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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: January 13th, 2025

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  • djsoren19@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoMemes@lemmy.mlVote blue no matter who!
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    3 days ago

    The reason there isn’t any other option is because nobody puts in the effort to add other options.

    There’s a Simpsons meme currently in Active on 196 rn from 1994 pointing out how ineffective both parties are. People have had longer than I have been alive to work on a third way.

    America isn’t collapsing now all of a sudden. People have been passively watching it die for decades.





  • djsoren19@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoMemes@lemmy.mlHave some civility.
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    8 days ago

    Except now Trump is starting to play hardball with Netanyahu, and is distinctly unhappy with the the U.S. taking so much flak while being treated as a money fountain.

    There is a much more real world where Trump gets sick of Bibi and pulls his support than Harris pulling support from Israel. A fully isolationist U.S. is better for Palestine.


  • As far as I know, we are still not quite in an Authoritarian state here in the US.

    Just wanna drill into this; the United States has been an authoritarian state for as long as I’ve been alive. Deporting people without due process is not new. Supporting genocides is not new. The police state we live in is not new. The rule of law has been a joke for so long zoomers have internalized it. There is a reason why most of the governments we have overthrown have been democracies, and there is a reason the US has mostly replaced those democracies with dictatorships. We are the evil empire, and we have been for decades at this point.


  • I really want to like Hellsing Ultimate. The same story I love, but turned up to 11! Nazis fighting the Vatican fighting Vampires, what’s not to love?

    Well it turns out when you turn everything up to 11, it mostly just becomes noise. A lot of the interesting subtle moments that I enjoyed in Hellsing were either dropped or abridged. Don’t even get me started on the extreme tone flipflopping! I stopped watching about halfway through, and don’t think I’ll ever pick it back up.


  • djsoren19@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlDo you believe in free will?
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    8 days ago

    Then we must agree to disagree, because there really isn’t any further to debate. My argument is that human beings are irrational and capable of making irrational decisions. Your argument is that irrationality is merely a pretense, and that there must be a confluence of factors that caused these things to happen. I think trying to constantly find a reason when one doesn’t need to exist is a path to madness, and that is why I believe in free will.



  • djsoren19@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlDo you believe in free will?
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    8 days ago

    This implies that every action must have a reason behind it, which I frankly find a laughable concept. Human beings are irrational creatures; our actions don’t require a reason. We have the ability to choose chaos. Unless your argument is that the cells in my stomach have the ability to know what kind of food they want and can unconsciously pass that information to my brain, there’s no reason for me to decide at 8:00 PM tonight “Hey, I want to eat Pakistani food.”

    In fact, I could choose an invalid choice! Say I chose Pakistani. I would logically need to find a Pakistani restaurant to order from. What if they all closed at 8? What if I didn’t have a Pakistani restaurant near me? I may make a decision that ultimately, I cannot act upon, and then I would have to introduce some constraints to my decision making process. The decisions that follow would have a reason, but the initial whim doesn’t require one.


  • This depends, because there are two different kinds of randomness. A lot of the “randomness” that people encounter is actually based upon something, and our theoretical entity with access to perfect information could predict the outcome of that randomness perfectly. I’m thinking of stuff like computer randomness, number generation, games of chance, that sort of thing.

    However, true random absolutely exists; in the words of Terry Pratchett “Things just happen, what the hell.” You see it with mutations in nature; ordinarily healthy cells can spontaneously change without directed input. It is unpredictable, even for our theoretical entity.


  • djsoren19@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlDo you believe in free will?
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    9 days ago

    If free will was truly non-existent, it would mean that a theoretical entity with access to perfect information would be able to perfectly predict your actions. I don’t believe that is possible; I think that human beings are too irrational. Consider a very simple decision: what am I going to have for dinner? You could know the restaurants I have access to, what food is in my home, what I have discussed in a given day, and even what my current mood is, but it can ultimately come down to a whim. I could choose something I’ve never had before, for no reason, and seek it out.

    I believe that we are individual actors in a very complex system that introduces lots of constraints to our decision-making process. We may not even be consciously aware of some of the constraints; however, we are always the ones ultimately making the decisions. You always have the option of a whim.



  • how can I get a place to live without a job, and how do I get a job without a place to live?" situation.

    as someone who went through this exact situation, I decided to just say “fuck it” and kinda threw myself out into the universe, with the understanding that if I failed the landing I was probably just going to die. I was homeless for a little bit, and the first job I had was a lot shittier than anything I’d worked before, but it is possible. The biggest issue I’d say is the lack of education; however, my partner at the time only had a high school diploma and was able to leverage his service industry experience to quickly find work.






  • I honestly feel like Smith gets a real bad rap from undereducated progressives. He would also have hated what the United States has morphed into, and I’m sure he’s spinning in his grave over people using his economic theories as justifications for pure laissez-faire capitalism. “The Invisible Hand of the Market” that conservatives use to justify trickle-down economics and often attribute to him isn’t even really his, it’s from a batshit insane later guy called Paul Samuelson! Smith only referred to it in the context of international investments, never this idea that “domestic corporations will always do what is good for the public.”

    I don’t agree with everything in Wealth of Nations, but it seems a lot of people just dismiss Smith completely out of hand. We should talk about him just like we talk about Marx, his work is not useless nor trivial.