Maybe Grausame Töchtor? At least, Aranea is one of the most consistently transgressive and productive artists I have enjoyed.

The first Clarissa comic has a bit of an anchor in my brain.

I’ve found others I enjoyed over the years but they’re usually one-off, unattributable, etc.

I’m not saying worst thing ever. I’m not catastrophizing. I’m not saying equal. They are different things. I’m saying unacceptable. I’m saying extent, though extant, is irrelevant to the question of acceptability.

This is an important point that keeps coming up in a thousand places and a thousand ways. The fact a femur can be broken does not make the papercut meaningless, acceptable, or excused any more than the fact someone can torture you and your loved ones for days on end could mean it’s acceptable to ‘only’ break your femur. If we try to scale measurement of harm in relation to ‘what might have been,’ attempted murder is completely acceptable as long as it fails, successful single murder is negligible as long as mass killings are possible, mass killings are fine as long as genocides are possible, and so on, and so on… You do not want to live in a world which takes the idea of ‘at least it’s not…’ seriously.

I’d take it as both being ‘past the line’ regardless of distance. If someone is seeking to defraud people, I don’t care whether their targets are made easier by desperation or not. The guy effectively robbing you is bad, but that doesn’t mean the guy price-gouging you isn’t. He didn’t help you out of a bad situation. He moved you from one bad situation to another. They are both harming you, and both would be prevented from doing it again in any just system.

They’re both forms of fraud. The gift card one is misrepresenting their position to trick you into giving them money. The house scam is misrepresenting your position to trick them into giving them something worth more than the money they give you. The only difference is that when they misrepresent you, it is expected that you be aware of your own situation such that you will be treated as though you gave informed consent, even if you didn’t. It’s analogous to the difference between someone sexually assaulting you by pretending to be a doctor vs never promising to be a doctor but telling you how sick you look and how they’re no expert but they’d be willing to condescend to feel around inside your undies as a favor to you. The only people who accept the offer have to be so dumb, desperate, intentionally misinformed, or some combination of all three as to be essentially incapable of informed consent.

You can’t.

‘Medium is the message.’ There are inherent limitations to the formats of social media and the way people interact with it. Text stores well for social media companies, but acts as a brutal limitation of social interaction. There is a self-selection issue for the kind of people who end up spending significant amounts of time online. There is a selection pressure created by the business model of social media. Anonymity is politically important but socially toxic. There is a problem of cultural inertia in changing anything about any of these things, even within the limits of their structures. All of these things interact with other external forces in complex ways.

All you can do is try to make your little part of things better. Help those you come into contact with. If you can, help them also to try to be a good influence on others. The earth is too big to affect all at once. You will never move it. But you can move someone near you.

How do you know we’re not in a time loop so long you can live entire lifetimes inside of it?

Treat it non-literally. Say ‘How’s it going?’ which turns it into a greeting rather than a question.

I explained it pretty clearly in that previous post, as did several others. You don’t seem ready or able to listen so I don’t see much value in repeating myself. Maybe you should find a hobby that isn’t arguing online.

Aren’t you the person who posted half a dozen pictures of guys in the UK equivalent of ‘thug life’ gear, asked Lemmy what they would call them, and then responded to dozens of comments of ‘chav’ with near identical complaints about how chav is a classist slur, revealing the entire post to be mostly just a way to pull people in so you could spam your objectively false opinion?

I will not argue with you. Internet arguments are pointless. Be well.

I am not an articulate genius.

You are the one making claims of knowledge.

I will not argue with you.

Have a nice day.

You have your deeply cherished beliefs so I won’t bother rehashing hundreds of years of existentialism. The only outcomes are the improbable horror of shattering of your worldview via internet comment or the much more likely waste of our time and energies. Have a nice day.

One of the most troubling things in life is the fact we are all ‘victims of circumstance,’ though perhaps ‘subject to conditions’ is a better phrase because ‘victims’ entails moral quality to which some would object. You didn’t choose to believe in personal agency. It was taught to you. You didn’t choose to be receptive when you were taught. You were in a place, mentally and physically, to absorb or not absorb the concepts based on what happened in your life before. The only escape from this is magical thinking, where some ineffable ‘you’ makes decisions from outside of physical reality yet always seem to comport with it.

Uh, those sound like things that are intensely flavorful, so maybe not the best example to show you still have functioning taste.

Colloquially, normal and common are synonyms.

Take your meds.

Anyone who says they can predict what’s going to happen years in advance is lying to you.

Take your meds.

It’s not really hypocrisy so much as a different form of speech. Telling a story doesn’t require you to believe in it. Edward Norton, for example, isn’t suicidally anti-consumerist any more than he is a recovered white nationalist. (American History X) It’s technically possible to have a movie created entirely through cynical pandering, where absolutely no one involved believed in the message of the film. It’s less likely the more people involved but it is possible. Heck, it’s possible to have a film in which no one even really seems to consider what the message might be.

From what I can tell, Lemmy started as wildly left but if you avoid the .ml areas, you’re going to get a much broader mix of views.

Re: lesson two

Long time ago, one of my teachers showed the class the data from a survey of managers. It asked them to prioritize a list of things that could lead to a firing. Number one was punctuality/attendance. Number four was theft. This suggested to him that you could be stealing from the company, but if you showed up every day on time you’d be less likely to be fired than if you were always MIA but not a thief. Years in the workplace has only served to confirm this for me.

This is true.