Every movement begins with and is made up of individuals working toward making things better, which is how anything in history has ever gotten better. One more individual joining their local mutual aid group, protesting for the climate, and fighting for what’s right is exactly what this world needs right now.

You may not have the ability to help someone across the world very effectively or at all, but if you fight for what’s right locally, it can spread all across the globe.

Also @[email protected]

The bot is designed to be resilient against those attacks, the creator goes into more detail here.

The automated bot was created by the mod of pleasant politics in an effort to create a place to talk about politics that didn’t have trolls and nasty people. It scans users across the lemmyverse and determines to ban or unban based on how inflammatory you are, which is determined by your downvote/upvotes ratio over time.

AFAIK the Nostr protocsal sorta let’s you hop around, but it’s full to the brimwith cryptobros, and I’m still not sure how moderation works there.

Assuming they search Lemmy, and one of top results is the join-lemmy page (second result for me, below Lemmy.world), the server recommendation tool can suggest small instances with only a couple hundred members. For instance, if one selects Art as the topic and English as the language.

Unless an instance enrolls in Lemmy-federate, the default behavior is that a user, even on the /all view, will only see local communities, and outside communities that another local user has sought out and subscribed to.

If a newbie joins a small instance and doesn’t know how to seek out communities that interest them with lemmyverse.net, they would likely have a very small range of content in their feed.

Lemmy-federate helps by auto subscribing an instance to participating communities, seeding a wide range of content immediately.

A large instance would offer a good experience either way, but would encourage centralization without Lemmy-federate existing.

You sound like someone who would enjoy The Secret Life of Machines. I’ve never met anyone else in real life who wanted to watch it with me, for the reasons you mention.

How do you like living in Albuquerque, if I may ask?

That would unironically be kinda rad. The local woodsmith of Lemmy! 😄

There’s Vanguard’s passive ESG index fund, ESGV, which while not perfect, does eliminate 99% of fossil fuel investments according to fossilfreefunds.org, while only having an expense ratio of 0.09%

If you need a spatula, you need a spatula. It’d be best to get a metal one second hand, but unless you carve one from a hunk of wood or get one from a friend or family, you’ll have to buy one somehow. Best to get one that is durable and innert, like stainless steel. America’s test kitchen does a good video on them if you’re a nerd like me :)

Wood is good for non-stick pans, I think. And so far wood has not tried to kill us yet, unless you make it too pointy and do the 'ol sliparoo in the kitchen and fall on thine spatula.

According to this, urban farming seems surprisingly viable due to yields being so much higher than big ag farming. If we grew on rooftops and replaced parking lots with growing space, a city could theoretically become food self sufficient.

You may want to consider getting involved with a local mutual aid group. The connections you make now will likely pay off in the future.

Think of it more like an amorphous mass, slowly pushing against an old wooden door until creaks, just to see if its locked.

Agree 100%

Also ahhhh! Another frog! :D

Sorta like Facebook, but federated with activitypub, so it can interact with mastodon and Lemmy a bit.

This blog post does a better job of explaining it.

RAWs illustrations about the contrast between our scientific understanding of general relativity and quantum mechanics. Which to my knowledge are irreconcilable but are what we observe the universe to be. Those lenses are both useful but don’t describe the full truth of how the universe works by themselves.

That just shows our understanding is not complete, and more investigation is necessary. The entire field of scientific inquiry is to give us a more filled in understanding of what the universe is, in terms that are able to be universally understood and built upon. Richard Feynman gives a wonderful response to that point.

Edit: just to address your critiques, you can make any ideology or worldview into eugenics without much effort. ‘Maybe logic’ doesn’t encourage it any more than any other ideology.

I would argue a worldview that lets an individual consider any point of view or theory to be plausible or correct, regardless of hard evidence, is more able to construct a justification for eugenics to be a worthwhile endeavour, compared to a worldview that is able to take a hard stance against it due material and historical evidence demonstrating its extreme harm and lack of humanity, and dismiss it entirely.

And I just find it hilarious that my original criticism was that it was a waste of time to criticize astrology, which you never addressed in your comment back that undoubtedly took away a lot of your time

I responded by asking who or what determines what is or is not a waste of time. I fundamentally disagree that it is a waste of time. I would also say that this conversation was fruitful, as it provides a good contrast between our points of view for any third party reading along.

Seriously you and I are not going to agree here. I do wish you the best. But could never agree with your rigid understanding of reality

I wish you the best as well.

I’m familiar with Kerry Thornly from Adam Curtis’ film Can’t Get You Out of My Head, where it’s made pretty clear that Thornly suffers from pretty severe paranoia in his later life, and succumbed to the very same wild conspiracies he unwittingly created as a parody earlier in life in Playboy magazine. I would actually point to him as a prime example of what Sagan was warning against. To go down that road earnestly, in my experience, leads only to an endless spinning of wheels, no conclusions, and a very confusing self-delusion with no useful end in sight.

I think it’s good that Thornly and RAW were anti-authoritarian and leaned toward Anarchism, but their mental states and delusions are far too offputting for me to give them any significant merit. I’ve lived in that world before where reality is based on fantasy and not hard fact, and it did me no good, only harm.

Ello ello!👋 How goes it in your pond mate?

I’m sure Mr. Wilson would indeed. I was not familiar with him until your mention, and upon researching him briefly, I would hedge that Sagan (and certainly myself) would disagree with him as well.

Firstly, I would ask how, or rather who, determines what misinformation is worth advising against and what isn’t? The relative harm of astrology is indeed low compared to say, Capitalism, but then again, the effort to write my initial comment was also low. I don’t expect it to do much, but on the off chance it steers someone away from magical thinking, it was worth writing.

As to why I would disagree with Wilson: I could never subscribe to his concept of trying to get people to become ‘agnostic about everything’ because the minute you take a hard stand on a single thing, you discover that to be agnostic about everything is just harmful. I think it’s good to be open-minded, and I’m not one of the dogmatic religious-level scientific fanatic he describes who blindly follow the AMA or any other scientific institution that insists they have everything figured out and demands you not question the sacred gospels, but his method seems like the ultimate cop-out: “We can’t truly know anything with certainty, so it’s all possibly right, just with different probabilities!”

I don’t buy into that one bit, because otherwise one could use such a worldview to justify saying “Hmm… I guess maybe eugenics could be right? I’ll give it a low probability, but can’t be too sure!”

It also could be used to justify belief in Scientology, literally any debunked scientific theory, climate change denial, radical religions, etc.

I think it far healthier to have an open-mind to new concepts that can be proven good, and to have an active and healthy skepticism for anything that makes claims without evidence. But that’s just my 2 cents.

I should mention that I don’t mean to strawman your argument, as you didn’t mention Wilson’s ‘agnostic’ concept, but that seems to be at the heart of this philosophy, and why he prescribed to mysticism and would likely find astrology harmless.