comfy

comfy, 7 months ago

I had decided to abstain from commenting on this subject further. Pretty much every reply I have received is a variation of ‘fake news’ or ‘racist cunt’.

Yeah, kneejerk reactions get tiring. I tend not to use reddit-like or twitter-like forums much because of how low-effort and unempathetic most posts are. ‘Read the news title, get angry’, might as well be the motto. I’m glad you appreciated it.

Affirmative action based on […] economic prosperity would help the most people in need and capture many more who would otherwise fall through the gaps.

This absolutely is and should be fought for, alongside other movements. The concentration of wealth at the top has just accelerated after the main COVID crisis. Our whole economic system funnels wealth to those with capital, and their influence on our political system and mass media is the root cause of most issues in our society. My caveat is that affirmative action re: economic prosperity won’t solve this, the problem runs so deep that affirmative action will ultimately be inadequate, treating the symptoms rather than the cause. We need a systematic overhaul… far far far far easier said than done.

That said, economic equity doesn’t cover everything, as many Indigenous people have other priorities that aren’t strictly economic, a major one being land rights. A somewhat-known recent example of the issue is mining companies destroying sacred land or historical artifacts, another is traditional use of the land to live off of. I admittedly don’t know enough about land right to explain in proper detail, but it’s one of the main demands that protesters have demanded for decades and decades.

I would argue that abolishing slavery, universal suffrage, and anti-discrimination laws have done far more to solve systemic racism than racial affirmative action.

I agree, and I would say that this doesn’t mean affirmative action isn’t still important. To take a metaphor from the Civil Rights struggle, that anti-discrimination is taking the knife out, there is still a need to heal the wound before we can say things are fine. We’ve abolished the most blatant aggression like non-suffrage, but done very little to make amends on things like colonisation and centuries of repression and land possession.

Generations of loss and disadvantage evidently still exist, and will remain without positive interference. Disadvantage is cyclical, it doesn’t heal by itself, poverty is an self-evident example of the cyclic nature of powerlessness. And to re-emphasise, this applies generally to disadvantage, not just disadvantage caused by colonisation or racial disadvantage.

As a side note, I’m not sure if it’s even correct to frame this as about race, Indigenous classification just inherently matches up with race since the historical inhabitants of Australian land were all, to use a racial term, Black indigenous Australians, and we’ve historically just grouped them all together when it comes to the social concept of race because they’re not White or Asian. The ill-advised and quite frankly worthless Voice proposal was about them being the native peoples, not about them being a certain race or having been racially discriminated.

comfy, 7 months ago

Ah, that sucks to hear about.

comfy, 7 months ago

https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/b5e00005-5982-4d38-9451-451e1c489572.png

comfy, 7 months ago

Is it even safe to start from the Ottomans?

comfy, 7 months ago

I was initially siding with Israel as they were hit first, but their response has made me rethink things.

To generalize this out to other wars and conflicts, even regular old arguments, there are almost always pre-existing conditions and tensions leading up to the first major attack. Even things like WWI, where the catalyst was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. But there is quite obviously more to the atmosphere, national ambitions, etc. etc. that make it so that the separatists wanted to assassinate him, and make it so that Austria-Hungary wanted to invade Serbia and used this as an excuse. A war would have happened anyway, no matter who attacked first.

comfy, 5 months ago

If someone’s take on 9/11 doesn’t go back to at least the early 1980s, it’s probably not worth taking too seriously. It didn’t start on 9/11, that’s just the date millions of people were forced into hearing about the messy and complex conflicts. A witness on ground zero doesn’t become a 9/11 expert.

The 4th season of the podcast Blowback does an excellent job of covering the background, both within and beyond the borders of Pakistan and Afghanistan. I highly recommend it.

comfy, 5 months ago

It’s disingenuous to assume the Soviet Union is representative of communism or even the Western communist movement at the time or afterwards. It would be similar to pointing to the unique horrors of the United States history and claiming therefore all those supporting capitalism are disturbing.

comfy, 1 month ago

Maybe I can grift a nice bounty developing AR glasses which patch out all the brands on clothes and places in real-time.

https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/c6d7006c-44f3-42a4-82e9-578fabc92978.jpeg

comfy, 7 months ago

For me, it was the palmy beach.

And I’ll have you know that I’m still under 30 and do regular back extension exercises!

comfy, 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

Ultimately, it’s important to remember that BlueSky is a for-profit business, like Twitter, like reddit. I urge everyone to avoid it where possible, just like I would go back in time and urge people not to make Twitter a thing.

They will inevitably go down a similar path. Even in the best case hypothetical scenario, they are still beholden to the interests of shareholders and advertisers. They have to make money from you, or from rich companies, to survive. Mastodon instances, on the other hand, are scalable enough that they can sustain themselves off self-funding or donations. Just like Lemmy, they don’t have an intrinsic motivation to throw in ads, or to get you addicted to scrolling and arguing, or to censor communities that offend their sponsors.

It’s no co-incidence that you’re feeling some similarities between Lemmy and Mastodon, in fact Mastodon users can actually post here! ‘Fediverse’ programs all use the same language (protocol) to communicate and so some are able to interact. I’ve had a Lemmy<->Mastodon conversation before. Admittedly it’s not ideal to do that everyday, because of the obvious difference in formats, but having the ability to do that can be useful, especially if one service has a community that yours doesn’t.

comfy, 7 months ago

Ah, I see what you mean. Yeah, that is a major issue.

An interesting part of it is that I’m not use how much of that is the service working as intended (even in abstract ways, like promoting interest-grabbing things) and how much is abuse of the service (basically SEO for social media posts, using botfarms to promote content, etc.). And just to be clear, it’s still a fault of the platform if it’s being abused by organized think-tanks and advertisers. Whereas in Lemmy and Mastodon, the openness and customisability would communities to adjust ‘the algorithm’ that decides which posts to promote, or just block things that are unwelcome in their community.

comfy, 7 months ago

I’m not sure if that’s really how the US propaganda model works (that is, the one defined in Manufacturing Consent). It’s an element of it, you’re right about that, but I think ultimately the issue is that they’re a for-profit information platform. And, as a result of that and the system we’re in, they’re affected by at least four of the five filters of bias that the authors proposed:

• They’re filtered by the investor demands to censor.
• They’re filtered by advertising demands to censor.
• They’re vulnerable to mass-media flak against their reputation.
• They’re vulnerable to anti-[flavour-of-the-month] red-scare hysteria.

Mastodon, like Lemmy, can basically ignore the first two filters, and established communities which don’t mind being smaller than mainstream are unaffected by the remaining two.

comfy, 1 month ago

>do community service

>get sentenced to community service

Great system.