough heat for the winter. It doesn't matter how dry the well gets, they'd have enough water.
They're insulated from the reality of how their life is maintained. That's why they start to act as if they don't need to worry about a lack of food, where our grandparents had pantries packed with canned food. That's why they start to act as if work is just a nuisance that should be abolished rather than a mandatory contribution to the society that benefits them. That's why they start to act as if we can shut off the biggest forms of energy, rather than a genocidal and insane proposition.
They're insulated from the reality of how their life is maintained. That's why they start to act as if they don't need to worry about a lack of food, where our grandparents had pantries packed with canned food. That's why they start to act as if work is just a nuisance that should be abolished rather than a mandatory contribution to the society that benefits them. That's why they start to act as if we can shut off the biggest forms of energy, rather than a genocidal and insane proposition.
The most successful society in history was a meritocracy that came from a tiny island surrounded by salt water and came to have an empire so large the sun was always shining on one piece of it.
Meritocracy is egalitarian in the sense that people from any walk of life can rise up, but it is the opposite in the sense that most people aren't exceptional and so there's a clear and ordered hierarchy.
Meritocracy is egalitarian in the sense that people from any walk of life can rise up, but it is the opposite in the sense that most people aren't exceptional and so there's a clear and ordered hierarchy.
That's a good point too -- Can you call something that's been implemented in places longer than any of us have been alive new or different?
"We need to once again try to implement this 200 year old book like we've been trying to do for 150 years but THIS TIME it'll work"
"We need to once again try to implement this 200 year old book like we've been trying to do for 150 years but THIS TIME it'll work"
Absolutely! Gab and Truth Social could switch on federation TOMORROW, and I'm certain that Twitter could have ActivityPub working in a week.
Both change and staying the same in a vacuum mean death.
You need to have a bit of both. We need to adopt changes that will make life better or allow us to continue to survive in changing circumstances, but we also need to remember our traditions didn't come about out of malice, but because they are lessons our great great grandparents wanted to pass on because they thought those ideas were the ones that kept them alive and allowed them to have good lives.
Our DNA does the same thing -- It's just coming to light now just how much of our behavior comes entirely from the way our brains are structured not due to external stimuli but due to our DNA. Certain things we're scared of, that's not because we learned to fear them but because our DNA has certain primal fears written into them by the people who survived the past where we would die childless and bloodlines would end.
A huge thing we need to do is listen to the lessons of the past without letting those lessons cripple us. When I was trying to find a woman after I got out of college, I had to learn that my fear of being rejected by women was normal and sensible, but I had to overcome it because if I didn't take that risk then I had a much greater risk of being alone for good, and that's in some ways a fate worse than death.
The problem right now is that change is presently the orthodoxy. It's just accepted as fact that all the structures we inherited are wrong and evil, and that's just not true. We're changing things that are good and that work because that's what we've always done. In this sense, leftism is conservatism, and that's not good. We need to realize that the past holds a lot of wisdom for us and we need to carry that with us in addition to being willing to bend when the future doesn't match with the past or the past had problems to solve.
Without the conservatism to keep good things, you don't get any successes for the changes you make because you just change good things anyway. Instead of an evolutionary method where we keep good things and change bad things and move forward, society just becomes like static on a TV -- random noise that's completely incoherent.
You need to have a bit of both. We need to adopt changes that will make life better or allow us to continue to survive in changing circumstances, but we also need to remember our traditions didn't come about out of malice, but because they are lessons our great great grandparents wanted to pass on because they thought those ideas were the ones that kept them alive and allowed them to have good lives.
Our DNA does the same thing -- It's just coming to light now just how much of our behavior comes entirely from the way our brains are structured not due to external stimuli but due to our DNA. Certain things we're scared of, that's not because we learned to fear them but because our DNA has certain primal fears written into them by the people who survived the past where we would die childless and bloodlines would end.
A huge thing we need to do is listen to the lessons of the past without letting those lessons cripple us. When I was trying to find a woman after I got out of college, I had to learn that my fear of being rejected by women was normal and sensible, but I had to overcome it because if I didn't take that risk then I had a much greater risk of being alone for good, and that's in some ways a fate worse than death.
The problem right now is that change is presently the orthodoxy. It's just accepted as fact that all the structures we inherited are wrong and evil, and that's just not true. We're changing things that are good and that work because that's what we've always done. In this sense, leftism is conservatism, and that's not good. We need to realize that the past holds a lot of wisdom for us and we need to carry that with us in addition to being willing to bend when the future doesn't match with the past or the past had problems to solve.
Without the conservatism to keep good things, you don't get any successes for the changes you make because you just change good things anyway. Instead of an evolutionary method where we keep good things and change bad things and move forward, society just becomes like static on a TV -- random noise that's completely incoherent.
Proposal for an Isekai: "A California leftist visits king arthur's court"
Goes back, is immediately shocked that King Arthur is just an anglo saxon male and not a little black girl
Expects to find a utopian society since America isn't invented yet, finds out that historical life is terrible in many ways compared to modern life.
Advocates for immigration, gets all cut up by norman raiders
advocates for modern gender theory, gets taken behind the woodshed and beaten by all the women who don't much like the sound of any of that
Shocked to find nobody much cares about blacks or arabs but they all hate those gits in glencousterburyshire next door
Goes back, is immediately shocked that King Arthur is just an anglo saxon male and not a little black girl
Expects to find a utopian society since America isn't invented yet, finds out that historical life is terrible in many ways compared to modern life.
Advocates for immigration, gets all cut up by norman raiders
advocates for modern gender theory, gets taken behind the woodshed and beaten by all the women who don't much like the sound of any of that
Shocked to find nobody much cares about blacks or arabs but they all hate those gits in glencousterburyshire next door
I'm not too familiar with Mastodon because when I was first looking up what to use it seemed sorta heavy for the roadside sign parts I run my sites off of, but I bet the option to export is in there somewhere. Pleroma can definitely import a csv file of your contacts if you can export it from mastodon.
In the immortal words of Dr Ron Paul, "you need to shut your whore mouth and follow the Constitution"
"And, indeed, this is the odd thing that is continually happening: there are continually turning up in life moral and rational persons, sages and lovers of humanity who make it their object to live all their lives as morally and rationally as possible, to be, so to speak, a light to their neighbours simply in order to show them that it is possible to live morally and rationally in this world. And yet we all know that those very people sooner or later have been false to themselves, playing some queer trick, often a most unseemly one. Now I ask you: what can be expected of man since he is a being endowed with strange qualities? Shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface; give him economic prosperity, such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes and busy himself with the continuation of his species, and even then out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some nasty trick. He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this positive good sense his fatal fantastic element. It is just his fantastic dreams, his vulgar folly that he will desire to retain, simply in order to prove to himself--as though that were so necessary-- that men still are men and not the keys of a piano, which the laws of nature threaten to control so completely that soon one will be able to desire nothing but by the calendar. And that is not all: even if man really were nothing but a piano-key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point. And if he does not find means he will contrive destruction and chaos, will contrive sufferings of all sorts, only to gain his point!" - Dostoyevsky, Notes from the underground
I've seen it: men are wired to have a life's work, and a life's struggle. Take way their productive struggles and they will often turn towards unproductive ones. The same happens with dogs who, lacking a productive outlet for their energy, will dig up the yard, tear into the furniture, and bark at every passing leaf.
Now, that doesn't mean that a person's only life's work can be slaving away for a megacorp, but there's something to be said for the idea of a man going out and gathering resources for his family so that his wife can toil away making the home a place worth living, and they can work together towards raising the children to be good people worth carrying the family name into the future.
The great existential crisis of my generation seems to be that we have rejected all of the old answers without having any answers to replace them with.
I've seen it: men are wired to have a life's work, and a life's struggle. Take way their productive struggles and they will often turn towards unproductive ones. The same happens with dogs who, lacking a productive outlet for their energy, will dig up the yard, tear into the furniture, and bark at every passing leaf.
Now, that doesn't mean that a person's only life's work can be slaving away for a megacorp, but there's something to be said for the idea of a man going out and gathering resources for his family so that his wife can toil away making the home a place worth living, and they can work together towards raising the children to be good people worth carrying the family name into the future.
The great existential crisis of my generation seems to be that we have rejected all of the old answers without having any answers to replace them with.
If it's true that there's a bunch of FBI agents working at twitter, then it's time to disband the FBI and refer a whole bunch of them to local law enforcement for prosecution.
Forget about the political side of things for a minute. Twitter is in the middle of a lawsuit right now where they refused to take down child porn. They are actively defending refusing to take down child porn. If the FBI has infiltrated an organization at the same time that that organization is actively refusing to remove child porn, and is defending lawsuits to defend its right to not take down child porn after it's been reported, then those FBI agents are either complicit or actively colluding to make it happen.
Forget about the political side of things for a minute. Twitter is in the middle of a lawsuit right now where they refused to take down child porn. They are actively defending refusing to take down child porn. If the FBI has infiltrated an organization at the same time that that organization is actively refusing to remove child porn, and is defending lawsuits to defend its right to not take down child porn after it's been reported, then those FBI agents are either complicit or actively colluding to make it happen.
And another thing! (sorry)
If we cared as much about public transportation and sustainable transportation as we pretend to, we have another 100 year old technology that worked just fine forever -- the electric streetcar. for places you don't want to install tracks, another 100 year old technology: The trackless trolley. Not only could we make these relatively cheaply, we could do it using non-exotic materials we can get from the countries we live in instead of using slave labor to mine rare earth minerals in dictatorships!
Nooooo, we need some special super sexy battery bus with seven figures of fancy metals we have to mine with child slaves on the moon because who wants to use practical, proven technology when we can pretend the past didn't exist so we have to create everything using technology that may someday be there if only we just invest another 6 trillion dollars!
If we cared as much about public transportation and sustainable transportation as we pretend to, we have another 100 year old technology that worked just fine forever -- the electric streetcar. for places you don't want to install tracks, another 100 year old technology: The trackless trolley. Not only could we make these relatively cheaply, we could do it using non-exotic materials we can get from the countries we live in instead of using slave labor to mine rare earth minerals in dictatorships!
Nooooo, we need some special super sexy battery bus with seven figures of fancy metals we have to mine with child slaves on the moon because who wants to use practical, proven technology when we can pretend the past didn't exist so we have to create everything using technology that may someday be there if only we just invest another 6 trillion dollars!
The problem with "transitioning" is that it's all for show. These people don't care about the environment. If they did, they'd be pushing for the solutions we know work today. Instead they're chasing magic environmentalism boxes that don't work but "if only we could pour more money into this bet, maybe we'd win someday!"
If they cared, there'd be a hard push for hydroelectric in places that have the geography for it. Instead, there's been a hard push against hydroelectric.
In Canada, every province has geography that can support massive hydroelectric. British Columbia, Manitoba, and Quebec, and Newfoundland and Labrador are exclusively hydroelectric. Those four provinces have incredibly low power rates such that people don't bother burning fossil fuels to heat their homes, and a lot of industry that would otherwise burn fossil fuels for energy can use carbon neutral renewable electricity. Not only do these provinces create enough electricity to make it cheap and practical for themselves, they usually export green power to surrounding jurisdictions! Imagine that -- so much renewable power it spills into places around it that would otherwise be burning fossil fuels!
Meanwhile, Ontario has been chasing expensive and impractical solutions for decades. First nuclear which does provide electrical power but it's very expensive and there's lots of asterisks next to that "Carbon Neutral", and then wind and solar. Electricity rates have shot up so high that electricity is not an option at all for heating one's home in many cases, and many people who have electrical heat have installed fossil fuel burners in their homes. The "Global adjustment charge" that is paying for all this wind and solar has massively driven up power to the point that there's a huge boom in in-situ fossil fuel powered electric generators because it's cheaper to run generators at times than to pay the global adjustment charge.
"Maybe Ontario doesn't have the geography for it?" That's dumb (person in my head who argues with me sometimes). Northern Manitoba and Northern Quebec are extremely similar to Northern Ontario(incl. Northwestern Ontario), there's tons of places we could build dams. They just don't want to, because it's not a politically exciting solution.
But making people's lives better and installing proven century-old technology and making the whole world better thereby is boring, and magic environmentalism boxes get us butt pats from southern California, so to hell with it -- more solar!
If they cared, there'd be a hard push for hydroelectric in places that have the geography for it. Instead, there's been a hard push against hydroelectric.
In Canada, every province has geography that can support massive hydroelectric. British Columbia, Manitoba, and Quebec, and Newfoundland and Labrador are exclusively hydroelectric. Those four provinces have incredibly low power rates such that people don't bother burning fossil fuels to heat their homes, and a lot of industry that would otherwise burn fossil fuels for energy can use carbon neutral renewable electricity. Not only do these provinces create enough electricity to make it cheap and practical for themselves, they usually export green power to surrounding jurisdictions! Imagine that -- so much renewable power it spills into places around it that would otherwise be burning fossil fuels!
Meanwhile, Ontario has been chasing expensive and impractical solutions for decades. First nuclear which does provide electrical power but it's very expensive and there's lots of asterisks next to that "Carbon Neutral", and then wind and solar. Electricity rates have shot up so high that electricity is not an option at all for heating one's home in many cases, and many people who have electrical heat have installed fossil fuel burners in their homes. The "Global adjustment charge" that is paying for all this wind and solar has massively driven up power to the point that there's a huge boom in in-situ fossil fuel powered electric generators because it's cheaper to run generators at times than to pay the global adjustment charge.
"Maybe Ontario doesn't have the geography for it?" That's dumb (person in my head who argues with me sometimes). Northern Manitoba and Northern Quebec are extremely similar to Northern Ontario(incl. Northwestern Ontario), there's tons of places we could build dams. They just don't want to, because it's not a politically exciting solution.
But making people's lives better and installing proven century-old technology and making the whole world better thereby is boring, and magic environmentalism boxes get us butt pats from southern California, so to hell with it -- more solar!
Southern Ontario is the only reason the balance of powers in Canada looks like it does, and to me Southern Ontario is culturally not Canadian, but New York.