Gadg8eer

joined 1 year ago
[–] Gadg8eer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Change.org petitions to not deport people from Canada, who either would be killed by their own government or hurt by other people due to endemic homophobia and transphobia in their culture after being deported to their home country, or, in one case, because he turned 18 just before his parents and younger siblings were granted citizenship.

Worst part is why; I'm half-European (my family were farmers and possibly feudal landowners at the wealthiest, political upheavals forced them to expatriate themselves a half-dozen times in the early 20th century so my dad's nationality is vague) and half-Colombian (and my mom's family tree is itself very mixed race), so I know how important immigration is for both the immigrants and the recieving nation. I've never held anything against anyone that they were born with since around 2007 and I have never tried to justify that dislike of severely mentally handicapped people from back then at any point, then or now.

Finally, I live in Western Canada and have a lot of empathy. It seems that, while I'm not going to hold it against all French Quebec residents, there are some Québécois who are fucking cruel when it comes to deportation. I've talked to a guy, Caucasian as paste, who has been illegally reported to Immigration twice because he's from Ontario and lives in Quebec, and that's just how Immigration - which is HQ'd in Quebec for no good reason - treats people who look similar to themselves, let alone the dozen different times an upstanding potential skilled worker migrant from a "person of color" background has been nearly deported despite a clear-cut case of being in life-threatening danger if they are deported.

Fortunately, most of the petitions succeeded in putting pressure on Immigration Canada to hand out exceptions to rules because of the circumstances and because most of the country is all too aware of how much bigotry has taken hold in Quebec.

I mean, I don't want to generalize and I've never known much about Francophone history, but I somehow can't help but wonder if French aristocracy both on the other side of my country and over in Europe have always tended to be sociopathicly narcissistic. Hearing about some of the things the French government has just tried to enact has me feeling like we're in some sort of home stretch of the end of the world, or at least a historical turning point that will go down in the history books of the 23rd and 24th century the way Napoleon's reign or the American Revolutionary War is portrayed in modern media.

Also, before anyone says it, I know every country has had corrupt leaders throughout history. It just seems to take a special kind of arrogance among leadership for "The rich bitch thinks we weren't allowed to eat cake without permission, when we can't afford the bread?!" to be a plausible accusation at multiple points in time and space with the only common thread being the language spoken, but since that could be said about English easily I apologize if that feels accusatory. You're not the language you speak or the flag you fly, just please don't let power go to your heads everyone.

[–] Gadg8eer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 year ago

Was going to mention this, I see you beat me to it.

[–] Gadg8eer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The one that led to McBling and Reality TV. I wouldn't try to force fashion to remain shiny bubblegum pop grafittipunk/shibiyapunk futurism to stick around or anything, I just think it had more staying power under normal conditions that was lost solely due to the nature of life from 2001-2008.

People don't change fashion at the drop of a hat for financial crises, that just strengthens counterculture and futurism. They change their tastes suddenly when innocent people die in a new and unexpected way. That's why art from the time period just before and during the Black Death is filled with more cynicism than even the past 7 years (roughly since Trump was elected), why an Oriental symbol of peace was ruined by the Nazis, and why the climate crisis has made FairPhone the only smartphone brand that survives without shoving ads down your throat.

Or at least, so it seems to me, I'm not a sociologist. What I also am not is petty or authoritarian, I'm not trying to make everyone wear 30 year old clothes or check their emails on an iLamp computer. I just know I'd like to see a world where people don't have to rely on mass production to provide the things we need to live, because then you're required to change your stuff out the moment it's broken or obsolete.

My point is, I was trying to say your idea would make planned obsolescence and obsolescence in general themselves a relic of early civilization, so limiting such a world to one genre or style of product that only remains popular for ~10 years before becoming nothing but zeitgeist and nostalgia feels needlessly restrictive. I can see how it could be taken the opposite way, sorry about that!

[–] Gadg8eer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 year ago

Oof, yeah. That puts a kink in it.

Tbh, maybe we should just ask "Does (insert ideology here) tell me to kill the preteen (or for recent events, anyone under the age of majority) children of the supposedly evil people?" and if the answer is yes or "not specifically but I have no recourse if they suddenly tell me to kill kids" then (insert ideology here) is evil.

[–] Gadg8eer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Simulate one human life, from beginning to end, in a way that allows unethical experiments to be dismissed as recurring nightmares by the individual, and not cause permanent damage to this simulated person. When their life ends, I'd arrange to talk to them, explain everything, apologize for the necessity of the experiments, and offer him immortality and/or freedom with no strings attached. He can get a biological or robot body, or stay virtual, but it's not up to anyone but him/her/? at that point.

I'd be fine with my life being an experiment under those circumstances as long as the results were put mostly to saving or improving lives, but I'd never be willing to put someone else in that position if I didn't; if you couldn't find a person like myself in real life with that opinion on the possibility, it's unjustifiable. If, however, you engineered their life just enough to strongly encourage that level of altruism, and made it comfortable and not dehumanizing when not involved in an experiment as well as having a ban on cruelty and gaslighting in doing the experiments, and apologize for having to resort to these measures at all, I could see the person not being overly upset.

Whether it meets the code of ethics for scientific research is another matter.

[–] Gadg8eer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Only if I get to live in a treehouse that's bigger on the inside, become my persona character, and dress like 9/11 never happened and Y2K aesthetic continued until '08 or longer.

[–] Gadg8eer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'd upload everyone. I'd also give them something for their trouble, since apparently all religious people and all hardcore atheists hate the sci-fi story I wrote where humanity's descendants resurrect everyone who ever died that was ever part of the Homo genus; the body their heart truly desires would be their VR avatar, though with delicious ironic caveats because if what your heart truly desires is money or power or fame over all other aspects, and that's been detrimental to others, deserves to be trapped as a virtual solid gold statue or somesuch forever for being a selfish fuck.

Basically, what if heaven and hell were not places, but literally whether being your true self truly makes you happy? That hell is if you needed to rethink your shallow, fake or otherwise hollow-feeling lifestyle but didn't do so soon enough and now you're stuck looking and feeling like what you slowly come to hate about yourself or at least who you were when you died.

[–] Gadg8eer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 year ago

I think it's "Persistent Entity Streaming"?

[–] Gadg8eer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, tbh I wish I knew more about the Indian caste system so I can properly understand how horrible it is. It's like someone who has never lived in a capitalist society, doesn't understand what steam trains are or what mustard gas is, and has only a basic understanding of the Abrahamic religions mostly via American Christianity, trying to explain the Holocaust to themselves beyond "Nazis kill children" and "Hitler was an evil overlord who hated Jews"; It gets the general picture (slave labor, cruel oppression, etc.) but is far too vague to trigger the sadness, anger and desire to never forget or repeat it that should accompany it.

[–] Gadg8eer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 year ago

Sorry, I might have "come on too strong"; I came to the conclusions in the third and onward paragraph but I'm not trying to get anyone else to. It does sound a bit crazy when you haven't noticed that dreams seem to play a far more important role even in pop-culture and mythology than we give them credit for. I just think it's likely that as images, ideas and feelings created by our unconscious rather than conscious mind and experienced only by our subconscious, dreams are being drastically underestimated.

[–] Gadg8eer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 year ago

And they were nice enough to leave the unit they gifted to us locked inside, safely and visibly trapped in the bars of a cage where they can't stab us with the pointy fork they invented!

view more: ‹ prev next ›