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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • After WWII there was a halcyon era where nearly every adult in America agreed that nerds had been crucial to our winning. That’s why Operation Paperclip came to be where we stole all the former Axis nerds we could find.

    It also led to an unprecedented boom in education spending, research spending, etc., mostly aimed at beating the USSR at technological development. Sputnik goosed that significantly, and the Apollo program briefly did as well, until Americans got bored of Moon landings…

    That was probably the first major flashing red warning light most of us ignored: Moon landings… boring!!!

    Anyway, educated people started doing things that weren’t directly associated with winning the Cold War, like exposing the dangers of lead in everything, the dangers of smoking, the dangers of chlorofluorocarbons, the dangers of greenhouse gasses, etc.

    That threatened the ability of grotesquely wealthy hoarders to hoard even more grotesque levels of wealth.

    So they started the project to dismantle education in America.

    That project kicked into afterburn once the USSR collapsed and the Cold War ended.

    And so far, nerds haven’t been successful in regaining their status.






  • it’s a combo of trolling and attention seeking. “there’s no such thing as bad press” and all that.

    we should point it out, condemn it, but not engage in arguments with them about what is and isn’t a sig heil.

    and when they pop up in other places trying to talk about other stuff, just bring up the fact that they threw a Nazi salute from time to time.

    the most important thing is to focus on their evil policies and actions. but we can’t forget their performative evil.




  • ristoril_zip@lemmy.ziptoAnarchism@lemmy.dbzer0.comDavid Graeber birthday
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    2 months ago

    every example of “monkey considering monkey stranger” was “bad monkey.” That is the forest of this article: we’re good monkeys to monkey friends and bad monkeys to monkey strangers.

    but that’s not the case at all, because we have monkey traditions and monkey manners and monkey mores.

    again I agree that we don’t think of people outside our 150-200 person capacity in the same way as those we know well. we don’t give them the level of consideration we should. we don’t live up to the golden rule all the time.

    but EVERY example in the article was monkey stranger --> bad monkey.


  • my thought is actually that higher levels of technology begin to whittle away at the workability of more “free form” social organization.

    For example, I’d argue that American Indians were living in something much closer to anarchy than anything else when the technologically vastly superior Europeans arrived with guns and absolutely demolished them.

    I think anarchist societies could probably solve problems that require high technology (electricity, sewage, water distribution…), probably in ways we can’t imagine. But I don’t think they can solve the “higher technology oppressor” problem.


  • ristoril_zip@lemmy.ziptoAnarchism@lemmy.dbzer0.comDavid Graeber birthday
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    2 months ago

    it seems accurate to say that most people conceive only of “people i know well enough to fully humanize” and “all other humans.”

    I take a huge issue with the portrayal that all of us are willing to fuck over the second group all the time with no acknowledgement that over the centuries we’ve built elaborate customs and mores for interacting with strangers or within groups or between groups.

    The author focusing on hypothetical examples of monkeys mistreating monkey strangers exclusively is inaccurate to the reality we all live in. There are monkeys out in the real world who just help monkey strangers altruistically. Just stopping to help change a tire gives the lie to the author’s premise.

    Are there asshole monkeys? Sure. But we’re not all assholes to monkey strangers.

    AND even in small knit monkey communities sometimes there are “defectors” (game theory term) and the society can react to them in many different ways.










  • Well back when computers were being developed/ improved there was a pretty strong commitment throughout the Western nations to advancing and expanding education for everyone.

    In that paradigm, people would become more educated and better at critical thinking at a steady pace, probably on par with the rate at which computer programs advanced in their capacity to mimic human behavior.

    So, “can it fool more people into believing it’s a human” would’ve been a great test of whether the program was super advanced.

    Instead we’ve had 50 years of attacks on public education by Republicans that has been tolerated - or at least not fought hard enough - by Democrats. So not particularly advanced programs can fool a great many people. That does make the Turing Test moot, I think.