Take a look! It’s in a book! It’s Readin Raaiiinboow!!

I too am disturbed by the noted decline in Austin Powers references among high school students.

Sure. It means they can ask you to do other things that aren’t explicitly written in the original job description. But every time they tell you to do something beyond it, you just start doing THAT exactly to the letter of the request.

Well, first, I’m not a guy. But two, if anyone ever makes a comment like that, I just say, "look…my work involves cutting, grinding, smashing, burning, and straining wood specimens until they break and buckle. If you really want to associate that with certain body parts, be my guest. But…it sounds quite painful.*

This reminds me of a work-to-rule or a “White Strike.” It turns out that every company, even those that supposedly operate off of “unskilled” labor, utterly rely on employees making a ton of judgment calls and often working outside their job description. When employees start working to the letter of their job description, the whole operation quickly grinds to a halt.

but I stand firm in my opinion that their boots-on-the-ground infantryman are also victims of the Israeli political machine.

Sure, but couldn’t the same be said for many of the literal guards at Auschwitz? A lot of those people were just kids who were drafted and were simply following orders. Even many of those who were there willingly only did such things after being subject to years of ruthless Nazi propaganda.

At some point, regardless of what circumstances led you to that moment, you become responsible for your own actions. There is no set of circumstances that can make murdering innocent civilians justified. And if you do that anyway, you bear full moral culpability, regardless of what may have happened in your life before that point.

We literally hashed this out during the Nuremberg trials. It doesn’t matter what propaganda you were subject to. It doesn’t matter how you were raised. It doesn’t matter if you were “just following orders.” It doesn’t even matter if you yourself would face execution for refusing to kill innocent civilians. It is never OK to kill innocent civilians, to perform genocide, or commit ethnic cleansing. If you do that, you deserve to hang for it. Full stop. No excuses.

Sure. But again, it’s a distributed platform. And it does tend to be less subject to zero-thought zero tolerance policies built to appease advertisers. If you start posting death threats to politicians, you’ll get banned (and probably visited by law enforcement.) But I never posted anything like that. I never threatened anyone. I never advocated vigilante violence. I never posted anything that I couldn’t, completely legally, write on a big sign and literally walk around in front of the White House fence advocating for.

I’ve had a few accounts banned from a few of the larger subreddits, then I got a general permaban for ban evasion. Among the things I was banned from big subreddits for:

1. Making even vaguely pro-Palestinian comments on r/worldnews

2. Commenting in r/politics, that if the SCOTUS ruled that the president had complete immunity and was effectively a dictator, he should drone strike Supreme Court justices until that power is taken away. (Actual news stories proposing this were allowed on r/politics. But the comments section had an idiotic zero-context zero-thought “no violence” policy. IMO, the only moral use of dictatorial powers is to force through changes stripping yourself of those dictatorial powers.)

3. Literally on January 6th, as a group of armed insurgents was actively trying to overthrow our government in a coup, asking why they weren’t being met with automatic weapons fire. I have zero doubt that if BLM tried to storm the inauguration of a president Trump, they would be shot by the dozen. But right wing extremists were allowed to openly attempt a coup in broad daylight. (We later learned the reason this didn’t happen is that the president had deliberately kept troops from being deployed to protect the capital building.)

My primary account on reddit had several hundred thousand comment karma on it. I’ve had accounts with 15 year histories on there. But the main subreddits have been completely taken over by either right wing radicals or pro-advertiser zero-thought censorship policies. I literally had my main account banned from r/politics for wondering why my nation’s military wasn’t defending the peaceful transfer of power from a group of armed revolutionaries.

Looking back, I think we would have been a lot better off if January 6th HAD resulted in scores of thugs being gunned down with machine guns. Instead, the people who planned it haven’t been brought to justice and have been left to simply try again. And since then, in right wing circles, it’s been recast as some noble peaceful protest. We would have been far better off if the leaders of that movement never made it off the capital grounds. If we’ve learned anything from history, it’s when fascists try to seize power violently, you need to come down like the Hammer of God upon them. Giving them a slap on the wrist to appease them does not work, it just teaches them that you are weak, and that they should keep trying til they succeed. If a thousand of the countries most violent right wing extremists had instead never left capital grounds alive that day, I think today we would be in a far better place.

But…you can’t post that kind of thing on r/politics without getting instantly permabanned. They censor any discussion of violence, even when it is entirely justified and legal in the defense of a nation and its democracy. It’s been said that from time to time, the tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of tyrants. But on r/politics, the tree of liberty is doomed to wither, as discussing watering the tree with the blood of tyrants violates community guidelines and doesn’t make advertisers happy.

Or, as a final example, I think there was a story on there once that was hyperbolically lamenting, “OMG, what happens if Trump raises a group of right wing militias to stage an armed revolution if they lose in 2024?” I replied truthfully and correctly. What do we do if any group of people tries to overthrow the government by force? We shoot them. We send in the most powerful military on Earth, we shoot them, and we put them in the ground. That is what you do with rebels. That is what any democracy needs to do if it wants people to respect the results of elections. When you try to overthrow a legitimately elected government, your life is now forfeit, and you will be met with unrelenting merciless force. That is how that scenario would actually go down in real life. Democracy is worth fighting for. And democracy is worth killing for. And I wasn’t afraid to state this plain and obvious fact. That got one account permabanned from r/politics.

In short, I am not afraid of saying that under certain circumstances, it is entirely just and legal for violence, even extreme and lethal violence, to be used to protect a nation and its republic. But on a big subreddit like r/politics, you’ll be permabanned for saying it’s OK to shoot people trying to violently overthrow the government.

Was on reddit for many years, didn’t like the direction it was going. Also I’m permabanned from there!

Not a tech person. I’m currently a PhD student in civil engineering and wood science.

Hitler’s book was literally titled “my struggle.” His whole shtick was “I’m just this poor downtrodden Everyman trying to help the country, but the bad people won’t let me!”

It’s certainly possible. The polls are showing it’s effectively a tossup. But my real theory is that things are fundamentally different after the death of Roe, and that the pollsters really don’t have a way to capture that. Yes, it is a harsh year for the Senate, but there are some dark horse races, namely Texas and Nebraska, that may really surprise us.

There have been a lot of Republican polls posted, part of their “flood the zone” strategy. But I think even the nonpartisan polls are underestimating Dem support a bit.

I think we’ll have a Dem trifecta after election night. I feel the even the nonpartisan polls have overcorrected in favor of Republicans after 2016, and since the overturning of Roe, polls have been underestimating Dem candidates.

That’s why you use the courts for this, not some government censorship bureau. We need to make the social media platforms themselves liable for misinformation posted on them. If you’re seriously harmed in some way by misinformation posted on Facebook, then you should be able to sue Facebook itself.

Courts operate on high standards of proof and are deliberately separated from the political process. They are the proper venue for this. There are other things we already criminalize, like criminal harassment, that are just ad subject to that same kind of slippery slope concern as regulation of social media. “Who’s to say what harassment is?..”

The real problem with “never live on a floodplain” is that you can’t know where the floodplains are. The flood maps are all based on historical rainfall data, and that data is now obsolete. Even worse, it won’t stabilize in our lifetimes. So we can’t just observe the next ten years of rainfall and plan around that. No, things are changing, and they will continue to change. You might think you don’t live on a 500 year floodplain. But the cold truth of it is, we no longer have any idea where the 500 year flood plains are anymore. You need decades of weather observations of a stable climate to come up with accurate flood maps. And we just don’t have that kind of reliable data anymore. Unless you happen to live on the top of a very tall hill, you really can’t be sure you don’t live in a flood zone of some sort or another.

Sure. But those many works have affected the discipline of AI development. There’s an entire field of study on AI ethics and alignment. But those are affected by the combined effects of many works and authors. Planet of the Apes really is unique in that it is really the sole example anyone would bring up of why you shouldn’t experiment on apes to try to make them more intelligent.

And to my knowledge, no one has attempted to engineer apes to be more intelligent. Obviously there is simply less economic drive to do so; it’s easier to be concerned about ethics when there’s not a ready path to profitability. But if some geneticist tomorrow puts out a paper proposing that we tinker with chimp DNA to make smarter chimps, I can guarantee you every single headline will reference Planet of the Apes. It’s similar to how you can’t right an article about resurrecting the woolly mammoth without throwing in a reference to Jurassic Park. Some singular works of fiction really do have a substantial effect on how the public understands an entire field of research.

To my knowledge, no one has ever actually tried to engineer smarter chimps, though I assume there might actually be a lot to be gained in terms of scientific knowledge by doing so. We could probably learn quite a lot about the evolution of language and human evolution in general by trying to experiment with engineering smarter apes. But to my knowledge, no one has ever done so. The lack of profit is obviously a big factor, but I guarantee you, accidentally creating Planet of the Apes would be on the mind of anyone seriously contemplating that sort of scientific endeavor.

That’s why it’s c/showerthoughts on c/academiccriticcalhistoricalanalyses

MSPaint. Paint is King.