“Trump will end support for Israel’s genocidal violence against Palestine” is essentially what you were saying.

If it were true, I’d grit my teeth and let this praise of Trump slide. But it is a lie in service to a fascist, relating to an issue that can swing votes.

snek has been permabanned from .world for their behavior in this thread. Somewhat refreshing to find a place where the admins recognize that voicing one’s violent murder fantasies doesn’t have a pedophile exception.

I personally think that pedophilia is genetic, or a chemical brain imbalance or something.

Any evidence of that, or just playing armchair scientist?

It seems a lot more likely that humans don’t have control over their attractions in general. Human sexuality has never been linked to specific genetics or brain chemistry, so maybe put the calipers away.

You don’t choose to be straight, you don’t choose to be gay. You don’t choose to like big boobs or little boobs. You don’t choose whether or not to be attracted to muscles. You literally don’t get to choose “your type”. You have your own set of attractions that you largely discover about yourself, rather than decide for yourself.

Pedophilia is likely no different. The only difference in practice is that most other types of interpersonal attraction can be ethically fulfilled between consenting adults. Pedophilia, by definition, cannot, as it involves someone who cannot ethically consent.

We need to start looking at people with inappropriate attractions as people who carry a burden.

Knowledge = Belief + Evidence

What really matters is how good of a critical thinker you are, and what you’ll accept as evidence, but if you’re decently educated, you should be able to manage it. The key is not accepting secondhand evidence from untrustworthy sources, and to seek firsthand evidence that you can see with your own eyes.

As for “Objective Truth”, that doesn’t exist. Not only are our experiences obligatorily filtered through our subjective human perceptions, but relativity allows for multiple conflicting truths to exist simultaneously in spacetime, so it literally can’t exist, and even if it could, we would be blind to it.

Don’t listen to this manipulative pro-Trump garbage. Trump loves Israel.

https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/harris-trump-iran-israel-gaza-positions/

As president, Trump controversially moved the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and ended decades of U.S. opposition to Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. (The Biden administration reversed the settlement decision.)

This isn’t surprising, it’s inevitable.

If you folks knew how common pedophilic fantasies are amongst the general public, you would be shocked. Just look to cultures like Japan and Russia that don’t strongly condemn such things, and you’ll find it’s about 15% of the population. It’s only less in the West because of the near homicidal stigma attached to it that makes people vigorously hide that part of themselves.

Fortunately, this also shows that the vast majority of those people don’t offend.

We also tend to define pedophilia as “anything sexual involving a minor”, while reacting to it as if it means “violent rape of a toddler”, so no shit, we sexualize youth all the time, the 18 year mark is a legal and social formality, not a hard limit on human attraction. Adults will find themselves attracted to teens, and they won’t reveal that because who the fuck ever would?

If anything, the issue isn’t that people have these attractions and fantasies, it is that some portion of those people can’t separate fantasy from reality and are willing to hurt a child to get what they want, or they are sociopaths that consume child porn without feeling disgust for witnessing horrific child abuse.

If I get to know all that stuff about my neighbors, my neighbors get to know tons of information about me too.

Hard pass. Wake me when someone commits a crime.

They are Republicans.

That’s called insomnia.

This looks like Bing Image Creator. It’s gotten way too adherent to prompts for my comfort level. This one is crazy.

In the scientific and medical world in which these things are relevant, words absolutely mean things. Good lord…

you are voting for putting people in prison for marijuana.

Harris has made Cannabis legalization a campaign promise.

You are voting for a party that will pretend to care only to watch key legislation die because 2 senators said “no”, despite being from the party that claimed to want the change.

You are literally complaining about democracy here. If you want more “yes” votes, elect more Democrats.

You vote for 2 more years of a locked government. There is no solution to the problems the 2 parties have created by voting for either of them. Nothing ever gets permanently better under either Democrat or Republican. They are the problem.

Democrats bring progress, and Republicans bring regression. I don’t see how not voting is a solution to this problem. If you want progress, vote for the people who bring it.

Don’t use Geordi to support your ruling class. Geordi comes from a world that got rid of boomer parties and they run the freaking galaxy.

Star Trek isn’t real.

How dare one political party oppose another political party! It completely flies in the face of what an election is supposed to be about. /s

If you think that by “toxicity” I am referring to moderators protecting their communities, you are sorely mistaken. That’s a feature, not a bug.

I got accused of being transphobic and banned from an instance because I said that hate towards trans people is a dead cat argument.

Good, you showed up in a trans-inclusive space and used right-wing jargon (coined by Boris fucking Johnson) that dismisses their testimony on their own lived experiences as being “shocking” and a “distraction”, when they know full well that their rights and their lives are on the line. Sorry you didn’t get a chance to correct the record on the fact that you were ignorant on the severity of the issue, but if you’re still publicly complaining about being banned on other uninvolved instances, I’d say that they made the right move.

I prefer allowing hashtags over site-wide search. People can use hashtags specifically when they want their post to be associated with a specific search, rather than letting people search for specific words and phrases.

Site-wide search works way better for communities structured the way Reddit or Lemmy are structured, since people can easily run afoul of different moderation policies, and get themselves banned from communities for bad faith interactions. You have no such protections on a microblogging service.

I don’t even care about the “AI is content theft” arguments. No self-respecting artist would ever accuse him of plagiarism over this. It looks like garbage. The copyright office rejected his copyright claims on the grounds that he didn’t make it. Same story as the monkey selfie guy: You didn’t make the art, it isn’t your art. If a human didn’t make the art, it can’t be copyrighted.

He claims it was a mix of Midjourney and Photoshop, but honestly, I’ve made prettier things just fucking around with SDXL on my gaming PC, and I can confirm that it took absolutely no talent or effort to do it. The hardest part of the process was setting up AUTOMATIC1111, and that’s not even very hard.

And I would never even dream of taking credit for anything I’ve generated, because I didn’t make it. I just typed a bunch of wildcard arguments into a prompt and let my GPU dump out thousands of 4K wallpapers for entertainment. This guy thinks this one artifact-ridden generation has any actual value? It’s “famous” for pissing people off by competing against humans and unjustifiably winning. Being controversial could be valuable, if the controversy didn’t fundamentally render the “art” valueless by revealing that it is nothing more than a GPU vomiting up inference. The real villain in this story is the art contest organizers that stuck a blue ribbon on this slop.

My experience with BlueSky has been that it is better than Twitter because it is smaller and doesn’t cater to the far-right.

BUT…

It can become extremely toxic very fast because they implemented the same poorly executed features Twitter did that fucked things up. In fact, it’s way worse than that…

The two features they copied from Twitter that hurt them the most are site-wide search and quote posts. Site-wide search enables people to “namesearch” or to monitor keywords for issues they want to fight about. Quote posts are a well understood “dunk mechanism”, that largely encourages dogpiling.

As for being free of a central algorithm, that seems good, until you see that there are tons of community algorithms you can subscribe to instead. Now there are algorithms for things like “anti-Zionist posts” and “pro-Israel posts”, which not only let people find their preferred echo-chamber, but also provide trolls access to exactly the groups of people they want to argue with or harass.

These algorithms can be built to detect certain hashtags and phrases, or they can just be big lists of accounts like a Twitter group. There’s no telling when you might show up in one of these algorithms or why.

As a result, if you say anything less than agreeable about any issue, there’s a chance you’re going to hear from a bunch of accounts you’ve never met before, regardless of what side of an issue you are on, or how extreme your view actually is.

I don’t recommend it. It’s a pro-profit company that seeks to be a wholesale replacement for Twitter. AT Proto federation is a complete joke, it’ll never expand if it doesn’t have a flagship open source server. They’ll give up on it just like Twitter did and just be another centralized, toxic, microblogging community.

You’re the one being disingenuous. The issue here isn’t related to the word “addiction” vs. “dependence”.

This issue is the use of the word “physical”, which you seem to be deliberately avoiding offering any explanation for.

Tik Tok cannot be physically addictive, because “physical addiction” is exclusively related to physical substances, like alcohol, recreational drugs, and medications. You cannot physically consume Tik Tok and become chemically addicted to it.

One could become addicted to the stimulation of Tik Tok, or dependent on it emotionally, but they literally cannot become physically addicted to or dependent on it unless “Tik Tok” is actually a slang term for a drug or something…

Mount an e-ink display with a rotating slideshow of different images on your car until they have a record of your car having thousands of different bumper stickers.

Eh, Israel, Hamas, and Hezbollah all have the right to exist, and to defend themselves. But we have to define that pretty strictly.

Carpet-bombing Gaza isn’t defense.

Slaughtering music festival attendees is not defense.

Indiscriminate bomb planting and destination is not defense.

Shooting up a train station is not defense.

Bombing hospitals and aid trucks is not defense.

I draw the line at deliberately or recklessly killing civilians.