pigeonburger
1yr ago
The people who are blaming hip-hop for cultural decay would have blamed jazz for the same 70 years ago, and now jazz is probably the second most "respectable" high brow musical genre after classical.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
The main argument is that Section 230 as-is allows big tech to have their cake and eat it too. They can claim to be not liable for user content on the basis that they cannot control what is posted on them, then turn around and heavily "curate" content on political grounds. The idea would be to repeal Section 230 and replace it with an alternative that forces a consistent position; either you curate content and are liable for the content you allow, or you aren't liable but have to tolerate wrongthink on your platform.
Reassurance that death is not the end.
*EDIT: Meaningful words of comfort for those who grieve.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
Numbers are hard to put in context on this, but vibes-wise, I don't know if I'm completely isolated from the affected class of people by my filter bubble, but here in Quebec I don't know a single person taking opioids outside of medical bounds (abusing prescribed or non prescribed). On the other hand the government recently put out a TV ad advising the population that they made an anti-opioid overdose drug available for free in pharmacies and that ad felt to me like a foreign object intruding into my filter bubble.
I'm not sure about the Swedes, but for the the British and the French I think a good part of it is in the national temperament. The British are legalists. They will only consider solutions to their predicament that paint inside the lines, even if the lines are so restrictive as to bind them from responding effectively to intimidation. While the French can be at any specific moment more or less accepting than the British, as a people if the wind changes they would be willing to take bolder actions. I can't ever imagine the British going for "repatriation" for any reason; from their perspective British citizens are all equal, period, and even permanent residents have rights and cannot be discriminated against directly. Any law to resolve these issues would have to be a carefully thought out meta-level law that doesn't single out anything in particular. But if the muslim population pushes the French the wrong way a couple more times, they might find these kind of solutions on the table. The French are willing to make object-level laws specifically against things they don't like, even if it's "unfair". See, law against the islamic veil. It's not going to stop youths from lashing out, but it might make more organized attempts at bullying the local population less attractive, as it tends to make the french hate muslims, not hold hands and sing "Don't Look Back In Anger" while decrying hatred in all its forms.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
A college friend from Luxembourg and I were in Montreal once and a homeless man asked us for money. He was shocked and said that would be unthinkable in Luxembourg.
It's probably that I've become desensitised but Montreal is not even really bad with this, we might have the proper balance of how to treat them. The police, barring extreme circumstances, do not let the homeless cluster until they become a problem. The real trouble tends to start when they interact with one another, if they're spread out they might panhandle and annoy the public a bit, but they don't often get violent.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
It's not exactly the same, but I think it shares components with the "DARVO" tactic. Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
Maybe if OP or his brother has a talk with the teen afterwards about the movie they could highlight the philosophy. Maybe I was just thick, but when I was younger it eluded me how Hollum was a weak leader, I accepted the crew's stated reason for their dislike of him.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
Of recent movies, the Dune adaptations would fit the bill while being entertaining. Later books muddle the message, but the first one (and its adaptations) showcases legitimate, virtuous leadership in a righteous struggle against decadent, and in the case of the Harkonnens outright degenerate, adversaries. It makes very clear why Leto and Paul are inspiring leaders and why they are a threat to the Emperor. It makes a great case in favor of virtue.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
A very good suggestion, but I'm afraid the case laid out by the movie would have eluded me when I was a teen, because it's not as clear it's making a general point about leadership and the nature of society rather than a narrow one purely in the service of a (truly excellent) action movie. Fight Club meanwhile beats you over the head with the fact it's making an argument about society.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
My wife is from southern europe, she moved to live with me. From observing life there, they do have high quality produce year round, which I envy them for, but we do have comparable produce here too, when it's in season and doesn't have to travel too much. Yes, winter is difficult, but in season I've had superlative local tomatoes I would be unashamed to pit against any other countries' best. Same for most produce we grow here.
Other than that, yes, the lifestyle in this video seems pleasant, but there isn't really much stopping us from having it even in cities, we just... don't. I have a farmer's market 5 minutes walk from me, and a very large one 30 minutes away by bus. No matter how much more expensive that food is than supermarket food, it's still vastly cheaper than ordering/eating out and we do the latter way too often (especially considering the diminishing returns in enjoyment).
Maybe there's something we don't want to admit in city life that makes most people at least bit depressive, and that makes us not want to seek out the things we know would make life better even when they're right at hand.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
Can we solve this with good old free market capitalism?
For one of your problems, namely:
Google has been largely useless for years
Then I think the answer is yes. Check out Kagi. It's not perfect, but it is an improvement on Google in my opinion
pigeonburger
1yr ago
The flip side of that is, for instance, action movies where the good guy blasts criminals that has conservatives and normies cheering together, and liberals clicking their tongue "this is so problematic, this is encouraging people acting vigilante violence against the underprivileged and minorities who are driven to crime by this racist, unfair count..." and so on.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
That was not his only outburst though, his first big moment in the spotlight (outside of his niche) in pop culture was the "George Bush doesn't care about black people" incident, something he probably believed outside of mental illness paranoia (it was commonly believed in liberal circles), but it was just indelicate to say in a charity marathon.
Or the "imma let you finish" incident, which had nothing to do with politics or paranoia but everything to do with misunderstanding what's appropriate.
Up until he touched the third rail his outbursts were just that of someone telling his mind the way you're not supposed to, doubly so when you have a public persona to maintain. I'm not convinced if his touching the third rail is meaningfully different except in the severity of the pushback he got.
That kind of person exists, his name is Kanye West and it was hilarious until it started being sad as it became harder and harder to ignore that his outbursts, his inability to read social cues (to play armchair psychiatrist, I think he is likely a savant autist), were not only selecting him out of super-stardom but alienating him from friends and family.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
I've read about a couple of these situations and the best answer I can take away is: they live in a place that has gone insane.
Yes, that's it. Sadly, places that have gone insane don't make it necessarily obvious that they have gone insane, because they attempt to gaslight the sane. And being nice prosocial apes those sane ones waste a lot of time they could be using to get away from insane place wondering if everyone around them seeming insane is not what insane people observe about the world.
Do you believe Canada is on the slippery slope towards gas chambers?
I wouldn't say quite that, but canadian culture in particular is uniquely vulnerable to mass insanity and mass manipulation, being obsessed with getting along over anything else. So while it's not on the slope right now, you can be sure the canadian slope is gonna be steep and well lubrified when we get on it.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
I think the deeper implication that makes it worth appealing for Trudeau is that being rebuked by the court does affect the real reason the act was invoked. Considering what kind of person I believe Trudeau is and his internationalist allies' goals are, I think the point was mostly the chilling effect. If the point was to end the blockades, police departments have testified that they had plans to do just that that did not require the invocation of the Emergencies Measure Act or doing anything as unprecedented as going after donators. And the rebuke can give some heart to those that will at some point in the future consider dissidence that maybe the system is not yet entirely captured after all.
https://safe.global/
Gnosis Safe (now it seems they've renamed to Safe) is a very popular multisig wallet. They boast of millions of accounts and tens of billions in assets locked. Back when I was more into crypto (before crypto winter) it seemed to be the most popular multisig in the Ethereum ecosystem. In essence a multisig is a smart contract that holds, recieves but sends crypto only when certain conditions are met, usually when x out of y wallets have signed off on the transaction.
https://help.safe.global/en/articles/40842-set-up-and-use-spending-limits
Safe has a spending limits option. That means you could lock your funds in a multisig wallet that a certain number of friends and extended family have keys for (and/or spread them in bank safe boxes), and keep the ability to spend up to a certain limit for yourself. That way you could not be forced to transfer the entirety of your crypto without someone at the same time getting to enough of your friends/family/safety box keys.
*EDIT: Of course, I think it's important to repeat one of the crucial mantras to safe crypto usage: never trust something you don't really understand. I'm looking at Safe now and they've added some "recovery" features that I would have to investigate personally before I could consider trusting. Even without outright fraud or incompetence, some wallets/contracts try to resolve difficult usability problems (like password recovery) in ways that sacrifice security, and they don't always communicate that fact very plainly.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
You can do similar things with crypto through smart contracts.
Seeing that over a summer it was free game to take over neighborhoods, torch police stations, do nightly assaults on federal courtrooms, attempting to blind police officers, and in the previous years interrupt official proceedings (supreme court nominations), some people could have been given a wrong impression, yes. Not so much that the government wouldn't be interested in it, but that the judiciary branch would be so captured as to do what looks at least to one side like enforcing laws on blatantly political lines.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
True, but more than ever we're at an inflection point nowadays where the ability to process this information and abuse it meets a distrust of its handlers. It's barely been one year where the public has seen the ability for computers to read and seemingly really "understand" human speech and its intents. All that collected data that we thought was too much to be processed, it could now be fed to NLP algos and to LLMs to read through and flag, on all sorts of criteria. Take a small fast LLM like Phi-2, tell it to read all personal conversations on Facebook Messenger or whatnot, flag all those that seem to indicate political extremism (as defined by politicians the public distrusts), forward them to a smarter LLM (GPT-4) to review, if it agrees, forward to a human for further review.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
The powers that be seem intent on making examples of very average people these days. We've seen extreme prosecution of actions that "reasonable people" would believe would not draw nearly that much individual attention from the government (trucker protest in Canada, J6). And the other side is worried about the idea that, for instance, a right-wing government could use private collected information to identify and deport immigrants. "If you haven't done anything wrong (or big) you have nothing to fear" is not convincing to anyone.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
and whoever hacks them, which is a very remote possibility
Would you consider Microsoft making a configuration mistake giving read access to every Office 365 account to a test account that was then trivially hacked more or less likely than Facebook making a similar mistake? I work in IT too, and I would have considered Microsoft more serious than Facebook regarding security. Maybe I'm wrong and Microsoft is just unserious about security while Facebook is serious. Maybe. But personally I still adjusted my estimation of the likelihood of this kind of serious breach from all of FAANG(O)/big tech upwards.
Will it cause a significant loss of political capital for Trudeau and his government?
No, political capital in favor of Trudeau is at very very low point right now, it's quite likely the people who still support Trudeau right now are not moderates and the lawfulness of the invocation is unlikely to be a concern to them.
It might be a bit more uncomfortable for the NDP, which supported the invocation, although the swing NDP voter is more likely someone who hesitated between NDP and Liberals than NDP and anything else, so unlikely to have much sympathy for the Conservative/"alt-right"-coded truckers either.
Well yeah, if criminals had the moral wiring and foresight to dodge "tragedy of the commons" scenarios, they wouldn't be criminals.
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