The problem with this is that none of it is rooted in reality. Pretty much everything you’ve said is just jibber jabber about your discomfort with being mean.

The right is not motivated by this gentle soothing of their pain. They don’t even remotely care about it. They gleefully jeer at us every time someone tries to take a hammer to a democrat’s head, every time black democrats in congress are murdered, every time Mexicans bound in chains are loaded single-file onto planes; they do not believe in this kindness you are affording them. It does not affect them.

When they complain about the public reaction to things like Charlie Kirk, they say those things because it bothers us, not because they care.

What this means is that the right gets to view themselves as strong, self-actualized, Roman warriors for racism freedom, and we are always putting the ball gag in our own mouths.

It is a culture of disempowerment. I’m not saying Harris should be jeering necessarily, but she should not be doing whatever the hell this is. It serves no one.

This… requires a person to look at the profit numbers. To care about them, even. I’m not really sure what you’re getting at.

I think you’re saying that computers can be very good at chess, but we are the ones who decide what the rules to chess are.

You’re welcome 🫡

The “guy” would be Shein.

Another neat way to frame the debate, to reach for the obvious example, is over swastikas. Of course, having a picture of a swastika tattooed on your arm isn’t harming anyone, so why should we as a society have any distaste for it?

To answer “we shouldn’t” is to cede ground to nazis. We do not, actually, have to tolerate their symbols.

The 4chan-nazi pipeline—yes, I’m still talking about pedophiles—if you’re not aware, is a strategy by which people are drenched in ironic, nazi iconography, which results in them being more permissive of that kind of thing, and thus makes them much, much easier to be groomed by king-master klansman, or whatever they call themselves.

Being too permissive of something is socially harmful.

I agree, pedophiles are often villainized way too much. I would like them not to be so afraid of being found out that they never get therapy. If they’re good people, I assume they want to be better as much as I want them to, even if it’s difficult. None of this means we need to sell dolls to them.

Think about it this way: I watch pornography all the time. I am not any less likely to fuck a woman. How is the doll supposed to satiate them?

I realize that I sound very condescending right now, but I’m sincerely asking: this idea that a legal outlet is actually more helpful to them, where does this come from? Does it even make sense?

Whether you mean to or not, I think that you are ceding ground to people who want pedophilia to be more popular. They do exist: middle America loves child marriage. This is why I’m not engaging with the personal freedom angle; it’s not really relevant.

Also, requiring child dolls to have some dimension by which they are clearly identifiable as adults is an effective ban on child dolls—it’s the same thing.

I thought you were referring to Disney’s live action remakes, which are ass and way the fuck more sexist, but do have one black woman in them, so congratulations to Rob Marshall.

I think there may be some social issues with a for-profit company being financially incentivized to promote and sell pedophilia to people.

How would you rather deal with this? A boycott? Do you have money in child sex doll manufacturing that you can withhold?

So he can think of it as a child in his head.

That’s not really what this is about. You’re trying to assess this on a personal freedom level when what we’re talking about is a guy with a megaphone.

Imagine however, that a machine objectively makes the better decisions than any person.

You can’t know if a decision is good or bad without a person to evaluate it. The situation you’re describing isn’t possible.

the people who deploy a machine […] should be accountable for those actions.

How is this meaningfully different from just having them make the decisions in the first place? Are they too stupid?

I live in the US. This American apathy and resentment of political power, this vaguely libertarian vote-with-your-wallet thing, is specifically what I’m criticizing. It’s a kind of political advocacy that abstains from the reigns of power. It’s also, like, a step above changing their profile picture.

I’m aware that everything is broken. But, it was less broken in the past. It’ll be more broken in the future. I look around, though, and I see so little interest in reclaiming the power we’ve lost. Nobody wants to hold the reigns. Zohran does. He’s trying something.

I worry that a lot of Americans, if not most of them, desperately want politics to go back to being something they don’t have to think about; which isn’t good—that’s not a good thing. You don’t win a game of chess by skipping your turn every time it comes up.

Okay, I’m trying not to be needlessly irate because I’m not yelling at you so much as I am lamenting the current state of political advocacy.

My problem is that you are confused. If we have enough people to do this:

If enough people are willing to say “no, I don’t want to see that show enough” then there is the possibility of change.

Then we have enough people to enact regulations. These aren’t different strategies, it’s the same strategy. You need coordinated public willpower either way. You need something tangible to actually direct the currents of the ocean.

People, today, broadly, don’t seem to believe that they can wield the government to their advantage at all. They don’t even see it as an option. They don’t have any ambition.

I’m not saying that you should spend money on a morally bankrupt company. I am saying that this won’t accomplish anything. It isn’t a solution. Certainly not if you don’t believe the regulations option is even possible.

I still have hope, you know. But, it’s dependent on people remembering the union, bar-brawl fistfights their grandpa used to get into.

I’m saying that people like boycotts more than they like actually doing anything. I think it’s a power fantasy, personally.

That said, I don’t expect anything to happen in the next 10 or 15 years given who’s currently in charge, so may as well.

the only way to defeat them is by not giving them money

Is this what it’s like to grow up on tiktok? Nobody has any ambition. It’s all just bootstrapping and personal responsibility.

It’s all arbitrary one way or another,

Exactly, yes.

The comparison is the door-to-door evangelism, i.e., it’s really easy to tell that that phrasing has an ulterior motive. Kinda like how “Netflix and chill” does not mean “let’s watch Netflix.”

What I’m suggesting is that if we’re going to pretend that consumers are never victims of company practices, then emeralddawn specifically should never, ever, ever complain about shrinkflation. Or $80 video games, as far as I’m concerned.

But who knows. Perhaps they don’t.

Getting around people’s lack of willingness is the only way the year of the linux desktop will ever happen.

Like with global warming, people can just choose not to, you know.

“Uh, I bought my computer from Alienware. I don’t know what a GPU is.”

You aren’t being paid to give IT advice either.

The thing I love about linux people is their inability to abstract or do any kind of analysis.

— Me to somebody complaining about their depression.

I would like to imagine you say these same things every single time grocery store packaging gets a little bit smaller.