ferristriangle [he/him]

So that is what the will of D is!

What else would learning R mean? The programming language?

No one is attacking your “factual and informative” comment.

No one is disputing the difficulties you’ve highlighted. What is being disputed is your assertion that those difficulties are relevant to your assertion that China won’t be able to achieve this.

And the subject of the conversation is a technology that humans have already developed and is in use. So what is it about China/the PRC that would cause you to assert they are incapable of building/employing this technology?

Your argument is that “Hard science doesn’t care about politics,” so I assume you don’t want to imply that you’re critiquing the capabilities of China’s political system. So what’s left? Is it racism? The removed can’t achieve what other humans have already proven is possible because the removed is subhuman?

You are making a political statement whether you intend to or not, you don’t just get to whine about how you were only talking about the science and why is everyone being so mean when you only started a discussion about the science to reinforce (or deflect from) your original assertion.

I’ve been making this joke for so long that I forgot what the actual law is called and no one will tell me 🥲

You’ve fallen prey to one of the oldest laws of the internet, which states that the quickest way to get an answer to something is to post the wrong answer and wait for someone to correct you.

It’s called Murphy’s Law.

“Ohh no a bunch of people are telling me I’m a dumbass. First day here losers?”

What is that supposed to mean? Is he saying that the fact that he’s a dumbass shouldn’t be news to anyone and is so well established that it isn’t worthy of comment?

This is good context, and I typically avoid the profit conversation on topics like this altogether.

Not everything can be or should be designed and operated around profit. Providing a service costs money. When something is a public service, the benefit that the public receives from operating that service isn’t profit, the benefit they receive is the service.

The whole point of transitioning towards socialism is that we want to be able to organize our labor and put the resources that we generate as a society towards projects that give some kind of benefit to us, not just towards projects that can turn a profit for people who privately own the economy.

No one is asking you to?

Gestures are also linguistically classified as emblems, so no more thumbs up or middle fingers for this guy

Defending language and human expression by arbitrarily limiting the scope of what should be considered valid language and expression.

The linguistic niche that emojis fill is the same niche that is filled by emblems, which are a powerful tool for communicating specific ideas very concisely and have existed long before the internet. If pictures are too childish and regressive for this guy, then I suppose they want a world without bright red hexagonal stop signs and railroad crossing markers and would instead prefer traffic control markers be replaced with plain text billboards containing the relevant legal codes written in plain text.

I know this comment is a few days old at this point and the conversation is dead, but is it really true that reddit users skew younger?

Like, I was a teen when I made a reddit account over a decade ago, but I feel like reddit isn’t the cool thing for high schoolers to sign up for anymore. If feels more like legacy social media with very outdated design sensibilities even if you’re using new reddit.

I think reddit’s userbase is certainly more immature in the way that being a semi-anonymous user in an endless sea of throw-away accounts tends to foster. That kind of design creates an environment where people feel comfortable putting less care and thought into the views that they share because whatever bullshit they wrote will get buried when the thread dies, and most communities aren’t small enough for individual users to develop a persistent reputation in a community based on their previous comments, so every interaction starts off as a fresh slate with little/no stakes. And people are less likely to mature if they never have any accountability to the things they say/believe.

I don’t think the quality/maturity of posters on Hexbear vs reddit and the “reddit diaspora” on Lemmy can be explained by the age demographics of those groups. I think it has more to do with the quality of moderation here filtering out people with “reddit-brain,” as well as simply having a more well defined community where you can somewhat expect other people to recognize your username and therefore care about the impression you leave on people as a result.

“Israel made it pretty simple: The collective punishment of Gaza which falls very cleanly under the definition of a war crime will end once the only leverage Palestinians have to deter even more brutal aggression is released.”

because there are not actually two parties

“The United States is also a one-party state but, with typical American extravagance, they have two of them.”

• Julius Nyerere

(SKYRIM WAS FUCKING 12 YEARS AGO!)

Hey, you’re not being entirely fair. Yes Skyrim was released 12 years ago, but Bethesda hasn’t been doing nothing with the IP since then.

You’re forgetting that they released Skyrim 10 years ago, and then they released Skyrim 7 years ago, and then they released Skyrim and Skyrim 6 years ago, and just 2 years ago they also released Skyrim, and just last year they released Skyrim.

I think that this also partially reflects a change in how media worked 20+ years ago and today.

The way most people were exposed to current events 20+ years ago was through a small handful of television news outlets, and if you were trying to manufacture consent for something and drum up some pro-war rhetoric you could get large portions of the country on the same page through the relatively small number of media sources that covered ~90% of America’s exposure to the news.

Now in the social media era the ways in which people consume news/current events is much more splintered and fractured. Which makes it harder to get everyone marching to the beat of the same drum, but it also means you can create content specifically tailored to inflame the worst impulses of whichever micro-demographic you’re trying to target without having to worry about your messaging needing to have mass appeal because you’re not trying to make sure that your broadcast network keeps its audience.

We’ve somehow found an even more exonerative tone than “Officer involved shooting”

I am already there, because as is written in the ancient prophesies: “It takes one to know one”

Old

I haven’t read through all of the responses in that thread yet to see if someone else addressed the point I’m about to make, but the definition used in the UN resolution is intentionally vague.

To give a brief history of where genocide originates from as a legal concept to the definition we have now, we’re gonna have to talk about legal scholar Raphael Lemkin.

When Lemkin was studying genocide and attempting to draft a law that would cover all aspects of what makes something a genocide, he made note of a few things. One was that genocide as a crime was unique in the sense that the entity carrying out this crime was usually itself a nation-state or working on behalf/under the jurisdiction of a nation-state. Therefore, a legal solution to address/prosecute a genocide could not be administered as a national law, since if a nation was in the process of carrying out a genocide then the entity responsible for prosecuting that crime is already complicit in the crime. So in order to pass a law that would have any effect with regards to deterring/prosecuting a genocide that law would need to be enforced by an international body.

This led to Lemkin petitioning the UN to adopt the UN resolution on genocide. In the original drafts Lemkin presented to the UN when he proposed that they adopt this resolution, the legal definition of genocide that he drafted was far more broad than the definition the UN ended up adopting. It included provisions for stripping a national group of cultural practices and the ability to participate in society in their native language, campaigns of forced assimilation, economic policy that created barriers to the economic participation in society on the basis of nationality/ethnicity, theft of land/wealth based on nationality/ethnicity, and in general any act that was designed to weaken a specific national group in whole or in part in order to benefit the national group who was wielding state power to carry out these acts. These acts of discrimination/disenfranchisement could eventually lead to the slaughter/destruction of the national group being targeted, but in Lemkin’s original drafts the slaughter/elimination of a national group was not necessary to prosecute something as a genocide. An attempt to infringe upon and disrupt the pattern of life of a given national group targeting people on the basis of their identity as part of that national group was sufficient to prosecute something as a genocide.

The problem with this definition is that in order to be ratified in the UN, it would need to pass a vote from the UN member states. And a large number of countries refused to ratify the resolution with its original wording because they were concerned that the existing wording could be used to prosecute their country. With notable examples being the USA still having Jim Crow laws in full effect at the time, as well the legal status of Native Americans and “Indian Reservations” being called into question by the original resolution, as well as the legal status of every colonial government held by the various countries of Europe falling under the jurisdiction of the original resolution.

Lemkin fought hard to keep those provisions in the resolution he drafted, but eventually relented because he saw a weaker resolution with the force of international law behind it as being preferable to a stronger resolution that only had partial support. But the result is that the current language of the UN resolution on genocide is the result of a process where the criminals were allowed to rewrite the law until they were no longer guilty.

Because the remaining language is so vague, it gives cover for powerful countries to legally squirm their way out of repercussions on pure technicality, while also giving those countries the ability to weaponize the resolution based on technicalities to accuse their geopolitical opponents of genocide as a pretext/justification for intervention and adversarial foreign policy. For example, the language in the UN resolution which references attempts to prevent births in a national group has been used in international politics to target developing countries. As different areas of a country become more economically developed, that development also usually results in greater accessibility to medical resources, which includes contraceptives. As families are given more control over when they choose to have a child, the overall effect is usually a decline in birth rates among a given population. This data showing declining birth rates will then be presented as evidence that a country’s policy is resulting in births being prevented in a national group, which is sufficient grounds for accusing a country of genocide under the current language of the resolution. And whether that accusation is ultimately prosecuted by the UN, the pretext of “Human Rights Concerns” is usually all that countries like the US need in order to initiate “Non-combatant warfare” against a country in the form of imposing unilateral sanctions on them as a way to gain leverage against a geopolitical entity that controls resources which are valuable to US state/business interests.

Well Israel is a settler-colonial project propped up by a global military empire who wants a military ally/outpost in the middle east, and that settler-colonial project is ripping people out of their homes to give land to settlers.

Palestinians are the ones getting ripped out of their homes, having legal rights stripped away from them, and ultimately being corralled into what are fenced-in, open air concentration camps as Israel continues expanding its borders. This is what has resulted in conditions like what we see in Gaza, which is currently one of the highest population density places on earth as a result of Palestinians having more and more of their land colonized and the families who weren’t murdered in ethnic cleansing campaigns had to live closer and closer together as they were driven out of their homes. And as more and more people keep getting shoved into smaller and areas of land as Israel closes its borders in more and more via military occupation, Israel uses its control of the land surrounding these settlements to restrict food, medicine, and electricity from getting to Palestinians. Gaza usually only gets 4 hours of electricity every day despite living in an arid climate where not having air conditioning can result in death from heat stroke on particularly hot days. ~95% of the water in Gaza is not safe to drink, so death from starvation and dehydration are both incredibly common. And with extremely limited access to medical resources, very few people live to/past middle age, with the average age in Gaza currently sitting around 19 years old. Living conditions are so bad that suicidality among children is incredibly common, with over half of people under 18 reporting that they have no will to live when surveyed. And when Israel is not expanding its borders and settling more land, it preys on the desperation of the Palestinian people who have had their lives ripped away from them by employing them for cheap labor to make the lives of the settlers more comfortable. Those are the Palestinians who also have citizenship in Israel so that they can work in Israel, but even with citizenship they are second-class citizens without access to most political and legal rights.

Israelis don’t have any particular reason to hate Palestinians, they’re just doing what every settler-colony does and they keep experiencing blowback from the people they are colonizing. All of the propaganda about thousands of years of Holy War over a Holy Land is just a founding mythos used to obscure this colonizer/colonized relationship by pretending that these are two groups on equal standing that are bickering with each other because they just can’t get along.