this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2024
1909 points (89.9% liked)

Political Memes

5492 readers
1918 users here now

Welcome to politcal memes!

These are our rules:

Be civilJokes are okay, but don’t intentionally harass or disturb any member of our community. Sexism, racism and bigotry are not allowed. Good faith argumentation only. No posts discouraging people to vote or shaming people for voting.

No misinformationDon’t post any intentional misinformation. When asked by mods, provide sources for any claims you make.

Posts should be memesRandom pictures do not qualify as memes. Relevance to politics is required.

No bots, spam or self-promotionFollow instance rules, ask for your bot to be allowed on this community.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
1909
Just a reminder (lemmy.world)
submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 27 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

What if you really want a warm hug but you only have the choice between a poke in the eye with a sharp stick and not a poke in the eye?

You still choose "not a poke in the eye", dumbo.

[–] [email protected] -4 points 5 months ago (2 children)

What if the options are sharp stick or dull stick?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago

Do you really want me to answer that for you? Is it really that hard to think for yourself?

Alright then... You get either one or the other, there's no way out of that whether you make a choice or not. Wouldn't you still want to influence the choice so you get the one that hurts a lot less?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

I mean at that point you struggle to escape, but assuming that's definitely not possible, then sharp sticks hurt less. 🤷‍♂️ "Optimal" does not necessarily mean "good" or "desirable".

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Sharp sticks hurt less...

What?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, equally deep and long injuries with a sharper implement destroy fewer cells (since they have a smaller cross-section), cause less trauma, and are less disruptive to the surrounding tissues. I know it's unintuitive, but it's true.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

Thank you. That's what I was trying to say.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

The dull stick is going to gouge your eye out entirely. I have no frame of reference of what would hurt more, but I guess that would be it.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

No a dull stick would probably fuck your eye up, a sharp stick will absolutely destroy your eye.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

That entirely depends on how deep the stick goes into your eye - though at some point it won't matter anyway.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Yes if fired the dull stick out of a fucking cannon it would destroy the eye, how many bits of criteria are we going to add to this (what should be anyway) very straightforward analogy?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

There are times when a clean cut hurts less than a crude one. We're not talking about actual damage done, which wasn't part of the analogy to begin with.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Dude you're talking about shoving a stick into your eye. What part of a stick will provide a clean cut?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

The budget cuts to essential programs

[–] [email protected] -4 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

How about the people who keep voting against the warm hug in the primaries get some of these lectures? Is that an option at some point?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago

Well they didn't listen. What happens afterwards is on them.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

David Attenborough voice: "We see here an 'internet troll' employing a strategy known as 'whataboutism'. It shows that it's desperate, and feels threatened by a stronger opponent."

[–] [email protected] -1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

What stronger opponent? You and Biden want me to vote for him again. I'm not going to.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (3 children)

Refusing to make the optimal play when lives are on the line isn't brave, good, or noble. If you increase the danger of others to preserve your sense of pride, innocence, or purity then you commit a deep evil.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I don’t want Biden to be president. So I’m not going to vote for him. It really is that simple. If the Democrats want my vote, they need to earn it by running a worthy candidate. My vote shouldn’t be taken for granted.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I don’t want Biden to be president.

Hey me too.

So I’m not going to vote for him.

Anti-fascism means doing everything we're able to stop fascism Being against genocide means doing what we can to shift the probability of genocide increasing as low as possible. If you can't put your petty feelings aside for long enough to push a few buttons, you shouldn't call yourself either. It's not about you.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Wait which one is the genocidal maniac? I can't keep up

What happened to Lemmy being a leftie safehaven?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

which one is the genocidal maniac

If we need to pick exactly one, that'd be Trump, the only one of the two who actively attempted to prosecute a genocide.

What happened to Lemmy being a leftie safehaven?

It never was; tankies started the platform, and tankies are anti-leftists.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

which one is the genocidal maniac

If we need to pick exactly one, that’d be Trump, the only one of the two who actively attempted to prosecute a genocide.

Wut? Did you mean "promote"?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

No.

Edit: to clarify, I meant "prosecute" (the word that I actually used), as in to prosecute a war or a trial.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Lol what a stupid way to use that word.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

So I was looking through your history and I was wondering why your opinion seems to have flipped from a month ago. Did you get hacked?

[–] [email protected] -2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Thinking that all information has been revealed, and therefore that anyone who plays a different move must have deliberately avoided the optimal one, is called “totalitarianism”.

One of the important pieces of information that should not be ignored about the universe is that there is more information than can be process by the available information processing mechanisms.

Also, there is no logical way to prioritize information for processing (at least in part because logic requires complete information).

To deal with the fact that life is not even qualitatively like a textbook optimization problem, and cannot ever be due to limitations in how information works, we have developed cultural heuristics that ensure relevant information is not lost.

One of those heuristics is having respect for others’ opinions, even when you think they’re wrong.

The opposite of the totalitarian viewpoint is the humble viewpoint. That’s the one that says “I know I don’t understand this completely” and behaves accordingly.

Tic tac toe is a good scenario to behave in a totalitarian way. It’s damned easy to see if a move is optimal or non-optimal in tic tac toe, because the number of possible permutations is pretty small.

If an ongoing game of Tic Tac Toe were somehow linked to whether people lived or died, and I saw someone was about to make an un-optimal move on behalf of the rest of us, I’d say tie that idiot up and override his rights because he was about to kill us all.

But games more complex than tic tac toe are harder to commit. Tic Tac Toe has nine spaces, so you have like 9! paths the game can take. But reality’s bigger than that. Hundreds of orders of magnitude bigger. I can’t be computed or grokked or boiled down to the point where you know what optimal is.

Even deterministic small game like systems get hard to optimize quickly.

It’s hard to get total knowledge of real life, so behaving in a totalitarian way is wrong, in real life. If real life were just one game of tic tac toe, maybe totalitarian attitude would be correct: “You are making a bad move, it’s going to cost us everything, it’s worth it to violate your rights because your rights are worthless when we’re all dead anyway”.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

I'm a mathematician; I too am aware of game theory and the principles of logic. Furthermore, you've made several mistakes.

is called “totalitarianism”

Bullshit. This is a common tankie word game.

there is no logical way to prioritize information for processing

This is wrong

logic requires complete information

Partially because this is wrong. Logic can operate with incomplete information. Heuristics and the standard of "cogency" exist for this very purpose.

Furthermore, this criticism entirely ignores the context of:

Potential optimal play provided

"No I don't wanna"

Which is a blatantly immoral thing to do, regardless of how much information is available because they have decided not to regardless of available information.

Furthermore, this is an internet argument; I'm not threatening violence, and so it's absolutely asinine of you to act like I'm "violating [somone else's] rights". I'm making a argument online about the morality of someone else's choices. Your entire argument is sophistry.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Refusing to make the optimal play when lives are on the line isn’t brave, good, or noble.

I never claimed to be brave, good or noble. Personally I think we're all pigs in the mud at this point.

But frankly it's irrelevant. I'm not voting for Biden again. Find some other way to elect your geriatric procorporate genocide supporting trash candidate.