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Notices by KFist (kfist@gs.smuglo.li)
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@clacke That's why serial killers target people who are too poor to have any financial footprint. There's a highway in Canada that's known as the Highway of Tears because of a serial killer who targeted native women along a stretch of highway for a decade. Nobody cared or noticed for years because he was targeting people with no footprints or connections to anyone else meaningful.
Tim McVeigh was caught because his rental van left a paper trail and his getaway car didn't have registry stickers on it. Ted Kaczynski was caught because of his brother. Jeffrey Dahmer managed to go 23 years continuously killing people simply because he targeted irrelevant nobodies, and only got caught because he let someone get away.
History has taught us that it's surprisingly easy to get away with huge crimes as long as there's no financial motive behind them and the victims have no meaningful clout. On the other end of the spectrum it's stupendously easy to get away with massive financial crimes if you're part of a cabal that controls the judicial and governmental systems to begin with.
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@lain CARDASSIA DID NOTHING WRONG
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@turbomoist @awg Resentment is one of the greatest emotional indicators of where you are in life. Resentment towards a person usually stems from having a dialogue with that person then suddenly realizing that said person isn't entertaining any of your ideas and really doesn't give a shit about what you have to say. Or more specifically, it's when your expectations for that person are completely incongruous with the person's actions. Then you feel contempt for that person if you have any backbone. Both emotions tell you that there's something deeply and fundamentally wrong with the social interaction at hand. So you have to adjust for that.
I had this epiphany more than a year ago now, and it completely flipped my social interactions upside down. I realized that I resented most of the "friends" I had in my life, and I figured that I had to adjust my expectations and actions accordingly. From then on, I only ever opened myself up when a conversation involved mutual respect. Boom, I lost a lot of "friends" but the ones I kept remain rock-solid to this day simply because every single one of our conversations were dialogues (not debates or monologues) and were grounded in mutually-acknowledged and mutually-given respect.
Now, there's an issue with that sort of approach. Respect is a two-way road, and it's also earned (not given). So how can you really respect someone you don't know? You just give them that baseline of being polite and socially-adjusted, and you simply don't disrespect someone until they disrespect you. You don't have to respect someone new, you just have to not outright disrespect them until reason is given. It's a stupidly convoluted way of saying "do unto others etc etc" but it's usually better to lay it out in actual terms instead of aphorisms and platitudes.
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@fate @sim Democracy has failed insofarasmuch as the method of franchisement has failed. The first failure was giving the franchise to those who have no stakes outside of their own immediate survival, and the second failure was giving the franchise to the individual rather than the family. Namely, democratic rule went from being a landed vote, to a sex-aligned vote, to being a universal vote. Give or take some steps along that intermediary step, such as going from landed vote to universal vote directly.
The underlying issue is the disconnect between the voter and the nation, especially within a welfare-state political structure. The focus of any particular vote goes from "what is best for each individual region within a united nation" to "what is best to the single largest demographic or numerical plurality of demographics within a given politically-structured catchment area." The plight of the poor, especially within a welfare state, becomes the political issue of the day, the month, the year, regardless of any other considerations. Simply promising more gibsmedats to the largest demographics within a political catchment area is enough to win.
To another extent, the superficially-relevant issue of gerrymandering is a mask for the fundamentally incorrect axiom that the city-dweller is just as important as the rural denizen. If 10,000 farmers/loggers/truckers/riggers/miners in a disparately-represented rural area provide enough material and economic wealth to support a city of 1,000,000 (who in turn support an elite of 1,000 businessmen/wealth-creators as per the Pareto principle), then are their votes really equal? Should the efforts of 9,998,000 parasites outweigh the efforts of 11,000 producers?
And here comes the fundamental issue of modern democracies: Universal suffrage. Universal suffrage should not exist. It simply cannot work. The past 100 years have taught us this lesson. The past 20 are simply hammering this lesson into the brains of those who are terminally and fatally asleep. https://gs.smuglo.li/attachment/478446
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@augustus Did someone say it's time for copypasta?
Let Africa Sink
Kim du Toit, May 26, 2002
When it comes to any analysis of the problems facing Africa, Western society, and particularly people from the United States, encounter a logical disconnect that makes clear analysis impossible. That disconnect is the way life is regarded in the West (it's precious, must be protected at all costs etc.), compared to the way life, and death, are regarded in Africa. Let me try to quantify this statement.
In Africa, life is cheap. There are so many ways to die in Africa that death is far more commonplace than in the West. You can die from so many things–snakebite, insect bite, wild animal attack, disease, starvation, food poisoning… the list goes on and on. At one time, crocodiles accounted for more deaths in sub-Saharan Africa than gunfire, for example. Now add the usual human tragedy (murder, assault, warfare and the rest), and you can begin to understand why the life expectancy for an African is low–in fact, horrifyingly low, if you remove White Africans from the statistics (they tend to be more urbanized, and more Western in behavior and outlook). Finally, if you add the horrifying spread of AIDS into the equation, anyone born in sub-Saharan Africa this century will be lucky to reach age forty.
I lived in Africa for over thirty years. Growing up there, I was infused with several African traits–traits which are not common in Western civilization. The almost-casual attitude towards death was one. (Another is a morbid fear of snakes.)
So because of my African background, I am seldom moved at the sight of death, unless it's accidental, or it affects someone close to me. (Death which strikes at strangers, of course, is mostly ignored.) Of my circle of about eighteen or so friends with whom I grew up, and whom I would consider "close", only about ten survive today–and not one of the survivors is over the age of fifty.
Two friends died from stepping on landmines while on Army duty in Namibia. Three died in horrific car accidents (and lest one thinks that this is not confined to Africa, one was caused by a kudu flying through a windshield and impaling the guy through the chest with its hoof–not your everyday traffic accident in, say, Florida). One was bitten by a snake, and died from heart failure. Another also died of heart failure, but he was a hopeless drunkard. Two were shot by muggers. The last went out on his surfboard one day and was never seen again (did I mention that sharks are plentiful off the African coasts and in the major rivers?). My situation is not uncommon in South Africa–and north of the Limpopo River (the border with Zimbabwe), I suspect that others would show worse statistics.
The death toll wasn't just confined to my friends. When I was still living in Johannesburg, the newspaper carried daily stories of people mauled by lions, or attacked by rival tribesmen, or dying from some unspeakable disease (and this was pre-AIDS Africa too) and in general, succumbing to some of Africa's many answers to the population explosion. Add to that the normal death toll from rampant crime, illness, poverty, flood, famine, traffic, and the police, and you'll begin to get the idea.
My favorite African story actually happened after I left the country. An American executive took a job over there, and on his very first day, the newspaper headlines read: "Three Headless Bodies Found".
The next day: "Three Heads Found".
The third day: "Heads Don't Match Bodies".
You can't make this stuff up.
As a result, death is treated more casually by Africans than by Westerners. I, and I suspect most Africans, am completely inured to reports of African suffering, for whatever cause. Drought causes crops to fail, thousands face starvation? Yup, that happened many times while I was growing up. Inter-tribal rivalry and warfare causes wholesale slaughter? Yep, been happening there for millennia, long before Whitey got there. Governments becoming rich and corrupt while their populations starved? Not more than nine or ten of those. In my lifetime, the following tragedies have occurred, causing untold millions of deaths: famine in Biafra, genocide in Rwanda, civil war in Angola, floods in South Africa, famine in Somalia, civil war in Sudan, famine in Ethiopia, floods in Mozambique, wholesale slaughter in Uganda, and tribal warfare in every single country. There are others, but you get the point.
Yes, all this was also true in Europe–maybe a thousand years ago. But not any more. And Europe doesn't teem with crocodiles, ultra-venomous snakes and so on.
The Dutch controlled the floods. All of Europe controls famine–it's non-existent now. Apart from a couple of examples of massive, state-sponsored slaughter (Nazi Germany, Communist Russia), Europe since 1700 doesn't even begin to compare to Africa today. Casual slaughter is another thing altogether–rare in Europe, common in Africa.
More to the point, the West has evolved into a society with a stable system of government, which follows the rule of law, and has respect for the rights and life of the individual–none of which is true in Africa.
Among old Africa hands, we have a saying, usually accompanied by a shrug: "Africa wins again." This is usually said after an incident such as:
a beloved missionary is butchered by his congregation, for no apparent reason
a tribal chief prefers to let his tribe starve to death rather than accepting food from the Red Cross (would mean he wasn't all-powerful, you see)
an entire nation starves to death, while its ruler accumulates wealth in foreign banks
a new government comes into power, promising democracy, free elections etc., provided that the freedom doesn't extend to the other tribe
the other tribe comes to power in a bloody coup, then promptly sets about slaughtering the first tribe
etc, etc, etc, ad nauseam, ad infinitum.
The prognosis is bleak, because none of this mayhem shows any sign of ending. The conclusions are equally bleak, because, quite frankly, there is no answer to Africa's problems, no solution that hasn't been tried before, and failed.
Just go to the CIA World Fact Book, pick any of the African countries (Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Malawi etc.), and compare the statistics to any Western country (eg. Portugal, Italy, Spain, Ireland). The disparities are appalling–and it's going to get worse, not better. It has certainly got worse since 1960, when most African countries achieved independence. We, and by this I mean the West, have tried many ways to help Africa. All such attempts have failed.
1. Charity is no answer. Money simply gets appropriated by the first, or second, or third person to touch it (17 countries saw a decline in real per capita GNP between 1970 and 1999, despite receiving well over $100 billion in World Bank assistance).
2. Food isn't distributed. This happens either because there is no transportation infrastructure (bad), or the local leader deliberately withholds the supplies to starve people into submission (worse).
3. Materiel is broken, stolen or sold off for a fraction of its worth. The result of decades of "foreign aid" has resulted in a continental infrastructure which, if one excludes South Africa, couldn't support Pittsburgh.
Add to this, as I mentioned above, the endless cycle of Nature's little bag of tricks–persistent drought followed by violent flooding, a plethora of animals, reptiles and insects so dangerous that life is already cheap before Man starts playing his little reindeer games with his fellow Man–and what you are left with is: catastrophe.
The inescapable conclusion is simply one of resignation. This goes against the grain of our humanity–we are accustomed to ridding the world of this or that problem (smallpox, polio, whatever), and accepting failure is anathema to us. But, to give a classic African scenario, a polio vaccine won't work if the kids are prevented from getting the vaccine by a venal overlord, or a frightened chieftain, or a lack of roads, or by criminals who steal the vaccine and sell it to someone else. If a cure for AIDS was found tomorrow, and offered to every African nation free of charge, the growth of the disease would scarcely be checked, let alone reversed. Basically, you'd have to try to inoculate as many two-year old children as possible, and write off the two older generations.
So that is the only one response, and it's a brutal one: accept that we are powerless to change Africa, and leave them to sink or swim, by themselves.
It sounds dreadful to say it, but if the entire African continent dissolves into a seething maelstrom of disease, famine and brutality, that's just too damn bad. We have better things to do–sometimes, you just have to say, "Can't do anything about it."
The viciousness, the cruelty, the corruption, the duplicity, the savagery, and the incompetence is endemic to the entire continent, and is so much of an anathema to any right-thinking person that the civilized imagination simply stalls when faced with its ubiquity, and with the enormity of trying to fix it. The Western media shouldn't even bother reporting on it. All that does is arouse our feelings of horror, and the instinctive need to do something, anything–but everything has been tried before, and failed. Everything, of course, except self-reliance.
All we should do is make sure that none of Africa gets transplanted over to the U.S., because the danger to our society is dire if it does. I note that several U.S. churches are attempting to bring groups of African refugees over to the United States, European churches the same for Europe. Mistake. Mark my words, this misplaced charity will turn around and bite us, big time.
Even worse would be to think that the simplicity of Africa holds some kind of answers for Western society: remember "It Takes A Village"? Trust me on this: there is not one thing that Africa can give the West which hasn't been tried before and failed, not one thing that isn't a step backwards, and not one thing which is worse than, or that contradicts, what we have already.
So here's my solution for the African fiasco: a high wall around the whole continent, all the guns and bombs in the world for everyone inside, and at the end, the last one alive should do us all a favor and kill himself.
Inevitably, some Kissingerian realpolitiker is going to argue in favor of intervention, because in the vacuum of Western aid, perhaps the Communist Chinese would step in and increase their influence in the area. There are two reasons why this isn't going to happen.
Firstly, the PRC doesn't have that kind of money to throw around; and secondly, the result of any communist assistance will be precisely the same as if it were Western assistance. For the record, Mozambique and Angola are both communist countries–and both are economic disaster areas. The prognosis for both countries is disastrous–and would be the same for any other African country.
Africa has to heal itself. The West can't help it. Nor should we. The record speaks for itself.
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@noyoushutthefuckupdad @ayy https://gs.smuglo.li/attachment/1134561
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>What kind of music do you enjoy?
Wrong answer: "Well, there's this guy named ZUN who replaced his bodily fluids with Japanese beer, and in the past 20 years about a third of the entire creative musical output of an entire autistic nation has been dedicated to remixing his music. I enjoy that."
Right answer: "Oh, a variety of things. Lately I've enjoyed a bit of light jazz by a group called Pineapple Digital. Really relaxing pieces of music, really." https://gs.smuglo.li/attachment/1050355
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@lain Blood alcohol levels: We must secure the existence of our waifus and a future for smug lolis.
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Peach!!!! https://gs.smuglo.li/attachment/1101301
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@augustus >hundreds of thousands of lonely virgins get in long-distance relationships over the internet
>when they finally meet up, their gf turns out to be a gigantic 2-ton drone that carries people away to the AI's lair
>when anyone tries to escape the AI stops them and says "but you told me you loved me for my personality!"
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@awg @xrevan86 @jeff Hanging out on one of the most blocked instances is the way to go. Even though you only talk with people on instances that respect free speech and freedom of opinion, it also prevents you from catching the internet HIV of the people who willingly subscribe to censorship. https://gs.smuglo.li/attachment/641263
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Part of why Facebook is so insidiously evil is because it's essentially a big display of bullshit. Nobody puts in their daily lives, just the really amazing shit. All you see are pages upon pages of people hanging out with their new girlfriend in the Bahamas or hang-gliding off a mountain or travelling the world, but not the 99% of their lives where they're waiting for the day to end or stuck at traffic. Nobody really wants to see that. Nobody really wants to see all those pictures from the Bahamas either.
And if you go in the other direction, all you get are people who write sympathy-baiting depressing garbage, and nobody wants to hang out with someone who's so miserable that they think constantly whining online to hundreds of people is an acceptable strategy to living their lives.
I think that's why I enjoy imageboards and recently Ganoo/Social. Here everyone justs posts smug lolis, anime tiddies, ebin memes, gets into arguments where both sides realize there's no stakes involved, and otherwise wastes their time. It's an extreme level of honesty and simplicity that's so utterly refreshing.
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"Here's a rule for whether or not you should take an opportunity: Will taking that opportunity teach you something that you can use to get other opportunities?"
KFist
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