Might take a karma hit for this, but whatever. Its the truth.
Christians are more concerned about *causing* extreme child abuse, and then turning around and claiming its to "save them", so the abuse isnt reallllly abuse.
Most of these camps cited are christian. And the people running them? Dogmatic christian fundamentalists. And these are the same types that run "pray the gay away" camps too.
And my inflammatory, albeit true comment also goes right back to the heart of the article:
"Reformatories were institutions where girls and young women who refused to conform to the Franco regime's Catholic values were detained - single mothers, girls with boyfriends, lesbians. Girls who'd been sexually assaulted were incarcerated, assuming the blame for their own abuse. Orphans and abandoned girls might also find themselves living behind convent walls."
Extremist Roman Catholic "values", demonization and imprisonment of 'unruly women', anti-LGBTQ. Same damned thing, again and again.
When are we going to actually look at these issues dispassionately and realize that religion itself is the problem?
So we're supposed to simultaneously discuss the article (General Franco's extremist Catholic task forces), but not identify the religious tropes behind this?
I read the article, and discussing the article. And as hackers, im curious as how to fix the problems.
I mean, of all the many, many talking points from the article 'This particular religious / cultural group is a global problem and must be eradicated, and (all of? Seems like it meant all of) its many billions of members are enthusiastic supporters or perpetrators of child abuse' is not one that leapt out to most people.
And even if it did, they didn't say it here. This is not the place for religious ideology.
I passionately hate my neighbours who listen to music really loudly in their garden all the time, but I don't call for their eradication on public fora unless there's a really, really specific relevance (like here, for example) and I also don't campaign against them on GitHub, my local supermarket, local government meetings, or other places where people are trying to do other things.
There are places for me to rant about my neighbours. There are entire discussions about noisy neighbours, my vicinity, local customs and manners etc. If I wanted to rant about them, those would be the place to do it.
But I don't, because I wouldn't actually gain anything from it. I'm not going to single handedly change the law on nuisance, and all a hate campaign could achieve would be, well, more hate. I want solutions, or quiet, and I won't achieve either of those by telling random strangers how terrible my neighbours are.
I'm sure you can think of the easiest solution to the hypothetical neighbour problem. It's not ideological and doesn't involve changing the hearts and minds of hundreds of people, none of whom are currently concerned about my neighbours.
It might look like I'm trivialising your point, but I promise, I'm not. Noisy neighbours, or an itchy foot, or even a literal broken fingernail, are a more immediate problem than 'we must rid the world of Christians', unless they are currently holding you hostage.
And the reason I'm bothering to write such a long-ass reply at all is because there is currently far too much intolerance and ethno-religious hatred being propogated and spread around the world. We know where this leads. It always leads the same way, there is no possibility of a happy ending. We have tried 'that religion is the problem, let's persecute them' repeatedly and we end up in the sort of fascist dystopia we were reminded of literal moments ago in the article.
It's not ok to do it to Jews or Muslims, which means it's not ok to do it to Christians.
And it's not ok to let people spread those messages in bad faith, which means I've got to call out those spreading the same message in presumed good faith.
My neighbours are just annoying me, I can deal with that. Christians are just kinda weird but whatever, we've all got our foibles. Racists, dogmatics and puritans can believe whatever they want, I just won't listen to it.
And I invite you to step away from the brewing culture war too. It's more fun discussing tech and stuff.
> When are we going to actually look at these issues dispassionately and realize that religion itself is the problem?
Because it's not.
I've been interrogating this sort of question for most of my life. I am a queer agnostic who grew up in a religious part of the South and saw shades of this kind of abuse firsthand, mostly around queerness.
At first, I did blame religion, but with the benefit of hindsight, I realized something. In the context of queerness, almost nobody I ran into growing up hated queer people because they heard their preacher say so and thought it must be true. They hated them because they were massively insecure. They were terrified of being labeled gay. They were terrified of guys hitting on them. They were terrified of hitting on a woman who turned out to have been born as a man.
Religion isn't the problem. Instead, religion gives these sorts of insecure people a trump card that requires very little interrogation. However, if these folks weren't Christian or weren't even religious, I have no doubt that the underlying insecurities would remain, and simply manifest in a different way.
Once I realized this, it was actually a massive weight lifted off my shoulders. In particular, I was no longer confused as to why my friend groups that were majority Christian continued to be nice to me and treated me with respect, despite me being a atheist queer at the time. It opened the door to connecting with them on a deeper level of understanding, as well as leading to me dabbling with my own forms of non-Christian spirituality.
So yeah, religion isn't the problem. It's merely a mechanism that allows shitty people to be shitty.
You don't have to wonder. I have been hearing about several recent church schisms over certain folks thinking the church had become too accepting.
This is literally an example of individuals choosing their religion based on their own values. Folks on one side of the schism might criticize folks on the other side of the schism for not being true Christians, but it's ultimately a dispute over "Thou shalt not lie with another man," versus "Love thy neighbor."
Not directly, but people find ways to believe in a manner analogous to religious beliefs. Faith doesn't have to be directed only at traditional theist objects. Religious or not, people can believe things by faith and by logic.
To give an example, science is not a replacement for philosophy, nor is it implemented perfectly, but some people elevate it far beyond its means to answer certain inquiries. That is irrationality, or faith.
> science is not a replacement for philosophy, nor is it implemented perfectly,
Yes, but it is far better than a fraud. Therefore it is the best we have to understand the world. And fairy tales invented by illiterate people thousands of years ago aren't a path to understand the world. They're a fraud, plain and simple.
I think you're being uncharitable towards religion. While I agree that a belief such as "the Earth was made 6000 years ago" is ridiculous, a belief like "God wants us to love our neighbors" is not. I think "good beliefs" (a very loaded term, mind you) get rediscovered constantly, in religious and nonreligious contexts alike. These are beliefs attained through philosophical inquiry. The beliefs provided by science are complementary.
> I think you're being uncharitable towards religion.
You are correct. I am, deliberately, "being uncharitable towards religion". I had far too much Catholicism in my upbringing to be respectful of any religion. If you want to know what I mean by Catholicism read the story linked by the title post, about Catholic parents in Catholic Spain. My story wasn't that bad but I saw a lot of that prejudice, arrogance and intolerance. It isn't surprising that in 50 years the country of Spain went from majorly Catholic to majorly agnostic.
> a belief like "God wants us to love our neighbors" is not.
You don't need "God wants" in that. Empathy doesn't need "God". Unlike what church people think, non-religious people have empathy and decency, too. Human beings are social animals, doing empathy is a common trait that doesn't need "divine" justification.
I agree that religion isn't necessary, but it's not necessarily bad. You're making a big generalization. There are plenty of people who abuse religious beliefs, but I'm more concerned with calling out people who abuse principles from any cut of cloth, and religion is only a part of that.
It’s true. The supposedly “secular people” I know are always prattling about “human dignity” and stuff that sounds very religious. They don’t think of humans as walking meat like a non-religious person would.
> Even bonobo monkeys and elephants understand empathy for others.
Empathy is an emotion. Emotions are real. You can see emotions in brain scans. But anger, desire for revenge, disgust, in-group affinity, etc., are also real emotions! It's rational to use people's emotions to guide what society should do. But most putatively secular people disagree with that approach! They're constantly telling people to put aside their emotions in favor of supposed universal principles that sound suspiciously similar to religious beliefs.
> They're constantly telling people to put aside their emotions in favor of supposed universal principles
Yeah, sure! Those evil "putatively secular people" that burned tens of thousands of women during the witch hunt in Europe, killed hundreds of thousands of other people during the Crusades and the European religious wars of the 17th and 18th century, that condoned with the fascist and authoritarian regimes in Argentina, Spain and Portugal because they were against the scourge of communism, that blessed the slavery of Latin American indigenous peoples because it was meant to spread the blessing of Christianity... that was all made by "putatively secular people", like the Catholic Church, right?
I am so impressed by how well and deep you know and understand "putatively secular people"... Are all church people smart like that? /s
But what’s your non-religious basis for saying that those actions were bad? You pointed to empathy above. But empathy in humans is mainly directed to one’s own community. Animals and humans alike will happily take over the territory of rival clans. Which is why empathy didn’t prevent Europeans from colonizing the indigenous people of America. So what’s your basis for saying that, e.g., colonization was bad?
I have no problem with housecats hunting, but playing with their prey seems unnecessary (as in gratuitous harm). Still, I won't try housecats in a criminal court, because my understanding of them is too alien to make me confident in my judgement.
I have no problem with humans hunting, or defending themselves, or whatnot. I accept that some degree of violence is necessary, and a lot more can be plausibly justified. However, I draw the line at, say, humans killing each other for bad reason. If it is to be believed that I and these other humans are of the same species, of the same kind, and whatnot, I feel secure in judging them as I would judge myself, and those more familiar to me. Killing indigenous people on the basis of merely not converting to Christianity, and even burning them, is entirely unnecessary. A modern-day analogue would be roundly condemned, or so I should hope.
> empathy in humans is mainly directed to one’s own community.
Speak for yourself. I won't confuse empathy with tribalism, as you do. I'll take humanism [1], the notion that every person is equal in rights. This is my moral basis.
> humans alike will happily take over the territory of rival clans.
Tribalism, again. You don't get past that, do you?
> Which is why empathy didn’t prevent Europeans from colonizing the indigenous people
Yep, but neither did religion and those countries were very, very Christian. And, btw, even today the U.S. is the most religious among rich countries and, at the same time, the most imperialist. If religion is so good how come the most Christian country is so bad to the rest of the world? (I am from South America, btw).
They seem to be one of those individuals who cannot possibly comprehend the idea that many people simply find murder and rape to be horrible, awful acts that shouldn't be inflicted on others and hold that belief without needing to have the fear of god or an ancient collection of texts constantly reminding them to not rape and murder people.
The very idea of a person believing murder and rape to be horrible without a convoluted and often contradicting spiritual belief system is preposterous to them. Hence "rayiner"'s insistence that not treating people like shit simply must be a religious concept because "it sounds religious". These people genuinely believe someone not treating people like shit can only happen if you're terrified of going to hell or something.
They're somewhat rare but not rare enough. They're extremely dangerous people because, after all, the only thing keeping their desire to harm others in check is a fear of an ever elusive supernatural entity punishing them, instead of just simply not having such a desire.
Maybe the above isn't applicable to "rayiner" but people who say not treating people like shit "sounds religious" are almost always that type.
> They seem to be one of those individuals who cannot possibly comprehend the idea that many people simply find murder and rape to be horrible, awful acts that shouldn't be inflicted on others
I’m not denying that some people feel that way. Feelings are real, they’re chemical signals in your brain in response to stimuli. But we agree it’s not more than a feeling, right? And nothing makes the chemical signals in your brain more legitimate than the ones in someone else’s brain? Say we gather up our tribe, clan, nation, whatever. We take a vote based on people’s feelings. And 40% feel like you do, and 60% feel rage at the neighboring tribe/clan/nation and want to violently conquer them and take their resources. We tallied up two sets of chemical signals, and we should pick the more numerous feeling, correct?
Not sure why you're so insistent on avoiding the multiple questions people have asked you that are inconvenient for your narrative.
Why does believing something is right or wrong require religion or is in any way religious?
Why does someone having signals in their brain making them a believer of religion make their beliefs more justified than someone who does not?
Have you ever asked someone why they believe in god or do you just immediately stop questioning the "legitimacy" of their beliefs the moment you realize they believe in religion so they must be right?
People have explained to you why they believe x is wrong, you refuse to accept their answer and insist they "sound religious"
Why, in your opinion, must nonreligious people constantly justify their belief in x being wrong if you don't demand the same of religious people? Double standards.
> I won't confuse empathy with tribalism, as you do.
I’m just following your logic. You pointed to empathy as something even animals have. Empathy is a real thing in nature, you can see those feelings in brain scans. But so is tribalism or pack behavior. Why do you privilege one type of feeling or instinct over another? What’s the basis for that distinction?
> I'll take humanism [1], the notion that every person is equal in rights.
What is the nature of this assertion? Is it a falsifiable scientific fact?
> Why do you privilege one type of feeling or instinct over another? What’s the basis for that distinction?
The basis is the context, is globalization. In prehistoric times a tribe where the people you'd physically meet. In a globalized world the tribe is much bigger, because of communication, commerce and transportation technologies broke the limitations of physical connections.
> Is it a falsifiable scientific fact?
No, it isn't. But it is something that mostly works. Life just feels better when you treat others the way you want to be treated by them, when you and them share the same rights. You see, Karl Popper (the "falsiable" guy) wasn't 100% correct. We actually have a lot of stuff in science that is just a convention and isn't "falsiable". E.g. how cold you possible demonstrate to be false the basic geometric elements: a point, a line, a plane. They don't really exist physically, they're just abstractions.
The general rule is that, in general, cooperation is better than war. War is too destructive and is even more destructive when it targets a complex society (because there is more to destroy). With cooperation, in general, you avoid the destruction of war.
> The basis is the context, is globalization. In prehistoric times a tribe where the people you'd physically meet. In a globalized world the tribe is much bigger, because of communication, commerce and transportation technologies broke the limitations of physical connections.
Is the difference in setting forceful? If the significant change is in the social environment, principles such as empathy would not be impacted. Or would you say the principles that apply to tribal life are different from those that apply to global life?
> You see, Karl Popper (the "falsiable" guy) wasn't 100% correct. We actually have a lot of stuff in science that is just a convention and isn't "falsiable". E.g. how cold you possible demonstrate to be false the basic geometric elements: a point, a line, a plane. They don't really exist physically, they're just abstractions.
Karl Popper is completely correct. He defines "science" as a narrow art, not the study of truth as a whole. Science is one discipline among many in pursuit of the truth.
> Life just feels better when you treat others the way you want to be treated by them, when you and them share the same rights.
My model is that truth is a matter of consistency, and that truth is related to good. Therefore, what one should do to be good is being consistent to one's beliefs. Beliefs are influenced by perception/experience, manifest in thoughts and actions, can be recorded in statements (accountability!), and so on. In practice, (a variation of) the Golden Rule is derived from this.
> I’m just following your logic. You pointed to empathy as something even animals have. Empathy is a real thing in nature, you can see those feelings in brain scans. But so is tribalism or pack behavior. Why do you privilege one type of feeling or instinct over another? What’s the basis for that distinction?
Please be transparent on your own beliefs too, if you demand this of others. On what basis do you stake your beliefs? Are you being empathetic? Are you being tribal?
> What is the nature of this assertion? Is it a falsifiable scientific fact?
Science alone is insufficient to answer all questions. Do not overextend its powers. None of us in this thread are mainly relying on science, for good reason. If someone poses the question "should humans do [thing]?" as a scientific one, they are a charlatan and a fraud.
> Whenever you try to remove religion the void fills up with something, and that something is demonic.
I've heard that exact type of comparison before, and it's from those fundamentalist christians. You find out quickly, that "everything is the devil or demonic" that wasn't written down in a bronze-age book and interpreted and translated the snot out of, over a game of telephone played over 2000 years. Most of which was done by illiterates.
Better yet, lets look at what the opposite of this demonic is - judeo-christian values.
1 Samuel 15:3 "Now go, attack Amalek, and proscribe [kill and dedicate to YHWH] all that belongs to him. Spare no one, but kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings, oxen and sheep, camels and asses!"
That god sounds like a petty tribal warlord. Really? Genocide? Even kill the infants and animals?!? And this is what's being accepted as good and holy? And when Saul (king) spared the Amalekite king and some animals, even that benevolence was rewarded with destroying Saul.
Petty. Tribal. Warlord.
And yeah, I've actually read the Torah and New Testament and Koran. I know what I disagree in, and I see how our culture are still afflicted by all this historical religious baggage.
So, you can find a few isolated quotes in a series of documents written over thousands of years that support the idea that religion is the problem.
Have you read these works considering historical and cultural context? Can you find anything in the New testament that supports this? Do you know about the history of how Christianity shaped European culture? There are excellent books on the subjects (Dominion by Tom Holland is brilliant on the lats of these).
I work in IT, but I also do stuff in historical studies. I dont want to dox myself, cause I just want to chat here anonymously.
In the Americas and Europe, Christianity is the fundamentalist scourge. We all know of Israel, of fundamentalist Judaism. Middle East? You guessed it, 4 of the 5 major sects of Islam are fundamentalist. And moving further East, we see extreme caste-ism and Fundamentalist Hinduism.
China rooted out Fundamentalist Buddhism with Tibet. In 1953, 700,000 of an estimated total population of 1,250,000 were serfs - effectively enslaved peoples on the land attached to the land-lord. Usually a lama, or a priest in Buddhism. This is a case where an oppressive fundamentalist religion was rooted out, and almost a million people were freed.
Im also well aware of all the damage Christianity and Islam did through the millennia in Europe. The priesthood collectively held back science, arts, literature, and countless other things because of "demons, devils, satan". And that only got worse with Dante's Inferno, which somehow got collapsed as bible stories, but really is a fanfiction.
We also see fundamentalist christian hatred flood everywhere with <GASP> more anti-woman sentiment with Witch Trials held basically everywhere. Even had executions up in Holmavik Iceland, to of which a museum was made to commemorate their witch trials. And everyone knows of Salem Massachusetts. Estimates of 30-60000 women were executed in these sham trials, and was predominantly women targeted here.
Perhaps it was too narrow to just blame christians, although the USA is a "christian nation" and what I'm most exposed against my will. No, the problem is fanaticism and fundamentalism. Its one thing to say "My religion says I cant do (action)." and a whole different thing to say "My religion says YOU cant do (action)". All the fundamentalists demand both.
> We also see fundamentalist christian hatred flood everywhere with <GASP> more anti-woman sentiment with Witch Trials held basically everywhere.
Which happened in early modern times.
> Its one thing to say "My religion says I cant do (action)." and a whole different thing to say "My religion says YOU cant do (action)".
I agree. On the other hand secular ideologies are often worse. Look at the history of the 20th century.
> > In the Americas and Europe, Christianity is the fundamentalist scourge.
yes, those horrible Christians. Doing things like abolishing slavery, improving the status of women and demanding marital fidelity from men as well as women. Do you have any idea what pre-Christian Europe was like? The Roman Empire, for example?
One spray of brake cleaner and it's gone. Cheaper to use a carbide scribe or simply get a shard of glass or ceramic and physically scribe into the drive. Now they're permanently used drives, no debate is possible.
"Extreme left" said by someone likely from the USA is slightly left-of-center basically anywhere else.
The USA democrats and "left" have been overton window'ed so hard that a actual democratic socialist, Mamdani, is compared to being a communist. https://nypost.com/cover/november-5-2025/
There's also hundreds of Lemmy federated servers. I'm sure some are actual communist. But there's plenty for all walks of life. And it's like Mastodon in that regard.
And honestly, if "killing SNAP and other public benefits for poor people" is capitalist, I want nothing to do with that. That is completely ethically bankrupt. Doubly so being one of the richest countries in the world. Absolutely 0 people should be starving. And I'd also say that 0 people should be involuntarily homeless. (some may want to, and choose to be vagabonds and travel. they should have that right! but they should also be able to choose to have a home.)
>"Extreme left" said by someone likely from the USA is slightly left-of-center basically anywhere else.
This is a 2000s era meme that was started to try and get people to see reason and vote against Bush, but it is not true and has not been for coming up on a decade. The Democratic Party is to the left of many European left parties, especially on issues like immigration and freedom of identity, and its politicians (especially the young ones) regularly pitch welfare state expansions that are more generous than European counterparts (see Kat Abu on 'medicare for anyone physically present in the US, for free'; a more generous offer than even the NHS).
Is that the democratic party or a fringe left that is trying to accomplish something as part of the party ? what policies did the democrats actually implement across the years? Bernie is considered by the democratic party leadership to be a radical(hes not) and would prop up anyone but him
>What policies did the Democrats actually implement over the years?
Roughly in order: Don't Ask/Don't Tell repeal. Dodd-Frank. Lily Ledbetter (extends the statute of limitations on equal pay suits). Making it clear that sexual orientation and gender identity are equal to race in hate crime law. Banning lifetime coverage caps so your insurer cannot simply decide your life is not worth living and banning the practice of excluding pre-existing conditions from healthcare coverage so that you are not enslaved to whatever employer you happened to be working for when you got the worst news of your life. Establishing the CFPB to end unfair credit practices like medical debt reporting. Capping the cost of insulin at $35 per month for Medicare. Allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices. ACA subsidy expansion. People our normie centrist presidents put on the bench decided Obergefell. People our normie centrist presidents put on the bench are protecting human expression.
You have to engage in motivated reasoning not to recognize these things as making life better. If you want to make life even better, consider voting for Democrats. When you don't vote for them, they become the minority party. When they are the minority party, no amount of impotent screaming or saying please can turn 49 votes into 61 votes, nor can it force Republicans to help them help you.
Bernie is a loudmouth with almost no legislative accomplishments that spent his life building his own brand and ratfucking the party. Of course the party leadership doesn't like him. When you get a rock in your shoe, do you like the rock?
Actual leaders are in the trenches right now embarrassing the GOP with this shutdown to force them to make COVID-era healthcare subsidies permanent. What's Bernie doing except derailing news events to complain that party leadership isn't supporting his faction in comparatively irrelevant local races?
Ah yes, so one candidate for the Democratic primary (she isn’t even a Dem primary winner yet) for one of 434 Congressional seats may have a position that on the edge might be slightly more “left wing” on one issue in one of the more right wing Western European nations, is clearly evidence that the U.S. is no longer far to Europe’s right…
To be fair, setting aside my snark, I don’t disagree with you. The real problem here is simply the fact that the single axis left-right political framework is insufficient to capture even the simplest democracy in the world right now.
And the US has made huge leaps to the left on some axes, but is still far to the right of the European center on many other axes.
The OP says tankies. Those kinds of extreme left are extreme even by non-USA standards. A European-style democratic socialist like Mamdani would be, one hopes, to the right of them. Tankies were largely forced out of European mainstream parties after the shocks of 1937, 1956 and 1968.
Lemmy is occupied by tankies and Marxist leninists and that’s not my type of lefties. They also espouse violence which I don’t like.
For example the main federated server is called lemmy.ml ml standing for Marxist leninists. They are also the developer server hence all federated servers have to federate with them.
What capitalism continues to show us: proof that public libraries, if created in the last 10 years, would be deemed illegal and sued out of existence.
It's only because the late 1800's billionaires wanted to leave legacies and made pay-to-enter and free libraries, and migrated them to free, or public libraries. Thats why so many of them are (John) Carnegie Libraries.
A lower stakes but still illustrative example I see is that the DVR is an invention that wouldn't be allowed to succeed today. All power is being wielded to its fullest in order to prevent skipping ads.
Cable to streaming took us from skippable to unskippable ads. Search results to LLM results will result in invisible/undisclosed ads. Each successive generation of technology will increase the power of advertising and strip rights we used to have. Another example, physical to digital media ownership, we lost resale rights.
We need to understand that we've passed a threshold after which innovation is hurting us more than helping us. That trumps everything else.
Exactly. A DVR governed by tech giants rather than just Tivo and the cable companies is going to have compromised functionality because it's the tech industry originating the "innovation" for their own benefit.
How do you figure libraries would be deemed illegal? They operate today. The Archive, on the other hand, attempted a fair use argument for whole copies of books (the copyrighted form most legible to copyright law) currently for sale as ebooks. I agree with the comment across the thread calling this a spectacularly boneheaded move and expressing gratitude that the entire Archive wasn't compromised over the stunt.
> How do you figure libraries would be deemed illegal? They operate today.
The history of public libraries is extremely messy, and the RIAA almost managed to get secondhand music made illegal in the 90s. Publishers did not ever support the idea of loaning a single copy of a work to dozens of people. While it's a huge stretch to say that every illegal download represents a lost sale (people download 100x more than they read), it's a lot less of a stretch to say that people who would sit down and read an entire book are fairly likely to have bought it.
Also, when books were relatively more expensive for people (19th century), a lot of income from publishers came from renting their books, rather than selling them. Public libraries involved a lot of positive propaganda and promises of societal uplift from wealthy benefactors, along the same lines and around the same time as the introduction of universal free public education. I remember hearing a lot about this history at the Enoch Pratt Library in Baltimore, which iirc was the first. Libraries were at that time normally private membership clubs.
edit: I also agree that the free book thing was stupid and have been very harsh about it. I don't know if it's possible to be too harsh about it, because it was obviously never going to get past a court. It felt almost like intentional sabotage.
Possibly, yeah. Make a "Deal" <spit> with AI companies to have back-end access to all the Archive org's content. Get 'permission' to copy EVERYTHING and have billionaires run interference.
The AI companies already got blank checks to do that. Anthropic is paying what, like $3000 per book? I remember when the fucks at the RIAA were suing 12 year olds for $10000 for Britney Spears albums.
Or better yet, if it's just $3k a book, can we license every book and have that added into Archive.org? Oh wait, deals for thee, not for me.
I'd argue that "No Socials November" should be "No corporate Socials November".
Places like the Fediverse (Mastodon, Peertube, Lemmy, pixelfed, etc) are that non-corporate non-gamified breath of fresh air.
Sure, there's less people on those networks, but that too is a great benefit - less bots and less "temperature". And 10 years ago, in 2015, we already saw videos analyzing social media hatred with CGP Grey's "This video will make you angry" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc
But why anger? Because anger and screaming at people is a guaranteed way to make "engagement", which seems to be the predominant way to prove to advertisers of "people per month". But is it good? Absolutely not. Its poison, slowly but surely. But how do we avoid the poison? The root cause here is money from advertising, which is from engagement.
But you cut out the profit motive, you also cut out advertisers, and you also cut out arbitrary and forced anger-gagement. And that, is the Fediverse.
The opposite is your Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, Reddit. And they're full of bots, quazi and directly hateful content posted for "engagement", and the same set of hate memes populated froom 1 site to all the rest by bots. No wonder people hate this type of social media. It's wholly toxic and poisonous.
I disagree. While smaller networks are a good thing for the social media landscape, ultimately people should go seek other activities where socializing is a secondary benefit. Rather than spending time on a social network. If we take a month to refocus on non-social-first activity we will be healthier 1000000x as communities.
Lemmy is great btw. I started putting “lemmy” instead of “reddit” in my searches and it often works.
People are also leaving out stuff like Pokemon, Yu Gi Oh, and Magic The Gathering.
All of them also introduce rarities (arbitrary exclusiveness), hidden cards in a pack, and extreme gambling gamification.
The only non-gambling MtG packs are the preconstructed commander decks. All 100 cards are published. But the packs and boxes? Pure gambling, especially for the chase rare cards.
I feel like it only became rampant in recent years. As a 90s kid no one cared about the card packs. We all assumed they'd be junk cards and a waste of $7 or whatever. No, the move for card people back then was to wait for the card show and just buy the cards you actually want from a card dealer.
The thing is now people are marketing the pack opening. You have social media accounts of them pulling cards from packs and getting all hyped up about it. Again no one thought that was fun in the 90s, everyone hated that aspect of cards in the 90s but thats because the unboxing as an experience wasn't marketed by anyone at all. People just wanted cards they thought were personally cool in some way.
And likewise expansion of markets in the internet era means people start to have shared values of what is a valuable card based on market price vs just being interested in some certain cards out of your own interest.
I don't know, in the 90s a bunch of friends and I were into MtG and everyone bought packs. The idea of buying from a card dealer instead wasn't even on our radar. We weren't the most hardcore players but I think we were pretty typical; we went to Comic Con a few times in that era.
I distinctly remember the first time I was able to afford to buy a box from a new magic set release. Had a lot of fun opening new packs. It’s too bad I wasn’t aware of the draft format at the time or it would have been even more rewarding!
Consider who your peers were then. Were they likely to get addicted? I know my circle was elite--doing the probability calculations, circulating card lists on Usenet, and joking that gambling was taxes on stupid people.
Now as an adult, I see tweens with addictions to multiple things. Watch them beg to buy a Pokemon pack, open it, and lose interest. It's completely the dopamine expectation. And it takes years in recovery. But I think I was ignorant and unaware in the 90s of what other people were addicted to.
Even if you aren't prone to gambling there are other factors that can apply. I never was into gambling, but I grew up in the Dutch countryside in the 90s, so trading with local players was my only option. I spent a ton of money on boosters as a teen without realizing it's all manufactured scarcity.
I knew a guy back then who would blow hundreds every couple of weeks on booster packs. It was surreal to watch. MTG was everything to him. This was around 2002—2004.
Good point. I should have included that at the time he really didn't have that kind of money to spend. We were young and he was struggling to even make rent or eat.
I can't imagine kids even liked it then. Again most of those packs were junk cards. Like total crap cards. Oh gee a rattata and some energy cards. All you wanted was Ash's squad from the shows.
The kids I knew who played these kinds of card games all loved buying booster packs, but they weren’t paying for these packs themselves and most grew out of playing by the time they reached high school. I can see it not being as fun for adult players who understand the probability metagame being played, but I think one of the reasons these games had so much financial success in the first place was that they identified a behavioral loop that they could exploit, exactly like contemporary developers did with loot boxes.
I was asking if the “everyone” he was referring to was comprised of children or adults, as it didn’t map to my experience with children who played these games in the 2000s.
The Pokémon card mania in particular is deeply weird to me. I play Magic at a local card shop a few times a month and it’s always full of people playing Magic, D&D, or various board games. I don’t think I’ve seen a single person playing the Pokémon card game. So who’s buying the valuable singles? What’s keeping the market afloat? It’s bizarre.
It's a collector's market, the value is in the demand and scarcity. Same as with all other collectibles like baseball cards and such. Or even wines, there are some that are so old they become undrinkable but cost like a car. In collectors market the price is detached from any kind of purpose of the item.
Also consider that most Magic cards are also valuable only because of their collector status. The valuable ones are mint first editions and nobody is buying them to play them.
So who fuels this collectors market? Nostalgic 30-something that have now disposable income and want to buy things they wanted as children. Same as with videogames collectors and such. You don't need an original copy of Supermario to play it, but people still spend thousands to buy it.
Pokémon TCG seems to have turned into a contest among opportunistic resellers to see who can buy up all of the cards and sell them to ... collectors? Other resellers? Who knows?
Which is a shame, since the game itself is actually fun. Or it would be if you could buy the cards easily and cheaply.
People in their 30s and 40s. It is the same thing with boomers and comic books. What was once in mass circulation in your childhood is now out of print and commanding real value among your nostalgic peers.
I think there's a massive difference between card packs - which have been as you describe for decades - and the recent boom in sports betting. Most people don't even know what MTG is, or that there's even a market for those cards. Everyone now knows that you can bet on any sport you want - and if some reports are to be believed, a large percentage of people are participating.
Anyway, this is why I play MTG online - same with 40k, although there's no gambling there. Just too expensive to play either IRL even if I wanted to.
I think this depends on how you interact with your chosen game. To me, I play Yugioh as a hobby. If I'm "only" into the digital versions of the game, then it's no different to playing just about any other video game.
And even then, these live service TCGs (outside of unofficial simulators) can often have the same lootbox/pack gambling aspects as the real thing.
Personally that's not what I want. A good chunk of why I play paper is because of the physical community, in a space outside my home.
> I think there's a massive difference between card packs - which have been as you describe for decades - and the recent boom in sports betting.
There is, until there isn't. MTG has been leaning drastically into tiered and ultra-premium products. Increasingly, it feels like Magic design and product is focused on extracting money from the whales at the price of hollowing out their playerbase.
It's difficult to draw a hard line between wholesome collecting and lootbox gambling, but it's hard not to notice that even the bastions of the collectible industry have been aggressively moving in the direction of the latter.
I have never been sure if collecting is wholesome. I think Pohl did show it as one example of rampant consumerist addiction in one of the books(can't remember which of the ones with marketing guys).
I would guess that collecting goes beyond wholesome once finding the products comes really hard and there is very high prices and extremely low rates involved.
As a Magic player, yeah some people definitely have a compulsive addictive gambling relationship with the product. And Wizards has been leaning into that recently with more rare versions of mechanically identical cards.
However, you can buy sealed product to both build your collection and get cards to trade. And the main reason for sealed to exist, ostensibly, is limited.
And a lot of people don't interact with the "gambling" aspect at all. I'm very deep into magic after 10 years, and I almost exclusively buy singles and do prereleases. I might buy like 10 random packs total in an entire year.
The randomness is marketed as part of the fun, but for a lot of players (especially younger ones), it taps into the same reward-loop psychology as slot machines
I used to really enjoy magic. Then at some point I couldn’t keep up with the constructed meta. So I switched to drafting. But now it seems like everything is so gamified that playing the game isn’t enough anymore. Now you need to play all the time both in the shop and on mtg arena and it’s like designed to keep you hooked. I hate it. I really just can’t be bothered to play anymore. It’s no longer fun it’s just a grind.
Yes I’ve been playing a lot of civ4 and sim city 2000. It’s so much more enjoyable because it’s simply about playing a game where complex simulations put together interesting problems to solve. As opposed to figuring out how to unlock the next whatever skin, weapon, armor, card set, fake money gems, other fake money coins, etc.
Edit: btw if anyone is looking for a civ4 game hit me up
I'm not that poster, but 4 times as many unique cards are released a year as 20 years ago (2X vs 10 years ago). The pace has greatly increased the commitment to keep abreast of the game.
Yes and it’s obvious the only reason is because making more money is better than only making enough money. This is probably why gameplay has changed so much to where every deck is some combo blah blah. Like most of the older deck formats are gone. Like look at the decks when they published the 1999 Grand Prix winning decks and compare them to today. Like it had mono green stompy next to these fiddly urza combo decks. I dunno I’m just sad the game sucks now. I had a lot of fun playing with friends when I was younger.
Labubus are much less about collectior value. They are more like a wearable luxury item that's sold via a gambling mechanic.
Their value is much less speculative and much more closely based on (blindbox price * distribution percentage of the rare variants) than most of the other items being dicussed here.
Its not 100% what you're looking for. Probably an 80% case..
But try looking into QubesOS. You create domains where applications can do whatever in the domain (a contained VM). So your personal domain is separate from your bank domain, which is separate from your media domain.
Of course, domains themselves can do naughty things. But they cant cross over to others.
And system resources are a separate domain, as is networking.
Some downsides - gaming is a no go mostly. And if you do SDR stuff, the USB domain is a heavy hit on performance. You really need dedicated machines for those things.
Fun, I had just started using it as a the data store for a distributed Rust compilation cache, guess we're moving that somewhere else. Hopefully the choice of NixOS as our server OS will make this easier rather than harder.
What alternatives do people recommend that has at least similar features-set and at least similar performance as MinIO?
I imagine that this makes it much less viable for hobby use, or as a dependency for other open source projects, but setting up a private docker registry and building this image nightly isn’t onerous for any business
The fact that these things are happening at all is enough for us to shop for alternatives. MinIO will be completely gone as soon as we identify the best option and get it rolled out, which should be rather quickly.
If they were hoping to drive conversions to paying customers, they've done the opposite, at least with my employer.
You can't put 3 lines in a Dockerfile but will be "shopping for alternatives", "identifying the best option" and "get it rolled out"? Do you ever get anything done, "rather quickly"?
Their trend towards walking away from the community is a major red flag to me. If we're going to need to swap them out for an alternative at some point, better to get on it now than wait until we're forced to do so.
Boomers stuck behind the times, vendoring their dependencies and even looking at the code they compile. Get with the program already and just push another container!
> We initially explored a basic admin UI for the community branch but haven't actively maintained it. Building and supporting separate graphical consoles for the community and commercial branches is substantial. Honestly, it is hard to duplicate this work for the community branch. A whole team is involved in console development, including design, UX, front-end, back-end, and pen testing. This commit introduces an enhanced object browser but removes the unmaintained admin UI code.
They deleted the admin UI from the current version of the open-source side. It's time to pay the VCs, the project is being rug-pulled and they're going all in on the enterprise version.
Christians are more concerned about *causing* extreme child abuse, and then turning around and claiming its to "save them", so the abuse isnt reallllly abuse.
Most of these camps cited are christian. And the people running them? Dogmatic christian fundamentalists. And these are the same types that run "pray the gay away" camps too.
And my inflammatory, albeit true comment also goes right back to the heart of the article:
"Reformatories were institutions where girls and young women who refused to conform to the Franco regime's Catholic values were detained - single mothers, girls with boyfriends, lesbians. Girls who'd been sexually assaulted were incarcerated, assuming the blame for their own abuse. Orphans and abandoned girls might also find themselves living behind convent walls."
Extremist Roman Catholic "values", demonization and imprisonment of 'unruly women', anti-LGBTQ. Same damned thing, again and again.
When are we going to actually look at these issues dispassionately and realize that religion itself is the problem?