I mean Jim Jones was pretty damn effective at convincing a large group of people to commit mass suicide. If he’d been ineffective, he’d have been one of the thousands of failed cult leaders you and I have never heard of. Similarly, if Hitler had been ineffective, it wouldn’t have takes the combined forces of half the world to fight him.

Futurama: Bender’s Big Score may not be the deepest film, but it’s never failed to make me smile. “I can wire anything to anything! I’m the professor!”

For fuck’s sake, can this debate die already? It’s one those made up words that no-one agrees on the meaning of, so people with the exact same views about the real world will fight to the death over it, because they’re using completely different definitions of the word.

It used to just mean “progressive” with a positive connotation, then it got oversaturated and some progressives started using it to describe the kinds of people who fake having progressive ideals just to make themselves look good or sell shit. Then conservatives started using it to describe all progressives again, but this time with a negative connotation. Then some of those conservatives started using it to describe literally anything they don’t like.

The problem is that the meaning’s changed so fast that whatever meaning you’re using, chances are there’s someone around you who defines it differently, leading to a lot of pointless conflict that could be resolved if we just all agreed on a meaning, or stopped saying the fucking word.

This logic doesn’t even work for tvs. Even if I return a bad tv to get a better one, I’m still gonna leave a bad review on the amazon page.

Gotta love how it’s somehow simultaneously “I’m so annoyed everyone’s talking about it” and “nobody gives a shit”. Make up your mind. You don’t get to have it both ways. Maybe you don’t give a shit, but a lot of people do, and they want to discuss it. Not everything is about you. Also, gotta love the irony of someone showing up on someone’s forum to loudly declare how much they don’t care about something.

I’m so tired of the “just change instances” argument that comes up every time mods make a bad decision. It’s as bad as “just watch something else” for movies. Like yeah, literally everyone recognizes that you can choose how to spend your time, but that fact isn’t a magic buffer against critisism.

+1 for GraphineOS, but I can’t get behind NFTs. The technology is cool, but for me, the definition of “owning” something includes not only the ability to view it, but also the ability to modify it. If I own an NFT of a song, then I could listen to the song, but I still couldn’t, say, make a remix of it, which for me is the entire point of owning it in the first place.

And the death by starvation rate?

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I mean we don’t have a /c/ for that yet, so might as well be here.

From your comments, it seems like you may just not be in the target demographic for these kinds of films. It sounds like you’re a teenager, and while there may be some teens who enjoy these films, they’re definitely intended for adults. Also, you mentioned that you live in a non-english-speaking country. There’s a lot of English films that manage to translate well to non-english-speaking audiences, but LOTR is unfortunately not one of them. The characters speak heavily in metaphor and idioms, most of which don’t translate well. It’s the same reason Western audiences often have difficulty with older Japanese media.

I agree with your examples, all of which have been heavily criticized for anti-consumer behavior, particularly Disney and Netflix, so I’m really not sure what point you’re trying to make. Just because Netflix does it, doesn’t make it okay for Nintendo to do it. Digital media companies have strong incentive to practice anti-consumer behavior, so public outcry is important to counterbalance that.

I don’t think the Ford and Apple examples apply, as these companies make primarily physical products. Both of these companies really do want you to use their products for two reasons:

• Most of their marketing is literally just people seeing their products being used.

• Cars wear out with usage, as do computers, so the more you use their products, the sooner you’ll buy a new one.

Digital media is unique in that it’s not highly visible and using it more doesn’t make it degrade.

Oh shit. Yeah I kinda forgot Whatsapp is an international standard of communication. That’s still different than requiring you to run it in on your personal devices through.

Any job that forces you to use Meta services is probably exploiting you in other ways and isn’t worth whatever they’re paying you. Even employees of Facebook don’t have to do this.

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I don’t disagree with this, but it sounds like you’re talking less about violent crime in general and more about sexual battery and premeditated assault, which makes up a relatively small proportion of violent crime.

Most violent crime is just regular conflict that escalates into throwing punches, and throwing these people in prison is the quickest way to push them away from lawfulness and down the path of crime. Prison is just networking for criminals.

So I agree with 90% of this, and I don’t understand why you’re getting downvoted. That being said, the one thing I can’t get behind is worse punishments for violent crime. I’m not saying violent crime is good, but basically all of the evidence suggest that worse punishments do nothing to curtail it, and in fact make it more likely. The longer someone spends in prison, the less likely they are to reintegrate into society. If the goal is to reduce violent crime, rehabilitation is far more effective than deterrence.

Based entirely on your comment, I would say the issue isn’t the concept of ideology, but the fact that the ideologies that matter the most and the ones that spread the fastest aren’t the same. After all, the idea that no one should starve is itself an idealogy.

Personally, I feel like most of the problems in the modern world come down to issues of scaling. We evolved our brains to coordinate in small bands of people, but we try use those same brains to coordinate groups of hundreds of millions.

The larger an organization (corporation, government, npo, etc.) gets, the worse they get at coordinating around a central goal or set of values, and the more likely they are to evolutionarily optimize around something entirely divorced from the values of any individual member.

A company of 100 employees is entirely capable of creating a high-quality product, compensating their workers well, and avoiding anti-consumer practices. This doesn’t mean they’ll always do this, but it’s possible. Meanwhile, a multinational corporation of millions of people, even if run by the most ethical CEO on earth, will always gravitate toward maximizing profit at the expense of everything else. Even libertarians recognize this as a fundamental flaw in unchecked Capitalism.

Similarly, a government of a few thousand people can create a good constitution for an orderly society, but in a massive government of a country of 300 million people, trying to make any sort of effective, positive political change is borderline-impossible because everyone has different goals that gridlock each other. Even proponents of large government recognize this.

It’s tempting to believe in some sort of easy action that could fix this, but truth be told, I think any simple solution would be horrifying, and I think any good solution is going to take an incredible amount of thought and be more complex than the sort of thing you’d see every day on the internet.