This’d likely a bit more than inconvenience, but honestly, to the degree that it would be more than that (or more accurately to the people to whom it would be more than that), I just don’t give a shit.
Make it literally impossible to knowingly lie. Full stop.
I sincerely believe that if any aliens are observing us, they’ve concluded that we actually value and reward insanity and loathe and punish sanity.
And they wouldn’t be entirely wrong…
Because it’s basically saying that you’re so dull or lazy or unimaginative that you can’t even manage to come up with a post of your own, and so pathetic and needy that you’re just going to copy someone else’s.
Generally, for me, it means something less than entirely “good.”
The times I’m most likely to use it are when I’m finding minor fault with something - “Well… it was pretty good, but…” or when something is better than I expected, but not quite fully good - “Hey! That was actually pretty good!”
On the contrary, a volunteer army allows the ruling class to prosecute wars without risk to their own families.
As does conscription, since there are always exceptions made for that explicit purpose.
So that works out the same either way.
If a war arrives that is necessary, justified, and also has broad support among the population there will still be those who avoid fighting because they know that others will do so for them.
Yes - there will always be such people. The issue is how many of them there would be.
I would say that a nation that’s unhealthy enough to have so many such people that they would make the difference between winning and losing deserves to lose.
You can make a similar argument about taxation. By your logic payment should be optional, since a society that genuinely wants to be just and fair should also voluntarily want to give money to achieve that.
Yes, and I in fact would. And with the same proviso - any society that would fail as a result deserves to fail.
IMO, it’s always wrong.
At heart, I believe that the claimed authority by which governments draft people is illegitimate - that all nominal justifications for it are necessarily insufficient, self-contradictory or self-defeating.
But that’s a more fundamental point, and one about governance as a whole.
Even if I pretend that such authority is legitimate, I still oppose conscription.
A volunteer army serves as a check on militaristic excess. If a war is both legitimate and necessary, then people will willingly fight it. If people will not willingly fight it, then it’s almost certainly the case that it’s not necessary or justified.
And if it is indeed the case that a war is necessary and justified and there’s still insufficient support to provide for a volunteer army, then frankly, the nation is too sick to be worth saving anyway.
Any argument for your freedom is an argument for everyone’s freedom.
To borrow the new age term, an old soul.
There are just people who possess a sort of cynically detached understanding of the world and people. They aren’t fired by largely pointless passion or desire, they’re intelligent and perceptive enough to generally understand things and emotionally mature enough to generally accept them and they have a way of just sort of gliding through life, maintaining a relatively even keel instead of getting distracted and disconcerted by irrelevancies.
Every single person I’ve ever known who was like that has been or is special to me.
I don’t care what other people choose to do with/to their own bodies. It’s none of my business, at all, ever.
For myself, I’m not sure. I don’t have the means, so it’s irrelevant, but if I did… I don’t know. I don’t have any issue with it really, but it doesn’t particularly appeal to me either. I can of course see advantages to overcoming the limitations of a natural body, but for whatever reason, I’ve never been much for pursuing fulfillment by acquiring things (which is pretty much what augmentation boils down to). It just seems to be too much hassle for too little gain, and particularly since the acquisition of things never leads to real fulfillment anyway - it just fuels the desire to acquire even more things.
Most likely, given the choice, I’d choose to just continue to inhabit my natural, unaugmented shell. But I really don’t know.
Yeah.
June was glorious. It was like the internet of the 1990s all over again. There wasn’t a lot of content, but what there was was posted by actual people who would actually engage in good faith. I had forgotten what that felt like.
But it’s been all downhill from there, and at this point, it’s starting to feel like Reddit, just on a smaller scale. More all the time, I’m just seeing rage bait that’s posted either by a bot or by a person who might as well be a bot, and if I bother to respond to it, it’s likely that if I get any response at all, it’s just going to be a string of shallowly emotive rhetoric and fallacies that again is either posted by a bot or by a person who might as well be a bot.
I’m cynically unsurprised but still disappointed.
Just Right
I can sort of understand people who can’t bring themselves to avoid Amazon - again, for me it’s really just a gut-level aversion that happens to coincide with an ethical stance. If I didn’t have that gut-level aversion, there’s a good chance I wouldn’t be able to resist either.
But yeah - the chain restaurant/coffee shop thing just makes no sense to me at all, no matter how I look at it. There are regional and local versions of pretty much anything one might want, and they’re pretty much universally both better and cheaper.
I don’t really go out of my way. It’s more like an ingrained habit.
Most notably, I’ve never bought a single thing from Amazon. I don’t even have an account with them. That’s not an ethical decision though - it sort of works out that way, but really it’s just a gut-level reaction. The whole idea just repulses me - just looking at a page from their site is somehow gross and creepy.
By the same token, there’s a long list of businesses I’ve either never gone to or at least haven’t in the last twenty or so years - Walmart, McDonalds, Starbucks, Taco Bell, Olive Garden, Kroger, Subway, Jack in the Box, etc., etc. Basically, if they’re big enough to run national level advertising, they are eliminated from my consideration. And again, it’s not really a conscious choice - they just gross me out. It’s like the instant I set foot in a place like that, I can feel it corroding my soul.
So when I’m looking for somewhere to shop or eat or whatever, just like anyone else does, there are specific places I don’t consider at all. And all major corporations are on that list.
So what’s left over - what I choose from - is local or regional, not because I go out of my way to choose them, but just because they’re the only ones I’m willing to choose in the first place
And the sort of surprising thing, even to me sometimes, is that I’m by no means starved for choices. There’s a world of alternatives out there.
I don’t even understand this headlong rush for an app. And especially being so desperate for an app that you’d use one that embeds ads unless you pay to remove them.
It just seems completely backwards to me.
With Reddit, it made sense - it was awful in a mobile browser, the official app was complete garbage, and either way it was buried in ads So you could (and I did) use a third party app and get a cleaner and more useful interface and no ads.
But Lemmy’s already fine in a browser and it’s ad-free. So what’s the point?
I could maybe see, somewhere down the road when the apps are complete and established, it might be interesting to experiment with some and maybe find one that’s got just the features I like most. But that’s not what I’m seeing. What I’m seeing are people desperately clamoring for an app - any app - it doesn’t matter how primitive and janky it is - they just desperately need to have an app right now, today, this instant. As if lemmy is completely unusable without one.
And it’s just… not that way at all. Sure, it could be better, but it’s fine.
So I just don’t get it.
This is pretty accurate, but it should be noted that ALL ideologies can be and often are treated essentially as religions.
They all serve as dogmas and myths around which a set of true believers congregate, who then alternate between telling each other their myths of inherent superiority, proselytizing non-believers and lashing out at the followers of competing sects. They all lay out moral guidelines by which they can both affirm the faithful and condemn the heretics and unbelievers. They all demand absolute submission and attack any sign of deviation, and since they’ve defined themselves as inherently morally superior, they consider any of those attacks to be self-evidently morally justified. They all have a hierarchy (whether formal or informal) by which dogma is disseminated to the faithful, with the view (again, whether formal or informal) that ideas that have not been sanctioned by the designated people somehow don’t qualify.
And, pointedly, they all have their own “Satans” - the ideas and/or people that they can generally be counted on to blame for whatever evil might arise.