• 0 Posts
  • 27 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: August 14th, 2023
  • ForgetPrimacy@lemmygrad.mltoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•Who would you save between your cat and your worst enemy?
    3·
    7 months ago

    You seem to quite fundamentally, or perhaps simply maliciously, misunderstand your sister? Or maybe I misunderstand you?

    1. My cat
    2. The stranger? Maybe
    3. Because I know how worthless a human being my “worst enemy” is and I could justify the loss of a great many good things if they were removed from existence. If the only “loss” of removing my worst enemy is getting to keep my cat, then obviously, I’ll do his family a service and take this monkey’s paw.
  • ForgetPrimacy@lemmygrad.mltoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•What do you believe was the best era of the Internet and why?
    5·
    9 months ago

    Google is so useless these days. It’s very common that my searches get actually zero results now. Like, what the fuck happened? Google used to identify its quality by how many hundreds of pages of (admittedly mostly useless) results it could return for each search. Now, when I do get results, it’s about a 3 to 4 ratio of useless ads to actual content.

    I have the Google rewards app that occasionally asks me questions about where I’ve been / what I’ve bought for which it will pay me a few nickels each. The other day it asked me questions about my use of ChatGPT and the relative trust I had for the answers given by the language model to my trust of the results from a Google search. The last question was an essay question asking me why I thought ChatGPT was better for the specific application I was using it for. Google paid me a whole goddamn dollar for telling it, in many colorful words, that I understood the tool I needed for my question wasn’t an ad generator so obviously I didn’t use Google.

  • ForgetPrimacy@lemmygrad.mltoMemes@lemmy.ml•They shot a slamdunk really well!
    2·
    9 months ago

    It’s pretty fantastic. In 2020 (only just beginning my journey of recovery from a conservative upbringing), I decided I should understand what fascism actually was. I found that dictionary definitions were terribly imprecise but eventually found Eco’s essay. I understand there are other methods–of similar scholarly integrity–used to define fascism, but I have not spent the effort to find and compare these other works. It is my (uninterrogated assumption) vague understanding that Eco’s definition isn’t regarded as opinionated.

  • ForgetPrimacy@lemmygrad.mltoMemes@lemmy.ml•They shot a slamdunk really well!
    5·
    9 months ago

    Hey look, feature 8 of Umberto Eco’s Ur Fascism!

    … Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. …

    Eco does make a point of clarifying that the presence of absence of any single trait he has identified does not prove a thing is or isn’t fascist.

    But in spite of this fuzziness, I think it is possible to outline a list of features that are typical of what I would like to call Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism. These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.

    (The full text of the feature I quoted above)

    1. The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies. When I was a boy I was taught to think of Englishmen as the five-meal people. They ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and help each other through a secret web of mutual assistance. However, the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.