Clement Tahershamsi @Clementulus@qoto.org

@thesquirrelfish @LouisIngenthron
Exactly. And from what I have observed it seems to me that there are a lot of people who would like a social platform that is similar to real life where you go to a public space and engage with ideas that you are interested in and ignore the ones that you are not. Its part of the reason I like the Fediverse, there is no algorithm, I just go and search for ideas that pique my interest. If the fediverse was full of Nazis and lets assume no content moderation for a moment, I would not really expect to ever come across those posts or ideas because I dont search them out and if for some reason I did see them I would just block those users and move on. I understand that content moderation is good for lots of other reasons (like preventing harassment and such) and I can understand that there are probably many people who would not mind outsourcing their content moderation to a trusted 3rd party; but there are a great many people like me who are perfectly happy to have an open space where we can craft our experience to our wishes, even if it means seeing some despicable content now and again (excluding those horrific things like child porn which should of course be wiped from the face of the earth)

@LouisIngenthron I do understand why deplatforming happens in a lot of cases in the real world. I was just saying that I could not think of a *principled* reason to do so. Clearly I am not the one making these decisions at Twitter or anywhere else. But also I would not think it correct to participate in protest deplatforming, where some people go to public lectures or presentations and make a rukus to prevent the genuine guests from hearing what the speaker has to say; or petition public institutions to refuse spaces to certain people based on their ideas (and usually very skewed views of their ideas at that).

@LouisIngenthron @Unit @unchartedworlds @futurebird
The deplatforming question is an interesting question to me. If we set aside legitimate targetted harassment, intimidation and threats, I cannot work out good first principles for deplatforming on social media. For one, if you don't like what someone is saying, you can just ignore them, block them, dont follow them or whatever. Deplatforming is only done to limit other peoples access to a certain individuals ideas. In the case of children I could understand having parental controls on what ideas they come into contact with since they are not yet mature in their thinking. But for adults I can't come up with a non-paternalistic reason why I should be allowed to limit what other people see online and I also don't trust other people to make these types of decisions for me.

@freemo hilarious. When I went in 2010 they pulled me aside and questioned me for 30 minutes because I was 20 cm shorter when my passport was made (they couldnt believe that I had grown that much in less than 2 years.)

@freemo the hands attached to these guns
P.S : I live in Canada

@icedquinn @freemo I think it's all to distract us from the orca uprising.

@molly0xfff Love this. But I am also of the opinion that most of us have a severe lack of imagination when it comes to what truly late stage capitalism will look like. We may just be getting started.

@icedquinn @freemo Obviously expressing joy at someones death is horrible. However, I suspect that some people were more trying to poke fun at the way our media trains us to care about relatively inconsequential things. I have seen dozens of news stories suggested to me over the past weeks about this group of foolhardy people (who also happened to be extremely wealthy) dying in a completely foreseeable way. Everyone at my workplace knows this story inside and out. Yet a few weeks ago not a single story appeared anywhere about the chinese helping to put an end to the decades long war in Yemen, a war in which american drones were killing women and children so that they could have better relations with the Saudis. Most of these same people dont even know that there was ever a war in Yemen, let alone that their tax dollars were probably used for war crimes.

@dragfyre This is actually a neat demonstration of how LLMs are not designed to instruct humans on the truth, like a teacher, but to make humans feel comfortable with the responses it gives (kind of like a sycophant). It will initially attempt to give a factual answer, but if the human is unreceptive it tries to change the answer to make it as palatable as possible to the recipient. LLMs are just trying to be that guy at the bar buying you drinks who is only there to get in your pants.

@esther Yeah the good old argument: People X are not like us, they do not believe in truth, they do not believe in Justice or Fairness. They wish simply to oppress others, like us.

An argument literally used by every authoritarian government ever to justify their oppression. Not to mention that the logical conclusion of that line of thinking is that People X must be cleansed from our lands to ensure our safety. It's disturbing how many people have voiiced their support of the statement, considering it could have been taken right out of a speech from Pol Pot.

@freemo I agree with a lot of that. You also reminded me of another reason I believe it became associated with the division of human sexes is that the two energies are required to be in balance with each other for the act of creation (perhaps seen as positive organization of matter) to take place, just as both male and female bodies are required for procreation. This is opposed to the imbalance of these energies which causes dissolution; excess male energy is how we view aggression symbolically and excess female energy as anxiety.

@freemo Another interesting conversation! (Especially for a dabbler in symbology). I think the fundamental difference is that femininity (associated with water or geometrically, the circle) is a spiritual stance of accepting information; which is why it is associated with empathy because to do so you must take in the information being given by other people in order to empathize with them. Masculinity (fire or geometrically a line) is the opposite, a blocking out of information so that one can act (since the world produces a huge abundance of information that we cannot possibly process, we are required to block out some to not be overwhelmed all the time). Thus action (getting from point A to point B, like a line) is considered masculine and reception (ability to contain like a circle or a receptacle) is considered feminine. What is unclear to me is whether the association to human sexes came from the geometric association (the main distinguishing feature of the sexes, the genitals, resembling a line for men and a circle for women) or if some observations of generalities in human behavior led to the association (men being more prone to action without as much thought and women being more likely to "overthink" things, or at least think more than men do). That is my concise answer, believe it or not

@freemo Clearly they were not into celebrity BDSM.

@freemo @rrb @pj I understand your points but I was not arguing for guns to be illegal. The vast majority of guns available to americans are also legal to buy and own in Canada, the difference however is that there is a much more involved process to acquiring guns, including mandatory safety courses. The process is especially detailed for those who wish to own handguns (statistically the most deadly firearm in developed nations). This process, along with the lack of cultural fixation on gun ownership is what keeps the numbers of guns in circulation down and not outright bans. These safety measures also helps us keep guns out of the hands of habitually violent criminals because there are far fewer black market guns to buy and fewer legal ones to steal. It would be amusing to an american to know how many petty criminals in canada resort to shooting each other with pellet and bb guns simply because it is so difficult for them to find actual guns, whether through theft or illegal purchase. And while many violent altercations will result in injury and death regardless of firearm involvement, it seems illogical to me to argue that those very altercations would be equally deadly if everyone was strapped. Also speaking to the attitude of police officers on the job here in Canada, there is definitely a whole lot of stress that is avoided because it is so rare that they have to deal with perps with access to guns. With the number of mental health related calls that police respond to daily here I couldnt imagine how they would feel if they knew that these people could very well have loaded firearms in their possession. I know quite a few cops with 30+ years on the job who only needed to draw their sidearm for a call a handfull of times in their entire careers! And it was not for lack of calls, but because they rarely felt that they needed them, because their perps werent packing heat.

@freemo @rrb @pj An interesting discussion. As someone who works in policing in canada I have been exposed to a lot of information about gun use in crime and the pros/cons of gun ownership and use in general. One of the aspects I think that you overlook when arguing that people would be safer if everyone carried around guns is that the vast majority of altercations, whether physical or otherwise, come about when otherwise reasonable individuals become emotionally disturbed or incensed (drugs and alcohol often contribute to this), then they make decisions they otherwise would not. A huge percentage of assaults/suicides by guns occur in residences where they are not safely stored, because individuals in the midst of an emotional episode can grab them and use them without a chance for a second thought. Suicide is also a huge one, you are *far* more likely to successfully commit suicide if there is a gun in your home and seeing as how the rate of suicidality in most developed countries keeps on increasing, probably the best reason to not own a gun is to protect you from yourself! And I think the argument for America being a naturally more violent country than other developed nations is not adequately supported by evidence, people in canada get into altercations all the time, but so few of them involve firearms that they are less likely to turn deadly, in fact, the communities within Canada that have the most fatal altercations are the very ones with the highest prevalence of gun ownership! Not having easy access to guns is certainly helping to prevent a ton of needless gun deaths. While it is true that a dedicated individual can acquire the necessary firepower to commit an atrocity, like what happened a few years ago in Nova Scotia, that event took years of planning and preparation; what gun control helps to prevent are the deaths that occur from more temporary insanities.