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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Al Gore was definitely prescient in naming his documentary inconvenient.

    Climate change is as much a human problem as it is a geophysical one because that psychological defense mechanism that you anecdotally describe in the face of existential gloom is universal to our species, and the cause of so much ill-placed skepticism and hostility toward climate science and its communicators. Don’t Look Up also did a good job at portraying this unfortunate human bias.

    We as a species are too smart for our own good; smart enough to geoengineer our world to the point of threatening its existence, but not smart enough to address our own resistance to change and take collective action where and when it’s urgently needed.

    For those who study climate change and those who try to mitigate it, there is this double burden of not only losing sleep over the magnitude of the existential threat, but also facing the moral and psychological failings of those who refuse to see reality for what it is and argue against it. It’s tiring.





  • Suck it Karl Popper!

    Just because he called it an apparent paradox doesn’t mean that Popper disagrees with you. He merely said that open societies should first fight intolerance with reason and civil discourse; but if that fails, the tolerant majority should hold the right to suppress intolerant opinions.




  • What’s the alternative to the will of the majority, though?

    The legislature is meant to be ≈ representative, but that ranges from 1:1 in places like Switzerland (direct votation on everything) to indirect representation such as a bicameral system where the higher chamber (typically, the senate) is supposed to embrace the long view and provide some degree of perennial wisdom that the masses sometimes lack (especially in reaction to current events).

    I agree that the mean has regressed toward populism and reactionary sentiment toward social progress (e.g., LGBTQ rights) among Western democracies in the last couple of decades. But I also look at this as history (with a lowercase h) ebbing and flowing, while History (with an uppercase H) trends unidirectionally toward more open and progressive societies. In other words, one step back, two steps forward. Every generation seems to be more tolerant than the previous, and holistically there’s been steady progress (in the “progressive” acceptance of the word) on societal matters over the 19th and 20th century to date.

    I also feel that an absolutist free speech position, while dogmatically progressive and permissive on the surface, is actually regressive in its byproducts (cf. Popper’s paradox of intolerance). I also feel that most Western democracies, through their imperfect but somewhat representative legislatures, have struck a nuanced position on free speech that wisely forbids advocating for discriminatory speed (all the way to handing down hefty fines and prison sentences for neonazi speech in Europe, for instance).

    That makes me not in favor of naively experimenting with relaxing those rules and risking hate speech (however thinly disguised) become banal once again.


  • I haven’t watched the vid and cannot right now. But responding to the comment above, it should be “forbidden to say unpleasant things” when the law makes it illegal, because the law comes from the elected legislature in a democracy (i.e., ≈ the collective will of the people). This is not about cushioning people from unpleasantness, it’s about not breaking laws that exist for a reason.

    When should it be made illegal to say such things? When we collectively and democratically agree that it leads to net negative societal outcomes; for example, quoting the worst of the Old Testament, or Hitler’s Mein Kampf in the context of uncritically calling for genocide or apartheid is already illegal in some countries, because we know exactly where this leads. It’s not the books themselves that are problematic, it’s advocating for illegal things like discrimination or mass murder based on race, beliefs, etc. Anyone advocating for such things is already legally liable under several jurisdictions, regardless of whether they couch their argument in some third-party written text.

    Such laws were enacted precisely because of historical lessons learned at an expensive cost to humanity. We don’t have to repeat the same experiments just because we didn’t live through that era.



  • anon@kbin.socialtoAtheism@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    1 year ago

    In the US, perhaps. But the logic that “if you work at a Catholic school you gotta do their shit” is precisely the problem here, and what needs to change. In many other countries, a contract is unenforceable if it contains discriminatory terms. The onus ought to be on religious schools to adapt to contemporary societal norms if they want to engage with society through labor, procurement, etc contracts. Otherwise we’re just tolerating and perpetuating little islands of discrimination and bigotry in the name of religious freedom.


  • anon@kbin.socialtoAtheism@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    1 year ago

    In many other countries, such contractual provisions would be considered abusive and be thrown out by the court, so that a religious school (or any bigoted employer) could not enforce discriminatory terms under the guise of institutional or personal beliefs. I find it doubly weird that this situation can be boiled down so casually to contract law when it ought to be a constitutional matter.



  • I agree with you.

    A company’s core business and skillset is rarely to manage an on-prem IT infrastructure, which is a highly complex endeavor these days. Security most always benefits from being put in the hands of cloud providers such as Microsoft, Amazon, or Google, who can mobilize the best talent and apply economies of scale and modern best practices to cybersecurity across an entire stack.

    It also means far fewer liability headaches for the companies that transfer this difficult and onerous responsibility to cloud providers. It’s not even necessarily cheaper to go full cloud; I’ve seen multiple examples where it wasn’t, but the reduction in complexity and liability made common sense. So even the “LaTe-StAgE CaPiTaLiSm!!” claim is just a tired trope at this point.

    It’s easy to focus on one publicized exploit of Microsoft’s cloud like this one, and not see the other side of the argument of how many exploits were avoided over the years by not having individual companies manage their own servers. It’s still entirely plausible that the general move to cloud infrastructure since the late 2000s is a net win for cybersecurity in aggregate.

    I would also add that whether other cloud customers might be breached simultaneously in the extremely rare event of a cloud-wide exploit is not a consideration when a company decides to move from on-prem to cloud. It’s just a Moloch problem that doesn’t and shouldn’t concern them.