Rottcodd

Sort of.

More it’s just the way I’ve pretty much always been. Before I was even really aware of it, I apparently figured out that I couldn’t control the outside world but I could control how I reacted to it, so that was what I focused on. One could sort of say that I did it simply because it made sense to me, but even that makes it sound more conscious than it was. It’s more that it just never occurred to me to do things any other way.

It was only much later that I discovered that there was a philosophy called “stoicism” that advocated that.

“You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this and you will find strength.” - Marcus Aurelius

I recognize that the universe is so vast that it’s likely that life forms other than us exist in it, but that’s the extent of it.

I’ve seen no verifiable evidence that they in fact do, so I don’t “believe” that they do.

Really, I don’t “believe” in much of anything for which there is no verifiable evidence. I don’t even understand how that works - how it is that other people apparently do. It’s not a conscious choice or anything - it’s just appears that there’s a set of requirements that must be met before the position of “belief” is triggered inside my mind, and one of those requirements is verifiable evidence. Without that, the state of “believing” just isn’t triggered, and it’s not as if I can somehow force it, so that’s that.

As far as I can see, governments are comprised almost entirely of psychopaths, opportunists, charlatans and fools, so I see little likelihood that they possess concealed knowledge regarding any nominal extraterrestrial life. First, and most simply, if they did possess any such knowledge, it’s near certain that somebody would’ve blabbed something by now.

Beyond that though, I think it’s exceedingly unlikely that any alien life form capable of traveling interstellar distances would, on arriving on the Earth, seek out contact with a government, much less limit its contact to a government. If they’re that advanced, it can only be the case that they, in their own development, either never bought into the flatly ludicrous and clearly destructive idea of institutionalized authority or overcame it before it inevitably destroyed them, and in either case, I don’t see any reason why they would lend any credence to our mass delusion that this one subset of humanity forms a specially qualified and empowered elite that rightly oversees everyone else’s interests. That’s our delusion - not theirs.

Right, but it’s not a paradox - it’s a conundrum. It’s not just that the person saying it is part of the first group, but that they necessarily are.

Since people want to believe that they “know better,” there’s a strong urge to count oneself among the second group, which immediately places one in the first.

There are two kinds of people in the world - those who think there are two kinds of people in the world and those who know better.

I deliberately avoided having kids and I don’t have any particular existential dread, so I’m just sort of sitting back and bemusedly watching it all play out. I just read the latest bit about one or another obscenely wealthy and/or powerful blatant psychopath doing or saying something gibberingly insane and I marvel yet again at the fact that the world is run by literal lunatics and nobody seems to even notice.

And when it stops being cynically amusing, I shut it off and go do something else.

What the fuck are you on about?

It’s not necessarily the case though that fewer crimes are being actually “solved,” in the most precise sense of the term.

It could be that the current heightened interest in police oversight and focus on investigation of (and huge lawsuit payouts as a consequence of) wrongdoing by the police has made it less likely that people will be railroaded/framed for crimes they didn’t actually commit, so the rate at which crimes are marked as solved has declined, even as the rate at which they actually are solved hasn’t.

That’s everything I said, right there. What part of it are you not understanding?

evidence is necessary. otherwise, it’s just speculation

Of course it’s fucking speculation! What the fuck else did you think it was?!

i didn’t expect equivocation

It would be equivocation if there was a disjunct between the intended meaning of what I said at one point and the intended meaning of the same thing at some other point.

But I’ve been entirely consistent in what I’ve said. The disjunct is between what YOU thought I meant and what I actually said, and that’s your fucking problem - not mine.

Eh?

I said that it’s “not necessarily the case that” one thing and “it could be that” something else.

Logic and plausibilty are all that’s necessary.

It struck me after I posted that that modern technology and investigative techniques would also contribute to such a decline.

It’s undoubtedly more difficult to falsely convict someone (whether deliberately or not) in the era of GPS, cell phone records, video surveillance and DNA tests.

It’s not necessarily the case though that fewer crimes are being actually “solved,” in the most precise sense of the term.

It could be that the current heightened interest in police oversight and focus on investigation of (and huge lawsuit payouts as a consequence of) wrongdoing by the police has made it less likely that people will be railroaded/framed for crimes they didn’t actually commit, so the rate at which crimes are marked as solved has declined, even as the rate at which they actually are solved hasn’t.

Money wins, every time.

And right there, you answered your own (presumably rhetorical) question.

The money people jumped on AI as soon as they scented the chance of profit, and that’s it. ALL other considerations are now secondary to a handful of psychopaths making as much money as possible.

Firefox.

Seriously. Every app I’ve tried has come up short in one way or another. Lemmy is best in a browser and the best browser is Firefox.

It doesn’t matter how much money he has - every time I visualize Musk posting to Twitter, I see him as a teenage edgelord in a shabby suburban tract house, hunched over an off-the-shelf desktop PC in a room with green shag carpeting and fake wood paneling, lit only by the glow from the screen, giggling to himself.

It’s something I was never actually conscious of until I stopped and thought about it yesterday because of this thread. I’ve just always moved the scroll wheel in the way that it seems like it should work, and it works the way it seems like it should.

The thing you’re apparently calling “traditional” seems natural to me.

I’ve never really stopped and thought about it before, but as far as I can figure, my brain expects the part of the system that does or would actually touch the surface to drag the screen in a particular direction through the simple workings of physics.

On a touchscreen, it’s simple - it’s my finger actually touching the screen and it drags the screen around exactly as I’d expect.

With a mouse, my finger isn’t the important part because it’s not touching the surface (or more precisely, the mousepad that substitutes for the surface). Rather, my finger is contolling the mouse, and the underside of the mouse is touching the surface. And as far as that goes, the “traditional” way it works is correct - when I move my finger downward on the mouse wheel, the bottom side of the wheel - the part that would actually be touching the surface if it was a purely mechanical system - is moving upward, so would drag the screen upward.

So to me, that’s what’s natural.

Right, but that doesn’t answer my question. If anything, it makes me more curious, since this isn’t the first time he’s been singled out for doing the same thing that virtually all of them do as a matter of course.

I’m not saying it’s a bad thing - quite the contrary. Charging (and preferably removing from office and imprisoning) corrupt politicians is not only a good thing, but arguably the single best thing we could do as a nation right now. Official corruption is at the heart of virtually every single ill that this country currently suffers.

But it’s notably a thing that’s almost never prosecuted, in spite of the fact that it’s not only widespread, but often brazen.

So again, I’m just curious what’s special about him - why a government that generally turns a blind eye to corruption has chosen to prosecute this particular instance of it.

I wonder what this is really about.

I have no doubt that the corruption is real, but that’s sort of beside the point, since corruption is essentially universal in Washington. There has to be some reason that they focused on him specifically when they legitimately could charge pretty much anyone and everyone. Charging one Washington politician with corruption is sort of like charging one Burning Man attendee with drug possession.

Yeah - I used to check in on it from time to time, and there were always new responses, and new people trying to argue with him, and he’d just run them in circles with hilariously overly literal (mis)interpretations of whatever they said. It went on for years.

I’m pretty sure I remember the admin deleting part of it while it was still active, and eventually deleting it entirely. It’s a shame - it should’ve been saved for posterity.

Years ago, on IMDb, a poster called rabbitmoon kept a thread going for years on the Rambo board that is still the best I’ve ever seen.

The whole thing started with him posting that he was shocked when, about a third of the way through the movie, there was a scene in which a character was shot with a bullet from a gun. Then he countered, completely earnestly and deadpan, every response he got.

The original thread is long gone, and the only thing I could find of it is an excerpt that was posted on Reddit - LINK

And not only will you make everyone’s lives better - seemingly ironically, by simply accepting the fact that you’re often wrong, you actually make it more likely that you’ll be right.

That’s the part that I think people especially need to understand, since a refusal to admit that you’re wrong is generally rooted in an ego-driven need to be right, and refusing to admit that you’re wrong guarantees that right is the one thing that you won’t be. You’ll just keep clinging to the same wrong idea and keep failing to fulfill that need to be right.

If, on the other hand, you just freely admit that you’re wrong, then you’re instantly free to move on to another, and better, position, making it that much more likely that you’ll actually be right. And if you don’t get it that time, that’s fine - just freely admit that you’re wrong again and move on again. Keep doing that and sooner or later you actually will be right, instead of just pretending to be.

So you’ll not only make everyone’s lives more pleasant - you’ll actually better serve your desire to be right. What more could you want?