Guavanaut posted:

You didn't tell us which part of a boat the dildo is.

Is... is it this part?

quote:

It was once used to reference a phallus-shaped pin stuck in the edging of a row boat to act as a pivot for the oar (also known as a "thole pin" or "dole pin").

CoolCab posted:

Several were lost to time - god, it was ages ago now. I have never met James Cordon nor been to that service station, of course there never was an argument about spagetti bollonese, nor do a wide number of us write S Club 7 fan sites or that puppet show with the ships erotic fiction. It was like we were receiving red texts from a better version of reality - one where our squabbles were not about nationalism but instead far purer things.

Guavanaut posted:

You didn't tell us which part of a boat the dildo is.

Is... is it this part?

CoolCab posted:

Several were lost to time - god, it was ages ago now. I have never met James Cordon nor been to that service station, of course there never was an argument about spagetti bollonese, nor do a wide number of us write S Club 7 fan sites or that puppet show with the ships erotic fiction. It was like we were receiving red texts from a better version of reality - one where our squabbles were not about nationalism but instead far purer things.

OwlFancier posted:

The entire concept of electoral and democratic legitimacy is contingent on enough people belieiving in it, though? Like yeah he got enough votes to win the election, but that doesn't mean people have to like it or think that it is legitimate or good? You can certainly make the argument that it is more important to preserve belief in the legitimacy of the electoral system than to have the guy you want in power, and you can also make the argument that trump is a garbage president who shouldn't be in power regardless, but in no case can you escape the fact that a crisis of the legitimacy of the governing apparatus of the US is not some unfathomable event, countries have those crises all the time because for whatever reason a sufficinet plurality of the people living there cease to buy into that particular mass hallucination that it is legitimate.

Like yes there is, presumably, an actual real reality which we can attempt to discern the shape of by prodding it with sticks and seeing what happens but in the realm of society, almost everything we deal with is constructed out of the mass belief of other people, that's what a social construct is. And what I am saying is that I don't think that humanity as a whole has ever had a unified connection to absolute reality, what we have had more recently is more hegemonic social constructs enforced by things like press, church, and state.

But it is the nature of people who form communities to build their own conceptions of the world and many of them are directly in opposition to the ones with more resources and more power. It is weird to me to try and cast the world before today as ever having some actual objective truth to it that we have strayed away from, rather than just a more effective domination of a smaller number of truths over others.

Social spaces do not, I think, just appear out of nowhere, they reflect the actual diversity of experience and ideas of human beings, and I don't like or understand the desire to just... shove all those back in the box or at least under the subjugation of the dominant narrative. That kind of thinking is what gets you suppression of LGBT rights, labour movements, women's emancipation, all that poo poo. Because what are those but people forming communities to reflect their reality and seeking to topple the dominance of the mainstream reality that denies their validity?

I don't think the conspiracy theorists just emerge out of nowhere, I think it is a reflection of actual problems in the world that people do not have a better explanation for, because they have been primed by extremely traditional forms of media to reject better explanations, it makes no sense to me to look at that and say "well the problem is social media is taking the conspiracy nuttery out of the hands of us, the people who created it for profit and because it suppressed backlash against the predatory actions of our state, and now it's affecting us in ways we didn't predict, so obviously we need to ban social media"

Complaining about the polarizing effects of social media I think is ultimately just a complaint by people who either don't understand how the world works and are only seeing a very small part of a wider structure, or who do understand how it works and what they dislike is that they are losing exclusive control what people believe, but they phrase it as if what they want people to believe is somehow "objective" which is just what every lovely lib journalist in the world does on twitter every day when they whine about the mob saying they're full of poo poo.

OwlFancier posted:

I think it's a bit stupid to say you can only exercise if you don't enjoy it. I bring drinks and sandwiches when I go for a walk because I like to stop to catch my breath and eat something when I do.

Jakabite posted:

It’s all good and well saying that elections only exist because of a fabricated reality we all agree on - absolutely true. But that isn’t the point I was making. No one at the Capitol today, or any of the tens of millions of people who believe the election was stolen, are criticising the very idea of elections and wondering what new systems we may be able to come up with. They’re saying it was stolen - that there was fraud. They’re using data, facts, accounts of events that objectively are false and objectively did not happen to justify that belief - and they believe those facts to be true. The people feeding them those facts almost certainly don’t, but who knows? The information is out there and because of how social media works, it has been amplified to such a degree that tens of millions of people now believe a set of events that are outright, absolutely objectively, lies. That’s what I’m getting at. We could argue black is white about the nature of truth and society and social construction but I’d argue we need to take a step back (or forward?) from that. Take a less deeply philosophical, academic view of things and for a moment just say that there are things that happen and things that don’t - take some of society’s truths as just truths for a second, just for the purpose of addressing how specifically untrue things are suddenly becoming true to millions. There’s space for other conversations about how society is fundamentally constructed obviously and the internet is great for exposing more people to those ideas too but in the realm of macro-politics those ideas will be nigh on irrelevant if half of the world ends up believing in literal harmful bullshit and we end up with a society based on that.

Basically, outside of academic high level discussion and in the minds of the vast vast majority of humanity there is objective truth. That might be an inconvenient fact but it’s how it is. If we on the left spend all of our time getting wrapped up in how actual my there isn’t objective truth etc etc without tackling things at a level most people empathise with then the right will just abolish those truths and replace them with their own, as they have been doing, and with our tacit approval because remember, we don’t believe in objective truth anyway.

Endjinneer posted:

Tier 6: You can only do it if it hurts.

a pipe smoking dog posted:

To be clear I think English Imperialism is a tool that has been used against the english working class as well as against other nations, but I think English people need to acknowledge how much it has warped their world view and recognise why Englishness is viewed so negatively by others.

Simply saying that others need to focus on internationalist solidarity and ignore the negative impacts of England stinks of failing to remove the plank from ones own eye before removing the splinter from your brother's.

Endjinneer posted:

Blaming social media for the insurrection in America is like blaming pamphleteers for the English civil war. It just happens to be the newest facilitator of communication at the moment. If we don't blame it we have to admit that the problems existed beforehand.
That Douglas Adams essay from 1999 touches on these ideas- How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet.

Jakabite posted:

It’s all good and well saying that elections only exist because of a fabricated reality we all agree on - absolutely true. But that isn’t the point I was making. No one at the Capitol today, or any of the tens of millions of people who believe the election was stolen, are criticising the very idea of elections and wondering what new systems we may be able to come up with. They’re saying it was stolen - that there was fraud. They’re using data, facts, accounts of events that objectively are false and objectively did not happen to justify that belief - and they believe those facts to be true. The people feeding them those facts almost certainly don’t, but who knows? The information is out there and because of how social media works, it has been amplified to such a degree that tens of millions of people now believe a set of events that are outright, absolutely objectively, lies. That’s what I’m getting at. We could argue black is white about the nature of truth and society and social construction but I’d argue we need to take a step back (or forward?) from that. Take a less deeply philosophical, academic view of things and for a moment just say that there are things that happen and things that don’t - take some of society’s truths as just truths for a second, just for the purpose of addressing how specifically untrue things are suddenly becoming true to millions. There’s space for other conversations about how society is fundamentally constructed obviously and the internet is great for exposing more people to those ideas too but in the realm of macro-politics those ideas will be nigh on irrelevant if half of the world ends up believing in literal harmful bullshit and we end up with a society based on that.

Basically, outside of academic high level discussion and in the minds of the vast vast majority of humanity there is objective truth. That might be an inconvenient fact but it’s how it is. If we on the left spend all of our time getting wrapped up in how actual my there isn’t objective truth etc etc without tackling things at a level most people empathise with then the right will just abolish those truths and replace them with their own, as they have been doing, and with our tacit approval because remember, we don’t believe in objective truth anyway.

Inexplicable Humblebrag posted:

Sex arses

Ewan posted:

Common sense, to me, suggests that having a cup of tea while walking around a lake that you have driven 5 miles to get to is more accurately described as 'recreation' than 'exercise'.

Jedit posted:

Naziroquai.

namesake posted:

I want a film made about the struggle to get those sex arses to their destination safely.

Das Butt

quote:

The Belief Trap

The media spread misinformation, for instance about Serb atrocities in Bosnia. The Sarajevo bread queue massacre was attributed to the Muslims, who were supposed to have stage-managed it as anti-Serb propaganda. It was said that most of the victims were Serbs, and that their bodies had been replaced by the corpses of Muslims killed elsewhere.

People assess the plausibility of what they are told in light of what other information they have. Where nearly all the information they have on a topic comes from distorting sources, they may be trapped inside a system of false beliefs. Information which contradicts that system of beliefs may be rejected as implausible.

The propaganda was so sustained and consistent that much of it was accepted. In 1992 people in Belgrade were asked in a survey to say who had been bombarding Sarajevo from the surrounding hills. Only 20.5 per cent thought it was Serbs, while 38.4 per cent thought the answer was 'Muslim-Croat forces'. Contrary views became hard to believe. In the same year as the survey, one journalist said that Serbian television could by then allow opposition views to be expressed: 'Reality sounds like the blackest anti-Serbian propaganda, and anyone who describes it will frighten people and turn them against him.'

NotJustANumber99 posted:

Can I still win the euromillions lottery?

ronya posted:

on a theme of nationalism and misinformation and insurrections, a passage from Jonathan Glover's Humanity:

Guavanaut posted:

Borrovan posted:

Ash Crimson has repeatedly made it clear in the past that they are actually talking about the English voters, yes all of them, and no not the Scottish Tories/Brexit voters/whatever. People who are saying "what they actually mean is..." are forgetting a whole bunch of their posts.

WhatEvil posted:

This is true. Also I'm reasonably sure this is like the third or fourth time we've had a 10 page debate about Ash Crimson's posting, which tells you all you need to know.

NotJustANumber99 posted:

It is surely a crime to try and solicit individuals within the NHS to illegally supply you with their drugs?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-55593210

Endjinneer posted:

I think this is one of the reasons why we're not issuing vaccinated people with cards and telling them they can behave like they used to. The black market it would create would be fierce.

Miftan posted:

Israel's doing that via their app, but they're actually vaccinating people properly afaik because they've got a very small population in a very small area.

Miftan posted:

Israel's doing that via their app, but they're actually vaccinating people properly afaik because they've got a very small population in a very small area.

Not So Fast posted:

Are they vaccinating Palestineans yet?

Noxville posted:

Also they’re not vaccinating Palestinians.

Miftan posted:

Israel's doing that via their app, but they're actually vaccinating people properly afaik because they've got a very small population in a very small area.

Guavanaut posted:

XMNN posted:

it should be illegal to go for a walk in the woods because you might enjoy it too much

all outdoor exercise should be strictly limited to industrial estates in the cold and wet, preferably at night, in order to prevent anyone lapsing into dangerous "recreation"

endlessmonotony posted:

I like desolate cityscapes, concrete, and decay though.

I can't stand sunshine, crowds or joy.