nickwitha_k (he/him)

  • 12 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 16th, 2023

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  • Indeed. It’s also not that everyone who embraces the ideology understands that it relies upon “magic” or what they even believe in (dispassionate self-reflection is antithetical).

    And definition of the preferred reality is also relevant in understanding why people embrace the ideology and why it should not, in my opinion, be given legitimacy for the real and unnecessary harms that it brings. Nearly all of its characteristics revolve around exerting power and control over others and leveraging the Just World fallacy to justify it.

    The ideology is strongly associated with fear and rage responses for a reason; it allows significant cognitive load related to coping with a chaotic reality that one doesn’t have control over to be completely avoided. It’s like having a heroin auto-injector that prevents one not at the top from feeling bad while those at the top can leverage it to reduce cognitive load necessary to justify megalomaniacal behavior to themselves and others.



  • I am also referring to rank-and-file conservatives. The ideology itself is one of bad faith, from the perspective of anyone who does not believe in rigid societal hierarchies, Just World fallacy, power over orders, or DOES believe in rule of law.

    The ideology is not honest about the goals that it communicates (ex. slowing societal progress to keep things “safe” and protecting the status quo). The actions of practitioners of the ideology, throughout history, including its modern origin of protecting monarchy, show that it is simply about establishment and enforcement of hierarchies of power, where everything from morality to facts are based upon the individual’s position in the hierarchy, and those lower or outside of the hierarchy are open targets for abuse and exploitation.

    The ideology is so fundamentally opposed to democracy and universal self-rule that it is not possible for good faith engagement on any level.

    That’s not just the lies of bad faith actors - that’s blithering insanity.

    For anyone that does not believe that objective reality changes upon the whim of someone high in societal hierarchy, yes, it is absolutely blithering insanity. My point is that any overlap between objective reality and “beliefs” spouted by conservatives is purely coincidental. Conservatism is not a reality-based ideology but rather one that seeks to force reality into whatever its practitioners’ preconceived ideas are, or what they are told by authority. Willful, voluntary delusion and denial of observed reality are features, not bugs.





  • This is an example of one of the things that most baffles me about the right in the US today.They have this whole narrative about government overreach, but the reality is that while, for example, government agencies did have DEI policies, they were internal. There was no interference in businesses - the businesses that had or have DEI policies chose to on their own.

    When you stop thinking of conservatives as acting in good faith and realize that they have always been bad faith actors, it makes a whole lot more sense and life gets a little easier because you no longer waste time and energy trying to bring just the right but of information or perspective to show them the errors in their logic.


  • That’s literally not what the ruling is about. It was about an AI bro company using proprietary, copyrighted materials to train its AI, which they obtained by questionable means, after being denied license to do so by the IP owners. Further, after training the AI with unlicensed materials, they launched a competing product.

    Whether you support IP or not, the AI company is clearly in the wrong here.

    It’s a pretty definitive example of many AI companies being little more than leeches, stealing others’ work and repackaging it as their own. All with zero long-term consideration of “what do we do when there’s noone left to leech off of because we undermined the ability of those make the source data to make a living, while unnecessarily driving increased emissions and consumption of potable water for something that provides little actual value do humanity as a whole?”