[-] Mnemnosyne@sh.itjust.works 4 points 4 hours ago

Democrats are like 'Good Cops'. They're not the ones actively murdering and beating and doing all the bad shit. But they do just kinda stand around while it happens and don't do much.

We need them, for now, to at least not make things worse, but what we really need is to fucking change things from the bottom up. Unfortunately, I'm afraid it is likely too late. Such change will take two or three decades, and that's if, in this next election, enough people actually rally together to start doing something, and continue doing something for the next thirty years.

[-] Mnemnosyne@sh.itjust.works 4 points 2 days ago

I feel the reference went over your head...

[-] Mnemnosyne@sh.itjust.works 21 points 2 days ago

You know, eventually, after we've seen enough of this shit, I feel like there's a point we have to ask...will no one rid us of these turbulent justices?

[-] Mnemnosyne@sh.itjust.works 8 points 3 days ago

Perhaps foolishly, I got rid of most of my older systems 20 years ago, so the oldest one I have left is my Sega Genesis.

[-] Mnemnosyne@sh.itjust.works 64 points 2 months ago

Voting does sort of make you complicit, honestly.

But guess what? Not voting also makes you complicit. So does voting in a way that has no chance of having an effect based on the current rules.

Basically, existing as an eligible voter, at least in a country where voting isn't rigged (so like, Russians are off the hook here, for example) makes you complicit in your government's actions.

That's kind of a big point of being in a democratic society - we are all, every one of us, responsible for the actions of our government.

And if you don't like that responsibility, I get it, I totally sympathize, because I agree. I hate that responsibility, especially cause I know damn well I'm not qualified to make those decisions. But I still am responsible, and pretending I'm not doesn't change that.

[-] Mnemnosyne@sh.itjust.works 113 points 6 months ago

I find the opposite more annoying. If your memory of those events is accurate there's plenty of things to point to to back it up.

But then you have older people like my father who...I don't know, something has completely rewritten their memories of significant events to the point where he claims many things happened differently than verifiable recorded history. It's impossible to argue with that because of him seeing me pointing out that's not true as an attack and accusing him of lying.

[-] Mnemnosyne@sh.itjust.works 90 points 7 months ago

The weird thing about this to me is how someone who has watched all this crime stuff, which generally (at least the English ones I've seen) portrays the police as being competent and successful at catching criminals, doesn't come up with a far more detailed plan to not get caught.

The interesting thing is she could genuinely have done a murder to see what it's like, just as she wanted, and probably never gotten caught. If you murder someone with no motive, no connection to you, chosen at random, in a place not close to your home or place of work or any other frequently visited locations....the police have little to go on. As a fan of these shows, she would surely be aware of this. But instead she chose to do things that would basically guarantee she's caught if the police are even minimally competent.

[-] Mnemnosyne@sh.itjust.works 41 points 7 months ago

Yeah, if I remember correctly. He sold the rights straight up to the developers of the game, no royalties or percentage or anything because of his anti-game bias, then when the game was successful and that decision bit him in the ass, he tried to change the deal and get more money out of them. As I understand it he lost and still receives no revenue from the games.

Even then they're still benefitting him tremendously because while he was popular in Poland, it's the games that have really made his work popular overall, and people are buying his books and all because of it.

[-] Mnemnosyne@sh.itjust.works 193 points 7 months ago

That's one of those paradoxes with human behavior around problems. If you put in effort to resolve the problem before it becomes significant, either no one notices, or they claim your effort was unnecessary because it wasn't a problem in the first place.

Y2K bugs are a great example. Lots of effort, time, and money was spent ahead of time to prevent it from becoming a problem...and you get people claiming the whole thing was just nothing to be worried about at all and the expense was pointless.

[-] Mnemnosyne@sh.itjust.works 46 points 8 months ago

This shouldn't be a problem based on how they think abortions work...the woman didn't go out FOR an abortion, she was out shopping and decided to get one, like picking up a snack on your way out of the market!

Seriously it's deranged. If they behaved generally like they care about the 'children' and the women, I could accept they're at least acting in good faith according to their dumbass beliefs, but they don't seem to care except for outlawing and restricting women's activities, so it's clear that those who say the point is just to subjugate women are right.

[-] Mnemnosyne@sh.itjust.works 83 points 8 months ago

Anything and everything that politicians propose to protect children, I am automatically against. It doesn't matter how good it sounds, if they say anything about protecting children, I'm opposed to it.

This is because they know that 'protect children' are magic words that let them get away with almost anything, and that's genuinely about the only time they say that anyway. Basically nothing the government does is actually to protect children.

[-] Mnemnosyne@sh.itjust.works 56 points 9 months ago

While language does evolve over time, we shouldn't encourage unnecessary and somewhat negative evolutions of it, and especially not encourage it to change over less time.

When two previously distinct words come to have the same meaning, this can be a problem. First, older written things become less comprehensible. Few of us today could read and understand old english because so many words have changed. The evolution of language has taken a long time to get to that point, at least. But if we encourage the acceleration of this change, something which appears to be happening even without encouragement, how long will it be?

Today, we can still pretty clearly understand things written 200 years ago; some bits are confusing but for the most part it is still clear. If language change accelerates enough, in the future, people may struggle to understand something written only a hundred years ago, or even less.

The second problem is that if the word for a thing goes away, it becomes more difficult to express that concept. Consider the word 'literally' whose meaning has become extremely muddled. In order to express the original concept, we now require additional emphasis. There are other, more difficult to think of terms like that - a concept for which a particular word would have been perfect had the word's meaning not significantly changed.

So when a word's usage is corrected, do not be so quick to defend the misuse of the word through 'language evolves!' If people accept that 'oops, I used that word wrong' and then see if there is already a better word for what they were trying to express to correct themselves with, that is probably better - in most cases.

Even more notably, new words should be used when possible, if an older word doesn't quite fit a newly emerging thing, or even a concept that has existed for some time but has not had a word to describe it precisely. One of my favorite examples of this is the word 'cromulent' which expresses a concept that did not have a specific word for it in common use at the time, even though the concept of 'understandable and linguistically correct' certainly already existed. Also consider the now common word 'emoji' which was coined specifically to represent this concept. This is an excellent evolution of language because it took nothing away. It arose in response to something which did not exist, and described that thing with a word created specifically for it.

That said, fighting against the evolution of language that has already happened and is far too entrenched to ever change is nonsensical. My father, for instance, insists 'cool' should be for temperature description only, even though that word possessed its non-temperature meaning before he was even born. Similarly, sometimes the change is resisted for bad reasons; like the word 'gay'. In these cases, it is best not to try to fight the change, but instead embrace and encourage it.

So ultimately, when a word is used wrong, consider whether the word evolving to the way it is being used is a positive change. If it does not make things better, it's probably best not to encourage it.

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Mnemnosyne

joined 1 year ago