The one that says that conspiracy theories are used by elites to distract us from the real injustices and problems in this world.

You’re right it does seem like a Polymarket brainrot bet.

I want to clarify where I’m coming from. For starters, what I was trying to say was that I’m not as pessimistic. I don’t believe in blatant conflict-of-interest bets, but I do like betting with friends quite a bit, especially when it comes to social processes. I usually bet a fast-food hamburger because it’s cheap and we can catch up or talk about why we each thought we were going to win the bet.

I’ve lost one bet and won dozens. Usually, my friends are pessimistic and I’m not so much.

So, here’s my proposal. Instead of betting, how about I just say I hope the world’s alright?

How long do we have before shit starts to break down due to lack of food and water, even in the imperial core? I give it less than a year at best.

Let’s bet.

Take your pick:

• I bet no G7 country will declare food emergency within their borders in the next 12 months (ending 2027-5-30 at 23:59 UTC).
• I bet the FAO food index will not go above 219 in the next 12 months (ending 2027-5-30 at 23:59 UTC).

These are contextual. Some people could say “absolutely” or “for sure” or “obviously”, and yet they could appear arrogant instead of being persuasive.

If you’re going for persuasive frames, I think it’s best to frame an argument around empathy. If you can prove that you understand someone else’s problems, they’ll be more open to you and your proposed solution.

Of course, this is easier said than done.

Yeah, the green number shows the improvement, and Babbel users improved more. What the green number doesn’t tell you is how much time it took to get there. If you look at that, Babbel is more inefficient than LingQ and Rosetta Stone.

Thx for your ethical considerations 🙏 here’s another important cause

Here: https://comparelanguageapps.com/index.html and here: https://comparelanguageapps.com/Vocabulary-or-Grammar-Proficiency.html

:)

I have a suggestion that is not FOSS, but it is privately held so the pressure to be profitable each quarter is not at all the same as publicly held companies.

Check out the privacy policies of LingQ and Rosetta Stone. Idk if they’re good, but I know they’re the most efficient language-learning apps right now. They require the least amount of minutes using them to achieve the highest scores in standardized language tests.

Two per day

Capitalism and imperialism

So that I can picture clearly what you’re saying, could you elaborate?

Ok… if we’re looking at this dispassionately and considering history, this meme may be accurate only in some places, but not in the rest.

Conservatism was articulated in response to liberalism. Liberalism argued for rationality, contractual social relationships, and natural rights. When liberalism proposed this, conservatives articulated a response: it argued for tradition, organicist and inherited social relationships, and traditional wisdom.

These two worldviews were so incompatible that hundreds of thousands of people died defending their views against the others’. An example is France in the 18th century.

Some conservatives recognized the power of liberalism: a bourgeois elite was burgeoning. Faced with this reality, some conservatives adapted to this change. This is what some people may take as evidence of “liberalism contains conservatism”. But that’s not the whole story.

Historical materialism may point out that both conservatism and liberalism have fought for capitalism, and that therefore they serve the same function. If that’s all we ask from an analytical framework, then that’s okay. But I want to understand why there are hundreds of thousands of dead people in the 18th century. And, luckily, historical materialism istelf can, at its best, explain the difference between liberalism and conservatism.

For example, the 18th century revolutions occurred in response to the growth of the bourgeois. Conservatives defended pre-capitalist social structures and modes of production. This was not capitalist versus capitalist. And historical materialism can explain this violence by distinguishing between these class formations, not by collapsing these class formations.

Even if both conservatives and liberals later prove capable of ruling capitalist societies, I believe we shouldn’t settle for a reductionist view of history.

There’s a further complication: America. The American Revolution is as American as the French Revolution was French. They were not the same. Americans lacked the aristocracy that the French had. Therefore, conservatism in America is not at all the same as conservatism in France. American conservatives defend a country that was born liberal.

In my view, saying that conservatism is the same as liberalism is problematic. It seems reductive and reduces the explanatory power of both concepts. For example, if someone truly believes there is no difference between liberalism and conservatism, how would they explain the hundreds of thousands of dead in the 19th century revoutions? Plus there’s the following problem: at its worst, conflating conservatism with liberalism is a way of imposing the American lens on the rest of the world.

I’ve met Christians who have explained their train of thought.

Their strongest argument, in my mind, is that the Christian god created the universe for humans to choose to live well. This god is not intervening and simply created the universe’s initial conditions, much like a clock-maker. In this view, Christians simply choose what kind of life they want and they hope it will get them closer to their god.

It would seem that the choice of being progressive does not stop many Christians from meeting their god. In fact, I’ve met people who say that progressive causes are the way we build heaven on Earth.

Another argument I’ve heard is that the Christian god has said lots of things to lots of people over long spans of time. These utterings have not always been exactly the same. Sometimes the Christian god says some things to some people and some other things to other people. Therefore it is a good Christian’s duty to dutifully reinterpret the Christian god’s words.

I don’t particularly like this second argument because it seems unnecessarily complicated.

But the first one seems more coherent and with less moving pieces.

Not ruminating about it + time + having stuff to look forward to in life + paying attention to my present

Maybe.

It’s possible reality has entities that don’t interact with anything.

But we wouldn’t know about them, because to be able to know them we’d have to interact with them.

They’d be an unknowable unknown.

I wouldn’t worry too much about unknowable unknowns.

For all we know, they might as well not exist.

This is a matter of defining words. It’s fine to play the game of “which word best corresponds to the phenomena”, but I prefer playing another game: what function or what purpose is this word or this definition serving in context?

It would be sad to see “racism is structural” as an excuse for people to be cynical assholes (as opposed to tactical protesters). It’s much better when it’s used to achieve an equitable and fair world.

Beyond function, there’s also another framework that could help you: complexity dynamics. Racism happens within a complex system. Within that system, there are powerful actors, constraints, and constructors. Understanding this makes it clearer why, even if polite society is polite to marginal groups, systematic discrimination in schooling, credit, and incarceration are still structural racism.

If this clicks with you and you wanna learn more, let me know and I can recommend some stuff :)

I was working temporarily at a place with a cafeteria. I was having lunch and a guy sat with me and we talked for a while. It was obvious he wasn’t brainwashed by neoliberalism or neoconservatism. I mentioned it and he said “I’m an anarchist”.

“Check out Lemmy.” He loved how it sounded. Idk. Maybe he’s here.

Also, I get that, arguably, anarchists aren’t normies, but you defined normies in a computer-literacy way and he wasn’t a techie.

how can I atone for my sins

I’m glad we can agree. It’s a bit funny that I don’t necessarily entirely agree with what you say we agree on, but I’m glad that we can.

As to evaluating nature, I’m not sure nature is always brutal and scary. Just last night I said hi to my good friend the opossum. As to being a nerd, can’t really argue with that one. I hear it’s an insult for millennials but a good thing for Gen Z. I’ll take the Z one thx

It’s alright I guess

I agree that nature is not hell. I also agree that there are plenty of problems when we orient our societies around capital accumulation. Heck, I see that there were benefits to the Paleolithic that we lost when we transitioned to the Neolithic.

If we are to conscientiously evaluate nature, I think it’s important neither to romanticize it nor demonize it.

I accept that my original comment seemed one-sided, reductive, and fear-laden. However, my goal was to serve as a counterweight to OP. Maybe I should’ve been more comprehensive in my original comment.

At the same time, I hope we can both agree that nature is a natural system that isn’t inherently good or bad. We humans are also not inherently good or bad. Therefore, any reductive narrative that claims that “nature is evil”, “nature is perfect”, “humans are the virus”, or “humans are perfect” is not accurate.

We are complex creatures in complex systems. Therefore our functions aren’t fixed. We can exploit exaptation. And so can what we call nature.