through thorough thought, yadda yadda.

What I don't understand is that as soon as you start criticizing other languages for similar absurdities you're gonna get a bunch of people coming out of the woodwork to defend it. People are fine to shit on english for being a horrible language, and I'm fine with that as well because that's true, but as soon as you criticize spanish, i.e. another language that spread to everywhere because of colonialism, you're gonna get dogpiled about how everything is getting forced from the outside by non-native spanish speakers and how it's all so artificial and astroturfed. But then they also don't acknowledge these calls whenever they have come from inside the house, which is something that's always happening, and they also won't do anything really to refute the core logic of the critique outside of what's basically just prescriptivism.

I dunno, maybe it's just because the british have sucked the fun out of everything and american imperialism has kind of given english generally a bad reputation among all of the south american countries which would generally speak spanish, and so that's going to lead to a kind of resistance to anything seen as coming in from there, which is fair enough.

The bigger problem I have, though,, which also applies to english, is how ineffective any of these more academic strategies for change are, even if they're mostly well-intentioned. You see this outside of language, too. As long as we're not making some institutional change, then no progress is gonna be made because people will see it all as artificial ivory tower bullshit, and won't wanna use it. For english, it would have to be taught in school as part of a base level curriculum, and if you're trying to grassroots it, then it'll have to be explained every time you use it, with every new person, which impedes communication in literal terms and means it probably won't get picked up.

What's weird to me is that we can't have that, and implicitly there can kind of be nothing that challenges the informal rules or structure of language, so no major shakeups are allowed, but still somehow we'll see every kid on tiktok every two weeks start to accumulate some form of AAVE and then proceed to completely drive it into the ground. I guess that's just because the internet is kind of a chaotic place and these things are primed to propagate pretty easily, but it's kind of frustrating how totally undirected it all is, and how it all preys on our worst instincts. Means we get people that can only talk in buzzwords and call everything woke without having any formal definition for what that means really. I wonder how fast you could artificially change someone's mind for the better if that's what you actually wanted to do with social media. That maybe sounds villainous or manipulative, but I think we have to understand that this is something that exists and has always existed with these platforms, and by ignoring it, we just let the worst instincts and actors take over and fester instead.

They’re putting the notion of assassinating the president out there into the weak minds of their listeners, who will take that information and do with it what they will.

I do understand they can do multiple things at once even if they can barely walk and chew gum, and I would like if they were wiped from the face of the earth, but I would much rather that they turn their attention towards the president, instead of putting their attention on trans people or whatever racial minority comes up week by week to rile up the base. The president has a large amount of protection on him at all times, the chances that any right wing nutjob can target him effectively strike me as shockingly low, and if they did target him, then probably you'd see something actually happen to prosecute them. Basically nobody else has that same level of protection.

The only way to move left at a national level is to show the establishment that progressive candidates are winning in local and state races and it’s more than just a couple of them here or there.

I mean, it's pretty hard to run as a progressive candidate if you're not running at the federal level. Not only are you working with a subdivision of a subdivision of a subdivision of the country's population, but there's not many actionable progressive policies that you can actually enact at the local level, where austerity politics (due to lack of power and federal funding) and NIMBYism are more free to reign supreme. You can't exactly enact universal healthcare at the local level. Hell, you can barely get it across to house the local homeless and your resources are probably gonna be maxed out as soon as that comes up. Local infrastructure is something that can take years and years for changes to take effect, so even if that's a pretty controllable thing at the local level, it's very hard for that to be an actually campaign-able issue. Local elections are also going to have larger disparities between who's able to communicate their message effectively because they're going to have larger disparities in terms of funding, which is obviously going to reflect voter engagement very directly.

It's a much more solid and impenetrable catch-22 than people would generally be led to believe. People would like to just say that we need higher voter turnout for the city water commissioner, or that we need people to run for those positions and other positions where elections are basically a formality, and be done with it, but the issues even at the local level are systemic and pretty heavily entrenched and there are lots of thing that you can't really make serious progress on without a large level of federal intervention or funding. Those things are worth doing in their own right, sure, and at an even more atomic level, volunteering at a soup kitchen or whatever other actual local work is something that can be rewarding just by itself, right, because it makes you a better person, helps people, etc. But I also wouldn't expect those things on their own to cause a massive upset or a series of cascading progressive victories, in the same way I would expect random fluctuations in the fabric of the universe to spawn a strawberry rhubarb pie right in front of me, unless the circumstances of the pie were to already be in effect or so on.

I suppose what I am saying is that it's pretty hard to fix the apathy because the apathy is a sensible response in many respects. At one hand, the apathy is a normal response to seeing that you are adrift in a kind of sea of chaos and noise where you are but one actor that can do basically nothing in the grand scheme. It's a sensible response when you understand that the things which keep you in that sea of chaos and noise are heavily entrenched and very hard to change. It's a sensible response when whatever grand narrative you were clutching to in order to make sense of the world has been exposed as totally false and hollow and probably made up by some guy in the 1800s. Apathy is especially a sensible response when you understand all of this, and also want to keep doing what you've been doing because it's really the only thing you know how to do and you're at odds otherwise with how to survive, and aren't very risk-taking specifically because you're in a kind of survival mode. The problem is I think that this is a kind of adverse adaptation, and there are some changes which are necessary to survive in such conditions. Community with other people is one of the things which consistently helps out the most in actual crises, either personal or grand in scale, and community with others is also one of those things that happens to line up precisely with political action.

Which is to say that I think the apathy will probably solve itself, because it's going to be pretty much either sink or swim, are you in or are you out, and I don't think people are going to find themselves with the luxury of inaction for very much longer or else they will probably more consistently condemn themselves to a lack of resources out of some sense of pride or just raw antisocial outlooks. But then, people knew smoking were killing them for a really long time, and that never really tapered off too much until places started banning it, so, who knows, maybe we're all just fucked.

You know this kinda makes me think that it would've been funnier if they connected two cities that hate each other more than just like, dublin and new york, which I can't really think of as ever having had beef. Maybe NYC and chicago, or something. You can't really put something like this in texas or LA because nobody fuckin walks anywhere, unless maybe you put it in like long beach or like some random part of Austin or something. Seattle? Does Seattle have beef with anywhere? On the other side, could we connect Dublin with like, London or something? Maybe some city in northern Ireland?

The fuck aren't we growing these kinds of bananas everywhere in overly exploited republics and then importing them into the US? Fuck the gros michel, fuck these petty banana snack foods, I want a banana that I can eat as a meal.

Human respect should be given, respect of an authority, I think, should be earned.

Yeah we're probably totally cooked. I wasn't even alive in the 90's, so I wouldn't know firsthand, but you can listen to nature recordings around certain locations and what was once many birds is now not very many birds.

I dunno. I think everyone looks at climate change and the destruction of ecosystems and habitats as a kind of, instantly apocalyptic issue, like that's just a turning point and then suddenly everyone dies. I don't think it's so simple. I don't really know if corn or many of the crops we rely on can weather 2 degrees celsius global warming or whatever, but I think it's probably pretty likely that humanity, or more likely, some well-meaning asshole, ends up terraforming a bunch of shit before that really happens, which will probably kill a bunch of other animals and decrease overall biodiversity to an even greater extent. I think probably humanity at large would rather kill almost every other lifeform on the planet for survival before we allow ourselves to be threatened. Or, before we allow our structures to threaten dissolution, so probably "other lifeforms" also includes like, people in third world countries who rely on more local ecology and depend on local ecosystems for their foodstuffs. More interdependent.

So I dunno, we're probably totally cooked.

I dunno I wonder how much of this thread believes in rehabilitative justice when it's convenient for them to do so, but will then turn around and advocate for extreme eye for an eye style punitive, retributive justice whenever it strikes their moral fancy. If it was seen as socially acceptable to go to the coliseum and see people thrown off of large wooden towers, or to go and look at the gallows, I can guarantee we'd still probably do it.

I also don't think this act requires psychopathy, or else you'd probably have to classify like, every teenage boy who kicks over an anthill or tries to shoot a squirrel with a bb gun as a psychopath. No, I think probably the fact that he paraded it through the town and bragged about it is the biggest indication that, much like the people in this thread, he thought he was doing something morally justified and cool.

Maybe finally I'd just like to ask the question of, if you don't actually want this guy to be horribly tortured and killed, or become some sort of adverse strain on the medical industry, become disabled, dependant on medical care (really revealing of your opinions of the elderly and disabled there, guys), then why are you calling for these things? These things which you do not actually believe should happen? Probably it's because your brain's been rotted by social media which I can appreciate, but still, I must chastize you for it, because when I do it, it's morally justified and cool. While I don't think that "death threats" from random people usually carry with them the same kind of weight as when political pundits call for the deaths of a given population or even a single person, and it's unlikely that this guy actually gets tortured with all the fixin's and trappin's of a cut off your toes style collections agency, I still think it's pretty morally repugnant and obviously unproductive to send this guy hate mail. At least package some ricin in it or something, if you really care, c'mon.

I don't actually care if you go scoop out this guy's eyes with pomegranate spoons or take your toenail clippers to his teeth or whatever, or maybe like. Leave him in the unrefrigerated milk and honey bath for several weeks. You know, lest I be accused of being an animal torturer, or complicit in animal torture, which, really beating the witch hunt allegations there, Simone. No, I don't really care about that shit, what I do mostly care about is that it's fucking annoying to see a bunch of presumably men but also women who are unable to experience emotional distress without wanting to call for an eye gougathon. It's okay to be sad and kind of mad that this shitlord is basically going to get away with this, as it would seem. I don't think it's healthy or productive to vent your emotions at this random person, though.

I could also maybe call out the "well, are you guys vegan?" hypocrisy that everyone else has already done, but I'm not a vegan and I don't care because I don't have morals, so I'll leave that to them.

Thank you for your time.

It's basically just because he's like, a moronic ape. He is able to kind of, wear the aesthetics of your everyday college dorm bro, who thinks the dark knight is the greatest movie ever made. Or at least, wear the aesthetics of their middling 30 year old, balding, divorced versions, because that movie came out in like 2008, or whatever. You can basically put him in any context, and he's able to function as the same idiot self-insert character. He's the vessel through which they can imagine themselves talking to famous celebrities, academics, comedians, and right wing conspiracy nuts.

Whoever keeps throwing in the shit about law enforcement in these stories, which I think was actually a security officer for the embassy, drawing a gun, is doing a pretty good job of distracting from the main issue of what this guy lit himself on fire and died for. Doing a much better job than all the whinging about how he was mentally ill, and how this won't change anything, and how there's no clear cause, that mainstream news outlets are doing when they cover this type of stuff, if they cover it at all.

I would also like to kind of point out here, that "this won't change anything, this guy was mentally ill, he killed himself for nothing", is really only true if you decide it to be true. We get to decide whether or not this motivates us to do something or not. We get to decide whether or not we let this affect us. Whether or not we do something, to make sure this doesn't happen again, you know? And that's mostly, in my mind, the purpose of this kind of protest.

Maybe it makes the institutions think about what they're doing, probably not, since, if they were gonna think that, they should've probably thought that about the 20,000 or so palestinians that have been killed. This protest is mostly engineered to get you mad, and sad, and to make you, the viewer, think about why this is happening, and think about what you can do to stop it. Not just deflecting immediately to whether or not it was effective, because by doing so, you let it not be as effective.

Brings to mind the discourse against, really any form of protest that I've seen. You could take the george floyd protests, for example. So, sure, the government throws in agent provocateurs, in order to turn what would otherwise be peaceful protests, which would shut down any traffic into and out of the city, and would choke off any economic activity (puts pressure on businesses, utilities, puts pressure on local government, which needs to please these people who don't really care about the protest but want things to go back to normal).

But by doing so, right, by causing those passive forms of damage, but also by causing active forms of damage, say, burning a big box store down, right, the public showcases that, if a certain legal decision to, say, let derek chauvin off, occurs, then there will be potentially more protests and more destruction, which provides great incentive against that decision occurring.

Now, in this case, there's not as clear of a process, because there's not as clear of repercussions if they decide to do nothing. About the only thing that might happen is that this might happen again, which, might, by some process of media coverage, put enough pressure on politicians to cause this to stop, if it becomes a political issue. The same thing is happening with mass shootings, which aren't a greatly impacting issue, by the numbers, right, they're much less than that of road deaths, heart disease, other forms of gun violence.

But they are so horrifying to the american public and to really anyone of moral conscience, that they should serve as a clear marker that something is wrong, and something needs to change. Serial killers create a similar effect. It's almost like a kind of terrorism, using that word without judgement, here. That's the power of these protests. We've already seen it spread across a bunch of news media, even though it's being reported about as poorly as you'd expect.

I'm not particularly sure that repeat incidents would do any good, and I think I'd generally be opposed to that, as should anyone, but, an instance of self-immolation is what caused the arab spring. This sort of thing isn't ineffective, I think it does a disservice to aaron bushnell to say otherwise.

If you want to stop this sort of thing from occurring in the first place, you should really try to understand why it was happening, instead of brushing it aside.

Damn, I thought lemmy would be better than easily swallowed obvious ragebait, but, I suppose, such is the modern internet.

I would like to believe in calendar reform as a goal. At the same time, I think calendars are one of the only pretty decent somewhat universal standards we have going for us, and if we changed it at all, you KNOW we would just be using two competing standards, not everyone would want to switch because people are stupid, so unless you forced it from the top down through technology, like a really advanced, shitty version of y2k, which would make people super pissed, I dunno if any of it would work.