I feel you in avoiding public transit. That’s where my hate comes from as well. And yes, many people that do these things have have excuses. Because they need to, to justify doing their business in a place where their habit unavoidably harms and frustrates other people. I hate the fact we still allow that so readily as society. Or at least we should restrict it further to the point a normal person doesn’t have to be bothered by people like that in public. It undermines public services to an extent.

But after I no longer needed to use public transit, I did start to see things in a slightly different light. And that’s the only thing I wanted to say. People that are conscientious about enjoying any kind of mind altering substances will choose to do so safely and harmlessly outside of public, or in designated places like clubs specifically for that substance. Harm reduction must be central to substance use. And I know now that many people have that mentality. But that mentality is somewhat threatened exactly because they make sure nobody is bothered by them. It causes the experience to be defined by those people in public places, the loud minority.

I hate public smokers with a passion. But you must realize that you have effectively zero exposure to people that contain their smoke by doing it at home or using a method without smoke production. And there could be a lot more of those.

The last line is especially golden for me since I live in the Netherlands so we have plenty of weed being smoked but the vast vast majority of public smoke hinderance is from tobacco smokers. If they decide to smoke in public they have absolutely no shame and will literally do it at places like bus stops and just outside restaurants. Weed smokers rarely do that here. So if I were to believe you it seems to just be correlated to people with shitty attitudes rather than the substance.

But there’s no denying that if everyone would drop alcohol for weed, it would be better. Not because weed is harmless but because alcohol is pretty terrible health wise.

Let bro touch some feathers man 😭

I am kind of afraid that if voting becomes more public than it already is, it will lead exactly to more of the kind of “zero-content downvote” accounts mentioned in the ticket. Because some people are just wildly irrational when it comes to touchy subjects, and aint nobody got time to spend an eternity with them dismantling their beliefs so they understand the nuance you see that they don’t (If they even let you). So it kind of incentivizes people to create an account like that to ensure a crazy person doesn’t latch on to the account you’re trying to have normal discussions with.

But I understand that they can technically already do this if they wanted to. So perhaps it will be fine as long as we fight against vote viewing being weaponized as a community.

Alright, don’t say I didn’t try. Good luck trying to convince people on a message that far more people disagree with than agree. And on a point that’s at the end of the day irrelevant to actually reducing genocide, even if you do convince them Joe Biden is somehow personally responsible.

You don’t know me, nor what I have done to try and change things, yet you think because I don’t want to accept your inaccurate beliefs that I’m somehow supporting genocide with that. Good luck trying to make anything but enemies with that mentality. I don’t even work for the US or pay taxes there, and I proudly support efforts in my country to stop funding Israel. My hands are clean when it comes to the money US puts into Israel, yet even I can see what you’re trying to peddle is incorrect.

By your own logic, you are doing genocide yourself. Because you are not personally flying the planes, but you are funding Joe Biden through your tax dollars, who funds Israel, who pays the pilots that fly the planes. You are also supporting the Uyghur genocide because you can’t get around buying Chinese made products that fund the CCP either. You are also most likely supporting child labor because you basically can’t get around products produced by child labour in Africa and South East Asia.

If you’re going to take that stance, pretty much everyone is a fucking horrible person. Which is why it’s stupid, because clearly people struggle with these things. You can fight against those things while still being forced to participate in them. Joe Biden definitely has more say in the matter than the average person, but he too is held back by factors which he can’t get around, which we talked about in grand detail. Who doesn’t have those constraints? Israel. The people who have the final say over the money and decide to commit war crimes with them instead of what the money is intended for. Is Joe Biden complicit in his weak response to Israel? Yes. But it doesn’t make him personally responsible because he’s just a figurehead that has certain responsibilities to his base and his country, which he too can’t get around. And Kamala will also inherit that if she takes office.

Only one of the two parties can win, c’mon, you know they have the whole thing rigged right?

It was you who claimed 50% of the votes were untapped. Now you’re saying it’s rigged anyways. It almost sounds like you don’t have any hope to change things, which you are readily accusing others of. Could it be that you are starting to recognize that there are barriers in place to get people to stop supporting genocide?

Okay. Here is my message.

1. Biden is doing genocide.
2. supporting Biden = supporting genocide
3. We can force this genocide to stop, and that starts with raising our voices against it. It isn’t hopeless.

As long as you keep including #1 (and to a certain extent #2) and militantly defend that position rather than understand the other person’s point of view, you will not change their mind. Even if there is a large majority perfectly willing to agree and fight for #3, and people that are undecided who could be convinced of #3, but not #1 and #2. As such, you are weakening the position to actually change #3. Even doing nothing would be better.

And yes, by that logic, that makes you a force for genocide, even if your actual opinion is anti-genocide. Actions speak louder than words, and your actions make people more likely to side with genocide because you’re making them irrationally resistant to your ideas, because you package the reasonable stance of stopping genocide with the unreasonable stance of assigning full responsibility to a not necessarily innocent, but still indirectly involved person.

As I said, my goal was to help you relax your stance so you can be a force against genocide, because I actually want to stop genocide, and so having more people effectively stop the genocide is what I want. But I have seemingly failed with you. Now every person you get to who is undecided, someone else will have to undo in their mind that they don’t mean your position, but a reasonable one. You have made it harder to convince them to drop their support for genocide, and even harder to get them to stand up against it. This will be my last response, and I hope you reflect on our conversation. We want the same thing, at the end of the day.

I was here since the start before any such messages appeared, so you’re not fooling me. You started out with “He’s still doing genocide y’all”. An inaccurate and laden statement which you rightfully got a critical responses for, not because people support the policy. You followed this up by calling your critics pro-genocide, regardless of their actual position. I’m sorry, but you don’t exist out of context either, so yeah, people are kind of not going to like you in this thread. It’s why you don’t attack people out of the gate, I warned you about that in my very first message. Hostility often creates more hostility. I don’t necessarily condone that, but you have thrown a little too much dirt to be surprised about being dirty.

We haven’t even discussed whether or not I think we can do anything about it, yet you call me deeply cynical for a position I don’t hold. I do think more people in the US should be against the support for Israel. I do think the support makes Israel emboldened to commit genocide. I do think people can be convinced. But as I was trying to explain to you, I understand that other people look at different aspects and have different experiences to where they can be unaware of Israels atrocities, or are indeed willing to look away. And often those people are sadly needed for a majority that has chances of actually stopping the genocide. So they must be convinced to get the end result I desire, no more genocide.

It should be obvious that anyone you ask if genocide is okay, they will say no. But people can have irrational and conflicting beliefs, and to actually make them change their mind the worst you can do is to effectively say “you are a terrible person”, even if it’s effectively true. Because if they’ve rationalized themselves to accept supporting Israel, being called a terrible person only emboldens that rationalization. There exists no magic incantation that will change this. (And it should be said, calling the people who very well might share your opinion on all but your questionable remarks, makes you look really bad)

If you think you can get 50% of the votes in the US, I really urge you to start a party right now. Because by that logic both Democrats and Republicans could only hold 25% of the vote, so you could win in a landslide victory with the remaining 50%. But I think we both know that will not happen. But according to the data, ~66% voted in the last election. 34% is still enough for a victory, but that’s a tall order.

I want you to understand that I’m talking to you because I want you to be effective at getting your message across. Having commendable opinions but being terribly self destructive in ways of expressing them is so incredibly wasteful and will at worst create more support for the thing you are rallying against. Clearly you have the vigor to stand up for what your opinion is, but actually changing things means taking on constructive, calm and respectful dialogue, and doing what’s effective over what perhaps more morally clean in the short term, but because you didn’t actually change anything, morally dubious in the long term.

I don’t think people connect her with Biden’s genocide. Yes, she is complicit because there are things she could be doing to remove Biden from office, but most people don’t see the Vice President as actually all that important in deciding policy. I do not think attacking Biden on this issue hurts her at all, and that’s why she’s going to win. Attacking Biden is, in fact, a good way to pressure Harris without hurting her chances at winning. He’s a fair target and it should be open season on his evil ancient ass.

Sure, I can see the logic in that. I do think it will affect her and people are kind of expecting her to have the same stance as Biden even if he changes it. Unless she comes out to denounce it, which I highly doubt she will. But we can disagree on that and criticizing Biden for that is totally fine.

Whenever they’ve retaliated in the past it’s always been very conservative and measured because they don’t want a regional war either. They understand that a regional war wouldn’t save Palestinian lives and would be extremely costly for everyone in the region, they’re not the problem here. Israel is the only actor trying to start more wars at this moment and you need to recognize that, rather than scaring yourself with Iranian boogeymen. Israel is the problem and Israel must be stopped, or war is inevitable.

I mean, we’re having this conversation because you insisted Joe Biden was the issue. It has always been my stance that Israel is the problem, and kind of abusing the good will of the populations that supported them. So I’m glad to hear you seem to agree on that. But I do think you are giving Iran too much credit, they are not a boogeyman, which would imply they are actually harmless. They are a legitimately evil autocracy that does not care for people more than Israel does. Iran will definitely take the chance if the US would drop support for Israel. It is because of Israels support in large part from the US that they have not made rash moves, because they too have to balance their pushback on Israel and invoking a response from the US and allies.

There’s still several months until the election. It can, and will, continue to get worse. I don’t think we should find out where the breaking point is.

I don’t think you should either. But I’m not so sure it’s set in stone if it will. We’re living in turbulent times.

The uncommitted movement is a powerful force in swing states and donors know this - Biden being old is only part of the reason he was forced to drop out.

Swing voters are pretty much by definition leaning more towards the Republicans than non-swing Democrats. And we just sort of agreed that Republicans are more in favor of supporting Israel. So I don’t think it’s very unreasonable to say these swing voters are more likely to support Israel than Democrats. More evidence of that is the fact I don’t think Kamala has spoken prominently once of Gaza since she became the presumptive and eventual candidate. Which she definitely would highlight if that would make her more favorable with swing voters. But there are seemingly more important issues that she’s addressing first, if she will even discuss Israel at all.

It’s like I said, I think Harris is going to be just fine. Dems believe, probably correctly, that Biden is a lightning rod that will distract voters away from Harris’s record on Israel and allow them to win this November. If they’re right, we can voice opposition to Biden’s racist genocidal policies without helping Trump win. We can’t afford to be silent. So now that he’s out of the race there’s literally no reason to hold back. At this point support for Biden is 100% just support for genocide.

I agree. Biden can be a lightning rod for criticism instead of Kamala. But again, I don’t think anyone is really supporting Joe Biden that way anymore. I certainly haven’t seen such sentiment from the people you accused of being pro genocide. Support is very different from rejecting what they perceive to be inaccuracies or mischaracterizations. And the two shouldn’t be confused, nor easily determined if you’re going to assign the label ‘pro genocide’ to them afterwards. If you want to actually change things, attacking people will not make people with opposing views change their mind, and reasonable allies will abandon you. Even if you are right, you still need to convince people who think you are wrong. And assuming they must hold that position because they are pro genocide is just massively slashing your own tires.

This conversation is not about Kamala, we are talking about Biden remember?

If you cannot see that Kamala’s campaign is still inherently tied to Joe Biden’s campaign and his current presidency, I don’t know what to tell you. He is still the president, and she is his vice president, and his policies inform people about hers.

Excuse me? It’s fucking Israel that is trying to start all out war with the shit they keep doing, Iran’s responses have only been reserved and reasonable by comparison

Are you forgetting that Iran is a militant Sharia state that clearly has more than a few human right violations under their belt? They are not the good guys either. You’re right, Israel is trying to provoke shit, and they rightfully should be punished for doing so. But that’s sadly irrelevant, If the US drops Israel, this will cause a massive power vacuum on Israels part, and it’s very likely that we will go from a war not between Israel and the Palestinians, but war to a war in all of the middle east. A magnitude larger in human suffering. If you want to stop genocide, that doesn’t sound like the thing you want.

With who? Germany, I guess? I doubt it. Europe is the US’s playground, whatever the US wants they’ll either support it or quietly stand aside.

Ehh, I’m not even sure where you get this from. The EU will not just blindly support what the US wants, but we are very aligned diplomatically. In the EU there is sadly a similar struggle for different reasons.
But it does make your position a little bit more understandable if you truly think the US is somehow the leader of everyone else they are good diplomatic partners with. Fortunately, that is not the case. To answer the question, no, I was referring in part to Taiwan and Ukraine, but also allies with whom a larger majority supports Isreal, or those that have agreements with the US that hang on their stance.

But, also? Support for this genocide is already hurting diplomatic relationships. Turkey and Egypt in particular are under a lot of domestic pressure from this war, when Israel starts a regional conflict it’s only going to burn more of those bridges. There are limits to how far we can support Israel before other Middle East allies turn against the US.

Yes. And yet, that’s not enough of a reason. Taking either position has negatives. And yes, there are limits to the support the US can take, but clearly and unfortunately where they’re currently at, they haven’t crossed that line.

Yes, this is entirely true. We support Israel as our unsinkable aircraft carrier in the Middle East, we need it to control that route for trade and migration and oil resources. I doubt realpolitik is a big factor on voter’s minds, though. The most ardent supporters of Israel are going to vote for Trump anyway. Appealing to them is bad politics.

And here is your fatal flaw. If this was actually the case, it would be unfathomable for a Democrat to hold this position, yet it’s not. It’s an uncomfortable truth, I’m sure. But not everyone has the same experiences as you do. Nor as your friends, nor as the people in your town, nor as the people in your state. You saw what happened to Joe Biden when his mental decline clearly became a reason to urge him out of the race. When the pressure is there, it’s hard to ignore. But sadly the truth is that his stance on Gaza wasn’t what caused him to drop out, and no significant pressure has even manifested.

They are not defending him, they just disagree with your view specifically that he is personally responsible for this and you are conflating that to be defending him. You are perhaps not technically wrong that Joe can just end this, but Joe Biden doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and neither does the war in Gaza. The US dropping Israel like a brick might do more harm than good on the long term:

• It could cost Kamala critical support from voters who want the US to remain Israels allies, leading to a pro-genocide Trump leadership.
• It could cause an all out war because Iran is just salivating at such an opportunity.
• It could break diplomatic relationships for the US that it relies on to function.
• And most likely (imo), it would be giving up the few places in the middle east that the US has some level of control and a positive (and not frienemy) relationship with. This is a particularly touchy reason because influence is power at the international level. And that does seem to resonate with most of the US people. So even if they might be anti-genocide, they might be more in favor of keeping that control.

Kamala could align her position more with the people once she’s in office. And if future elections produce a more reasonable candidate on the other side (lol), you could actually punish them for it with your vote if they don’t. But right now, supporting Israel is what is seemingly the safest option for a candidate. The fact that is the answer they settled on shows there are underlying reasons that out-weigh just dropping Israel, and if you want to make an actual change, those underlying reasons are the ones you have to put to rest before things can change. Or… you can refuse to look at actual solutions, and just accuse people because they don’t believe in your absolutist stance which has a near zero chance to actually change anything.

You should be trying to change minds so that the pressure from people might actually make them reconsider their options. And by calling people who don’t immediately agree with you as being pro genocide, they’re going to equate being anti genocide with your position, and they’re going to see anyone holding the position as being naive. Even though it clearly isn’t, but you’ve wasted the first impression they could have had to change their mind. It will not make people who don’t yet understand the issue side with you to actually make a change. Now every attempt after that is going to be harder and harder. And so their stance remains ever in the direction of supporting Isreal. And leadership will once more have to appeal to that side.

Do you care about genocide? You don’t make it look like you do. Because most people take genocide seriously and don’t just throw around accusations about random strangers. And they understand the real barriers there are to reducing and stopping it, and who bears the most responsibility for those barriers, and who is simply forced to bow down to them.

This kind of provocative rhetoric is harmful if you actually want to stop it. You’re getting bombed by downvotes not because what you’re saying, but because the way you’re bringing it, even people that want to stop genocide consider you to be a negative impact on how we actually reduce it. Think about that for a moment.

You’re undermining your own cause, and it’s hard to differentiate you from someone who wants to muddy the water so we don’t discuss atrocities in good faith at all.

Counter point: It’s from that one teacher who really gets teaching and it’s two hours of fun where you dont realize you’re learning

There’s also the absolute lack of nuance of “Haha the Dutch are all kinda racist - look they wear blackface as a tradition, aren’t they so morally reprehensible am I right?”. Of course I’m going for maximum nuance after that, because they already muddied the water.

And you damn well know that posting that carelessly next to a different touchy subject is in extreme bad faith. It’s almost like you’re mad I didn’t let them slander my country unopposed. Get outta here.

If you’re not willing to be nuanced about difficult topics in good faith, you clearly do not care about it, nor about making the world a better place.

I’m sorry, but this is just really kind of disingenuous to start something like this next to a topic such as this. Your experience with one company or something is purely anecdotal and the controversy around Zwarte Piet is also very nuanced to this very day. The kind of nuance someone not from here will not get from a casual google search. For anyone that cares about actually understanding, here’s a rundown:

Many people attributed Zwarte Piet as a fun and good role model for kids, not some kind of caricature clown to laugh at. Literally almost everyone grew up knowing and having a fond enjoyment of Zwarte Piet, like a childhood imaginary friend that always showed up when you needed a smile the most. And that creates a strong desire to set that positivity forth by continuing the tradition. It takes really good reasons to destroy something most people attribute to be part of the greater good of their lives.

We try to understand racism, and strive to effectively reduce it rather than just mindlessly treat symptoms. Many people saw the existence of Zwarte Piet as a way to instill positive experiences to kids who might be isolated from having positive experiences with actual people of color. We know that in part racism comes about from not having enough (or too many bad) real world experiences with people of different skin colors. It is a type of fear of the unknown. As such, this still seems like solid reasoning. (Fun note, rats will also not help other stranger rats with a different fur color to escape even with no direct harm to themselves except when they have already lived alongside aside a rat with that fur color)

Even people of color were not completely on one side, but for the ones that it hurt, it hurt loudly. Black people in the Caribbean (Also part of the Netherlands) still use Zwarte Piet to this day, because they do not care - They do not see the racism in it. Unfortunately there seems to be a correlation between being affected by racism and seeing the racism in Zwarte Piet, as many of us learned as the conversation marched on. And racists definitely did wield Zwarte Piet to make their racism be known. In a world without racism, Zwarte Piet would not be controversial. And many people were not acutely aware of the racism some people of color faced.

The majority has wanted to get rid of it (since about 2018, actually), and most places have more accepted solutions in place now. But this does not mean that many people agree because we think Zwarte Piet is actually inherently racist. It’s because we’ve heard the concerns of people of color and weighed their burden to be more important to relieve than the perceived benefit of tradition and instilling a positive message on people that look different from yourself. It also didn’t help that the vast majority of people that still wanted to overrule those concerns were pretty obviously racist, which pushed even more people over the edge, because we don’t want to hold traditions in place that shield racists and bigots. Some countries could really learn from that.

EDIT: Added a video about the rat study :)

Yes and it’s really getting to the point where it undoubtedly impacts his ability to perform without an aide basically at his side at all times. Imagine him telling another world leader something insane and the translator having to jump in correct him. Or worse, how can you be sure something he did mean to say was actually something he meant to say and not just another mistake? That kind of communication failure is very dangerous at the highest level.

I thought you were trolling, like in a “you have to double check if I’m bullshitting you now” kind of way. But it’s actually true… and unlike his Putin remark he didn’t seem to even notice he said it.

They said struggle - not that they couldn’t. Dont just attribute such a horrible thing based on your own reading. You can have all the empathy for the Russian people but no empathy for the Russian state. After all, the Russian state is also directly responsible for the continuous cold blooded murder of Ukrainian civilians. Not like they gave much warning on February 24th 2022, or in 2014.

First: They did actually end up removing this and making it configurable, check the bottom of the page. In a vacuum, the idea to stop cut-and-clear racists and trolls from using Lemmy is not something that’s too controversial. Sure, they are being hard asses about changing their mind and allowing instance owners to configure it themselves (and I’m glad they changed their mind). But there’s a big overlap between passionate and opinionated people, so they have to be at times to ensure a project doesn’t devolve into something they can’t put your passion into anymore.

Second: I mean… what do you expect? In the issue above they actively encourage people to make their own fork of Lemmy and run that if they don’t like something from the base version of Lemmy, so I kind of would assume they do as they preach. Instance owners also have the option to block communities without defederation. Lemmy.ml is basically their home instance. If anything this is a reason not to make an account on lemmy.ml, but as long as that doesn’t leak into the source code of Lemmy, who cares?

It’s because the current version has nothing wrong with it. If the Lemmy devs should choose to sabotage the Lemmy software, you’d be surprised how easily that happens when it pisses off all the instances and their owners. Instances will simply refuse to upgrade. And like most things, eventually some fork will win the race to become the dominant fork and the current Lemmy devs would be essentially disowned. Different forks also doesn’t necessarily mean API breaking changes, so different forks would have no issue communicating (at least for a while).

If you use StableDiffusion through a web UI (might exist for others as well), you might have access to a feature called ‘interrogate’, which allows you to find an approximate prompt to an image. Can be useful if you need it for future images.

It can also be done online: https://huggingface.co/spaces/pharmapsychotic/CLIP-Interrogator