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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • My parents don’t speak English, but I learned it as a kid by watching a lot of Cartoon Network. All the cartoons were in English, no subtitles or dub or anything. Somehow I assimilated the language without any external aid, and then learned the rest when we first got the internet and I started communicating with others via games.

    So, if I had to teach a kid English, I’d just expose them to as much English as possible with plenty of context and encourage them to express themselves in English when they can. This is also a popular method how adults can learn languages, called tprs


  • The meaning and ideas of solarpunk are still evolving, but the main themes are freedom, community, ecology and pragmatism. I won’t go over the anarchic organisation of communities since I think you mistook the pragmatism for primitivism.

    Solarpunk is not about primitivism and a return to a low-technological era, and neither is it a high tech cyberpunk spinoff, as some others think. Solarpunk is about using practical solutions that are also ethical and egolocially friendly. This often means not throwing stuff away, but fixing what can be fixed and reusing what can be reused, because mass production and consumerism is seen as a damaging force. So instead of trying to make up new tech and produce new things, solarpunk would ask you to first consider whether you can do something already with what you have, which means that a DIY approach is encouraged. However, if new technology can improve our lives without damaging everything else, it’s acceptable.

    And it is the complete opposite of thinking about the “good old days”, as solarpunk is looking only towards the future. The ‘punk’ in the name means that when you look at all the doom and gloom in the future (capitalism, wars, global warming) you don’t fall into despair, but instead try to play your part in your community to fight it and promote a lifestyle of mutual aid and a respect for nature, with whatever level of technology can give you the best results.

    That was my attempt at a short presentation. We have a wiki and a manifesto if anyone is interested


  • AccountMaker@slrpnk.nettoScience Memes@mander.xyzCan I still use this salt?
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    21 days ago

    From what I heard, salt is usually packaged with iodine or some substances that prevent clumping that expire over time. So after some time the salt won’t have those anymore, but it should be safe to consume. Salt cannot spoil because bacteria cannot grow in salty places.

    Don’t know how plastic containers relate to that sadly.







  • This might be due to the fact that I’m not a native speaker and I encountered this phrase at a later date, but people saying “it’s all but xyz” to mean “it’s xyz” really gets on my nerves. I get it, “it’s all but complete” means that virtually all the conditions are met for it to be complete, but I find it so annoying for some reason.

    “The task is all but impossible” registers as ‘it’s not impossible, it’s everything else: possible’, so the fact that it means the opposite of that makes my brain twitch.


  • I’ve decided the best and most feasible thing I can do right now is thoroughly decoupling myself from the corporate consumerism world

    I honestly think this is a very valid approach. Most people are imagining revolutions and a sudden and violent end to the capitalist class, but I’m more inclined towards the idea where people just change their life habbits so that they don’t depend on massive corporations. Step one stop using crap you don’t need, step two try to get the things you do need locally. If enough people do this, you might start seeing small communities that take care of a lot of stuff by themselves, and the moment you get a big enough community where at least some can live comfortably with little to no dependency from big corporations, things might change…



  • “It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it”

    And at the end:

    “No one keeps death in view, no one refrains from far-reaching hopes; some men, indeed, even arrange for things that lie beyond life—huge masses of tombs and dedications of public works and gifts for their funeral-pyres and ostentatious funerals. But, in very truth, the funerals of such men ought to be conducted by the light of torches and wax tapers, as though they had lived but the tiniest span.” [As if a child had died]

    Seneca, On the Shortness of Life


  • That actually was a popular way of life for philosophers in late antiquity where they would abstain from sex for pleasure, but would still do it for conception. I can’t recall the name, but there was one dude who, when he figured out that he can’t have children, told his wife that she can leave him for someone else if she wants because he will not engage in sexual behaviour anymore.

    This was from Edward J. Watts’ book on Hypatia.


  • If anyone is interested, I already commented on Plato’s position on sex in his dialogues in https://slrpnk.net/comment/4266874

    But in short, the Symposium creates a complex web of how everything ties in, but the point made was that love is a messanger between humans and the gods, it draws people towards the form of the beautiful, and in his steps towards the Beautiful, the love of bodies is the first and lowest step, which when overcome by the next (love of the soul) is seen as nothing in comparisson. Socrates himself, presented as the ideal philosopher and lover, refuses Alcibiades’ sexual advances.

    But the most explicit statement against sexual relationships is given in ‘Phaedrus’, where beauty and love for people reminds the soul of the form of Beauty, but the shameless part of the soul pulls the body towards sexual relations, to “mount them like an animal”, but the reasonable part of the soul, upon being reminded of Beauty, pulls back and subdues the shameless part.

    Plato is against most physical things on a good day, but when it comes to love, sexual relations are out of the question because they miss the mark (knowledge of the forms) by a mile.




  • Seriously, I never would’ve guessed that my most unpopular opinion on lemmy would be “murdering people vaguely connected to your problem because you’re angry is bad”.

    This wasn’t an ideological act or whatever, the assassin’s mother was brainwashed and financially ruined her family, he was angry because of that (so because the church caused his mother to ruin the family, it’s a personal grudge against the church because it affected him), wanted to kill the head of the church, but couldn’t, so 20 years later he settled for Abe since he was accessible and supported the church (as the party did before him).

    The assassin could’ve exposed and drew attention to the church and their connections in various ways, instead he shot an old man at the end of his career. I am all for exposing corruption and malpractices, for taking away influence and power from those who have too much, but arbitrary killing is disgusting. Shall we applaud every broken and desperate murderer if the target they could get their hands on was bad enough by some criteria of the day? I hope this is people just trying to be edgy.



  • I forced myself to watch through the first season of Breaking Bad, the second was meh, but starting from the third and until the end it became the best series I ever watched. The same happend to a friend, he wanted to stop watching, I told him to go on and at the end he loved it.

    Better Call Saul also got better as episodes went on.

    The Foundation series had terrible pacing in the first season, and they massively improved on that in the second.