Why did you bother writing 500 words in response to a website that exists to sell sex toys on Black Friday?

Meme of guy looking at two buttons:

“Psychology is junk science!”

“This confirms my biases!”

!riddles@catata.fish

There is a riddles sublemmy, just fyi!

Temperature is average kinetic energy. It is very easy to put kinetic energy into an object and much harder to take it out. Microwaves do it by shining a “light” tuned to microwave frequencies on objects. So you can imagine the problem is about as hard as shining a lamp on something and having it get colder. Laser-based cooling methods do exist but they’re quite expensive and mostly operate on the atomic scale. For now, the best way we know of to cool large items in bulk is to put them next to something that’s even colder—in short, a refrigerator.

I did this but the power never went out. I don’t drink bottled water, but my freezer is full of them now now. Do I just defrost them all in a big pot or something?

Wait what? Maybe I’m misunderstanding, but this is what I got out of the article:

“We had anecdotes and preliminary evidence of a phenomenon. A robust scientific study showed no evidence of said phenomenon. Therefore, the phenomenon was previously real but has now stopped.”

That seems like really, really bad science. Or at least, really really bad science reporting. Like, if anecdotes are all it takes, here’s one from just a few weeks ago.

I left some Andrew Tate-esque stuff running overnight by accident and ended up having to delete my watch history to get my homepage back to how it was before.

The absolutely optimal move is probably to keep 5 or so k of debt around just to hedge the forgiveness play. But just paying it all off is also a great investment. You’re not likely to find another way of using your money with a >4% ROI. If the hassle of keeping another set of bills current is going to significantly add stress to your life I would pay it off. Really, though, there’s no way to lose here.

Fascism is well-defined? With all due respect, this is the kind of statement that betrays a lack of knowledge of the field. Fascism is notorious in political science for being poorly defined both as a system of government and as an ideology.

What constitutes as a definition of fascism and fascist governments has been a complicated and highly disputed subject concerning the exact nature of fascism and its core tenets debated amongst historians, political scientists, and other scholars ever since Benito Mussolini first used the term in 1915. Historian Ian Kershaw once wrote that “trying to define ‘fascism’ is like trying to nail jelly to the wall”.

For convenience, we can use the Wikipedia definition, which clearly signposts the oppression of political and social minorities as key parts of the definition of fascism.

Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement,[1][2][3] characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation and race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.

“Paradox of tolerance” does not justify literally any oppressive act.

And yeah, if a plane with 20 people on board is on a glide path towards a stadium, I’m going to be pretty skeptical of anybody who’s just champing at the bit to shoot it down. If we’ve got the time to talk about it, we can evacuate the stadium, or get in contact with the pilot, or scramble a jet to take a look inside and confirm if the occupants are incapacitated, or nudge a wingtip so that it glides into a less populated area. All of which have a better chance of success and are less disruptive than firing an armed missile within civilian airspace. Your unwillingness to consider less extreme options will inadvertently end up empowering authoritarians and enabling the very abuses you nominally wish to prevent.

If the silencing and persecution of minorities is not part of your definition of “the rise of fascism”, you should really gain a better definition of the “fascism” actually is.

Awesome! That way, the next time a minority starts connecting and coordinating using the internet, conservatives can silence them by doxxing them and threatening their families!

I originally wrote this for !noncredibledefense@sh.itjust.works but it works pretty good for me too:

NATO Astronaut 1: It never gets old, huh?

NATO Astronaut 2: Nope.

Astronaut 1: It kinda makes you want to…

Astronaut 2: Break into a song?

Astronaut 1: Yep.

I love the trenches,

I love the roadside mines,

I love blown bridges,

I love when turrets fly.

I love the whole world

And all its sights and sounds.

Boom-de-yah-da, boom-de-yah-da (twice)

I love my plane-fus,

I love nuke submarines,

I love logistics,

I love democracy!

I love the whole world

And all its craziness

Boom-de-yah-da, boom-de-yah-da (twice)

I love dictators

(I like to watch em hang)

I love Three Gorges

I love when things go bang!

I love the whole world

It’s such a brilliant place

Boom-de-ah-da, boom-de-ah-da (repeating until fade)

But what about the comic?! The comic says I don’t have to change my lifestyle to align with my purported values! It absolves me of my responsibility to do anything beyond complain, no matter how trivial the change required! Doesn’t the comic say complaining about a problem is basically just as good as actually contributing to fixing it?

There was a Politico article about this last week:

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/08/08/age-law-online-porn-00110148

The public is also on her side. “You poll this, it’s like an 85-15 issue,” explained Jon Schweppe, the policy director for the socially conservative think tank American Principles Project. Age-verification for porn is not his think tank’s only priority, but when they poll it against other priorities in swing states, age-verification blows the rest out of the water, with 77 percent in support and 15 percent opposed.

Here’s a Pew survey suggesting that the majority of Americans consider porn harmful:

A large 70%-majority of Americans reject the idea that “nude pictures and X-rated videos on the internet provide harmless entertainment for those who enjoy it”; only 27% agree; in general, opinions about pornography have become slightly more conservative over the past 20 years. Currently 41% agree that “nude magazines and X-rated movies provide harmless entertainment for those who enjoy it,” while 53% disagree. The number saying such material is harmless has fluctuated, declining from 48% in 1987 to 41% in 1990 and then varying by no more than four percentage points thereafter. The pattern is more mixed for other values related to freedom of expression.

Note that trends in this space are getting more conservative, rather than less. This tracks with my experience with Gen Z.

Admittedly, I have not seen any polling about specific legislation. It hasn’t been long since these bills were passed, and I don’t know if it’s a priority for pollsters. But if nothing else, just look through the thread. Lemmy leans way further left that the general public, and even here most people’s problems with it are about execution rather than intent.

No, not “no one is claiming that”, because I am claiming that. Contrary to your apparent belief, large swathes of urban Texas are little different politically from a blue city anywhere else in the country. A state rep for Austin fought prescription drug companies and against putting the 10 Commandments in classrooms. Does that sound Christofascist to you? Because he voted for the bill. Close to 40% of the State legislature are Democrats and the majority of them approved this bill. Acting like a representative for Austin and a representative for rural Texas are both Christofascists because they come from the same state is actively counterproductive to gaining a better understanding of the situation. If you’re tilting at windmills and blaming imaginary enemies you’re going to miss the real forces that are driving these decisions.

Both the concept and the implementation were approved almost unanimously, with overwhelming bipartisan support. Not sure why you’re having a hard time with this.

Exactly. Malicious compliance, while reminding people exactly why they shouldn’t be so quick to give up their anonymity on the internet.

Age verification for pornography has something like a 70% approval rating. It’s not a religious extremism issue, it’s a “normies don’t want or care about their freedoms issue”.

The sicko in me hopes they spend the next two weeks linking every policymaker in the state to their pornography habits and just dump the whole dataset online. Yeah, it would probably counterproductive and not great for democracy but I wouldn’t it be the sickest burn of all time?

Don’t apologize! It’s a good idea and I hadn’t considered it before.