Reminds me of Claptrap

Are you serious? So you’re saying mods should be able to do whatever they want?

Yes, but a Tag wouldn’t restrict freedom in any way. It would just make things easier.

By the way: You should make a post out of your blocklist and include the keywords in the description - I think that would be very helpful to a lot of people, since it’s pretty obvious that something like what I’m suggesting here will never be implemented.

Yes, but is it really necessary to go to all that trouble?

I think the Fediverse would be much more appealing to new users if they could just tune out all the hate and the utter absurdity of the US—then there would be relatively few posts left, but at least those that remain wouldn’t portray the world as the US billionaires want it to be.

It would also be a step in the right direction, because it’s completely obvious what the US oligarchs’ tactic is: distracting from the real problems through misinformation and hate.

So why shouldn’t people who don’t want any of that have a very simple way to avoid it?

If the moderators are doing their job, there shouldn’t be any problems. As I’ve said before: Many communities have a “no politics” rule that actually causes more problems because it’s so arbitrary. The reason for this is essentially the completely absurd U.S. discours. It’s all about the insane spectacle that the U.S. regime passes off as politics. If that can simply be filtered out - provided no relevant tag has been assigned to a topic concerning the U.S. - then fruitful, civilized debates will once again be possible.

I think the Fediverse would simply facilitate better discussions if we could effectively filter out the clown show in the U.S. - those who are interested in this could still participate in it.

Why is that? It should be very easy for the mods to see whether a post deals with U.S. issues and whether the appropriate tag was used.

In large Lemmy communities, there’s a “no politics” rule that’s so broad it’s completely absurd. It would be much easier to simply remove all posts that discuss U.S. politics and don’t have the tag. That would make a lot more sense.

That’s a good comparison, because it illustrates very well why LLMs are so (seemingly) successful. If this useful technology were used primarily by the people who actually worked during COVID, there wouldn’t be a problem, because these people are very good at assessing what’s possible and what isn’t - since they actually understand their work. The problem - and the absurd hype - arises simply because LLMs reinforce the completely absurd ideas of incompetent people - and these are the ones who had nothing to do during the pandemic, since they do nothing but schedule pointless meetings and waste the time of those who are actually doing something meaningful.

Sometimes it might not be such a bad idea to listen to this DJ: I recently went to a class reunion. I felt really guilty for ages because at the graduation ceremony—where the graduates walk onto the stage in pairs—I had, back then, turned down a girl I’d had a one-night stand with a while earlier in a truly awful way.

That was one of my worst moments, I still believe. Back then, I hadn’t even mustered the courage to tell her myself; instead, I sent someone else to do it—and to make matters worse, it was one of her best friends. I blamed myself for that for years and years afterward because it was so utterly pathetic.

So, twenty years later, I finally worked up the courage to bring it up with her when we finally met again and we had talked for some time. We had a great conversation; I apologized, and it turned out that, fortunately, my mistake hadn’t affected her at all: she could barely remember it.

That was a huge relief for me. Not that I thought she wouldn’t get over me or anything, but I would never have forgiven myself if it had affected her in any way. That wasn’t the case at all, which was such a nice thing to hear. We sat together for a long time—and later, we were joined by the other girl, who’s still her friend today and who, back then during that short-lived love triangle, told her what I should have said.

The girl, whom I had so heartlessly rejected at the time—or rather, the vibrant, awesome woman she has become—reminded her friend of that, and we laughed about it. She’s doing great, too, and it’s all water under the bridge—just a fading memory that didn’t hurt any of us, although I was certainly to blame for how things turned out back then. Even though it was school years, and such escapades may lose their significance in adulthood, I’m still glad I dug up this ancient story so that we could finally close this chapter together and be good about all that fuzz I might have caused back when it mattered.

So, to make a long story short: The inner voice certainly spouts a lot of nonsense and exaggerates when it hears only its own echo, but sometimes it can help to take up its stories and share its messages with others. Chances might be, that they have a completely different perspective on things that our inner self might sell to us as an unsolvable problem.

This might be a bad example, since, on the one hand, it might make me seem like somewhat of a womanizer—which I’m not—and, on the other hand, because it presents inexcusable behavior as excusable, which wouldn’t be right, either. But what I’m getting at is that it can’t hurt to question yourself—and that works best when you face things head-on instead of turning them into castles in the air that they may never have been.

This whole situation recently has brought that fact home to me again. Maybe someone even in a completely different situation will get something from it, too. Please be so kind as not to wait decades to try…

Edit: of course, I don’t just mean things you regret because they weren’t right toward others, but also opportunities you might think you missed, self-doubt, and all that—it’s probably not that bad at all, but just the same old tune this DJ keeps playing in your head.

Absolutely, I just think that the fact that the U.S. system isn’t designed for rehabilitation has a lot to do with the fact that billionaires make billions by putting people in prison.

However, I don’t understand how you can have no problem with forced labor.

You’re right that only a minority of inmates are held in private facilities:

In fact, less than 9% of all incarcerated people are held in private prisons; the vast majority are in publicly-owned prisons and jails. Some states have more people in private prisons than others, of course, and the industry has lobbied to maintain high levels of incarceration, but private prisons are essentially a parasite on the massive publicly-owned system — not the root of it. Nevertheless, a range of private industries and even some public agencies continue to profit from mass incarceration. Many city and county jails rent space to other agencies, including state prison systems, the U.S. Marshals Service, and ICE. Private companies are frequently granted contracts to operate prison food and health services (often so bad they result in major lawsuits), and prison and jail telecom and commissary functions have spawned multi-billion dollar private industries. By privatizing services like phone calls, medical care, and commissary, prisons and jails are offloading the costs of incarceration onto incarcerated people and their families, trimming their budgets at an unconscionable social cost.

Source

However, this does nothing to make the fact that private individuals profit from the incarceration of people any better. This practice could hardly be more unethical or counterproductive, as it creates a financial incentive to incarcerate as many people as possible—and it is obvious that this runs counter to the social purpose of prisons.

Nor is the fact mentioned that most prisons in the U.S. are run by and as for-profit private companies.

That is why so many people are incarcerated in the U.S., and unpaid slave labor is part of this multibillion-dollar business.

It is a business that, for entirely obvious reasons, no other democracy in the world allows in this absurd form—only the U.S., the “Land of the Free.”

That man deserves life in prison for his war crimes.

It was never a secret: it’s still the Mechanical Turk, a historical model that, for example, the Amazon company of the same name is based on—and such services are part of its business.

Mr. Oizo - Moustache (Half a Scissor)

I realize that’s superficial, but someone with a beard like that can’t possibly be up to anything good…

Yes

A friend of mine had six wisdom teeth. Does that mean he’s especially wise or especially judgemental?

My fault: I had assumed that the people at Lemmy were capable of thinking abstractly.

I’ve added an edit that might make it clearer.

Experts undoubtedly agree on many points. The fact that they have differing opinions—and indeed should have them—is part of their craft, something on which they are in complete agreement, regardless of the field in question.

Here’s an example: A craftsman knows what a nail is, but how, when, and whether it should be hammered in is a matter of judgment.

Edit: To put it more clearly: Someone who doesn’t know what a nail is has no say in whether it’s a good decision to use one.

That’s not to say that the opinions of laypeople don’t matter, since they may very well be affected by the issue. My point is simply that nothing is less productive than someone trying to tell a craftsman how to do his job without having even the slightest clue about the subject.

In this analogy, imagine a client who hires craftsmen and stands behind them the whole time, offering his uninformed opinions on everything they do—that only shows a lack of respect for the work of experts; it’s absolutely counterproductive.

It would make much more sense to clearly state what you want and simply let people do their jobs.