Amber Volcel Police Whataboutism

I’m part of a coalition trying to prevent a private equity firm from buying out a local nonprofit hospital and using AI to “Improve efficiency” is one of their plans that we’ve had to study (done by people much more competent than I).

The main thing they plan to use AI for is filling out paperwork - nurses will record their introductory interviews with patients and the AI (basically, speech recognition + knowing what fields to fill out for certain information) will automatically fill out that patient’s chart.

I’m sure they’re planning on using AI for other purposes as well, but this is the most prevalent use - speech recognition and filling out charts automatically.

Political affiliation is not a protected class, nor should it be.

One thing that people seem to take for granted is that these government-hosted instances would be open to the public for account creation, while this doesn’t necessarily have to be the case. Not everyone can get a statedepartment.gov email address. Not everyone needs to be able to get a @statedepartment.mastodon.gov handle. Just leave it to public officials only.

One additional suggestion I might make is to allow you to report the post to your own instance admins but not the host admins. This would be useful for when you want a post to be hidden or an instance defederated and you don’t want to also send your identity to the instance you’re reporting.

This might be used for:

Reporting spam coming from an instance that is unlikely to delete it.

Reporting CSAM on an instance that supports it.

Reporting hate speech on instances that believe hate speech is covered by free speech.

Etc.

China bad, updoots to the left

Couldn’t you have left this braindead bullshit on Reddit?

There’s a word for this, the promotion of leaders based on merit instead of popularity - Technocracy. And it’s not a distinct ideology but a syncretic one that has been adopted by many groups with differing politics. The most prominent example would be the Technocratic faction of the People’s Republic of China, which was opposed to the Maoists back in the 50s and 60s; they argued for society to be led by experts instead of Democratically with a strong emphasis on Peasant participation (the standpoint of the Maoists). China today follows a moderate path taking from both factions.

In the West, however, Technocracy is mostly associated with Liberals; however, I would argue that the modern Liberal view of Technocracy is fundamentally flawed, since it relies on Capitalism distributing wealth meritocratically (which Socialists understand is not the case).

Lmao amazing

I am an Authoritarian. “Authoritarianism” as a pejorative is a liberal buzzword, and I am not a Liberal. Any Marxist who has actually read a book will say the same.

What system do you believe in, oh politically enlightened Redditor? Or are you just a South Park Libertarian who believes that caring about things and having opinions is cringe?

Yes

Gommunism is when no food, iPhone vuvuzela

Stalin and Mao were glorious and the tankies are correct.

Uncritical support for the Lemmy development team.

I think their alignment was probably changed because it was counterintuitive that a Chaotic Evil outsider was from Acheron, a Lawful Evil plane.

Good, I’m a Tankie too.

You can select multiple languages in the box. The “Undetermined” option is for all posts without a language set. Most people do not set a language on their posts. So unselecting it will hide most posts from you.

This might be desirable if you, say, only speak French and don’t want your feed clogged up with unmarked English-language posts. But it also means that if someone made a post in French but forgot to tag it, you won’t see that post either.

If you’re, say, bilingual English/Spanish, you would probably want Undetermined, English, and Spanish selected in the box.

I think this, especially the second issue, is something the Fediverse (Lemmy in particular) will have to work through at some point.

If Reddit bans a subreddit on a controversial subject, it’s banned, it’s gone. But if a Lemmy instance defederates with another instance for hosting controversial content, you just find another instance that doesn’t.

I think the real issue is with federation in general and the creation of bubbles: there is a certain subset of users who just want full federation and full visibility, including sites that host lolicon, fascism, and other problematic content. Even if they aren’t, say, fascists themselves, but just free-speech absolutists. The issue is that any instance that doesn’t defederate with, say, Fascist instances, is tainted, either by association (“this instance refused to defederate from fascist instances, so we’re defederating from them too”) or because problem users are attracted to it (“people in our comment sections from this instance have been defending fascism, so we’re defederating to keep them out”).

And there really isn’t a good solution to the issue, aside from hosting your own tiny client-only server.

No-one has thought of Anarchists when they hear the word “Libertarian” for over 20 years and no amount of complaining on the internet about how the word was stolen will bring it back.

There are different ideologies that fall within the broad spectrum of “Libertarianism” as it is used in America. They are all bad, but some are “misguided but good at heart” (and better than, say, a Democratic-establishment Liberal) while others are “you have to be a literal sociopath to believe this”. The latter tend to get signal-boosted more because they get funding from right-wing foundations and think-tanks.

Most ordinary people who identify as “Libertarians” would be Socialists of some sort but have been brainwashed by Capitalist propaganda that Socialism is bad and evil and is also when the government does stuff, and the government is bad, so Socialism is bad.

The logical extreme of Libertarian thought is Anarcho-Capitalism: the belief in the Non-Aggression Principle (that no-one should ever restrict another’s freedoms, including their freedom to use their private property as they see fit), that coercion does not exist, contracts are sacrosanct, and that people have an absolute right to control what happens with the things that they own. This of course runs contrary to things like “Worker’s Rights” or “Anti-Discrimination Laws”; and is also where a lot of the Pedophilia stuff comes from, since children are either (1). property of their parents (in which case the parents, as their owners, should be allowed to abuse or prostitute them) or (2). free actors in society (in which case they should be allowed to give consent or prostitute themselves). The ultimate issue with Anarcho-Capitalism is that its logical endpoint is Neo-Feudalism: if you own land, you have the right to dictate what the people living on that land are allowed to do while living there; there are no Tenant’s Rights (in fact, like I said before, the only right you have under Anarcho-Capitalism is your freedom to act as you please on your own property, with your own property, without interference from others). Thus, Landlords become a new sort of feudal government, with complete power over their fiefdoms.

There’s also Randian Objectivism, which is a rationalist philosophy whose main influence on modern Libertarianism is the Randian Ubermensch: living your life independently, to the pursuit of your own happiness (and only your own happiness), without care for the social rules of society at large. Batman’s creators have cited Randian Objectivism as a major influence; Batman is the archetypical Randian Ubermensch: wealthy, white, egotistical, and living outside of society and its rules and laws (while benefiting from them).

There are more moderate forms of Libertarianism that believe in things like Net Neutrality (that the internet, like a public service, should treat all traffic through it equally, not giving preference to certain sites or companies) or the Right to Repair (the right to repair something you own personally, rather than having to take it to a licensed repairman). It’s important to note that both of these run contrary to Anarcho-Capitalism: under Anarcho-Capitalism, an ISP has a right to treat traffic through its tubes however it sees fit; and a company can lease its products with whatever anti-repair clauses it wishes. There’s also Right to Roam, which is very popular in Europe (but less so in the states), the idea that you should be allowed to travel through private land, as long as you do not mistreat it.

Things like North Korean parents feeding their children mud, or Kim Jong-un personally executing an orchestra conductor in front of a crowd.

North Korea is not a complete black box. Americans are banned from the country, but most Europeans can visit on guided tours.

Millions of North Koreans work abroad in China. If anyone actually wanted to know what life was like in North Korea, you could just ask them. But no-one with the money to hire a translator and head to Beijing is really interested in the very boring truth; that North Korea is a poor, imperfect country where the vast majority of people live normal lives.

The documentary “Loyal Citizens of Pyeongyang in Seoul” has a few interviews with North Korean citizens who went to the South for better economic opportunities before having their passports seized and prevented from going home to the North.