Yeah, the tankies writing for the filthy communist rag that is … The Guardian?

So all the authoritarian regimes of today and the countless ones in the past are in my head? All the hierarchical corporate structures with a male CEO at the top is in my head? What world are you living in where there isn’t a small group or even a single male at the top making the major decisions?

I never said this is the right way to organize things, or that those people should be leading, I literally said we shouldnt idolize them and let them rule us, I think outside of times of crisis that shouldn’t be how we organize society. I believe we need to fight these systems of organization but to do that we need to understand them, denying there existence or the drives that propel them just maintains the status quo. In order to fight fascism you need to understand what drives fascism.

You could say it’s not true for bonobos but I have no idea how you could make the case that a silverback gorilla is not an “alpha” unless you have some very specific definition. Just pulling from Wikipedia as I’m lazy, but if you have better sources please provide them:

The silverback is the centre of the troop’s attention, making all the decisions, mediating conflicts, determining the movements of the group, leading the others to feeding sites, and taking responsibility for the safety and well-being of the troop. Younger males subordinate to the silverback, known as blackbacks, may serve as backup protection. Blackbacks are aged between 8 and 12 years

That seems to describe an alpha beta hierarchy structure to me. With chimps it may be a little less obvious and more variable but still, according to wikipedia again:

Among males, there is generally a dominance hierarchy, and males are dominant over females.

And

Male chimpanzees exist in a linear dominance hierarchy. Top-ranking males tend to be aggressive even during dominance stability

Yes humans have way more complex social structures but almost always there is a hierarchy of men at the top usually with a single man at the apex, call them alphas, the patriarchy, the oppressors, the greats or whatever you want, they exist. Denying their existence or the fundamental drive powering them only helps to obfuscate there motives. We as a society need to recognize those people and harness them for the benefit of society instead of the benefit of themselves.

I mean it may not be true for wolves, but it definitely is true for gorillas and chimps who are very closely related to us. Also most societies from hunter gathering bands all the way up to multi-national empires usually have a single male at the top. Is that right, probably not. Is it natural?, sort of. There seems to be a drive in a lot of men to dominate society and reach the top of the hierarchy. If you combine that natural drive with someone naturally capable to reach the top of the hierarchy and you get an alpha male. You also don’t have to be an incel to recognize a lot of women are attracted to these driven capable men.

The question isn’t whether alpha males exist, it’s what we as a society should do with them. We shouldn’t idolize them and let them rule over us. We should harness there drive and capabilities to help society as a whole

a drug that was originally manufactured and distributed by the American Sackler family through their American Purdue Pharma company.

Purdue doesn’t make fentanyl, they make oxycontin. People rarely overdose on prescription oxycontin as the dosage is consistent and most addicts understand their tolerance. Fentanyl is a different story, it’s so strong and the margin of error is so small that people overdose on it way easier.

You seem to have a similar myopic view of the crisis but instead of evil Mexican immigrants and drug cartels being the sole problem it’s the evil sackler family. Both those only look at the supply side of the problem, which in my opinion is unsolvable. Trying to control the supply of a highly desirable product is a losing battle, especially with fentanyl where you can hide enough of it to kill an elephant in your sock. In order to solve this problem we need to look at the demand side, both getting current addicts off fentanyl and on to safer substances and also addressing the pain that this society is causing that makes people turn to drugs.

Honestly not the worst idea if you’re trying to save your knees but still want to enjoy the outdoors when you run. Would be better if it was an electric motor though and was at least somewhat powered by the treadmill like an e-bike.

Yeah but this is a “needle in a haystack” problem that chatgpt and AI in general are actually very useful for, ie. Solutions that are hard to find but easy to verify. Issues like this are hard to find as it requires combing through your code , config files and documentation to find the problem, but once you find the solution it either works or it doesn’t.

It’d be great if the decision was made by developers, they’d probably implement it since they can benefit from it as well. It’s not the developers making these decisions though, it’s the companies who have a vested interest in selling your data that are.

Also good for the environment, mostly the not eating meat part. Especially if you buy them dried in bulk you can cut down on your food and packaging waste. Even the lack of fruits and vegetables is good for not drying up California, probably not good for your long term health though. Also fuck billionaires

That’s an imperial war where local knowledge is extremely limited and your relying on sympathetic locals to let you know the terrain and who the enemy are. If that sympathetic population is low like in Afghanistan or Vietnam then you’ll walk into every ambush and never root out the enemy. In this environment guerilla war with small arms can work

If tyrrany comes to the u.s. though it’ll come with at least 30% support if not more, ironically most likely by the 2a nuts. They’ll happily point out every enemy of the state on there block and warn you about every ambush, hell they’ll probably shoot them for you.

Read “insurrections” as slave revolts and you can get a real sense of what the 2a was for.

Waivers exist and are very easy to enforce in this situation. Either you’d have to sign one with your lease or hoa agreement. If not then then the room would have some sort of access control and in order to go in you’d have to sign a waiver. It’s the same as a gym, pool, rooftop area where you can also easily hurt or kill yourself if your dumb.

Insurance companies don’t care about access controlled areas with dangerous objects, otherwise shooting ranges wouldn’t exist. They care about random people coming into your lobby, tripping and then suing the place because they didn’t sign a waiver.

Partially, even if you got rid of the lawns the houses would still take up significantly more space for both the road infrastructure as well as the houses themselves.

You could go out to the middle of the forest and yell, would disturb less people that way anyway.

You could also have a community workshop in the basement like how a lot of buildings have gyms these days. Similar to gyms it would probably have more machines as well since the cost can be spread out. You probably can’t justify buying a lathe for one project but a lathe for a whole apartment block makes more sense.

Yeah, but most people don’t live in that other 90% . Most people live in urban and suburban areas where most if not all of the land is privately owned. Because of this the problem shown of fitting 100 households into 25 acres is way more common than your scenario of fitting 100 households on 2500 acres

Not from Canada but this sent me down a rabbit hole, So the Ontario government sold a monopoly on beer sales to a company and ford backed out early and now the government has to pay 200 million in damages to the company instead of letting the contract expire in a year?

Fuck it I’ll take the down votes, he’s right. Ukraine is losing this war and stand no chance of winning back there lost territory, barring western countries putting troops on the ground. The longer the war goes on, the more territory the Russians gain and the more Ukraine’s manpower gets drained. The only people who stand to benefit from the war continuing is the Russians and western defense contractors.

Obviously fuck Russia for starting this needless war but you have to understand when to cut your losses and stop pouring money and lives into a losing quagmire.

It’s genuinely great that China offers that to the people they don’t imprison for asking for their rights and speaking out against the state.

I mean that’s the vast majority of the people, looks like they have a little under 10,000 political prisoners in a country of 1.4 billion, so 0.0007% of people. That’s not good and should be 0 but it’s not some orwellian police state with stazi on every corner checking if you said xi looks like Winnie the Pooh.

I’m no fan of Chinese authoritarianism and there human rights record but pretending there authoritarianism is the same as the totalitarianism of the 20th century is naive. It’s Definitely not an “open air prison” and does a disservice to people who live in actual open air prisons like Gaza or North Korea.

Yeah but they were mostly aristocrats who hated the uppity new rich bourgeois as much as they hated the peasants.

I didn’t like this line of attack, yes you’re going to have to negotiate with a terrorist organization after you lost a war to that terrorist organization and that organization is going to take control of the country. The fact that you talked with the Taliban isn’t the problem, the fact that you negotiated a bad deal is.