ondoyant

ondoyant, 7 months ago

so if hamas is exploiting civilians for their own protection, they should kill their victims too? cool dude. you’re totally not justifying killing civilians! it’s not technically a war crime, so its fine! fuck. off.

ondoyant, 7 months ago

that frankly isn’t the situation that we’re dealing with. the idea that israel either has to let Hamas operate unchallenged or kill civilians is a vast oversimplification of how conflict works, and giving the IDF blanket permission to kill civilians if it also hurts Hamas is fucking monstrous. you suck.

ondoyant, 7 months ago

all civilian casualties are inadmissible. its not wrong, its a moral imperative, and one that the state of Israel is blatantly disregarding. the framing that “okay, these civilian causalities are okay” is fucking monstrous, and gives a ready made excuse for Israel to escalate violence in Gaza.

ondoyant, 7 months ago

the scenario you’re imagining doesn’t exist. this isn’t a rock paper scissors thing, where Israel either shoots through hostages to kill insurgents or dies themselves. if Hamas is hiding amongst civilians, they aren’t attacking Israel, they’re hiding. if they’re attacking Israel, they aren’t in a crowd of Palestinian civilians. the IDF does not need to have a shootout with civilians in the crossfire to protect its people. the IDF does not need to bomb civilian residences to wage war against an insurgency.

you are so willing to conflate the two, assume that Israel must kill or be killed themselves. that is a fucking falsehood. there is so fucking much a military force can do to defend against attack that doesn’t involve shelling apartment buildings, shooting into crowds, and otherwise being monsters.

ondoyant, 7 months ago

i think that’s a bit of an alarming stance, to be honest. authoritarians have a pretty long history of characterizing protest movements as looting and rioting, characterizing protestors as “outside agitators”, and other nonsense as a way to justify violent oppression, and the vast majority of the time for the vast majority of participants it really isn’t the case.

maybe there’s some people who would say that (are these like twitter guys or something?), but in the vast majority of cases the actual objection to “antifa smashing up your city” was “no, actually, the amount of smashing being done is much less than what right-wing media sources are saying, “antifa” is often broadly applied to the protest movement in general, and police officers coming in with tear gas and rubber bullets often leads to escalating violence from protesters in response.”

ondoyant, 7 months ago

this is such a weird thing to say. fascism is all about authoritarian shit, it is defined by ultranationalism, racism, bigotry, and centralized control, not by “virtue signaling”, a phrase more common in right-wing spaces than anywhere else. we can quibble all we want about the left, but demonstrably, who is limiting the freedoms of minority groups, which states are attempting to disenfranchise voters, who has actual real ass nazi’s hanging at their parties? it isn’t the left, or whatever you think the left is.

like, don’t get me wrong, there are very many ways a left wing government can demonstrably get authoritarian, but the term “fascism” is defined by being far-right on the political scale. i would just generally suggest reading some stuff about fascism, because you don’t seem to be very well informed on what scholarship says about the ideology at large.

ondoyant, 7 months ago

Antifa and “the Black Bloc” are not organizations that disrupt protests, they are decentralized left-wing political strategies that do quite a bit of organizing for protest movements. they are just protesters, and the vast majority of the people who self-identify as antifa demonstrably don’t do violence. but again, right wing groups designate any kind of left-leaning of liberal protest action as “antifa”, so the actual utility of opposing “antifa” is kind of dubious to me. the entire BLM protest was called antifa by the right, despite the protest on average being quite peaceful.

ondoyant, 7 months ago

But, I suppose it is the actual biological parts that are different, which I was thinking about.

one thing i think is important to recognize is that, while gender is socially constructed, so is sex to some extent. we have a number of features we generally say are “male” or “female” characteristics, including genitalia, but keep in mind that there are around 1-2% of the population that are born intersex. the way we determine sex assigned at birth is almost always through an inspection of genitalia, but for some people that isn’t conclusive.

in a lot of places, doctors will attempt “fix” these natural variations, deciding for the child which category they belong in. there is enough variation from “male” and “female” characteristics, and enough people with traits from both categories, that the categories themselves can’t really be said to have a purely biological origin, even if statistically they are highly correlated.

Am I right in thinking the main issues is that we have created a society in which sex and gender were separated and defined so distinctly, that for transexual individuals, there just is no ‘correct’ option available to them?

that’s very much part of the problem. lots of trans people really don’t fit neatly into the boxes doctors currently expect of them, especially once they’ve gone on hormones, and sharply delineating sex categories like doctors do measurably leads to less positive health outcomes for trans people. the intersex population is also affected by this kind of marginalization.

the reality is that the health of a person has a lot more to do with their specific traits than it does with the collection of traits a sex category expects them to have, which is in reality composed of a cluster of related physical, cognitive, and social traits that can vary independently of one another, and affect our health in specific ways. assuming any of these traits are one way simply because of how somebody’s genitals are supposed to be is almost always going to be more wrong than just allowing people to describe and denote their personal experience as they see fit. checking M or F on a box is, unfortunately, not really the same as just saying you have a penis or a vagina. it implies a lot more than that, even if your personal experience does not align with that implication.

ondoyant, 7 months ago

that’s far from what the study says. there is no research on the effects of plastic chemicals in human beings cited in the study, the vast majority of the data is in rats and mice. saying that its responsible for trans people requires some very large leaps of logic that aren’t supported by the data or the conclusion of the study.

we have a great deal of anthropological evidence that other cultures conceive of sex and gender in wildly differing ways, both through history and in the modern era. gender identity is a complex social and cultural phenomenon, not some essential trait of the human body with a basis in endocrine function. maybe i’m just sensitive to this shit, but i can’t see somebody making a claim like this without just fundamentally misunderstanding what being trans is.

ondoyant, 7 months ago

i don’t know why they need to be mutually exclusive. individuals in communities with other individuals are what comprise a system. its all built from people.

ondoyant, 7 months ago

ugh. i barely want to respond to this, but “deserve” in this context is wild. substance abuse is a medical condition, not a moral failing. its disproportionately affects people who are poor, mentally ill, or otherwise disadvantaged, and many unhoused people start doing drugs while on the street, because if fucking sucks to be living on the street.

the actual utility of “locking people up” as a response to drug abuse is not positive. prisons are miserable places, and people often aren’t given the kind of care they need to get clean and stay clean, and relapse when they get out, because their circumstances haven’t improved. as it turns out, locking people in a cage for years does little to address the underlying issues that cause substance abuse. nobody “deserves” prison. its ineffective generally, and particularly ineffective at actually getting people off of drugs. all it does is punish people who are suffering.

ondoyant, 7 months ago

how are being a capitalist and despising the direct product of capitalism compatible lol?

ondoyant, 7 months ago

food insecurity is a huge problem in many places today, including in some of the wealthiest countries on the world. there aren’t too many communist regimes around to blame for it anymore.

ondoyant, 7 months ago

uh huh. because our current system has definitely demonstrated that shitty companies fail, right? i don’t know how you can look at the landscape of modern corporations and come away with the thought that capitalism has in any way increased our freedom to choose, or that that really important part actually in practice weeds out shitty business practices in any way.

what companies do you like? are any of them the large multinational corporations swallowing up every speck of available market share and spiraling us towards climate apocalypse? if so, you’re wrong.

ondoyant, 7 months ago

if you don’t want to acknowledge the vast swaths of the human population for which options are strictly limited by capitalism seeking profits, i genuinely don’t know what to tell you.

food deserts, where the most impoverished people in the country are forced to eat processed foods because the nearest produce isle is miles away. the complete market domination of amazon. local repair shops being subsumed into corporate enterprise. planned obsolescence. the fact that nearly 100% of the vast variety of cereals you’re referring to are produced by like two corporations, alongside the vast majority of the products you see in grocery stores period. the fact that all the grocery stores are large corporate chains. the fact that nearly every single piece of consumer electronics you have in your home is almost certainly made from resources extracted by actual real life human slaves. nestle sucking up all the water from already drought stressed areas, and also more slave labor, this time with children. millions of tons of single use plastics funneled into our oceans. the fact that our access to life-saving medication is dependent on our wealth, rather than our need.

Overall, when I compare the system I’m living in with the alternatives that we’ve tried in the past…well, it’s very much a no-brainer.

i would encourage you to apply your brain to the situation. i understand, you find yourself in a comfortable position, where the luxuries of modern capitalism have availed themselves to you. not everybody is so lucky. capitalism is currently causing massive amounts of real human suffering. everything you buy, everything you’ve mentioned, has been made possible by widespread ecological destruction, rampant pollution, and exploitation, all of which have a cost in human lives.

the history of capitalism is also not so rosy. the East India Company commiting horrific acts of violence against the people of India, and contributed to massive famines that killed 15 million people. the slave trade being directly powered by capitalist interests. banana republics like in Guatemala, where the US government helped the United Fruit Company, now Chiquita, actively coup an elected leader and install a military dictator in his place to protect their monopoly over fruit farms. many South and Central american governments still suffer from the consequences of US backed dictators, as a direct result of the US government putting the profits of fruit companies over the lives of millions.

even if this is the best system we’ve ever devised, uh… its really not that fucking great for a vast quantity of human beings. the status quo causes immense amounts of human suffering, and will cause even more as we spiral into climate catastrophe.

ondoyant, 7 months ago

…Are a thing. They’re around. But the vast majority of people in the US (much less Europe and other developed countries, with developed public transportation) have easy access to fresh food. This…just isn’t a huge deal. It’s a public policy tweak away from being solved.

you can’t be serious about this, right? have you done any research on this at all? vast quantities of people live in food deserts in a ton of places. 23 million people. and its suspected that that figure is under-reporting.

you make a bunch of comments about being essentially fine with monopolies, which i’m going to just ignore, because if you can’t understand why entrusting so much of the things we consume to a couple megacorps is really dangerous i don’t know what to tell you. historically that doesn’t tend to lead to people having a great time, and all evidence suggests that the people working for those corporations are suffering pretty bad right now. we actually have quite a few protections in place to theoretically break up monopolies, specifically because they’re known to cause lots of suffering for people.

…In countries that are resolutely authoritarian or anarchic, and non-capitalist. I hope some day China escapes it’s authoritarian tendencies, and Africa manages to pull itself together. If they just establish functioning market economies, then the problem is solved.

i genuinely can’t believe this one lol. you are actually going to pretend that market forces aren’t the explicit driving factor of slavery in these regions. their work is directly linked into global supply chains, you bought the slave labor phone with dollars, how is that possibly something that can be solved with a market economy? the market economy is already there, and it has driven human beings into bondage. whatever. if a country is the target of rampant resource exploitation that directly enriches corporations existing under capitalism, its not non-capitalist. and even if it were true that countries that are “anarchic” or “authoritarian” weren’t capitalist by their participation in the global system of capital, the way the government got that way is not some accident of history. the exploitation started with colonial expansion, and it never stopped. rich countries pillaged these places, enriching themselves even further, and then you go and blame them for being unstable enough to continue pillaging.

Exploiting those noncapitalist countries. Shame on them. I have no problem punishing them accordingly.

is the US noncapitalist? nestle is doing this in impoverished regions of the states too. sometimes not legally, but mostly while protected by the US government.

And there just isn’t a form of government where everybody gets what they need, and nobody has proposed such a government, or a path to get to it, so it’s kinda fucking irrelevant, isn’t it?

now i know you really haven’t explored these ideas at all lol. that’s just marx. from each according to their ability, to each according to their need. he actually did propose such a government, and laid out a pretty detailed roadmap to get there. the failures of that system are well described, but nah man, there are a ton of proposed models of government based specifically about getting people what they need. that you seem not to have heard of them doesn’t really make your defense of capitalism seem well considered. wouldn’t it be nice if the government gave everybody what they needed? why shouldn’t that be our goal?

No, reality is causing massive human suffering, and capitalism is the single best tool we have to ameliorate it.

fuck that noise. the specific suffering caused by capitalism are not natural consequences of our lives as humans. there are identifiable harms caused by structures that extract resources from places without any to spare. the “developing world” is often in the state they’re in because capitalist governments took all their shit and kept all the profits.

Famines, again, were completely normal until relatively recently.

this one’s just ignorant. the frequency of crop failures in india increased drastically under British control, and there is fairly solid research to support the assertion that the extraction of wealth and food from the region by the East India Company directly led to the famines there. that is not to mention that the resource extraction capitalism has driven worldwide has made crop failures a lot more likely, and increasingly so, as we continue to ramp up our fossil fuel usage, despite knowing about the very real dangers of climate change for fucking decades.

Until you have an amazing vision and a bulletproof plan to achieve it, you’re just whining.

nah. i don’t need those things. i can criticize the many many flaws inherent to the current economic system without having a perfect alternative available for you. not that i don’t have any alternatives. again, there are so many fucking books on this stuff its insane. i know you seem to think that capitalism is not responsible for the many things capitalism is directly responsible for, but capitalists of yore fought tooth and nail to keep slaves, to work people impossible hours under unsafe conditions, to deprive people of food, water, and shelter, and they are continuing to do so to this day. the only way that’s gonna change is if we make it change. the only way we’ve improved things through the past is by directly opposing the ability for single dudes to own all the land and all the stuff and all the tools to make the stuff, and the same is true today. but you go ahead, have fun licking that boot.

ondoyant, 8 months ago

Streaming (as a legal business model) is not violating copyright, but streaming changed the business model for a lot of artists negatively.

my point is that people seem to think copyright law is somehow protecting artists from corporate exploitation, when it categorically is not doing that. you’re right, streaming as a business model is legal, and it does mean that lots of artists don’t profit as much from their work. that’s the part i object to, the part where copyright law did not in any way prevent record companies from eating into artist compensation.

It should be fairly obvious that the big record companies come out of this change of business model a lot better because they have a continuous stream of revenue across their played/consumed portfolio, but smaller labels face the same difficulty as the artists.

here’s the thing, though. the revenue is being generated on the basis of their ownership of that portfolio, and the only way that works is if there is an enforcement mechanism for that ownership. that enforcement mechanism is copyright law. that state of things as they currently exists allows people who did not make music to make the vast majority of the money from the music that gets made. that is wrong.

But remove copyright law and no-one is getting paid for anything.

they already aren’t getting paid though. copyright law just isn’t ensuring people get paid. like, have you paid attention to the WGA strike at all? companies use copyright law to legally strip the rights artists have over their art far more often than artists use it to prevent their art from being used by corporations.

The problem you are complaining about is how labels are milking artists, in lack of a better analogy. A cow gets fed and cared for just enough to make sure milk production keeps going and the cow stays healthy. A farmer doesn’t cry when a cow gets old and slaughtered, he’ll get a new cow to replace her. That’s just how the business works.

look. i really don’t care how business works. if it’s depriving people of the fruits of their own labor, we should make it work a different way. in any case, making a comparison to a system of agriculture which routinely tortures living beings, forcibly impregnates them, steals the milk meant for their babies, then kills them when they are no longer useful is not the slam dunk you think it is. i’m not particularly fond of that business model either.

Obviously not a perfect analogy, but the discrepancy between what the label earns and the artist is nothing new and anyone who was around before streaming should know this.

right. i’m fully aware this isn’t a streaming only problem, but its one that streaming has exacerbated. that doesn’t make it more okay. functionally, the fact that we have a mechanism by which the legal ownership of artistic works can be transferred to corporate entities concentrates the wealth generated by working artists into the hands of rich executives. i don’t know how i’m meant to ignore the way in which ownership of music is the primary mechanism by which record companies separate the wealth that music produces from the artists that make all the music, no matter how much its actually supposed to make doing that more difficult.

ondoyant, 8 months ago

i’m a radical, so i’d say don’t use copyright, use copyleft. make everything free. use open source software. let people listen to your music if they want to, and donate to you if they choose. make it so that the best products on every market are freely available to all people to modify and alter as they wish, and make it so the modifications must also be freely available. allow anybody anywhere to produce any medication they have the means to safely synthesize. make our culture free to use and free to participate in. the open source economy is a great model to look at, and its how we’re talking to each other right now. every piece of information can be that way, if we choose it. information scarcity is already a lie, copyright just artificially imposes antiquated notions of scarcity onto a limitless resource. its a gift economy! we freely contribute, and receive support in turn.

ondoyant, 8 months ago

copyleft. make contributions voluntary, credit mandatory, and commercialization impossible. gift your creations to the collective knowledge of humanity, and if people like it, they will in turn give you support. cut out corporate middle men, and cultivate an audience that will reward you generously for what you give to them.

ondoyant, 8 months ago

However, the fact that you don’t care about how business works means you ignore the root of the problem - how business works.

i can see how you might read that as me not understanding or otherwise being ignorant to how business functions, but its more that from the foundation upwards the way that we conceive of ownership and property is objectionable to me. the specific ways and methods by which capital is used to deprive people of resources and exploit their labor for profit are secondary to the problem of them doing the deprivation of resources and exploitation. i don’t believe there is some sort of mechanistic solution that will give us good or fair capitalism, so all my solutions to the problem involve to the greatest extent possible providing all resources we can to everybody who needs them, and doing away with institutions that prevent us from doing that.

I’m not going to argue for communism

then we’re definitely not on the same page lol.

according to Larry Lessig, i would be an extremist. i can admit that. i am. i am proudly pro-piracy. i would download a car, and i want everybody to have unfettered access to the sum total of human knowledge. i have negative respect for the intellectual property of corporations. i think generally looking to legal frameworks as a tool to prevent the exploitation of artists is kind of just a half step. we should be imagining a world where our ability to create, share, modify, and collaborate is unrestricted. that, to my mind, implies a world that does not have corporations owning our art, music, and technology.

ondoyant, 7 months ago

its not necessarily common, but its weird to make this kind of point while using a platform that works by the exact principles i’m describing lol. open source projects are very frequently built from community support and public funding alone, and the people building them seem to be fine with their jobs.

ondoyant, 7 months ago

Call me cynical, but good things don’t last if we even get them at all.

i am gonna call you cynical, at least a little bit. the reality is, we are today far closer to the kind of utopia i’m describing than in any other point in human history. access to knowledge has improved massively in only the span of a couple of decades, and even with how much things suck right now, its still like the best time to be alive. most of human history has been pretty miserable for most people.

climate change spooks me real bad, and i have felt the way you do. i have never lived in a country where we had the things you’re describing you have lost. it doesn’t matter. it doesn’t even matter if we are going to kill the planet and everything’s gonna die and things will just get worse and worse.

the reality is, our bodies have less than a hundred years, maybe even significantly less, before we become nothing, and in the long run, humanity and everything we’ve ever created will also become nothing. with that perspective, at least for me, the problem of what to do about the various injustices of the modern world becomes fairly simple. imma do what i can until i’m dead in the ground, then i won’t care if we’re in an anarcho-communist solar punk utopia or a nuclear wasteland.

ondoyant, 7 months ago

i don’t know what to tell you man. not everybody who develops open source projects for a living does it in their free time. for a lot of projects, particularly the big ones, there is full time development staff.

but i’m sorry, the thing you’re describing, music performance being out of reach for everybody but the rich? uhh… that is how things are right now. lots of musicians are struggling to afford touring, even the very wealthy ones, and tours often don’t do much more than break even. its gotten worse in recent years, too, as large corporations monopolize venue spaces and independent artists are pushed further and further into the margins. musicians have been talking about how much the live-music industry is fucked for a long time. its almost like the problems you’re imagining would occur under a different system are exactly how it works under this one.

ondoyant, 8 months ago

Apply that argument to someone who has been censored/silenced, and you might begin to understand why I oppose it.

ugh. i know you think that’s clever, but its just confusing. what would they be judged by anything other than the content of their arguments? that’s why people get banned, its because of what they’re saying! i don’t hold the position that people should be banned or moderated for something other than for their behavior, that wouldn’t make sense. in any case, i’m not conflating speech with violence, i’m not misconceiving anything. i disagree with the premise that speech and violence are discrete from one another. they operate on a continuum. there is speech that is more violent than other speech, and we should have tools for dealing with the things that can lead to but are not in and of themselves violence. content moderation is one of those tools.

ondoyant, 8 months ago

Those two sentences are contradictory. There is no such thing as lawful, violent speech, nor unlawful, non-violent speech. No violent speech is protected; no non-violent speech is prohibited.

i’ve given several examples where that isn’t as clear cut, but whatever. speech is a behavior, and can modulate how we act. if you tell people that a group of people is evil, and never say what to do about it, you still increase the likelihood that somebody will act on the belief that that group of people is evil. there are material consequences for speech between causing violence and not causing violence.

We don’t have an authority to tell us exactly where that line is. We do have the consensus of society in general, who we can consult - formally or informally - on whether that line has been crossed.

the barrier of lawfulness, violence, and all that are socially defined, yes, but if you concede that much, then there will be communities that define racism, bigotry, and other forms of inflammatory speech as violent, and decide that those things ought not to be in their social spaces. unless you’re appealing to the group consensus of the largest possible group, there will be subcultures that disagree with each other on what does and doesn’t constitute violent speech. if you’re appealing to the legality of speech, you aren’t appealing to group consensus, you’re appealing to the government. so either we as autonomous communities ought to draw our own lines for what is and isn’t violent speech ourselves (what i believe), or there is a precise legal definition we have to adhere to, given to us by the government. in reality, its both. there are firm lines of conduct that the government prohibits in theory (though i would dispute their efficacy), and there are communities that disagree on what the limit should be. i don’t think that having codes of conduct in this way is necessarily authoritarian.

“Content moderation” replaces that societal consensus with authoritarian opinion. When you decide I don’t need to hear from Redneck Russell about how he hates Jews, I am harmed. I don’t get to challenge Russell’s opinions, or argue with him, or rally people against him. In silencing him, you’ve taken away my ability to engage him. He still gets to recruit his disciples into his own little spaces out of your control. If I try to engage him there, he merely silences me, censors me. His acolytes never hear a dissenting opinion against him, because he, and you, have decided I don’t need to engage him.

to be clear, i am here talking to you because i prefer the model that federated services use for moderating their communities, and believe that having tech companies be the sole arbiter of what is and isn’t proper speech is a fundamentally flawed approach. that being said, the problem i have with your solution is one that’s shared with a lot of community moderation on platforms. it relies on people being willing and able to confront and defuse bigotry on an individual level. i’m jewish. i don’t want to hear what Redneck Russell has to say. i doubt that i could say anything to him to change his mind, and i don’t want my internet experience to be saturated in Russells, for the basic reason that i want my time online to be relatively relaxing. people who are less attached to jewish identity are even less likely to engage with him, because it doesn’t affect them personally, internet arguments are often unpleasant, and they also want their time online to be relatively relaxing. so how do things pan out if a community is only loosely engaged? well, if we aren’t relying on moderators to curate our platforms, the hate motivated Russells of the world are empowered to say their bullshit, they receive relatively little resistance, and the relative permissiveness attracts more Russells. the people who want a nice place to hang out online go elsewhere, the concentration of Russells rises, and we’re left with a platform that is actively hostile towards jewish people. oops!

if you are part of a focused, highly engaged community, maybe your solution works, but most online spaces are not focused and highly engaged. i agree generally that echo chambers are problematic, but i think on the whole that federation does more to mitigate that than large, algorithmically segregated platforms. i don’t really agree that banning or blocking don’t or won’t play a role in ensuring that social spaces are friendly and enjoyable to be in, especially for marginalized people groups. if you let people say the n word on your platform, and don’t do anything about the people who do, don’t expect many people of color to want to be where you are. its just not fun to hang out with bigots if you’re the one they’re targeting, and that will affect the culture of your platform.

Content moderation should not take the form of banning or blocking speech outright, and should not be conducted unilaterally. Moderation should be community driven and transparent. Anyone should be able to see what was hidden, so they can determine for themselves if the censorship was reasonable and appropriate. The content should remain readily available, perhaps “hidden” behind an unexpanded tab rather than deleted entirely.

i think it really isn’t so simple. some people are more invested in a community than others, lots of people are just… not interested in auditing their moderators. generally i think its a good idea to have it be transparent, certainly better than what any major social media platforms do, but at a certain point it does just come down to trust. for example, i agree broadly with the code of conduct for Beehaw, that’s why i have an account there. i’m generally uninterested in trying to verbally spar with bigots, i don’t want to engage deeply with the moderation of the platform, i have no interest in litigating what is and isn’t proper conduct on the site, that’s not what i use the internet for. lots of people who are the target of bigotry and hatred just… don’t really want to constantly be on guard for that shit. they want a space where they can exist without being confronted with cruelty. i wouldn’t want to be on the kind of platform you’re describing, sorry.