BodyBySisyphus

joined 2 years ago
[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 days ago

Not that you can see this reply, but this was literally crossposted to our news comm, soup for brains.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (3 children)

It's probably not worth engaging on a logical level because the people making that argument never reach it. From my perspective, it looks like the argument is a product of retrofitting an existing justification (Kamala is the harm reduction candidate) onto a specific issue (Palestinian genocide) and getting an incoherent result (Palestine will be genocided less). What motivates someone to put that incoherent result out into the world rather than, like, considering it, is probably a product of the shallow thinking social media encourages, an unwillingness to engage with the idea that we don't truly have political agency in the US, and a feeling that there are no other options.

In my less charitable moods I've viewed the argument as an attempted sop where the person advancing the argument does not actually care but does know that if they say as much they'll come across as a monster. So instead they do the bare minimum to retain what they view as the moral high ground in the extremely restricted landscape of the two major parties. Pointing to even higher ground outside that landscape can then be attacked as virtue signaling (anyone can tell that it's unreachable; this is the highest attainable spot) or trickery (anything that looks more complicated than this very simple reasoning must be some form of subterfuge, so I can continue to appear the most reasonable if I just keep hammering on "less genocide"). Absence of pushback from anyone with too much power to be dismissed as a troll or a curmudgeon allows the idea to enter the discourse, at which point other people pick it up and reinforce it.

But it's such a self-evidently weak claim that I can't do anymore than spit ball. It's an argument defeated easily even on its home turf of utilitarianism; any attempts to do that, though, just sends them back to the "Trump is worse" binary.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 4 days ago (5 children)

One could potentially argue that Trump's rhetoric of "finishing the job" means that he would do something to accelerate things by directly committing troops/planes/whatever. But we don't know exactly what would happen, so even then voting for slower genocide is more like voting for some unknown probability X that the genocide will be slower. Everyone in Kamala's corner is parsing her statements according to what they assume will be true and then projecting that into the future with 100% confidence.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

That was a funny response because shortly before the debate there was a Hexbear post about a report that compared China's rate of technological progress to the US's and found that the US was behind China in all technologies but two. Guess which ones? Someone on Kamala's team must have also seen it.

I tried to find the post but I'm not sure where it went.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 4 days ago

Just a good ol' bad cop/psycho cop routine.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago

To be fair, being an A student in the US is way more about complying with power structures than it is about knowing things.

Source: "BodyBySisyphus consistently fails to follow directions" x 1,000,000

[–] [email protected] 18 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

So what you do is you take a nuke. Drop it in a hole. Then drop another one in. Then another one. Hope you brought a lot of nukes. Eventually the gas law (Pv=nrt baby) dictates that you end up with an atmosphere dense enough to be breathable plus you're definitely low enough down that you're shielded from radiation. Bring some looooong cables to connect to solar panels up on the surface, crank up the heater, hang up a grow lamp for your potatoes, and live large in the miles-deep, yards-wide prison you dug for yourself.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 4 days ago (4 children)

The funny thing is She of the Real Time Fact Checkers lied her ass off the entire time. She lied about the Chinese Covid response, she repeated the Hamas sexual assault allegations that the NYT chose not to print, she either lied about her love of fracking (less likely) or her belief that climate change is an existential threat (more likely)*.

The thing is those lies are all within the Pale of Discourse so they go unchallenged. Trump is such a gift to the democrats because they get to go as far to the right as they want while still keeping their cherished veneer of intelligence and maturity.

*I suppose she could think both and either be a bona-fide threat to humanity or a complete idiot who doesn't know what's causing climate change

[–] [email protected] 22 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Their method of data collection is - and this is not a joke - "We asked 5 academics to rate each country on a scale of 1 to 10 and then average the result"

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago

It was one of multiple moments where I experienced mental "Wait, I thought the dems thought this was beyond the pale, too" whiplash.

 

Slightly older interview with the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh. He points out that a lot of anxiety over climate change is related to anxiety over the end of Western dominance, because the tropics are already experiencing climate driven catastrophe on top of the damage done by colonialism:

The West has also come to rely on what Ghosh calls "an expert discourse" from scientists. The result, he believes, is that science is giving fearful westerners a hope in business-friendly "sustainable development," biofuels, or carbon-capture technology, which they think will save the system before it collapses.

The alternative, a massive-scale economic adaptation to a new distribution of resources, is too scary to consider: The end of capitalism would be as bad as the end of the world.

"The people who saw the climate crisis first are at the absolute other end: farmers, fishermen, Inuit, indigenous peoples, forest peoples in India, and they've already had to adapt, mainly by moving, finding new livelihoods," says Ghosh. "And indigenous peoples have already lived through the end of the world and found ways to survive."

It's a grim sort of optimism, but it is a reminder that there are opportunities to adapt and persist if we don't push our biosphere to the point of collapse in an effort to maintain a failed system. We're not going to do that, right? anakin-padme-4

 

The hubris of zooming around Poseidon's domain like it owned the place
Forgot to pack short grain rice, soy sauce, rice vinegar, and Wasabi. Hope you like seaweed for dinner, boys!
Captain is a self-professed loner, has a mode of travel that requires dozens of crew in close proximity.
Definitely smelled musty in there.
20,000 leagues was the distance they traveled, depth rating was probably nothing special.

spoiler for a 200 year old bookCouldn't even handle one measly whirlpool, probably would've performed awful in a hot tub
Most importantly: shared a name with the worst animal in the ocean. Terrible choice.

 

From this post: https://hexbear.net/post/2063160. The whole comments thread is gold, this guy is on a reply streak.

Someone get him on the lathe, let's see more CEOs getting held personally liable.

Also, bonus points that this guy can take time away from his busy day of running a company to post on IGN comment threads, really speaks to the important work he's doing.

 
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submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

Another Beany Tuesday classic and a must-add after he surfaced in real life here: https://hexbear.net/post/2021804?scrollToComments=false

 

I have a .edu email that I still use, and I've gotten multiple emails addressed to a Dr. BodyBySisyphus (I do not hold a PhD) from an organization called Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (brought to you courtesy of the Koch brothers, among other usual suspects) asking me to take a survey so it can understand faculty opinions on campus Freeze Peach. The URL looks uniquely generated so I don't think I can just hand it out without triggering something on their end, but is there anything else I can do to make their day worse?

 

Did it accomplish anything? No. Was it a dumb thing to do? Yes. Does it eat at me more and more every day that I'm just sitting by while the bombs keep dropping and people keep dying? Yeppers.

Don't really have anything else to say, just angry at everything including myself.

 

badeline-jokerfied

Added without comment because any comments I have would be inadequate to express my rage.

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