Instigate

It’s really sad to me that Americans get put in the awful position of choosing between tipping, which supports the low wages, and taking responsibility for ensuring another human being has a living wage. It’s just such a terrible position for a consumer to be placed in, having to make ethical and moral choices about how much money to pay for goods and services.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=796VtspzH0I

I think he’d feel this similarly devalues it.

I respect Watterson too much to assume his stance.

Well… which is it? Do you respect him too much to assume his stance or are you assuming he’d feel this similarly devalues it?

Holy shit, is this why lowly assistants are colloquially called gophers?!? I never drew the connection. Sometime we just take weird words or phrases for granted without thinking about their etymology.

Sorry, what? I was agreeing with you. I’m not the other poster you were arguing with.

What you are suggesting is cornering an animal, and then saying “Hey, we should corner it more because it’s acting aggressively.” And then acting surprised when it attacks you.

I really like this line of logic because it highlights how the insipid manosphere’s propaganda directly targets the most animalistic part of the brain - the amygdala - and uses fear and anger to propel antisocial behaviour much as a cornered animal lashes out against its captor. It’s a very apt metaphor beyond the simplistic reasoning it suggests.

it’s more than analog cigarettes

I assume you mean less and yeah, that would make sense on the face of it. It just seems as though there’s no empirical evidence that nicotine specifically causes skin damage - only evidence that it causes blood vessel constriction. Do you have a source that shows a causal relationship from constricting blood vessels to poor skin health? That again would make sense to me, but I just don’t like to base my positions on assumptions - I’m a raw data sort of person.

There’s definitely no world where nicotine is harmless - it causes very clear harms beyond simple addiction that we’ve known for some time - but it’s important to be accurate around how much safer nicotine is in its other forms, particularly as you mentioned that it’s a necessary medicinal quit-smoking aid compound.

If vaping nicotine is the equivalent of five minutes of sun exposure per day without sunscreen, that’s a tolerable risk. If it causes anywhere near 50% of the damage that cigarettes cause, that’s a serious issue.

Thanks four the sources. So there’s evidence that nicotine impacts blood vessels, but not yet that that impacts skin condition? That makes sense, nicotine use in isolation hasn’t been around all that long yet. As I mentioned, that specific link doesn’t appear to have been studied yet to the best of my knowledge, but I don’t have access to journalistic databases that I used to.

Does nicotine specifically cause skin damage? Obviously smoking tobacco does, but I’m not sure it’s necessarily the nicotine component that causes the skin damage. There’s thousands of chemicals in tobacco beyond nicotine and I haven’t yet seen a study that shows that nicotine in isolation impacts skin condition.

High-heeled shoes were invented in Persia for cavalrymen and later used by sharpshooters. Men wear flowing cloth garments like skirts/dresses in many extant cultures. Men used to play all of the female roles in Western plays, in full clothing and makeup. Men have been removing and shaping body hair since the ancient Egyptians, Romans and Greeks. Even as recently as the 1970s men would wear cropped tops and short-shorts.

There are so many examples to deconstruct things that we view as feminine or masculine as being entirely arbitrary, culturally-locked and era specific. It’s all socially constructed, and therefore can be deconstructed - but only if you’re willing or able to engage in reflection.

Wait, do you go to the dentist literally just to get them to clean your teeth? As in they’re not checking for cavities or issues, they just brush and floss you and you’re on your way? That’s super weird.

I only go once a year for a checkup - they give me a clean as well, but that’s not the purpose of the visit. I’ve never met anyone who goes to the dentist just for a clean.

It’s just a well-known trope of Lemmy nowadays that whenever any issue with any OS is reported, rather than providing advice for the situation the default response is often “FUCK [OS], USE LINUX”. It’s become so common that it’s essentially now viewed by non-Linux users as Linux users just engaging in a circlejerk of their favourite OS. I know that circlejerks usually require more than one person but the Lemmy hivemind tends to respond this way, so a single comment (that is usually highly upvoted) is viewed as a circlejerk.

Because it’s valuable to deconstruct any concept that is held without a clear reason. It’s far more important to know why you believe or feel what you do than just knowing what you feel or believe.

I’m not expecting to convince people of my position, nor to have others change their positions based upon said deconstruction, but it’s worth raising nonetheless.

If attraction can be socially programmed (as it so very obviously is), then it can similarly be deconstructed. The first step to achieving that is questioning the motivation for attraction beyond “that’s hot”.

We definitely shouldn’t be putting down people for their attractions, but I think there is value in highlighting that a person’s concept of attractiveness can be socially constructed and therefore can also be deconstructed.

I think instead of labelling people with narrow or socio-centric concepts of attraction as “lesser” or stupid or uninformed isn’t fair, but I also think it’s fair to say that they likely haven’t gone through the process of deconstructing why they feel the way they do.

Humour doesn’t require punching down. He used to punch up, which made him both hilarious and insightful at the same time, particularly while deconstructing issues of race relations in the US. Now he’s just another angry old man who likes to rant about things he doesn’t understand. That’s not humour; that’s a letter to the editor at the New York Post.

BOOK GOOD

“A Lively Fisting”

Level-headed people are not saying that Palestine shouldn’t fight back against the occupation, they’re just deriding the method they’re using. It’s hard to support a regime that kills civilians and children, even if they’re doing it in response to their civilians and children being killed. Two wrongs usually don’t make a right.

Now the question that I think is still rhetorical and whose answer people can’t agree upon is this: what is the appropriate response to apartheid and genocide? Many would agree that attacking the IDF, government officials etc. would constitute reasonable reactive force, however this is particularly difficult for Palestine due to Israel’s domination of the geography.

What should Hamas do that can expedite the end of apartheid and genocide? I don’t know. It’s a fucked situation. I feel deeply for the Palestinians, especially the almost 50% of them that are under the age of 18, and believe that they need to be liberated. I also feel deeply for Israeli citizens, many of whom didn’t vote for Netanyahu, who have been killed as a result of the Hamas incursion.

This issue is flooded with nuance that’s just going over many people’s heads.

Will the experience of war victims resonate with the victors of that war? Will the victors understand the oppressed and be able to prove their position with adequate psychology? Does the psychology of an occupied people differ from the psychology from the oppressors? Does a person whose culture has been stripped from them require the same counsel as those who believes that illegally occupied territories are their’s?

Many confounding variables exist here that may interact with being militarily oppressed, and therefore comparisons between the two sides are incomparable. I don’t have the answers to these questions. I wish I did, because then I’d be able to secure facts. In this situation the only secure facts are that both sides have committed atrocities and crimes against humanity.

Sure, but someone who lives in Addis Ababa probably doesn’t have the cultural knowledge to give adequate therapy to someone in Pyongyang, despite them both being located in cities.

Could someone in London counsel someone in New York? Probably, because the cultures are quite similar and share a root ethnicity and language. But that Londonian probably won’t have as much luck counselling someone in Ho Chi Minh.