Birds are not real

The only person who benefits from choosing to pursue truth than eat up propagandized unsourced theories is the self. I’ve taken some time to put pretty simple and evident, verifiable information right up there, if you wish to ignore it, you’re the only one affected by it, I win nothing else than the pleasure of sharing and explaining information that I think is representative of things as they exist in our world.

I have chosen the path of academic information such as books and papers to back up my beliefs, and not of oversimplified information with no source. Do you really believe that world politics and diplomatical relationships of the biggest superpowers layered on top of an information war that spans more than a century opposing the colonial post-colonial western states to the anti-colonial and anti-imperial global south can really be summed up to “It’s pretty obvious what has happened really”? It almost sound like satire when I read it again.

First, we do not know this, even the weather channel provides the odds of something happening alongside a reminder that future outcomes cannot be predicted with certainty. Second, they are fundamentally different:

American capitalism: Maximization of individual economic freedom and utility. The system is designed to facilitate capital accumulation, innovation, and consumer choice through decentralized decision-making. The individual (consumer, investor, entrepreneur) is the primary unit of analysis which in turn is often a source of criticism due to the individualist nature of the social doctrine. The “invisible arbitrator (state)” of the market is trusted to aggregate individual choices into the best possible social outcomes but as seen recently, this trust has no incentive and can be taken advantage of leading to internal corruption and instance of accumulation of powers. Process is paramount: free choice, free competition, and profit motive are both the means and the implicit ends. It was also a direct response by John Locke to the issues caused by mercantilism and was created in the 1689 if I remember correctly.

Chinese socialism: National rejuvenation and the perpetuation of the ruling party’s governance (let us remember that this is a country that is still less than 100 years old). Economic development is a critical tool for ensuring state sovereignty, social stability, and the legitimacy of the Peoples republic of China, which in turn is governed by a marxist-leninist influenced communist party. The economy is a subsystem of the state, not a separate sphere. It draws from Confucian traditions of a meritocratic, guiding state (similar to marx’s conclusion “From each according to his ability to each according to his needs” on the flaws of the 19th century german socialist democracy present in his last volume, Kritik Des Gothaer Programs). The collective (nation, party, society) is the primary unit of analysis. Economic growth is a means to power, stability, and civilizational restoration. The system is teleological oriented toward a specific end-state (a “modern socialist,” strong nation, correcting the post-modern false narrative that communism does not work which is a complete generalization and misdirected association on why certain states failed, yet cuba remains and has been for over a century even with the american embargo still being present). Efficiency matters, but only insofar as it serves the ultimate political goals.

The competition between them is not just economic so we can be clear; it is a competition between two fundamentally different logics of social organization: one rooted in individual autonomy and decentralized choice, the other in collective goals and centralized coordination. The 21st century will be a live test of their relative performance and resilience and I think of it as amazing that we get front row seats to see this.

We do not know, and therefore should abstain from deducing fallacies out of air. I only commented on what was actually observable and relatable.

Unless you can refute the below cited sources (which I doubt even I could despite teaching at the graduate and undergraduate level), I will assume you have just replied because of cognitive dissonance or lack of awareness of preconceived dogmas of how the dynamics of knowledge and linguistics work one with the other:

1-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymology_of_electricity

2-https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10728-012-0231-2

Fun fact, the disconnect between true academic knowledge discoveries which are bound to a very strict code of ethics, do not apply to the common working man. This creates paradoxes everywhere, especially at the fundamental level and english, being a language not regulated by a linguistic body like French is by the Académie Française. It becomes even more interesting when looking at very old languages that still are able to function like arabic which is 3000 years old and has morphed into common domestic tongues for the most part but is regulated by the Majma’ al-Lugha al-'Arabiyya as a theological unified language in Cairo and Chinese which is 1800 years old and regulated by the Guójiā Yǔyán Wénzì Gōngzuò Wěiyuánhuì (National language commission, or 国家语言文字工作委员会 ) and has had a modernist revision which gave us mandarin or “Simplified” chinese, building onto older “Traditional” Chinese.

Conflating 19th century shabbatist and zionist rhetoric with political science to hone a narrative meant to adress a hateful government will only rob away the validity of the rematriation of the occupied palestinan land.

I’ll support landback for any opressed people, but if I can agree on one point in your comment, adressing the holocaust with the creation of the israeli state was definitely the most effective and stupid way of creating a lot of hate that will someday come back to the jewish religious practitioners and harming them in the process. It’s not good, a lot of jewish people like Neturei Karta have made so much effort to correct the hate.

So is Dr norman finklestein, religious faiths should not be an excuse to genocidal support.

Haha, i agree, and thank you for the correction, my memory is not what it used to be, the montreal protocol did fix the ozone layer problem, the kyoto protocol adressed different issues, my error. Hopefully common sense will shift regarding the assumption that nuclear energy is bad, in my view, it is the only way to sustain humankind as we move past the recent start of the fifth industrial revolution. Humanists like Marx, Keynes and Rifkin seem to agree that the hopeful (and paradoxially very unlikely) sixth will be the death of work but I still have to see how things advance before I start believing into it.

China has shown a lot of promise thus far with their carbon reduction and development of small scale nuclear reactors, and hopefully someone will fix the fission theory someday. And concerning the simpler times, things are strange indeed in the future we live.

At times when we cannot understand the causality of a problem, it is better to acknowledge what we know, and more importantly, what we do not know rather than to create narratives from ignorance. I hope that my words will find you in a tone of compassion, not as an attempt to be classist or make you think that your grasp of reality is not valid.

Rest, and relax, math is not the issue here, the problem is ignorance. What you have just posted a tribalistic fallacy believing that things are simple, us vs them and the system being akin to big brother, this is a normal human behavior that some describe as Projective Identification. Nature is more complex than we think and so is a reality in which over 8 000 000 000 exist, and all pitch in to the pool of what the future will always carry back to us. Wether positive or negative.

I relate to your struggles and it often is so infuriating to see people on the bigoted end conflate mental health as an inherent characteristic of queer individuals blaming their queerness rather than to be able to see what alienation does to a brain. Wether it comes from sexism, homophobia or racism, it all is ignorant hate.

I also walked the path that leads to us corrupting our thinking and giving in to the pressure and hate to think that maybe it is better to rest eternally than to live and suffer.

Gay pride is proud because it fights the shame that we live in because of hate. And I am proud to still be alive and I am proud of hearing your victory in preserving your mental sovereignty. 🏳️‍🌈

I believe it is on lemmy and you’re right since most users of this platform are here for a reason, and it mostly comes from witnessing first hand digital changes, mine is seeing recurring patterns of digital weaponization and coporate/governmental appropriation of the digital medium.

But to most people, using facebook, tiktok, using public access internet with no filtering of their IP or using the router your ISP gave you is totally valid and the broad public lacks the knowledge to understand why some people default to avoiding these options and why there is a moral explanation for why the internet should not be used with ignorance. My sharing of a historical fact was only because I made the error of thinking this was not public knowledge here.

Thank you for your reply. I’m new to Lemmy, and while replies like yours are why I’m still falling in love with it (since no platform has felt as representative of the human experience as Reddit before Helen Pao) it is a genuine pleasure to be met with careful intellectual consideration rather than misguided reductionism.

To address your point: yes, it is true that there are alternative ways to describe the practice of human abstraction of the natural realm, or “Science” which is a word that will be met by scrutiny under any ethics review for a university paper but works perfectly well in the common and fun daily discussions of any intellectually curious human.

Karl Popper is the one who perfected this for us, owing to the parallel contributions of two Jinns of knowledge who shook human and natural disciplines to their foundational assumptions: Einstein and Freud . Each published groundbreaking works using profoundly different methodologies. Popper, perhaps unintentionally—and arguably by mistake—brought this tension into sharp focus, setting in motion the philosophical move that ultimately negated Freud’s claim to scientific status and is now an (imo highly slanderous) general point of view that psychoanalysis has no merit and should therefore be discarded. By extension, this helped solidify a framework in which only certain forms of inquiry were deemed truly “scientific.” This, in turn, is why naturalistic physical abstraction and the echoes of scientism are now “painting the walls white” in every reflection of what we understand our world to be.

I was initially drawn into this because I am male and a lover of all scientific knowledge—knowledge acquired through hypothesis synthesis, verification via empirically and statistically supported evidence, and peer review. I also practice and teach at a Canadian university, though I’d prefer not to leave identifying details online. My husband (a brilliant art historian and big advocate member of the LGBTQ+ community and reform of logically outdated concepts such as race, gender, work and others), had the insight to engage me in a careful, sustained dialogue debating and reflecting on every facet of my materialist worldview. Through this, it became easier to understand why societal mental health is in its current state, and why humans seem (at least to my eyes) less self-aware than in prior eras. It had also a profound effect in allowing me to understand so much of myself and only got better as I became more and more nuanced in how I abstracted upon thoughts. But it also kept being a friction point on linguistics and academic nomenclature and yes, I do still believe that the abuse of language often made by calling academic disciplines “Science” is why “common sense” and popular points of views have done such a disservice to “human sciences” (despite them not using the scientific method).

This dialogue brought me to realize that the natural sciences are merely the tip of the iceberg, and that humanistic discourse plunges into far deeper waters. The journey has been mentally taxing, if I may share my lived experience, and I now feel a certain intellectual jealousy toward my husband’s discipline. I’ve come to believe that the humanities, scientism, and, by extension, the common abuse of language (such as treating “Science” as a monolithic entity) do a profound disservice to the second half of what it means to see the world as a human. Human and Natural sciences operate in a dichotomy after all and this is why the world can be interpreted as; There is everything outside of you, and then there is everything inside of you. The interior world remains a profound puzzle, one that still demands enormous focus. In my view, significant reforms in scientific methodology are urgently needed, especially as the dominant model has been a systemic impediment to disciplines like psychology and anthropology. And if I can pique your curiosity; below is a good paper on the issue if you happen to be tied to academic practice and if you are looking for a good challenge, natural sciences (in my eyes as I now get older and wiser) are total child’s play compared to how more robust and taxing humanities can be from a logical standpoint.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/368879558_Hoskins_1_Emerson_in_the_Digital_Age_The_Transcendent_Potential_of_Human_Nature

I agree that the perception of Americans lacking the agency to reform their own systems is a valid critique. However, I would respectfully add that this perceived inertia is not just a failure of internal will, but also a symptom of a profound lack of substantive, critical input from within the dominant cultural narrative.

The issue is self-perpetuating: a system that prioritizes defensive certainty over rigorous self-examination actively stifles the critical discourse necessary for its own health. When negative or challenging feedback is dismissed as unpatriotic or illegitimate, it creates an intellectual vacuum. There is no reason to remain self-critical if the only acceptable dialogue is celebratory or accusatory without nuance.

This is the core flaw of a one-sided, regressive, and restrictive Western narrative (particularly the American engagement in it). It often confuses loyalty with unanimity of thought. The historical pattern is clear and alarming when one has the brillance to read historical records: when a powerful system prioritizes being right over understanding why it might be wrong, it enters a state of dangerous decadence and insularity. We see this time and again, from the hubris of empires to the downfall of leaders like Nero, whose tyranny was enabled by a court that echoed rather than examined.

True agency isn’t just the power to act, but the wisdom to course-correct. And that wisdom cannot exist without the uncomfortable, essential gift of critical perspective—whether it comes from within or from outside looking in.

I genuinely wish to thank you for your input, I did miss that. I will take the time to say that my intention was mostly to relate my lived experience since I share a lot of empathyfor the socially marginalized having lived the mental helplessness that happens in those zones of the psyche, and what lead to my attempts at ending my life, which was the common and false assumption that depression is akin to the normal transient response to grief or dissapointment. False assumptions on depression being sadness, plus the fact that I experienced it as an alienation of the validity of my own suffering and jumped straight into “I am broken, let’s end this shit because it hurts all the damn time”.

This led in my false assumption that I was not depressed, well what the hell is then wrong with me? But yes there are a lot of other symptoms that I have felt and can be good basis to assume a depressive episode such as cognitive impairment, fatigue and the feeling of heavyness, negative outlook on prior subjective experiences (reviewing subjective events and constantly blaming yourself for all that happened), even physical issues like problems with digestion and the last one my memory is able to serve back to me would be the experience of being far away from your lived experience and physically regressing into your own cranium, like a sense of physical distance from your physical bodily agency. All were things I took years to go through thanks to my psychologist (an academic doctor with some damn good expertise) and I agree that my lived experience should not either be taken as an invitation to gatekeep and label what is and is not valid suffering since all suffering is valid and should never be judged.

Yes and it is on the US citizens to correct the narrative. Being angry at international opinions that are gaining traction is (and I use this word seriously) stupid. I also wonder what chinese citizens have to say about western generalization of their social identity, or afghan social identity for that matter.

Fun fact: the internet actually has a precursor believed to be the real origin of the concept of the internet. It used to be called ARPANET developed by ARPA, a US military organization which later changed name to DARPA. This is similar with the concept of VPNs which actually were invented by the US military when they designed IPsec. I will abstain from trying to connect the two since this would sound conspiratory but it is a pretty weird phenomenon that instances of the western internet being militarized are becoming more frequent and observable through time and this aligns with the tendency of most digital innovations usually having creation origins stemming from military research.

China is actually a socialist democratic state, that is the political doctrine, their party was formed by marxists and communists but this applies to all current socialist states when looking at the origins of their governing bodies and the creation of those states. For the economic doctrine, they just really used their head and created a very well executed model that is relatively new in economy.

It’s usually called a social market economy and it uses the best traits capitalism can offer for growth and scale whilst containing it so it remains innovative and improves the economic situation of it’s citizens. It’s well secured to not allow internal corruption (see what happened when Jack Ma thought he was as polically powerful as US billionaires) and structures like state councils to approve or refuse mergers if they deem it attempts at building monopolies. Wether it will fail or not, all economic models have always had one thing in common; they are born, change through time, evolve and die eventually. That is their only common trait aside from their fundamental nature in being ideological systems to manage ressources. Capitalism may die within the next 100 years if the trends of what has happened in the last 20 years keep themselves up but yeah, it should not be dismissed because of the historical chinese/western frictions.

Don’t overeact, the US ain’t France where half of the popular opinion is leftist, pro-strike and progressive and the other is outdated hateful conservatism. Instead, to most of the international population, the press corruption is very apparent since the popular opinion is very uniform and both of your politcal parties have times and times failed to recognize popular ideas and keep up the neo-liberalism, foreign interventionism and collaboration with lobbyists.

It’s not an attack on individual americans, it’s someone pointing out obvious systemic flaws that show in the way the citizens behave.

Removed by mod

Wait, are we still all thinking he’ll peacefully leave the white house after the shit he pulled last time?

I think it’s useful to remember what happened to Francis Bacon after his father caught him wearing his mother’s underwear and had him whipped by a group of boys who worked on their land. He’s my favorite painter but that whole approach at manning someone up is just destructive.

You should raise a child to allow them to reach their full potential and accept their individual nature, making them fit a very specific indentical mold your pre-conceived ideals is a good way of destroying them.