mechoman444

Yes.

This response was also AI generated.

No doofus it wasn’t.

Google keyboard has a grammar and spelling check that’s powered by AI and that is what I use because it’s the quickest way to type all that up.

The words however are my own.

I apologize for bringing your logical fallacies to light. I realize pointing them out is intellectually lazy, but unfortunately it seems necessary when they make up the basis of the rebuttal.

You’re conflating the effort required to manufacture an image with the effort involved in creating the joke. The context of the joke isn’t who manufactured the image; it’s who made the joke. The AI didn’t independently decide that Netanyahu, Trump, and Ed Sheeran standing on a stage would be funny. A person came up with that concept and used AI as the tool to produce it.

You could have made the same image in Paint.NET in 20 minutes. Great. That doesn’t demonstrate that the joke is lazy, and it certainly doesn’t demonstrate that it’s unfunny. It demonstrates that you prefer a different method of producing the image.

And “lazy” isn’t a synonym for “unfunny.” If I spend twenty hours painstakingly creating the exact same image in Photoshop, the joke doesn’t magically become funnier because I invested more labor into manufacturing the pixels.

If you don’t find the joke funny, that’s perfectly fine. But that’s a subjective reaction, not an argument. If your argument is that the joke itself is lazy, then explain why the idea is lazy. The fact that the production of the image was automated doesn’t establish that.

For the record, your rebuttal relies on several logical fallacies. The “you criticize AI while using the internet” comparison is a false analogy because my point was about the irony of criticizing the energy consumption of one internet-based activity while participating in another, not that you are somehow forbidden from criticizing technology you use. Your claim that the image is lazy because it was AI-generated is essentially circular reasoning because you are using the use of AI as both the evidence and the conclusion that the work was lazy. And saying that it could have been made in Paint.NET in 20 minutes is a non sequitur: the amount of effort required to produce an image does not establish whether the underlying joke is funny or whether the person who conceived it was creative. Those arguments don’t establish your conclusion; they simply assert it from different directions.

Great, another “AI sucks and I’m so much more enlightened because I don’t like or use AI” post.

The irony of using the internet on a device to post about the energy consumption of AI while relying on that same general infrastructure and energy consumption to make and distribute the post is… rather fantastic.

If OP really wanted to make a point about reducing AI usage, there is something amusing about using an internet-based service to make that argument.

And the fact that the joke is considered unfunny specifically because it was AI-generated seems like a particularly strange criticism. Whether someone personally likes or dislikes AI is certainly their prerogative, but that doesn’t really tell anyone anything about whether the joke itself works. It’s a little like saying, “I don’t like this joke because of the tool that was used to make it.”

Great, another “AI sucks and I’m so much more enlightened because I don’t like or use AI” post.

The irony of this person using the internet on their device to post about AI’s energy usage while using the exact same infrastructure and consuming energy to make the post and complain about it… is… fantastic!

If OP really wanted to rally against AI, they would have shut the fuck up and not posted about it at all.

And the fact that he doesn’t like the joke specifically because it’s AI-generated is one of the most pointless statements I could think of. No one gives a crap what you like or why. It’s also one of the most useless pieces of information an individual can provide to another person.

I’m not necessarily against the gradual removal of physical media, and that’s not because I’m defending Sony or anything like that. We’ve been downloading games digitally for decades, and physical media has increasingly gone the way of the DVD. That transition itself doesn’t really bother me.

That said, I absolutely agree that what they’re doing here is bullshit, and physical media is objectively more consumer-friendly in a lot of ways. I’m just saying I understand the argument from a different perspective.

Because when it comes to books, I’m exactly the opposite.

I want an actual physical book. Paper pages, a cover, the whole thing. I’ve tried reading digitally, and I just can’t get into it. Something about reading a book on a screen feels completely wrong to me.

So I guess I understand the attachment to physical media more than I initially thought. I just happen to draw the line in a very different place.

Disregard my previous comment if you can still see it.

You are intellectually dishonest, willfully ignorant, and apparently incapable of engaging with anything I actually said. Responding with incoherent babble instead of addressing the argument isn’t a discussion it’s a waste of my time.

Good day.

Because it is defensible. Capitalism isn’t a living entity that personally insulted you or wronged your family. It doesn’t have intentions, feelings, or a moral compass. It is an economic system. The people operating within that system are the ones capable of abusing it, exploiting it, or using it to enrich themselves at someone else’s expense.

And yes, capitalism has historically produced better outcomes than many of the alternative economic systems we’ve actually attempted. That’s not a defense of every aspect of capitalism; it’s a statement of historical fact. You don’t get to dismiss an empirical observation simply because you dislike the conclusion.

What I find particularly amusing is how you people seem to think that confidently declaring something makes it an argument. You haven’t actually refuted anything I’ve said. You haven’t provided evidence, addressed the historical record, or even engaged with the distinction between an economic system and the people abusing it. You’ve simply produced a handful of indignant declarations, apparently mistaking the intensity of your feelings for the strength of your argument. That’s not analysis. That’s ideological ventriloquism with the critical-thinking portion conveniently removed. If you want to disagree with me, by all means bring an argument. But if all you’ve got is “capitalism bad” repeated with increasing levels of outrage, you’re not actually contributing anything to the discussion.

First of all, thank you. Your response was well-mannered and thoughtful, which puts it several multitudes above the usual riffraff on this platform who encounter criticism of a belief they hold and immediately start foaming at the mouth.

Let me be perfectly clear about what I am arguing against: the wholesale slaughter of an entire group of people.

That is not revolution. That is not justice. That is not liberation. It is simply another form of barbarism, dressed up in whatever ideological language makes the person committing it feel righteous.

Human history is littered with the corpses of people who were convinced that this time the mass killing was justified because their victims were the right people to hate. It has never ended well. One hatred does not magically become virtuous because you attach a political theory to it.

There is already more than enough hatred in this world.

And no, I am not opposed to violence in every conceivable circumstance. There are political leaders in the Middle East and Russia whom I would have very little sympathy for if they were violently removed from power. There are people who commit such extraordinary acts of cruelty that I have no moral objection to the idea that they should face the ultimate consequence.

I can even understand the moral argument behind what Luigi Mangione did, regardless of where someone ultimately draws the legal or ethical line.

But there is an enormous difference between saying some individuals have forfeited their moral claim to our sympathy and saying an entire class of human beings deserves to die.

That distinction matters.

I understand why people are angry. I understand the plight of people being crushed by the economic and political systems we have constructed. I understand the desire to smash a system that appears fundamentally indifferent to the people trapped beneath it.

And I am not even particularly enthusiastic about capitalism. I see its failures. I see its contradictions. I see the suffering it can produce and the ways in which wealth and power concentrate themselves.

But here’s where I draw the fucking line:

“Kill the capitalists.”

No.

Because the moment your solution to oppression becomes finding another category of human beings to exterminate, you haven’t transcended the system you despise. You’ve simply inherited its worst characteristics.

You have become the thing you claim to be fighting.

And that’s the part nobody seems to want to hear.

If your revolution requires you to dehumanize an entire population before you can justify killing them, then congratulations—you haven’t built a better ideology. You’ve just found a new excuse for the oldest human vice imaginable.

We have to be better.

Someone has to be willing to say the quiet part out loud: killing people because they belong to the wrong class does not make us morally superior to the people we condemn for doing the same thing to someone else.

You don’t get moral absolution simply because your victims are different from theirs.

If the only thing separating your politics from the atrocities of the past is that you have chosen a different group of people to hate, then you haven’t learned a damn thing from history.

You’ve just changed the uniforms.

I have no clue what the hell you’re talking about.

And as for the people who say they didn’t read it because it was “too long”, my personal favorite, I can tell them to go fuck themselves. They’re among the most useless and intellectually incurious people in any demographic, and their refusal to engage with something simply because it requires more than a few seconds of their attention makes them eminently dismissible.

You’re making a prediction about a hypothetical future and presenting it as though it disproves a statement about the historical present. It doesn’t.

Yes, climate change, resource scarcity, geopolitical competition, and environmental degradation create serious risks. Nobody is disputing that. But “therefore humanity is gearing up for an enormous war” is a prediction, not an established fact. There is no evidence that some inevitable apocalyptic conflict is waiting for us around the corner.

And the capitalism argument is just as selective. I’m not claiming capitalism single-handedly created modern prosperity. Technology, science, medicine, education, infrastructure, and countless other factors obviously contributed. But pretending that economic systems have nothing to do with how those advancements are financed, produced, distributed, and adopted is equally ahistorical.

More importantly, you seem to have conveniently ignored the enormous number of countries that are both capitalist and extraordinarily successful. Countries such as Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany, Australia, Canada, Japan, and South Korea aren’t prosperous because they somehow escaped capitalism. They have different varieties of capitalist economies combined with different levels of taxation, regulation, social welfare, labor protections, and public investment.

That’s actually the interesting question: not “capitalism good” or “capitalism bad,” but which institutions produce the best outcomes and under what circumstances.

And yes, Western economic exploitation and economic warfare have contributed to poverty in some countries. That’s a legitimate historical argument. But “this country is poor because the West exploited it” cannot simply become a universal explanation for every impoverished country that doesn’t fit your preferred narrative.

Ultimately, you’re replacing one simplistic historical explanation with another. Capitalism doesn’t deserve sole credit for human progress, but neither can its critics simply remove it from the history of that progress because it complicates the argument.

And the accusation that I’m somehow a “capitalism fanboy” is particularly lazy, considering I explicitly stated that I do not outright support capitalism. You are arguing against a position I never expressed because it’s considerably easier than engaging with what I actually said. Recognizing that capitalism has contributed to economic growth, technological development, and improvements in living standards is not the same thing as worshipping the system or believing it is inherently good. If your argument requires you to invent my position before you can attack it, that’s not a particularly strong argument.

If you must know I support social democracy and further down the line democratic socialism. Which I assume you’ll

You’re an idiot.

Ya. There’s always one of you. Don’t read it. I’m not going to force you to do anything. But thanks for wasting your time by telling me you wont read it.

But I’ll still leave you with my default response to this: go fuck yourself.

No it’s not. Advocating for the wholesale slaughter of an entire group of people is morally reprehensible on every level.

“And replace them with socialists, right?”

“Kill the capitalists.” What an absolutely deranged thing to chant as though it were some kind of political slogan worth celebrating. Apparently we’ve reached a point where people can casually advocate killing an entire class of people and then congratulate themselves for being morally enlightened.

For all the advancements humanity has made in medicine, philosophy, science, and morality, we still manage to say incredibly stupid shit like this and other people cheer it on because they seem to have forgotten what the word kill actually means.

And before anyone starts: no, capitalism is not perfect. Of course it isn’t. But pretending that capitalism has produced nothing but misery requires ignoring an enormous amount of history.

We are living through one of the most prosperous and peaceful periods in human history. The countries that consistently rank among the world’s most prosperous, stable, and livable are overwhelmingly capitalist economies. Germany is capitalist. Sweden is capitalist. Norway is capitalist. Denmark is capitalist. They have extensive welfare programs, strong labor protections, and social safety nets, but they are still capitalist economies.

Even the United States, despite its very real problems, remains one of the wealthiest and most prosperous countries on Earth. You don’t have to like that fact, but disliking it doesn’t make it untrue.

There is nothing inherently virtuous about hating an economic class. There is certainly nothing virtuous about fantasizing about killing people because of the economic system they support.

“Kill the capitalists” isn’t a serious political argument. It is virtue signaling dressed up as revolutionary rhetoric, a way for people to feel morally superior without having to articulate an actual solution to the problems they’re angry about.

If your political philosophy requires you to start by deciding which group of human beings deserves to die, perhaps the problem isn’t capitalism.

Disclaimer: None of this should be interpreted as me claiming that capitalism is some flawless or inherently virtuous economic system. I fully acknowledge its massive faults, including exploitation, wealth concentration, monopolistic behavior, and the increasingly corporatocratic nature of the United States. I simply reject socialism as an economic model and don’t believe that acknowledging capitalism’s failures requires pretending that socialism is the answer. You can criticize capitalism and we absolutely should without advocating for its abolition or fantasizing about killing the people who participate in it.

Additional disclaimer: I am not oblivious to the violence happening around the world right now. I am fully aware of the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the massive war between Russia and Ukraine, the conflict involving Iran, and the numerous wars, insurgencies, and other forms of violence occurring across Africa and elsewhere. None of that should be minimized or dismissed. My point is a comparative historical one: even with these horrific conflicts occurring today, humanity as a whole is still living through one of the least violent and most peaceful periods in recorded history when measured against the enormous scale of human history and global population. That does not make today’s suffering any less horrific, nor does it excuse any of it. It simply puts the present into its proper historical context.

Even Russia’s like: sure don’t care.

Uh. This was physically painful but I must upvote because it fits the sub.

I think who financially owns a company is largely irrelevant, whether they’re saints or pedophiles. In this case, reducing the discussion to “immoral billionaires” or mythical dragons hoarding wealth misses the point entirely.

Reddit is a publicly traded social media and news aggregation platform with ownership spread across institutional investors, including a major publishing conglomerate and a large Chinese technology company. The possibility that some wealthy individuals connected to those organizations may be immoral is, to me, one of the least interesting aspects of the discussion. There are far more substantive issues surrounding Reddit’s ownership, governance, moderation policies, business incentives, and corporate structure than the personal character of people at the very top.

For example, if someone is banned after criticizing a public figure, what is the more plausible explanation? That Reddit is deliberately protecting a specific pedophile because of who they are, or that moderators or administrators are enforcing a political or ideological preference? The latter strikes me as vastly more likely. If you’re trying to explain why moderation decisions happen, political bias or inconsistent enforcement is a much more convincing explanation than a coordinated effort to shield particular criminals.

Focusing on whether a billionaire somewhere in the ownership chain is a bad person is like criticizing cars because they produce CO₂. It’s true, but it’s so obvious and commonplace that it contributes very little to understanding the actual issue.

Why does every discussion, especially on Lemmy, eventually turn into “it’s run by a pedophile” or “it’s owned by billionaires”?

Reddit is a publicly traded company. Steve Huffman is still the CEO. From what I can tell, the largest shareholders include Tencent and Advance Publications, along with various institutional investors.

Could there be pedophiles working at those companies or individuals who own Reddit stock? Maybe. That’s true of practically any large corporation. It doesn’t mean Reddit is “run by pedophiles.”

And for the love of God, can we stop bringing up Elon Musk every five minutes? I’m exhausted by people forcing him into conversations that have nothing to do with him. Whether you love him or hate him, not every discussion needs to revolve around the same handful of public figures.

My problem isn’t with criticizing Reddit. Criticize the company all you want when it’s deserved. My problem is replacing factual criticism with lazy slogans and guilt-by-association. If you’re going to criticize a company, criticize what it actually does, not some cartoon version of who you imagine owns or controls it.

Lol! Keep Reddit safe. They just want that sweet sweet marking info!