Walt J. Rimmer

I can almost understand the Personal Liberties Libertarian, which I think is what the philosophy was originally supposed to be about. But we often see Corpo-National Libertarians or Totally-Not-An-Anarchist-I-Swear Libertarians, and both of those are baffling to me.

Yeah. If this hadn’t been banned already in Canada, it makes me wonder what other laws I just assumed were common in Western republics and democracies actually aren’t.

Well, time to fill my life with meaningless debauchery, because it’s not like there’s a future to plan for.

Wait, wait, wait… The average middle-class voter who is struggling to get by is starting to turn away from the Tories and their leader’s suggestion is to reduce taxes on the wealthiest people? Not to improve services or perhaps address the issues that drove former conservative party voters to Labour. No. Cutting the taxes of the elite, further reducing funding for services that the majority of voters use or rely on is the obvious answer.

I also noticed that both here on Lemmy and over on Reddit that there’s been a push of pro-Russian talking points and a huge push towards Islamaphobia for the past few days, starting just before the attacks this weekend.

I understand there’s going to be some natural anger over the attack, but the amount of accounts I’ve seen, especially noticeable here on Lemmy because we just don’t have as many users, who are saying things like, “This is just what Muslims are like,” and, “Western countries accept these kinds of people, so expect them to do the same there,” and other racist bullshit talking points. They’ve also been painting the ongoing conflict as unquestionably one-sided in Israel’s favor.

It’s depressing but kind of to be expected that there’s a psyops campaign going on trying to get people outraged at not just Hamas, not just Palestine, but all of Islam right now while simultaneously trying to paint Ukrainian surrender and pro-Russian propaganda. This horrible act of terror was either in part planned by Russia or at the very least is seen as an easy opportunity to try and weaken Western support of repelling their invasion of Ukraine. Just spending a little time in the wrong circles on social media should make that obvious.

Is it actually reducing harm to fight to the last Ukrainian though?

When Russia is trying to commit genocide against Ukraine? Yes.

One of the things that made me really like Sanders when he was first campaigning for president was when I looked up his record on American war and he had a voting record that tended to follow a quote from him that amounted to something like (paraphrasing), “War should be the last resort, but if a war is started, we need to see it fully see it through.”

It’s not like siding with Ukraine and getting into that conflict is supporting warfare. It’s seeking to prevent warmongers from profiting off a senseless war. The idea that abandoning Ukraine to just be invaded and allowing Russia to get whatever they want by force is an, “Anti-war,” stance is fucking absurd.

I thought Lemmy was supposed to be the best free speech alternative

I don’t think there’s any useful definition of a “good” free speech website. Because everyone’s going to disagree on the criteria of what makes one good. Myself, I like more moderation, but I like that moderation to be held accountable in an attempt to keep the moderation higher quality and honest. Some people see free speech as no moderation, total anarchy, and I hate that, I’ve seen some websites that tried that, it turned into hate speech and revenge porn and other terrible things very quickly.

You joke, but I’ve seen those kinds of arguments, especially online.

Some time back, someone argued that global warming was a self-solving problem because the oceans reflect light and heat energy back out into space, so as the earth warms and the oceans rise, the ability to reflect that heat will increase and we could even go back into an ice age because of it.

That is, of course, not really how it’s going to go. Massive ecological collapse and possible human extinction would occur due to the initial warming, first off, even before you get to the arguments about… Everything else at the crux of that.

For a long time, one of the talking points of climate change denial wasn’t that it wasn’t happening but that it was normal for us to go through heating and cooling cycles, so just deal with it and wait it out, we survived the last ice age so we can survive this heat wave, right? But again, that’s mostly bullshit.

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Of course, the unprompted violence against a people must be the first thing to be addressed. But this new policy does nothing to actually help in that fight while doing harm to the peace which one would hope would happen afterward. There have been nations in perpetual states of war, and it’s rather horrible. No one should want this to become one.

That was more my point. This is a fascinating thing to study! It’s new and from very far away and observations around it are odd! That’s all exciting! But that’s all exciting without having to force in, “ALIENS CONFIRMED???” into the conversation around it.

The U.S. Space Command confirmed with almost near certainty, 99.999%, that the material came from another solar system.

Yeah, but… Lots of things come to us from other solar systems given enough time. Just naturally. Is it alien? Yes! But that’s nothing special. Is it technology? I mean. Probably not. This is almost certainly a non-story. If the headline read something like, “Harvard professor studying extra-solar fragments,” it would be just as interesting to anyone who actually cares. But that group is very niche. As it is, the headline we get is eye-catching but stupid and malicious.