Mainstream media is just billionaire media.

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Sociocultural boundaries are almost entirely grounded in language. Nation states are almost entirely grounded in imagination.

Someone claimed that Stalin made things worse. You implied that Stalinism couldn’t be worse than the Tsarist system.

Obviously such an argument is flawed. When we say that Stalinism “made things worse,” we mean compared to an easy-to-imagine, common-sense alternative for that time and place. For instance, if someone had shot Stalin and then allowed a random person to run the Soviet Union for a while, things would have almost certainly gone better.

This is like saying “in which way is capitalism worse than feudalism.” In the way that it was easy to imagine a better alternative.

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Yes, and while I like being anonymous, I don’t like literally half the internet being made of bots and foreign trolls. Lemmy is such a tiny community that we haven’t attracted their attention, but these bot farms and state-sponsored disinformation campaigns could crush this website in a weekend if they directed their attention here.

Why is this bad? What is the upside of anyone under 16 using social media?

EDIT: the last 20 years have been an experiment in online anonymity, and the result is a dead internet infested by AI bots and foreign disinformation. At this point, I think civilized nations with free-speech protections should experiment with this sort of thing.

Republicans are human, but they’re not people in the normative sense of the word. Blaming them is like blaming rabid animals. You might think this is an exaggeration. Technically, only 5% of people are psychopathic, but the condition is a spectrum. Sub-diagnostically, it’s closer to 30% of the population. Those are the folks happy to ban abortion, criminalize homosexuality, etc. A main feature of psychopathy is an indifference to the truth, moral or empirical, and the suffering of others.

Why would any rational person move to Florida? Lmao.

The Supreme Kangaroo Court of the United States strikes again. It’s kind of amazing that out of 9 justices we have 2 avowed rapists, not to mention several christian nationalists.

And yet we don’t have a black market of “lawn darts.” There are no cartels manufacturing and smuggling lawn darts. No epidemic of lawn dart users. Something about these cases is disanalogous.

All laws are concessions. You surrender some rights in order to safeguard other more important rights. It seems that the right to use lawn darts is not one that people value, unlike the right to eat, drink, and imbibe whatever they want.

Medical doctors agree that sugar is extremely harmful, hepatotoxic. There’s no upside to ingesting it unless you’re starving. Why is it legal? Because,

1. there’s no moral standing for the government to tell anyone what to do with their own body as long as they’re not harming anyone else, and
2. the consequences of outlawing sugar would be worse than the harms of ingesting it.
3. And the same is true of drugs.

Pragmatism is one way to justify policies (seat belt laws infringe on your autonomy, but they make society quantifiably better). Unfortunately, criminalizing drugs makes society worse.

Many of the downsides of drug abuse are a direct consequence of such criminalization: addicts unable to seek medical treatment and having their lives ruined, communities torn apart by drug cartels and police violence.