tikitaki

tikitaki, hace 11 meses

My favorite part

Communities are the lifeblood of the Internet. But on today's Internet, they are not in charge of their own destiny. Instead, they are controlled by the large platforms that hold all the power online. It is time for a change.

It's time for a change all right, lol

tikitaki, hace 1 año

i think it's dangerous to be too broad with this definition

harmful in my mind is saying explicitly racist, homophobic, promoting violent, etc type of stuff

i think freedom of expression is something we should not give up easily. in actually harmful speech, i think the pros outweigh the cons. but him saying the word "triggered" is not harmful

tikitaki, hace 1 año

as much as i hate trump we should hate the sin and not the sinner

lots of trump supporters could easily be leftists

tikitaki, hace 1 año

yes, of course. it's indicative of that type of worldview and it's demeaning

however the key important part is that it isn't hate speech. being pro-hate speech and using hate speech are two different things

tikitaki, hace 1 año

zizek talks about this a lot. who are trump's most loyal fans? sure, there are the harvard educated elitists who like that he lowers taxes on the rich and the business magnates and whatnot. but the bulk of it in terms of absolute numbers is the redneck poor people

why do they support trump? because their jobs were lost to outsourcing, their wages aren't going up so housing is more expensive, their towns are slowly rotting away. they see these things and feel a (in my opinion, justified) anger towards the establishment.

someone like Trump and the GOP in general comes around, blames the gays and immigrants and tells them they will fight for them. we all know it's a lie and that they are voting against their interests - but the MAGA propaganda has gotten to them first

these same triggers (stagnant wages, anger towards the establishment/elites, erosion of infrastructure, inaccessible healthcare) also causes people to become leftists

these people could have easily flipped one way or the other and the only different is propaganda. we need to reach out to these people and convince them that the left has viable solutions for their problems. if you're interested, i can find a zizek bit where he talks about this but I've seen it myself talking to a lot of trump-supporting conservatives.

some of them are racist bigots and whatnot, but others are just really ignorant old folk who genuinely want the best for most people and have been misled by propaganda

tikitaki, hace 1 año

You're not their doctor, they arent your patients, what business is it of yours?

ok, so if you're not a doctor you can have no opinion on healthcare now? ridiculous statement. i think healthcare should be free. i don't work in healthcare or health insurance. so am i just supposed to shut the fuck up and know my place?

no, I have my opinion and I'm going to share it and @JasSmith has his opinion and he's going to share it. that's the whole point of having discussion boards. the last thing i want is this place to become an echo chamber

i think kids should be able to transition. but it's also not so simple a conversation when you're making permanent changes to teenage kids - https://nypost.com/2022/06/18/detransitioned-teens-explain-why-they-regret-changing-genders/

kids are fickle creatures and fads catch on - all of a sudden we see a dramatic rise in kids wanting to transition - like 4400% increase in girls wanting to transition to boys. is it because we are now more accepting as a society or is it social contagion? probably both and it's a serious topic we need to address if we actually do want the best for the kids. we need to keep ideology out of healthcare and make sure each individual kid is taken care of with whatever is best for them - transitioning is not always the best option. but sometimes it is.

tikitaki, hace 1 año

we aren't seeing a 4000% increase in kids becoming gymnasts

it's a poignant social topic. instead of attacking my credibility, aiming to represent me as biased, you should try to attack my argument

having said that, i support kids transitioning. i'm more upset about the "wrongthink" mentality where someone can't even share their opinion without getting pounced on. he isn't sharing hate speech he's just talking

tikitaki, hace 1 año

Also, do you really think that more people identify as trans because it’s a „fad“ or maybe it’s because your can finally openly talk about it

i think it's both. i don't know at what ratio, but kids really do follow fads. one kid kills themselves at a school and it raises the chances for all of them to do so. ideas are contagious. a kid that may just be going through the regular teenage angst period searching for an identity might latch onto the trans label to explain their feelings when really it's just a normal teenage thing to go through identity issues

again, i'm not trying to say kids shouldn't transition. i view transitioning as healthcare so to block kids off from it is absurd. but i think we also need to be careful and talk about the elephant in the room - that the rate of trans kids increasing so dramatically points to some issues with the ways we are doing it. when something jumps up so dramatically we should be asking questions

tikitaki, hace 1 año

was in the article i linked

between 2009 and 2019, children being referred for transitioning treatment in the United Kingdom increased 1,000% among biological males and 4,400% among biological females.

i guess it's too much to expect people to read things

tikitaki, hace 1 año

I vote Fedora

I've tried lots of different ones. Arch is cool if you really wanna set up your system how you like it. But Fedora works well right out of the box and updates don't break the system. Keep in mind.. I'm a Gnome-ist. I think it's the best WM for Linux.

tikitaki, hace 1 año

i didn't delete my account or my comments. i figured it'd be better to fill the thousands of comments i've made over the last 14 years with stuff like "no more centralized social medias, join kbin/lemmy/fediverse" spam

a) makes old pages look more cluttered and spammy so reduces quality of reddit

b) still removes all the content i generated from reddit so they can no longer profit off of my labor

c) it seems they can roll back deletions but it's harder for them to roll back edits (citation needed)

tikitaki, hace 1 año

this is why everyone needs to edit all their comments instead of deleting them. i edited all the comments on my 14 year old account using a script. i got banned from like 5 subs in the process - but a few days later still not rolled back

remember the API is liable to change in the next few days.. if someone wants to do this they need to do it now while they still can

tikitaki, hace 1 año

well the CCP has effectively incorporated Tiananmen Square into the propaganda. it's become a part of the national narrative - it was "a conflicted time where there were bad decisions made by both sides and they learned from it and are stronger today because of it." - please don't call me a tankie i'm trying to summarize CCP narrative

so it's not really taboo to talk about in China like people assume it is. same thing with the cultural revolution. I read the "three body problem" series by a Chinese author (really good books, if anybody likes sci-fi) and I was amazed at how critical he was of the cultural revolution

and i checked, and he's not an ex-patriate or anything.. he lives in China and released a book that became internationally succesful that was critical of the chinese government during the cultural revolution

it turns out that the CCP actually does allow some level of critique - because they view themselves today as a different party than existed 30 or 50 years ago.

Taiwan, on the other hand, is a current issue. Personally, I feel bad for the taiwanese that don't want to be integrated into China but it does seem like an inevitability at this point.

tikitaki, hace 1 año

i'm not sure what you are trying to say. you mean taiwan just needs to stay de facto independent for another few decades and they will be OK? maybe you are right, but to call Taiwan "the government of China" is to ignore reality

point being look who has a seat at the UN

tikitaki, hace 1 año

while pretending like this might be fun for you, reality is it's never going to happen. even if CCP falls apart, the state apparatus in mainland China for whatever fills the void would still be stronger than Taiwan. They're like 2 factors of magnitude larger. and that's assuming CCP falls apart - the momentum doesn't seem to be going in that direction

It's like saying Texas will be independent again one day. It's a larp

tikitaki, hace 1 año

differences between west germany / east germany v taiwan / china

1 - population

east germany 1989 - Around 16 million
west germany 1989 - Around 62 million
east germany was about 1/4th the size of west germany in terms of population

taiwan current - Around 23 million
china current - Around 1.4 billion
china has about 61x the population of taiwan in terms of population

2 - gdp

east germany 1989 - around $300 billion
west germany 1989 - around $1.5 trillion
east germany was about 1/5th the size of west germany in terms of GDP

taiwan current - around $760 billion
china current - around $17 trillion
china has about 13x the size of taiwan's GDP

3 - time period separated

germany - around 41 years
china - around 74 years
china and taiwan have been separated nearly double the time as germany - with no reunification in sight

So in the case of East Germany vs West Germany, the West was significantly larger both in terms of GDP and population. West Germany was about 4x~5x bigger and was able to incorporate the East because they were bigger. In addition, they were separated for a shorter amount of time.. the longer it goes on the more complicated it gets.

If we look at Taiwan and China, Chinese economy and population is somewhere between 1 and 2 factors of magnitude larger. Taiwan simply does not have the capacity to incorporate China. The state apparatus in mainland China is absolutely massive - it's hard to fathom how many bureaucrats are needed to effectively run that country.

Having said all that, looking at the future of China, I sincerely doubt there will be a democratic revolution. The approval rating for the CCP is very high (much higher than democratic countries in the West). China has historically been authoritarian. They have taken the capitalist model and effectively used it in an authoritarian state. It works well for them and I don't see that changing anytime soon.

Of course, nobody can tell the future. With the accelerating pace of technology and the inevitable climate change and who knows how much radical change there will be in the coming decades.

tikitaki, hace 1 año

taiwanese government could be extremely useful in helping China convert to democracy in a stable manner

there are 10 million bureaucrats in china

that's already half of the population of taiwan alone. the city of shanghai has a bigger population than taiwan

So what? None of that is relevant to what I said.

yes, it is. it's logistically impossible. i tried to elaborate on why because to hold a belief like you do someone must not know all of the obvious facts

It is totally impossible for Taiwan to unify with China unless China becomes democratic like Taiwan

it's very possible. it's happening right now in Hong Kong. China just takes over and slowly integrates it and removes the democracy bit by bit. I think it's so strange how you make a comment pretending reality is some way when it isn't. I get it - I support Taiwan too. I prefer Democracies over authoritarian regimes. But let's be real here

First of all NEVER EVER believe that a dictatorship has a "very high approval rating".

independent organizations have done studies in China. they really do support the CCP. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/07/long-term-survey-reveals-chinese-government-satisfaction/

it's sort of a side effect from the "heavenly mandate" idea in China. they've always had authoritarian leaders. as long as the economy is doing well the people tolerate anything. and china has been growing fast for decades now

tikitaki, hace 1 año

i think you need to disconnect your ideology from the analysis. you will never see beyond your nose if you take ideology too seriously in these types of affairs

It is literally impossible for "independent organizations" to objectively "study China".

there have been many smarter people than you or I doing analysis of CCP approval rating and it's always much much higher than our democratic countries in the west. read the article i sent you from harvard. look up more on google. or put your fingers in your ears, close your eyes, whatever. again - doesn't change the reality of the situation

people are pleased that their economic position is much better than their grandparents. and as long as economic growth keeps happening, that will remain true.

No you don't. Let's be real here. You are an apologist for the Communist tyranny. You do not understand how obvious it is but no American would ever say what you said.

i don't like to put my head in the sand and pretend like ideology trumps reality. no matter how much i prefer a free open society i have read the research. i have seen the news. i know CCP has higher approval rating than any democratic country. this isn't one or two studies. this is the consensus for decades.

chinese people are happy with CCP. same thing with Putin in Russia. just because a country is authoritarian and brutal does not mean they cannot have high approval ratings. the difference is they are contingent on a few very important things

china is economic growth. putin is not appearing weak - making russians feel strong. if CCP cannot guarantee that economic growth for too long a period of time, it will fall apart. they lose the "heavenly mandate"

Your stance that only white people want and are capable of having freedom and democracy is totally obsurd.

no it's "obsurd" that you totally ignore the opinions of 1.4 billion people in China. read some chinese history. the emperor had the mandate and everything ran smoothly or he didn't and there was civil war.

government legitimacy means different things for different forms of government

having said all that, you are not truly wanting to discuss geopolitics here. you want to larp and play a game of alt-history and that's fine i guess but at least put a disclaimer

tikitaki, hace 1 año

You want to mirror publicfreakout so we again watch american people fight into airplanes and governors banning books on the other side of the planet? Because this is what you're gonna get.

what is so wrong with this? the reason reddit is successful is because there are infinite genres of content. i think you make a strong argument that we shouldn't mirror reddit..

but people posting videos like /r/fightporn or /r/crazyfuckingvideos or whatever I think is perfectly fine and should be encouraged