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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • That’s a cute comic, thanks for that. I see what you mean, and I could see that happening with the Tulsa Race Massacre because a lot of people actually never learned about it. But not so much with the founding fathers holding slaves, because everyone already knows that.

    Unfortunately, I still disagree with your assertions here on a number of levels. It seems to me that you’re tilting at windmills in service of a tweet that inherently makes no sense.

    I understand that wasn’t the intent, which is why it seemed to me that the authors understanding of black history was coming from an extremely shallow perspective. I didn’t misread anything, I simply have a more advanced conception of what history is.

    If history is defined by excluding all of the bad things that happened, then it’s not actually history, it’s just fairy tales and bedtime stories to help kids sleep at night.





  • Not only do I not think that way, but I also can’t imagine someone getting offended about people mentioning the Tulsa Race Massacre or the fact that the founding fathers held slaves.

    Actual racists aren’t going to be offended by those historical facts, they just might argue that they were justifiable in some way. Which is obviously super fucked up, but it’s not like racist people are going to deny the fact that slavery happened or that black people got massacred by white people in history. They literally get off on that shit.

    Which is why the tweet seems so strange to me. Black people getting enslaved and massacred and persecuted? That slaps? I fucking hope not.

    I’m obviously overthinking but it just triggered my nonsense detector.



  • I never claimed to speak for all young people? I have loved learning about history since I was a kid. But most people don’t know much about history and don’t have any interest in learning. They find it boring. That’s just what I’ve noticed from being alive on this planet.

    I bring up virtue signaling because it seems like the entire point of the tweet is for the person to signal that they are a moral and good person. I don’t even understand the concept of being “offended by black history”. Like what does that even mean and who does it apply to?

    She’s possibly talking about being offended by Black history month, which I guess is a thing? But in that case I would still disagree because you could be offended by it for the exact opposite reason, like how people are talking about Morgan Freeman not being a fan of it.


  • I guess it makes slightly more sense if they meant to say learning about history.

    But still, I’m not sure making claims like this is going to reverse the eternal reality of young people not giving a shit about history and only starting to recognize its importance after they have made the same mistakes.

    It’s like “Math is fun kids!”, “history slaps!”. While young people just roll their eyes. Just because the slang is slightly updated doesn’t actually make the message any more compelling.

    I’m not sure why I’m being so negative here, I guess I just feel like the tweet is kinda dumb and virtue signalling and that’s setting the tone for my interaction with it.



  • If you have morality doesn’t it kind of suck to hear about century after century of slavery, violence, and exploitation?

    Honestly I feel like if any type of history “slaps” then you’re probably viewing it through a very narrow lens that omits an immense amount of human suffering. History is depressing as fuck. It can definitely serve a purpose to focus on the cool events and forget about the rest at times, but it’s also misleading if that’s all you do.







  • You put a little more effort here so I’ll respond directly. Just because human beings don’t fully understand reality doesn’t necessarily have any bearing on whether or not reality exists.

    You claim that tomorrow the universe could change state and astrology would suddenly work. I disagree with that claim, because there’s at least a few thousand, if not a few billion years of evidence that would indicate that physics, chemistry, biology, etc have been functioning according to the same fundamental laws for a long time.

    I don’t think there is any argument that would convince me that such laws could simply change randomly, having been so consistent for so long. And you seem to generally agree with me based on what you say after your introductory paragraph.

    But then in your final paragraph you get back into this arbitrarian mindset. If you actually believed the laws of physics weren’t absolute, then you would surely be in constant suspense that you might die at any moment. Whether gravity were to stop working, or inertia, or the strong nuclear force, the consequences would be immediate and dire. If a single law of physics were to stop working for an instant, the entire universe as we know it would cease to exist, or at least be thrown into absolute chaos. Which is perhaps the strongest argument for their validity, because we can observe 15 billion years of history where that doesn’t seem to have occurred.

    With regard to this story, I mentioned more about misinformation on the internet in my other comment. Basically, people telling lies on the internet caused a lot of people to refuse the covid vaccine and die from covid. That’s the most obvious example, but there are many more insidious example that are harder to definitively quantify.

    Finally, and perhaps most emphatically, I’m going to have to disagree with your take on homeless people. I would argue that homeless people are almost the prototypical example of a marginalized group or community. There are many people who are LGBTQ and/or part of racial minority groups that are rich, successful, prominent, well respected members of mainstream society. The same cannot be said about homeless people.

    As for how the consequences of internet misinformation relate to this specific story, I can’t really say. I just think it’s impossible to know what the ultimate effects of misinformation will be, and thus it’s best to avoid whenever possible.


  • imaqtpie@sh.itjust.workstoPeople Twitter@sh.itjust.worksGo Local
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    I agree that truth and reality aren’t easy to define, and I think astrology is fairly harmless, despite being untrue.

    But on the other hand we can’t just ignore reality and pretend that anything could be true. The whole course of human history has been a slow and painful journey towards a more accurate understanding of the universe. That’s how we’ve been able to invent and discover all of the things that make our lives so much easier (in theory), by trying to figure out what reality is and how it works.

    To discount the importance of truth is to embrace nihilism, and that doesn’t seem like it benefits anyone imho.

    In the specific context of this thread, reading made up stories on social media has been proven to cause people to become severely detached from reality. This is one of the major reasons why millions of people refused to get vaccinated against Covid and subsequently died from Covid. So I think it is important to call out made up stories when we see them, because it’s hard to know the downstream effects of what will happen when people’s perceptions of reality get warped by reading things on the internet.

    Of course it’s impossible to prevent entirely, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to seek the truth when possible as a general principle of being a responsible adult and cultivating an online environment that values truth and quashes misinformation.

    @Stamets@lemmy.world @HalfSalesman@lemm.ee @WoodScientist@sh.itjust.works



  • I don’t understand the question. Pretty much all fediverse software was built with federation in mind from the start. They all started from scratch afaik, nothing was built on top of a centralized design.

    They also happen to perform similar functions as earlier centralized websites, but that’s simply because those are the ways that people commonly prefer to use the internet. People use it to share photos, stream videos, connect with friends, microblog, blog, browse content aggregators, etc.

    There could definitely be new paradigms of internet usage waiting to be discovered, but if the fediverse can’t even replace the existing functionality of the web first, it’d be very ambitious to start building brand new types of sites already.