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PrinceWith999Enemies

@ PrinceWith999Enemies @lemmy.world

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Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sues Meta, citing chatbot’s reply as evidence of shadowban

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  • No, because he’s actually quite mad and belongs nowhere near any kind of power. I can see his conspiracy theories appealing to the Q type, but most of them are going to go for Trump. He’s polling this highly because he’s an unknown. As more people start paying attention to who he actually is, he will be the Herman Cain of the race.

  • How would you decorate this room?

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  • The Kids Who Lived.

  • George W. Bush’s Original Paintings Are Making Their Disney Theme Park Debut

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  • I have no idea where the disconnect is. I don’t care that the paintings are by W, I’m pointing out that they’re amateurish and that if they weren’t by W they wouldn’t be exhibited. It has zero to do with my artistic judgement being informed by knowing the artist.

    I don’t actually listen to MJ very often, although I do enjoy his music and appreciate his contributions to both music and dance. I do tend to avoid work by people like Weinstein, Spacey, and Joanne Rowling because I would prefer not to contribute even incrementally to their income or the perception of public support.

    But in particular, as someone who does not believe in free will, I don’t believe in the idea of culpability. I believe that if you physically recreated W’s brain in perfect detail and put it into someone else, you’d get the exact same outputs to the exact same inputs. Even if you want to include some kind of randomness from quantum effects, that doesn’t make for free will, it’s just randomness. That’s the opposite of free will.

    So although it might be a natural reaction from me to hate W or Trump or Hitler, I try to remind myself that it’s all neurophysiology and neurochemistry (plus other aspects of physiology) as informed by factors such as learning and genetics.I can pretty much guarantee that, were we to do neuroimaging on Trump’s brain, we’d find a hypertrophic amygdala and a hypotrophic prefrontal cortex. Simplifying a bit, you can think of those as the primitive fear center and the rational consideration parts of the brain. No one with that kind of neuroanatomy is going to behave in a rational and controlled manner, especially under stress.

    I might hate the harm they cause and want to prevent it, but there’s no “self” inside of them for me to hate.

  • George W. Bush’s Original Paintings Are Making Their Disney Theme Park Debut

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  • To be clear, I explicitly stated that I wasn’t saying it’s not art. It is art, and I am all for people embracing their creativity. I think more people should be painting/sculpting/playing music/etc., especially in retirement. What I’m saying is that as much as someone might get a kick out of playing Wonderwall doesn’t mean they should be getting a public concert at Epcot.

    Although if I was in the neighborhood I’d probably pay $15 to see Dick Cheney play a self-taught version of Wonderwall if he was also singing.

  • George W. Bush’s Original Paintings Are Making Their Disney Theme Park Debut

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  • I didn’t say “hang it on my fridge,” I said “hang it in my restaurant.” It’s not like a five year old, but it’s like a high school student. You can look at his paintings online and see how he developed over time.

    I’m not discrediting it - I’m saying it doesn’t have great vision, great technique, or innovation. He’s been doing this for ten years, and he is still at the level of “That’s great! Keep practicing!”

    It’s fine though. Painting is a great hobby. I don’t have a problem with him painting, and I don’t have a problem if his political loyalists want to imbue them with some value. I read a fun article from about a decade ago intentionally overanalyzing his shower-selfie painting.

    What I am saying is that there is nothing special about his paintings except the fact that he’s the one who painted them. I’m not comparing W to Hitler, but Hitler’s paintings were also pretty bad, and the only reason why anyone looks at them today is because they were painted by Hitler.

  • The China-linked EV battery mega factory dividing a US township

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  • It is a bucolic way of life in Green Township, but one that Brock and many of her neighbours believe could be threatened by an unlikely adversary – China’s Communist party.

    Oh, ffs. It’s like when the people in suburbs/rural settings worry about “terrorism” and want their police to have access to military equipment.

  • X now treats the term cisgender as a slur

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  • Well, damn.

    The word is a threat because it linguistically separates biological sex from socially constructed categories of “woman” and “man.” That gender is a social construction undermines heteronormativity, critical to defending patriarchal sex roles and procreation.

  • George W. Bush’s Original Paintings Are Making Their Disney Theme Park Debut

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  • I’m not going to say it’s not “art,” but this is basically the level of sophistication that parents get from their kid to hang in their diner. If this was actually painted by anyone who wasn’t the ex-president, it wouldn’t be noticed by anyone, much less exhibited.

  • X now treats the term cisgender as a slur

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  • I was really thinking they were going to challenge Musk since it’s not only their name, but he chose practically the same logo.

  • F1 Manager developer accused of “dehumanizing” layoffs and mismanagement

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  • There’s a tsunami of layoffs in the gaming community, and in tech in general. A lot of the time, it’s entirely unjustified as the positions being laid off are often quickly put on the market again, and it’s usually not the top engineering talent (the most expensive) because they’re harder to replace. It’s often focused on lower tier jobs/support teams, and the cost of re-filling a position (sourcing, interviewing, hiring, training) would far offset any kind of salary reduction. It’s like the tech management version of a Michael Scott vasectomy.

    I wish someone would compile a list of companies acting in extraordinary bad faith so I could consider that when making purchase decisions.

  • Thousands protest in Israel amid anger at Netanyahu over hostages held in Gaza

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  • These are not, in general, people opposed to the offensive. These are people angry that the incursion on Oct 7 was allowed to happen, and that the hostages haven’t yet been freed. They’re not calling for a pullout, ceasefire, or two state solution. This was closer to a Bomb Iran rally than a Free Palestine rally.

  • Roger Corman, Pioneering Independent Producer and King of B Movies, Dies at 98

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  • RIP to one of the greats. This is a really good bio, too.

  • Jack Dorsey claims Bluesky is 'repeating all the mistakes' he made at Twitter

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  • He went from looking like The Mandarin from Iron Man to wish.com late stage Tyrion.

  • Language

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  • Probabilistic curves are pretty much the opposite of what we normally mean when we say “free will.” If the assumptions were correct, we’d tend to use the term “non-deterministic.”

    I tend to lean in the direction of Stanford neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky who believes that it is deterministic but not predictable due to the complexity of the parts and their interactions.

  • Language

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  • This is known as the Whorfian Hypothesis, aka Sapir-Whorf theory. In generalized-to-the-point-of-inaccuracy terms, the idea is that language constrains thought. It’s one of those ideas that we can perceive as intuitively correct but that does not stand up to experiment.

    There are, for example, languages that don’t have words differentiating green and blue, and others whose counting numbers don’t include specific words for numbers larger than two. Some languages have no words for cardinal directions but use terms like “mountain-way” and “ocean-way.”

    Experiments do seem to support a weak version of Whorf - people from cultures with “missing” words can differentiate between green and blue for instance, but it seems to take a bit longer. There’s also a paper indicating that people who don’t use cardinal coordinates have a better innate sense of orientation when, eg, walking corridors in an enclosed building.

    I’d personally fall between the weak and strong position because I do not believe in free will and do believe that semantics are a significant driver of behavior, but that’s a step beyond where most of the current research is. There’s research into free will, but none that I’m aware of that pulls in cognitive semantics as a driver.

  • Robot dogs armed with AI-aimed rifles undergo US Marines Special Ops evaluation

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  • I was involved in discussions 20-some years ago when we were first exploring the idea of autonomous and semiautonomous weapons systems. The question that really brought it home to me was “When an autonomous weapon targets a school and kills 50 kids, who gets charged with the war crime? The soldier who sent the weapon in, the commander who was responsible for the op, the company who wrote the software, or the programmer who actually coded it up?” That really felt like a grounding question.

    As we now know, the actual answer is “Nobody.”

  • Beeseball

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  • Beads?

  • Boy Scouts of America rebranding to more inclusive Scouting America

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  • They did the same for LGBT until recently.

    Being a private organization does not grant you an unlimited right to discriminate, no matter how much the right likes to pretend it does. That’s why anti-discrimination laws exist. There’s loopholes orgs have tried to use, and protections vary by state, but just being a “private organization” doesn’t mean “do whatever prejudicial thing you want.”

    Like I said, I don’t see this current iteration of the org fighting atheists in court.

  • The Palestinian activists fighting for LGBTQ+ rights against a neverending backdrop of war

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  • I’ve never been out in Russia, but I know we’re persecuted there. Same for Poland. I’ve never been out in Uganda (I haven’t been there yet), and although I’ve been to India the social circles I moved in meant I didn’t encounter anything like what the community members find there.

    What I find curious is that Americans use this as a lash particularly against Islam, while at the same time a large part of their population not only supports LGBT-phobic legislation in the US, but also the evangelical community that actively lobbies for the death penalty for being LGBT in Africa. I can sympathize with the plight of Russians under the violent and murderous dictatorship of Putin without saying that the average Russian is correct on their opinion about the LGBT community. If Russia were to invade Uganda and kill 50k civilians, there would be an outcry against it and anyone who said “But they hate The Gays” would hopefully be ushered peacefully out of the room, as the two are orthogonal.

    Is Israel killing 40-50k people to secure gay rights in Gaza? Or have they been supporting Hamas because it allowed them to avoid a two state solution?

    Trust me - we are not strangers to the idea that other oppressed communities have parts that are still prejudiced against us. That neither justifies genocide nor does it relieve us as individuals from acknowledging such extreme moral wrongdoing. If an unarmed person shot by police turned out to have opposed marriage equality, that doesn’t excuse the moral requirement to oppose that action.

    So unless you think that anti-LGBT legislation and violence justifies terrorist activity including the slaughter of civilians within the US (it does not), I respectfully suggest you review your premises.