Man, I still really struggle to understand​ how we can reliably age-gate anything on the Internet without sacrificing privacy for everyone.

IRL you can just show your govt issued ID, but there’s virtually zero privacy risk doing so. Bouncers don’t register ID scans, typically, and they’re just one person. The govt doesn’t know you went to that club or drank at that one bar, unless they’re actively surveilling you.

But if I needed to identify myself as an adult online, simply by virtue of how digital systems work, that probably requires checking against a govt database, and that database will keep logs, and now Trump knows I went to Pornhub, and likely also exactly what I watched or searched for.

Maybe I’m dumb, but I really don’t know any way around this sort of thing.

I remember reading a Haidt article for an ethics class in grad school. The analysis felt… underwhelming? It’s been too long to remember the article, but I think it was something about the “morality” of conservatives being not worse but different than liberals (limited to the US, iirc). I just remember reading it and going… yeah conservative morality functions differently. It’s also just demonstrably worse, though, even based on what the article was focusing on?

That class was weird though. Mostly just a bunch of folks going,“yeah well this is what I care about” and disagreeing with each other with seemingly no intention whatsoever to try and evaluate or engage with one another.

Was that from Bluesky or somewhere else?

No worries! The only reason to evaluate (or re-evaluate) a piece of software is if you have a need or desire the software might fulfill. And if you don’t have either, it literally doesn’t matter, lol.

I quite like Discord, but I really only use it for it’s original purpose - a place for groups of friends to hang out, play video games with voice chat, and maybe watch shows/movies together. For these purposes, Discord is great!

I have found very little value in how Discord gets used for anything and everything else - forums for video games, support channels for businesses, 1000+ member communities, etc etc. All of those use cases feel better served through traditional websites and forums… but it’s so much easier to set up a Discord server for the average person it has turned into a weird default.

In that regard, fuck Discord.

Hey there. So I’m doing some reading trying to see if I’m just wrong here. I might be?

Just for context about where I learned about Conservatism, its roots, and how it functions in America now, this is really good distillation of what I’ve been learning: The Alt-Right Playbook - Endnote 3: The Origins of Conservatism.

There’s a few bits in there that I find particularly salient for this discussion. First, that early Conservatism was trying to figure out how the aristocracy could maintain its position in society post-monarchy, and they eventually settled on “the market”. Second, that Conservatism has an everpresent undercurrent of “the wealthy deserve what they get, the poors are just freeloaders.” And third, that conservatives in the US say they care about measured steps and slow steady progress, but then all of a sudden they’re about swift, decisive action (usually by invading somewhere).

That final point is a big reason I tend to balk when people say that conservatism is about slow and steady progress vs revolutionary action. That’s something I grew up believing in the US, but it just never seemed accurate to how any conservatives in the US actually behaved. Virtually nothing conservatives say or do here make sense through the lens of “slow and steady” but make a lot more sense if you view it through a lens of preserving hierarchies and ensuring the people at the top stay there and those at the bottom grovel harder.

So I see these throughlines, and I have a hard time imagining that Conservatism (of the old European variety) simply had no strains here in the US. Yet, a lot of what I’m reading suggests that American conservatism is, as you said, a bit different. I haven’t looked deeply enough yet, but my initial thought is because the USA itself was instituted against monarchy, the pro-monarchy bits may not have fit, but the strict traditional hierarchy preservation certainly did.

I dunno. You have any idea how hard it is to unfuck your brain? It’s harder than you think!

This was all interesting, and I’m thankful you’ve shared. On reading, I’m not seeing any connection to the discussion at hand, that of Conservatism and whether or not it has or hasn’t existed in the US.

But to comment anyhow - I find it difficult to understand what the transcribed speech is saying. Mostly because I don’t think I understand what the speaker means by “spiritual”. As a term, I have found “spirit” and its derivatives to be nebulous and unhelpful at best, and pernicious at worst. But my experience with the word is primarily through American Christianity, from which I’m an apostate. So I must decline to ascribe to the speaker there what my own brain interjects. But that leaves the speech largely unintelligible to me. That’s nothing against the speaker, but rather an admission of my own ignorance.

The Dawn of Everything seems interesting though. Seems to have gotten good reception from historians. I’ll add it to the list.

Two things started the slow 10ish year journey to atheism for me. I can’t remember which happened first.

Some Mormon lads doing their mandatory missionary work knocked on our door when I was home alone. I decided, screw it, kill them with kindness. Maybe I’ll convert them! After I got them some ice water, they started the spiel. It was so stupid, how could anyone believe this? Then I thought, wait, how is what I believe any more believable? That was an unsettling thought that I could never really shake.

I also challenged myself to read the entire Bible (NIV) front to back (which I did, thankyouverymuch). I already had a lot of apologetics for the pentateuch warfare, slavery, etc. but in Psalms there’s a verse that basically goes, “blessed is he who dashes the babies on the rocks.” And like. What the fuck is that. In what possible circumstances is killing babies okay, let alone with God’s explicit endorsement? That also stuck in my head ever since.

There was a lot else in between, but years later I stumbled into a copy of The God Delusion. “Know thine enemy, right?” So I read it on lunch breaks at work. While I now know the book has a reputation for kinda bad philosophy, by the end it had tidily dismantled the last vestiges of the purely “rational” arguments to believe in God I still had. So I sat there, an atheist for the first time in my life.

Then please, enlighten me.

Surely I’m not so “brain fucked” that I can’t learn? Help a brother out.

Edit: I love how for a supposedly leftist community, a guy asking for a lesson is down voted. The leftist infighting is real. You think I wouldn’t read what you sent?

Yeah, I don’t buy that. Liberalism and Conservatism have different ideological foundations, philosophical traditions, and political histories.

If you don’t know the difference, that’s on you.

I have to make a lot of leaps to guess what you mean by “conservative liberal”. Do you mean a modern “social liberal economic conservative”? Aka a neoliberal?

Cuz yeah US Dems and Repubs are almost all economically neoliberal, sure. Is that what you mean?

So conservatives are… what? Not a group of people? Or in your view, are conservatives just fascists already?

At the same time, “what the population votes for is what the population gets” ignores that we are often only presented with crappy options to start with.

Perhaps it would be more accurate to say “you get what you fight for, and if you don’t fight you get what you get.”

I… haven’t really fought for anything. I believed the right things. I voted as best I could. But that clearly didn’t stop this.

I want to protect my ego and say I’m not a coward. Is there a distinction to be made between cowardice and simply not knowing what to do? I don’t know. I just know I’m trying my best, but maybe that’s just not enough.

Depends on what you mean by “much”? I’d argue the Democrats, on the whole, are liberals, not fascists.

I’d certainly prefer progressives and leftists though.

The support for Israel whole they genocide Palestine, thought… ugh. That can certainly be viewed as fascism, although where you draw the distinction between fascism and imperialism is up for debate. Not that imperialism is good either, just saying.

That about sums it up.

I’ll vote Democrat as long as the alternative is fascism.

But fuck me, I’d love to vote for something else. And I’ll be honest, I have no idea how we get anything better.

I hear people saying to organize, but I can’t even imagine what that takes. I wonder if most Americans feel as helpless as I do in the face of this absolute bullshit.

I like this idea, but I don’t know how you build a site to facilitate that without also being super appealing to children and pedos at the same time.

You misunderstand. This IS Trump’s chosen stooge. FTC Chairman Carr.

He’s complaining about tech companies “censoring” conservatives for “speaking their minds”, aka being hateful bigots and spreading misinformation during a public health crisis.

Honestly, same. Mastodon is fine if you like the Twitter format, but I never did. Lemmy works for me, largely cuz Reddit also worked for me, until the API debacle.

At that point, wouldn’t making an OnlyFans be easier and more likely to attract paying customers?

About two or three months ago. It’s not for all content, but their more in depth stuff, How X did Y articles, and other writing that’s more analysis and opinion than reporting on facts usually goes behind the new paywall. Anything you’d care about for news or breaking stories is still free, which is about 75%+ of the content on the site.

Okay that gave me a hearty chuckle, thank you.