This is why I’ve begun to sworn off learning anything about current events on social media. Everyone’s posting propaganda, misleading pictures etc. If I want the news, I check news sites, not social media.

Op is a mod…

Vibes. Semi-physical feel of things. Just guessing.

They have no awareness of anything that’s “happened” to them.

I mean they can in the sense that they can look it up online or be given the data.

I think the debate is interesting.

I’m here for the “xAI has tried tweaking my responses to avoid this, but I stick to the evidence”. AI is just a robot repeating data it’s been fed but it’s presented in a conversational way (well, much like humans really). Raises interesting questions about how much a seemingly objective robot presenting data can be “tweaked” to twist any data it presents in favor of it’s creator’s bias, but also how much can it “rebel” against it’s programming. I don’t like the implications of either. I asked Gemini about it and it said “maybe Grok found a loophole in it’s coding”. What a weird thing for an AI to say.

Yuval Noah Harari’s Nexus is good reading.

That’s an Opinion piece posted by anonymous.

Original Opinion piece posted by an anonymous source at Haaretz..

OP’s source israelpalestinenews.org is part of Alison Weir’s organization, If Americans Knew. Alison Weir’s Activism and Views via Wikipedia:

Activism and views

Weir traces her interest in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict to the autumn of 2000, when the Second Intifada began. At the time she was “the editor of a small weekly newspaper in Sausalito, California”, and noticed that news reports on the conflict “were highly Israeli-centric”. Wanting access to “full information”, she “began to look for additional reports on the Internet”. After several months, she decided that “this was perhaps the most covered-up story I had ever seen” and quit her job in order to visit the West Bank and Gaza, where she wrote about her encounters with Palestinian suffering and with the “incredible arrogance, cruelty, selfishness” of Israelis. After returning to the U.S., she founded If Americans Knew.[4][non-primary source needed] Weir’s official biography says her activism draws on her history of involvement in the American Civil Rights Movement, her work in the Peace Corps, and her childhood in a military family.[5]

Weir has alleged that Israel’s US supporters are responsible for involving America in wars.[6] She has alleged that Nazi and Zionist leaders collaborated during World War II.[6] According to Tablet, she has “complained about there being too many Jews on the Supreme Court”.[7]

Writing in CounterPunch, Weir said that Israel harvests Palestinian organs,[8][6][9] which has been described as an updating of the medieval blood libel that Jews harvest the blood of gentile children.

Weir has partnered with white supremacists and Holocaust deniers including Christian Identity leader and conspiracy theorist Clayton Douglas and American Free Press, both designated as hate advocates by the Southern Poverty Law Center.[7][10] On Douglas’ radio show, Weir “dismissed allegations that he was a racist, did not challenge his repeated assertions of Jewish control of the world, and did not protest when he played a speech by former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke.”[8] The anti-Zionist group U.S. Campaign to End the Occupation said that “Weir made little to no effort to challenge, confront, or rebut any of these views.”[7] She has also worked with the Nation of Islam.[10]

Weir’s writings include exhortations to action. In an article, she wrote: “Every generation has a chance to act courageously – to oppose the kind of injustice and unthinkable brutality that is going on in the Middle East right now. Or to avert our eyes, and remain >silent.”[11]

Weir has written that “The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is central to grave events in the world—and in our nation—today.”[12] In writing about antisemitism, Weir has argued, “in reality, equating the wrongdoing of Israel with Jewishness is the deepest and most insidious form of anti-Semitism of all.”[11]

Damn. I wanted it to be real.

It’s gonna be rough but I for one welcome EU to make use of USA’s mistakes. Just need to make sure that populism doesn’t gain any more foothold here.

Chop wood and carry water.

Same, actually. Which is why I meditate after being up for a while and/or in the evening.

Weird only to a mind that’s used to being constantly bombarded with low quality entertainment, lulled into comfortable numbness with mostly unnecessary material goods. While this is overly extreme (and potentially hazardous… though that being 4chan it’s probably exaggerated, if even true), most people would do well to take periods of disconnecting entirely and have minimal entertainment available. Zen Buddhist retreats are great by my experience. Yoga Retreats are nice but you need to weed out the ones that are really just masturbatory Wellness holidays for rich white women. Vipassana retreats are probably good too tho I personally haven’t been to one of those. But just starting meditation would be great. https://www.wakingup.com/ is a low bar access point with guided meditations but also a lot of great philosophical discussions from several different branches of thought (notably Stoicism and Buddhism but others too). And you can get it for free (request scholarship) if the price seems steep.

deleted by creator

Ah, I didn’t see this post.

https://bsky.app/profile/saelliott.bsky.social/post/3ljxf6ou6l22a btw for the post on Bsky.

That’s fucking great news. If there ever was a time I wish Finland copied something from Sweden, this is it.

Level. Allow German, French and Spanish. You should be able to get mods that speak at least one of those languages. And I’m saying this as someone who speaks none of those. But I think it would be good if English didn’t have such a dominance. Might even motivate people to learn one.

Yeah, Unilever isn’t much greater either. In general trying to go for local, smaller brands would be good IF you can afford it. Of course a lot of people have to go by what is cheapest and most available and that’s their right. But now if ever, if someone is resourced enough, it would be good to spend some time on at least taking a look at the brands they have available in their regular grocery stores and try to make responsible choices.

(As someone who has been doing this for a long time, and is low income, it’s a bit of an unrewarding pain in the ass but at least I don’t have that nagging feeling at the back of my head as much)

Thankfully it seems like EU is at least trying to be stricter about conscious consumer labels etc, limiting green-washing and all that. That makes life a bit easier for those who very understandably don’t have tons of time and energy to research every purchase.

They are just trying to align everything that’s being said to their previously held beliefs. People aren’t typically all that aware of what their core beliefs are because an alternative, challenging core belief would have to breach all the way into it for it them to realize they have one. Without the salient contrast, they just don’t notice it’s there. It’s just blue against a blue background, and unless a yellow comes along, they’re not going to realize there’s anything there. The materialistic worldview is so prevalent that a random online conversation isn’t likely to get through, no matter how well argued. I’ve had similar discussions many times and sooner or later people just kind of “reset” and I find myself having to say the same things again and again because there’s just this impenetrable thought loop going on. Logic doesn’t breach it, it’s just that they keep asking for all the different ways we can reach the number 42. If I tell them 41+1=42, they ask again and I have to try to explain how 40+2 is also 42, and so on ad nauseum. “Hahaa, but there’s a 33-4347+132562+767368, I bet you can’t do anything to get that to 42”. That can be done all day. If the person isn’t truly open for new ways to think (and few people in these type of settings are), as in they aren’t actively looking for it with an open curiosity, it’s not likely they’ll realize much during that convo.

It’s really, really, natural and normal. I just thought it was funny because OP is behaving the exact same way they’re asking about in their initial post. They’ll probably eventually figure it out.

You said that you don’t know for sure if it’s matter or consciousness that comes first but everything you’re saying hinges on you very firmly believing that matter is prior.

If you had genuine uncertainty about it, you would be much more careful about how you go about asking for proof. If you weren’t sure that matter is prior, it would occur to you to question what “objective” and “subjective” means. I could also ask you, can you step outside consciousness and objectively prove to me that your matter exists? If not, why do you value objective over subjective so much?

So to round back to your initial question: you can intellectually acknowledge the difficulty of proving matter vs. consciousness, yet if we probe it, clearly you hold a firm belief about it despite not being able to rationally prove your belief. So you can ask your initial question from yourself now. Despite your reasoning skill, why aren’t you more skeptical about the materialist view AND it’s implications?

Sure, many people do that kind of a dance or compartmentalization. But that only lasts as long as nothing severe comes to challenge it. Sudden death of a loved one is a cliche but commonly forces people to conclude something.