6 ms·

Also Italian. I think everybody sucks here? Most Italian authorities like this one are chock full of incompetents, and I'm almost sure they're just caving in t

by qsort 9mo ago

Also Italian. I think everybody sucks here? Most Italian authorities like this one are chock full of incompetents, and I'm almost sure they're just caving in to some soccer broadcaster or some crap like that. He might very well be fully correct on the fact of the matter. Still, the rhetoric of the post is frankly disgusting. No, I'm not taking lessons in democracy from JD Vance, thank you very much. No, I don't think that might makes right and it's unsurprising that those who believe otherwise are so eager to transparently suck up to this administration. Making public threats in this way is just vice signaling, nice bait.

NamlchakKhandro 9mo ago
But might does make rights. Because all it takes is men with guns to change what rights you think you have. If you can't defend yourself against that then you have no rights.
- dragonwriter 9mo ago
  Might can defend, or violate, rights, but it does not make them.
  - DangitBobby 9mo ago
    What does make them? Children apparently don't have them, and many races in many countries didn't have them for a long time either. How do you account for that? Are we now distinguishing between "having" rights and uh... being allow to use them?
- burkaman 9mo ago
  This is the Stephen Miller caveman view of the world, but it obviously doesn't make sense if you think about it for more than five seconds. It's a very straightforward consequence of refusing to ever admit you are wrong. "If I did it, then I must have had the right to do it." It's just a refusal to accept the philosophical concept of rights. The right to vote doesn't exist because you didn't have to defeat the entire army to vote against their leader, it's just that the leader benevolently decided to let you vote against them. You don't have the right to life, it's just that everyone on the planet with a weapon has coincidentally decided not to murder you, for now. Laws don't actually exist. Any right that appeared to be established against the wishes of the men with guns (i.e. all of them) was actually fake or an inexplicable accident. You can imagine a world that works like this, but it certainly isn't our world. No historical period or even any fictional story I can think of operates like this.
  - dingnuts 9mo ago
    [dead]
  - unbecoming 9mo ago
    [flagged]
  - pixl97 9mo ago
    > The right to vote doesn't exist because you didn't have to defeat the entire army to vote against their leader, I would say you're wrong. The right to vote does exist because men rose up together and fought leaders that wouldn't let them vote. And, when leaders rise up that take our right to vote and we don't stop them they will prevail. > it's just that everyone on the planet with a weapon has coincidentally decided not to murder you, for now. Correct. Start up a big disaster where food goes away for some reason and it comes back. We have a stable world where we don't kill each other at the moment because in general we all have food, water, shelter, and I would say enough entertainment that fighting each other isn't worth the risk. There is no rule that says this will last forever. Quite often in history there have been stable times, that then fell apart because of greed and malice of leaders.
    - burkaman 9mo ago
      I am not saying it's impossible for rights to be taken away, I am arguing against this statement: > If you can't defend yourself against that then you have no rights. I do not own a gun and I have no fighting skills, so I cannot defend myself against men with guns. Would you agree that I therefore have no rights? I think that you and the original poster are seeing the situation "you are vulnerable to potentially losing rights in the future", which is true, but conflating that with "you have no rights". It's like telling a rich person "you actually don't have any money" because it's possible they might be robbed someday.
      - pixl97 9mo ago
        >Would you agree that I therefore have no rights? You have the right to vote, if you lose that right, and you don't have a gun after that you have whatever 'rights' that are provided to you by a dictator. One of the things you're missing here is the idea of herd immunity. While you won't fight for your rights, theoretically someone else will making taking your rights dangerous. Once enough people won't fight for their rights, or enough of the population gathers together to take your rights, you lose your rights.
- throw310822 9mo ago
  Ok. So a man with a gun has the right to shoot you and kill you. Then a policeman comes with a bigger gun and he has the right to kidnap the murderer. Then comes a judge with an even bigger gun (the law) and has the right to lock him up in a prison. But then the murderer gets hold of a weapon and he has the right to escape from prison. Etc. You see that this view doesn't go very far.
- Volundr 9mo ago
  > If you can't defend yourself against that then you have no rights. My sister is wheelchair bound with MS. Half the time she can barely see. You can give her all the guns you want and she isn't going be to able to defend herself. I reject your nonsense assertion that because of this she has no rights.
- chrneu 9mo ago
  race to the bottom logic this kind of logic will always lead to everyone losing in the long run. always. there will always be a more powerful bully that steps up to take over. history is very clear on this one.
  - immibis 9mo ago
    You might be conflating description with prescription. Descriptively, powerful people have all the rights and weak people have none. This is what we observe in the world. No amount of philosophical thought outweighs actual observations. For example, Donald Trump has (retroactively!) the right to r**e ch*ldren. We know this because he is not suffering consequences for doing that. But Renee Good did not have a right to free speech. We know this because she was executed because of her speech. You can prescribe whatever fancy academia language you want, but the facts in the real world don't seem to currently support any of it beyond "might makes rights".
- throw0101d 9mo ago
  > Because all it takes is men with guns to change what rights you think you have. Plenty folks of didn't / don't change their minds about what rights they thought they had/have, even in the face of guns. Just look at what's currently going in Iran. If you're in the US, and believe in your own Constitution, then people have "unalienable Rights" that are "endowed by their Creator", regardless of whether they are recognized by the government or not: * https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcrip... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Declaration_of_Independence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Declaration_of_I...
- OkayPhysicist 9mo ago
  You're conflating rights with freedoms, which is the same category error as confusing legality with morality. Your rights are, by their nature inalienable. They are recognized (or not) by individual power structures, granting you freedoms. Under an authoritarian regime, your freedoms maybe be limited, for example, your right to free speech may be curtailed by men with guns. Killing those men is illegal, but not unethical, exactly because they are infringing your rights. This all may seem academic to the person with a boot on their throat, but it dictates how outsiders view one's actions.
- svara 9mo ago
  You can go back to the ancient Greeks to explain what is wrong about that. Literally two thousand years of civilization were spent on combating the pockets in which people live by that principle.
- lostlogin 9mo ago
  How are all those guns helping in the US right now, as it turns authoritarian?
  - mlrtime 9mo ago
    Pretty good, thanks for asking!
    - lostlogin 9mo ago
      I’m confused. I thought the guns were for stopping an authoritarian regime?
      - mlrtime 9mo ago
        I'll cut the cheekiness, I disagree with a "authoritarian regime". I don't support everything, but to some up an entire government as "authoritarian regime" is wrong IMO. So why would I use my guns again?
        lostlogin 9mo ago
        > to some up an entire government as "authoritarian regime" is wrong IMO It doesn’t work like that though. The most authoritarian regime in the world has bits that seem benign, we don’t judge them on that. We judge them based on the extremes. Things like masked men grabbing civilians off the street and shooting them in the face, with the full support of the regime.
subsistence234 9mo ago
[flagged]
- oytis 9mo ago
  Western Europe is not an authoritarian dystopia by any measure. Economic growth or lack of thereof is absolutely irrelevant here
  - selfmodruntime 9mo ago
    > Western Europe is not an authoritarian dystopia by any measure People are locked up in the Germany and the UK because they criticize the government, its politicians or their policies. I live in Germany.
    - oytis 9mo ago
      Who is locked up for criticizing the government in Germany? You can be fined for insulting a government official, and I think it's a bad law and should be retracted, but a) insulting is not the same as criticizing and b) I've never heard of a single person locked up because of it - you'd basically need to deliberately refuse paying the fine for that
      - immibis 9mo ago
        Yanis Varoufakis, I think? Except he was banned from Germany, not locked up. If he tries to enter, then he might be locked up. They used the intermediate step of calling him a terrorist.
      - selfmodruntime 9mo ago
        188 Criminal Code Insult, defamation and slander directed against persons in political life[1]: (1) If an insult (§ 185) is committed against a person involved in the political life of the people, either publicly, at a meeting or by disseminating content (§ 11 (3)), for reasons related to the position of the offended person in public life, and if the act is likely to significantly impede their public activities, the penalty shall be imprisonment for up to three years or a fine. The political life of the people extends to the local level. (2) Under the same conditions, defamation (§ 186) shall be punished with imprisonment from three months to five years, and slander (§ 187) with imprisonment from six months to five years. This law is commonly criticized by free speech activists in Germany, as well as liberal parties like Die Linke and FDP. It was updated to be even harsher by our last government. David Bendels received a sentence of 7 months for posting an edited insulting picture of Nancy Faeser, Germany's last minister for interior affairs. The case sparked an international outcry and got a lot of press coverage [2]. Note that ironically the doctored image showed Faeser holding a sign with the message "I hate freedom of speech". [1]: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stgb/__188.html https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stgb/__188.html [2]: https://www.thetimes.com/world/europe/article/germany-insult-laws-explained-freedom-speech-cd5qdq0jq https://www.thetimes.com/world/europe/article/germany-insult...
selfmodruntime 9mo ago
> No, I'm not taking lessons in democracy from JD Vance, thank you very much You are falling into a trap where you can not recognize a true point because it is made by someone you disagree with. I don't condone Vance or the Trump admin. He is right about European governemnt's attacks on free speech.
- jacquesm 9mo ago
  And you are falling into the trap of thinking that if a person is busy deconstructing what used to be one of the larger democracies in the world that their other words are going to be taken at face value, which obviously is not going to happen. We're not discussing Pol Pot's views on cooking either, even though he might have had some valuable insight. Bringing up Vance and Musk in polite conversation to bolster your argument is - especially in the context of Europe, which both men seem to have declared to be enemy #1 before Russia and China - a little tone deaf.
  - nkmnz 9mo ago
    To be fair, he's not bringing them up as intellectual support for his argumentative base – he's bringing them up as support for acts of retaliation. This is mostly about power and we've lost 30% in power vs. the US in just ~12 years because we've fucked up our economy.
    - jacquesm 9mo ago
      Maybe 'the economy' is not the only valid yardstick to compare countries by?
      - nkmnz 9mo ago
        I absolutely and 100% agree! But it's the stick that others will use to force their world view down your throat. So if you want to be not only righteous, but also hold others accountable according to your standards, you need the economic power to do so.
    - 9mo ago
xinayder 9mo ago
The AI generated art is also disgusting. Makes the CEO look like an angry kid because his multi-billion dolar industry got a 1% income fine, which is nothing for them, for a service they provide that keeps having outages because they have bad coders who thought moving their shit code to Rust was a good idea.

by qsort 9mo ago

NamlchakKhandro 9mo ago

But might does make rights. Because all it takes is men with guns to change what rights you think you have. If you can't defend yourself against that then you have no rights.

dragonwriter 9mo ago
Might can defend, or violate, rights, but it does not make them.
- DangitBobby 9mo ago
  What does make them? Children apparently don't have them, and many races in many countries didn't have them for a long time either. How do you account for that? Are we now distinguishing between "having" rights and uh... being allow to use them?
burkaman 9mo ago
This is the Stephen Miller caveman view of the world, but it obviously doesn't make sense if you think about it for more than five seconds. It's a very straightforward consequence of refusing to ever admit you are wrong. "If I did it, then I must have had the right to do it." It's just a refusal to accept the philosophical concept of rights. The right to vote doesn't exist because you didn't have to defeat the entire army to vote against their leader, it's just that the leader benevolently decided to let you vote against them. You don't have the right to life, it's just that everyone on the planet with a weapon has coincidentally decided not to murder you, for now. Laws don't actually exist. Any right that appeared to be established against the wishes of the men with guns (i.e. all of them) was actually fake or an inexplicable accident. You can imagine a world that works like this, but it certainly isn't our world. No historical period or even any fictional story I can think of operates like this.
- dingnuts 9mo ago
  [dead]
- unbecoming 9mo ago
  [flagged]
- pixl97 9mo ago
  > The right to vote doesn't exist because you didn't have to defeat the entire army to vote against their leader, I would say you're wrong. The right to vote does exist because men rose up together and fought leaders that wouldn't let them vote. And, when leaders rise up that take our right to vote and we don't stop them they will prevail. > it's just that everyone on the planet with a weapon has coincidentally decided not to murder you, for now. Correct. Start up a big disaster where food goes away for some reason and it comes back. We have a stable world where we don't kill each other at the moment because in general we all have food, water, shelter, and I would say enough entertainment that fighting each other isn't worth the risk. There is no rule that says this will last forever. Quite often in history there have been stable times, that then fell apart because of greed and malice of leaders.
  - burkaman 9mo ago
    I am not saying it's impossible for rights to be taken away, I am arguing against this statement: > If you can't defend yourself against that then you have no rights. I do not own a gun and I have no fighting skills, so I cannot defend myself against men with guns. Would you agree that I therefore have no rights? I think that you and the original poster are seeing the situation "you are vulnerable to potentially losing rights in the future", which is true, but conflating that with "you have no rights". It's like telling a rich person "you actually don't have any money" because it's possible they might be robbed someday.
    - pixl97 9mo ago
      >Would you agree that I therefore have no rights? You have the right to vote, if you lose that right, and you don't have a gun after that you have whatever 'rights' that are provided to you by a dictator. One of the things you're missing here is the idea of herd immunity. While you won't fight for your rights, theoretically someone else will making taking your rights dangerous. Once enough people won't fight for their rights, or enough of the population gathers together to take your rights, you lose your rights.
throw310822 9mo ago
Ok. So a man with a gun has the right to shoot you and kill you. Then a policeman comes with a bigger gun and he has the right to kidnap the murderer. Then comes a judge with an even bigger gun (the law) and has the right to lock him up in a prison. But then the murderer gets hold of a weapon and he has the right to escape from prison. Etc. You see that this view doesn't go very far.
Volundr 9mo ago
> If you can't defend yourself against that then you have no rights. My sister is wheelchair bound with MS. Half the time she can barely see. You can give her all the guns you want and she isn't going be to able to defend herself. I reject your nonsense assertion that because of this she has no rights.
chrneu 9mo ago
race to the bottom logic this kind of logic will always lead to everyone losing in the long run. always. there will always be a more powerful bully that steps up to take over. history is very clear on this one.
- immibis 9mo ago
  You might be conflating description with prescription. Descriptively, powerful people have all the rights and weak people have none. This is what we observe in the world. No amount of philosophical thought outweighs actual observations. For example, Donald Trump has (retroactively!) the right to r**e ch*ldren. We know this because he is not suffering consequences for doing that. But Renee Good did not have a right to free speech. We know this because she was executed because of her speech. You can prescribe whatever fancy academia language you want, but the facts in the real world don't seem to currently support any of it beyond "might makes rights".
throw0101d 9mo ago
> Because all it takes is men with guns to change what rights you think you have. Plenty folks of didn't / don't change their minds about what rights they thought they had/have, even in the face of guns. Just look at what's currently going in Iran. If you're in the US, and believe in your own Constitution, then people have "unalienable Rights" that are "endowed by their Creator", regardless of whether they are recognized by the government or not: * https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcrip... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Declaration_of_Independence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Declaration_of_I...
OkayPhysicist 9mo ago
You're conflating rights with freedoms, which is the same category error as confusing legality with morality. Your rights are, by their nature inalienable. They are recognized (or not) by individual power structures, granting you freedoms. Under an authoritarian regime, your freedoms maybe be limited, for example, your right to free speech may be curtailed by men with guns. Killing those men is illegal, but not unethical, exactly because they are infringing your rights. This all may seem academic to the person with a boot on their throat, but it dictates how outsiders view one's actions.
svara 9mo ago
You can go back to the ancient Greeks to explain what is wrong about that. Literally two thousand years of civilization were spent on combating the pockets in which people live by that principle.
lostlogin 9mo ago
How are all those guns helping in the US right now, as it turns authoritarian?
- mlrtime 9mo ago
  Pretty good, thanks for asking!
  - lostlogin 9mo ago
    I’m confused. I thought the guns were for stopping an authoritarian regime?
    - mlrtime 9mo ago
      I'll cut the cheekiness, I disagree with a "authoritarian regime". I don't support everything, but to some up an entire government as "authoritarian regime" is wrong IMO. So why would I use my guns again?
      - lostlogin 9mo ago
        > to some up an entire government as "authoritarian regime" is wrong IMO It doesn’t work like that though. The most authoritarian regime in the world has bits that seem benign, we don’t judge them on that. We judge them based on the extremes. Things like masked men grabbing civilians off the street and shooting them in the face, with the full support of the regime.

subsistence234 9mo ago

[flagged]

oytis 9mo ago
Western Europe is not an authoritarian dystopia by any measure. Economic growth or lack of thereof is absolutely irrelevant here
- selfmodruntime 9mo ago
  > Western Europe is not an authoritarian dystopia by any measure People are locked up in the Germany and the UK because they criticize the government, its politicians or their policies. I live in Germany.
  - oytis 9mo ago
    Who is locked up for criticizing the government in Germany? You can be fined for insulting a government official, and I think it's a bad law and should be retracted, but a) insulting is not the same as criticizing and b) I've never heard of a single person locked up because of it - you'd basically need to deliberately refuse paying the fine for that
    - immibis 9mo ago
      Yanis Varoufakis, I think? Except he was banned from Germany, not locked up. If he tries to enter, then he might be locked up. They used the intermediate step of calling him a terrorist.
    - selfmodruntime 9mo ago
      188 Criminal Code Insult, defamation and slander directed against persons in political life[1]: (1) If an insult (§ 185) is committed against a person involved in the political life of the people, either publicly, at a meeting or by disseminating content (§ 11 (3)), for reasons related to the position of the offended person in public life, and if the act is likely to significantly impede their public activities, the penalty shall be imprisonment for up to three years or a fine. The political life of the people extends to the local level. (2) Under the same conditions, defamation (§ 186) shall be punished with imprisonment from three months to five years, and slander (§ 187) with imprisonment from six months to five years. This law is commonly criticized by free speech activists in Germany, as well as liberal parties like Die Linke and FDP. It was updated to be even harsher by our last government. David Bendels received a sentence of 7 months for posting an edited insulting picture of Nancy Faeser, Germany's last minister for interior affairs. The case sparked an international outcry and got a lot of press coverage [2]. Note that ironically the doctored image showed Faeser holding a sign with the message "I hate freedom of speech". [1]: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stgb/__188.html https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stgb/__188.html [2]: https://www.thetimes.com/world/europe/article/germany-insult-laws-explained-freedom-speech-cd5qdq0jq https://www.thetimes.com/world/europe/article/germany-insult...

selfmodruntime 9mo ago

> No, I'm not taking lessons in democracy from JD Vance, thank you very much You are falling into a trap where you can not recognize a true point because it is made by someone you disagree with. I don't condone Vance or the Trump admin. He is right about European governemnt's attacks on free speech.

jacquesm 9mo ago
And you are falling into the trap of thinking that if a person is busy deconstructing what used to be one of the larger democracies in the world that their other words are going to be taken at face value, which obviously is not going to happen. We're not discussing Pol Pot's views on cooking either, even though he might have had some valuable insight. Bringing up Vance and Musk in polite conversation to bolster your argument is - especially in the context of Europe, which both men seem to have declared to be enemy #1 before Russia and China - a little tone deaf.
- nkmnz 9mo ago
  To be fair, he's not bringing them up as intellectual support for his argumentative base – he's bringing them up as support for acts of retaliation. This is mostly about power and we've lost 30% in power vs. the US in just ~12 years because we've fucked up our economy.
  - jacquesm 9mo ago
    Maybe 'the economy' is not the only valid yardstick to compare countries by?
    - nkmnz 9mo ago
      I absolutely and 100% agree! But it's the stick that others will use to force their world view down your throat. So if you want to be not only righteous, but also hold others accountable according to your standards, you need the economic power to do so.
  - 9mo ago

xinayder 9mo ago

The AI generated art is also disgusting. Makes the CEO look like an angry kid because his multi-billion dolar industry got a 1% income fine, which is nothing for them, for a service they provide that keeps having outages because they have bad coders who thought moving their shit code to Rust was a good idea.