they/them

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • My understanding is that it means going, loosely, to the opposite side of the state of the major metropolitan area in that state. Upstate NY is the northwest part, upstate MA is the west part, upstate PA is the northeast part. I’m looking around, and it seems to also 1) only be used on a few states, 2) usually is on the north half (but not always), and 3) is somewhat interchangable with “rural”.





  • I have tried arguing with the people I would categorise as ‘anti-intellectual’ more than 99% of people to ever have lived trying to understand them

    this betrays a lot about your attitudes towards 99% of people and how you interact with them

    Consider that the ones who aren’t as enlightened as you just haven’t had the privilege to get the free time, financial flexibility, and education to spend a lot of time and effort self-reflecting on their own intellectual purity. Consider also that there are many in that group who count you as anti-intellectual for your prioritization of the ideals of a squeaky clean intellectual platform over the material realities of living in the world and having to engage in conflict and contradictions.


  • Alright, from the very words of your own comment:

    At some point, does it matter?

    in direct response to my comment

    Who decides what is stupid and what isn’t?

    Yes, it does matter. If you want to “Give people the resources to educate themselves”, you have to have a definition of stupid and not stupid that guides your choice of what is and isn’t good education; in order to “Give them the benefit of the doubt, once”, you have to have a criteria for when they’ve stopped being stupid.




  • Okay, sure, what about vaccines then? Hypothetically, I think the idea that we shoot ourselves full of mercury and viruses is extremely stupid. Malicious too, by your model. And also, I don’t think climate change is real, so now I think you’re stupid and you think I’m stupid and it’s he said she said and if we both think the other is being malicious we have a brawl. The thing that fixes this is a definition of “stupid” that we both agree on that is clear, useful, and objective. What is that definition?






  • I can respect that y’all kind of hate my kind here and I’m going to use this comment to share only the most unobjectionable works that even the most anticommunist liberal should find completely and utterly appealing

    Fully Automated Luxury Communism is a book about how we have all of the tools at our disposal right now to automate at least 50% of the work that we have to do to stay alive, and thus get rid of that work as a tool of coercion and exertion of power.

    How Capitalism Ends is about how the power got to the concentrations it has today, where we can expect it to go by extrapolating that tendency, why there was no other way it could have gone, and what we can do now to start building the next thing.

    These are two very good and easy starts to starting to think about this problem. I’m happy to field questions about the works or anything else related.



  • I was born and raised atheist/agnostic, never set foot in a church before 18 besides weddings. Still am, never doubted it. Maybe I believe in like Spinoza’s god or something but definitely no Abrahamic God.

    Something I’ve learned is that among many other things, a certain holy quality to persecution has definitely permeated the western consciousness and it 100% has me second guessing myself often. The christliness of being persecuted, made a martyr, and suffering for your cause carries a moral quality that I have absolutely not freed myself from, even though there’s nothing automatically morally good or bad in suffering and being made a victim for fighting for a cause.