Yes. Having any one person 'in charge" who is not an immortal with superhuman morality and judgement will eventually lead to tyrannical suffering or the waste of a bloody civil war.

Lemmy (and piefed) is a great example of human societies done correctly. There are people who run things, and while they can establish whatever rules they want for the parts they run, everyone else is free to either ask for a change or go elsewhere.

For bad actions, options range from immediate negative feedback (downvote) and.corrective speech (public comment or private message), to negative consequences from those in power (ban account from instance), which can ultimately rise to community separation (de-federation). Heck, even the underlying software can be forked or replaced.

Of course, the stakes here are essentially trivial. Which means the consequences are too, but also we all have less incentive for bad action than in the real world where poverty and death are a possibility from bad action.

Putting the mob in charge is the least-bad form of government humans have ever conceived of.

Experts can and do establish reputations to persuade the masses or those chosen by the masses.

When we try putting the experts in charge directly, they invariably become corrupt and stop being as skilled.

There is a reason why America’s founding fathers put a wall between church and state. Not because they thought religion was bad, but because they learned from history that when you give a topic-expert political control they stop being good at either function.

Censorship is suspect, not inherently bad.

Freedom of viewpoint expression is a key part of democracy and modern society. But it’s not an absolute right of unfettered communication, since that would lead to no recourse when a racist troll projects a deep fake of you raping small children on the side of your house.

Being able to sue someone for libel is censorship. Property rights allowing you to control what happens on your house are censorship. And, yes, the government arresting that hypothetical racist troll for the production of child pornography is also censorship.

Of course, we could just define censorship as “suppression of protected speech” or something similar, but that just hides the game and helps folk who actually want to censor political ideas they don’t like get away with it.

I wonder how many lives would be saved if this was repeated enough to be made common knowledge.

Considering all of the times a child has accidentally discharged a firearm and killed someone, I don’t think it’s as many as the other rules.

I like the actors, I like the characters, and the interplay between the three superheros was great. Not to mention the absurd joy of saving a whole bunch of humans by way of non-euclidian space cars.

But the marvels didn’t have a villain worth punching, and felt like it implied a Captain Marvel 2 or “fall of the kree” Disney+ series that never happened.

(Seriously, though, if you skipped this one and heard it sucked, you heard wrong. It was probably the best marvel movie since Endgame, aside from maybe FF or that Spider-Man where DrStange channels the idiot ball.)

This looks like one of those “well, duh” scientific studies that feels obvious but hasn’t necessarily been done before.

Kin to “heterosexual men are aroused by lesbian porn” or “support for banning trans girls from sports decreases among those who actually know any.”

Basic fairness says if the rich aren’t paying their fair share, we should either raise their taxes or lower everyone else’s. (Which could lead to hyperinflation for all most of us care, except that the rich are better suited to fleeing inflation.)

Since both clauses are interdependent and incorrect on their own, the join here with merely a comma is entirely proper and not a comma slice

China is definitely stupid about something, but “let’s.join the current USA bubble” doesn’t seem to be it.

The Christians who live by their principles generally are fairly discreet in doing so, both because that’s one of their principles and because they’re embarrassed by the ones who don’t.

Yes. And yet staring at twenty years of them reporting the weather would not at all improve my understanding of global warming. Especially if that observation was stretched out over twenty years.

Accurately recorded and identified specific observations are necessary for scientific progress, but their mere collection is not sufficient for understanding.

Science requires us to speculate, predict, test, and refine. And if all we do is observe without even having made a prediction, we’re not even testing.

If understanding was caused by direct observation we wouldnt have local weather-persons who doubt global warming.

Stackexchange sites aren’t intended as forums, they’re supposed to be “places to find answers to questions”.

The more you get away from stack overflow itself the worse they get, though, because anything beyond “how can I fix this tech problem” doesn’t necessarily have an answer at all, much less a single best one

How is “significantly worse” not different?

Nazisim wasn’t existentially anti-jewish. It was just an evil philosophy looking for an enemy to attack, and would have as happily focused on Romani, Apache, or Poles if they were more present in Germany.

Zionism is that same evil philosophy, spreading among Jews instead of Germans.

Ethnic nationalism is just bigotry enshrined into law.

FWIW, the biggest sci-fi in 1984 wasn’t big brother or the proto-internet. It was a predictive model of human behavior that could perfectly predict individual behavior.

That, and a competent tyrannical regime.

(My personal headcannon is that “Airstrip one” or whatever they called Britain is the North Korea of its world, and everyone else just ignores them.)

“if we just made this opt-in” has become the bleakest nonsense in IT.

Be it LLMs or ads or “free” albums, tech companies just can’t accept that “make me say yes” should always be the default.

“Being bullied can be good; I was bullied and ended it by engaging in violence!” is like “I grew my business from nothing with a small loan of 10 million from my parents”

Yes, teaching kids how to stand up for themselves and interact with unfriendly peers is a good thing. But sending a child into an abusive situation and saying “you figure it out” is still bad parenting.

I wouldn’t tease if I didn’t love. :)

Americans think the French mock our food culture in the way that we mock their military resolve – only in jest, or on the lips of the dumbest citizens of our respective countries.

America’s far too obese to not have amazing food, and we would still be part of the British empire (or speaking German!) if the French did not know how to fight.

Well, good PR and a bunch of recipes that call for them

That we buy croutons in stores is why the French don’t believe Americans can cook

I wish more pop science reporters would report on “dark energy” and “dark matter” as the questions they are.

Dark energy is “our best models of physics say redshift is due to movement away, and when we apply that model to our best observations the furthest galaxies appear to be accelerating, what the fuck is making them accelerate”?

(Dark matter is, simpler, “why are all these galaxies rotating as if they have way more matter than we can see – and why the fuck can’t we see that matter?”)