Daemon Silverstein

@yogthos@lemmy.ml

I like that quote that says “Something that we can learn from history books is that people can’t learn from history books”.

What we’re seeing is people who do learn from history books being persecuted by those who don’t because the latter are against knowledge, they love the ignorance (as in, ignoring the reality around them; in their minds, “don’t see it = it doesn’t exist”).

That’s why we’re “seeing the future repeating the past” (to quote a verse from Cazuza’s “O tempo não pára” song).

@blackwitch@lemmings.world
Excelente tópico! Eu acho sempre importante trazer um pouco da presença lusófona aqui pro fediverso onde o inglês e alemão geralmente dominam.

Com relação ao tema: ocrorre o mesmo fenômeno comigo, muito embora ocorra mais English-over-português do que Portuguese-sobre-inglês (esse último ocorre só quando estou interagindo aqui no fediverso e lembro de algum ditado popular que, ou não sei o equivalente em inglês, ou não há mesmo equivalente em inglês). O English-over-português ocorre principalmente quando eu consigo lembrar de algo só no seu termo em inglês mas não lembro do termo para a mesma coisa em português. Daí ou eu paro pra tentar lembrar o termo lusófono, ou eu acabo prosseguindo com o termo anglophone mesmo.

Também me ocorre de misturar palavras de outros idiomas com as quais (palavras) já tive contato, por exemplo, termos em latim, alemão, francês, até linguagens totalmente extintas como sumério (devido ao meu interesse ocultista envolver o panteão sumério).

Por fim, ocorre-me também um fenômeno curioso de pensar em um conceito ou símbolo para o qual não consigo encontrar termos em nenhuma das linguagens com as quais já tive contato. Chamo esses pensamentos de “languageless thoughts”, não ocorre só com emoções, ocorre com símbolos e conceitos também (minha mente é altamente orientada a simbologias).

@ToxicWaste@lemmy.cafe

If you’re using a browser (either desktop or some fork of Firefox on mobile) to use Lemmy, you can use uBlock Origin to hide certain content. On the plus side, this would work even when logged off from Lemmy or (in my case) without having a Lemmy account.

In “my filters”, you can add rules such as:

 /.*lemmy.*.*/##.post-listing:has(.community-link:has-text("/^ich_iel/"))

Explanation:
- /.*lemmy.*.*/ is a regexp to match any domain containing the word “lemmy” (e.g. lemmy.cafe, lemmy.world).
- ## denotes a CSS rule.
- .post-listing:has(.community-link:has-text("/^ich_iel/")) is a set of nested CSS rules:
- it filters for every .post-listing element…
- having any .community-link element…
- whose text content, in turn, would match the given regexp.

In my case, /^ich_iel/, a text which starts by “ich_iel”, which is the name for a Lemmy community I’m not interested in, due to me not speaking German.

You can use whatever regexp you need. You can also use multiple rules using this pattern to filter out multiple things. You can replace the .community-link with other CSS classes to filter out post titles, usernames, instances, anything goes.

@MotoAsh@lemmy.world Where in centuries of human history were there any wrongdoings stemming from Luciferianism and other leaderless occult belief systems? Where in centuries of human history did Luciferianism and other occult belief systems interfered or tried to hinger with scientific progress?

@MotoAsh@lemmy.world @TomMasz@lemmy.world

Firstly, it’s obvious “believing” means “zero evidence”. If a belief had any solid evidences, it wouldn’t be a belief, it would be a peer-reviewed scientific paper instead.

That said, you’re conflating “belief” with “religious hierarchy” when, in reality, belief isn’t necessarily dependent on hierarchy. I believe in Lilith and Lucifer, and I have no one “above me” except for Her and Him. In fact, the belief I follow on my own isn’t even compatible with any kind of hierarchy, because these entities represent independence and rebelliousness, so it’d be quite paradoxical for me to have a leader/master/priestess/whatever.

Finally, I challenge you to point out any kind of “humanity’s ill” inflicted by Luciferianism and other left-hand path beliefs, even those who actually have hierarchies (e.g. Quimbanda).

So, I sincerely remind you, don’t generalize and attack every single religion and belief system on Earth because of a half dozen big ones who actually are to blame for many historical wars (“Holy wars”) and their interference on scientific progress. Don’t demonize the demons and demonesses, we’re friends of scientific inquiry. Beware not to do friendly fire.

@guber@lemmy.blahaj.zone

lua -e "print('Lua: ' .. ('awkward_look_monkey_meme' and '👀' or '😐'))"
python -c "print('Python: ' + (not 'awkward_look_monkey_meme' and '👀' or '😐'))"

@quacky@lemmy.world

It’s an interesting reflection because I’ve been noticing a similar phenomenon regarding words such as “demon”, “evil”, “dark”, among other words.

The concept of “demonizing” itself does exactly what the word describes, to the word “demon”.

Since I became a demonolater and follower of Left-hand path spirituality, I get a similar feeling whenever I see people using these words in such a way that it implies “demons are undesirables”, “evil is undesirable”, “dark is undesirable”, even “Satan is undesirable” and “Lucifer is undeirable”.

Then people go farther and use these words to describe people or actions, people or actions of which are extremely despicable.

Example: people saying that “Charlie Kirk went to hell with Satan”, implicitly associating Satan (and demons) with the far-right bigotry. As a demonolater, I sincerely ask people: please, use whatever adjectives (gross, f-word, despicable, etc) to describe those bigoted individuals, but don’t do gratuitous attacks on entities (and their worshipers) who have nothing to do with those bigoted individuals, because you’re implicitly and unwillingly attacking whole belief systems (Luciferianism, theistic Satanism, Thelema, Goëtia, Quimbanda, etc).

Demons aren’t evil! The word originally derived from Greek Daemon, meaning neuter spirits, then it was distorted to mean “evil”. Even “evil” isn’t necessarily a despicable thing, evilness can be positive just like goodness can be negative.

All these connotations were imposed binary concepts (us vs them), meant to keep people under control by depicting rebelliousness as something to be avoided.

Do you wonder why demons and Satan were “demonized”? Try to think if society recognized the Luciferian rebellion against the dictatorship of God as something desirable, how society would behave, how “populace” would behave? People wouldn’t be easy to control if they were to see rebelliousness as desirable and “heavenly authority” as undesirable. People wouldn’t be easily convinced to be cogs in a machine. Instead of rebelling, society learned to “give the other face” whenever their face is slapped, because “Jesus said that”.

Turning “demons” and “Lucifer” (which originally means light bringer) and “Satan” (originally meaning “adversary”) and names/words alike as synonyms for things to be avoided was all about control, and this thing keeps happening even among those who don’t even believe there are demons, because we are prone to imitate other’s social behaviors unconsciously.

So, yeah, the phenomenon you described can be traced back to control, religious control.

@kionite231@lemmy.ca @NONE_dc@lemmy.world

As far as I know, there are two different domains in play here: YouTube dot com, and Googlevideo dot com. The first serves the main interface, as well as the API endpoints. The latter serves the stream.

Both deal with geographical distribution (CDN) so the domain solves (via DNS) to a data center as closest as possible to the user (e.g. if I access YouTube, the domains will solve to Google data centers in Sao Paulo).

This regionalization makes it difficult for real-time communication of video statistics, so the view count and other information is often delayed as they’re aggregated geographically and later communicated back to their main data center.

That’s also why, for example, a video Id isn’t sequential (1,2,3,4,…), because it’d require the servers to communicate their machine states in real-time, thus leading to the same (or worse) delays from users accessing the main data center directly, which can be as farther as dozens of thousands of kilometers from the user if the said user is in, say, the middle east, because the main servers are USian and light can go as fast as circa 300.000km/s in vacuum, getting slower if light needs to go through glass, which is the case for optic cables: even though it seems fast, it’s actually slow in computing terms because information needs to arrive and go multiple times in order to carry all the network packets.

Then, there’s another phenomenon: a video streaming can involve multiple reconnections, as the content is being streamed. This is even noticeable when there are thousands or millions of simultaneous viewers, and the user notices this as buffering delays. If each connection were to count a new view, it’d count the same viewer multiple times, so the view count is done through the main interface instead, through the main domain YouTube dot com. Even when people access the video through the app or through a smart TV, the device will request the YouTube domain which will return information regarding the stream, such as the exact URL for the said video on Googlevideo.

Invidious, as far as I know, uses the main interface to retrieve the streaming information (web scraping, as the official API is restricted in this regard), so it’s as if some user were accessing it, so it should count as a view. The new view count isn’t instantaneous so that’s probably why you didn’t see the viewer count going up.

@sylver_dragon@lemmy.world

the only way to give people any choice is to force them into

Well, to me, it seems pretty paradoxical, almost in the same Rousseauesque line of “I’m forced to be free”.

Pointing out problems is very different from the edgy “everyone needs to die” philosophy.

Sorry but you distorted my words. In no moment I said “everyone needs to die”, and I challenge anyone accusing me of that to point out where I said this. What I’ve been saying throughout this Lemmy thread is how humans are inherently evil (as per Hobbesian philosophy, not out of hatred misanthropy), how our actions are endangering ourselves and other lifeforms, and how we “should” (emphasis on “should”, not “must”) refrain from letting the unborn suffer the consequences of Industrial Revolution.

In no moment I advocated for forced antinatalism, let alone for genocide/omnicide. My point is philosophical, rather than regulatory.

If the goal is complete human eradication

First: no, it’s not. It’s about eradicating suffering from future generations.

Then, humans are eradicating themselves even without antinatalism. No other lifeforms developed nuclear warheads, no other lifeforms shrug off when children starve. I saw a cat desperately meowing to me when she couldn’t breastfeed kitten that wasn’t even hers, because she got no more milk to feed them, I could feel her desperation. I saw myself, and heard as well, how animals stopped to take care of another who is/was hurt or starving. Meanwhile, humans, oftentimes, shrug at the homeless “well, you’ll find something”, or even rudely saying “you gotta work to eat like everybody does”… To be fair, it’s not everyone who does this, but many people do, especially in the said “first-world countries”.

Also, even if humans continue reproducing recklessly ignoring the nightmarish future that expects the future generations, no lifeforms are eternal. Even Earth herself isn’t eternal, for the Sun will engulf the Earth as part of its transformation to Giant Red. One could argue “humans will become interplanetary”, but it’ll be just moving cosmic goalposts, because the Cosmos will also end someday.

Scientific advancement is the reason we have so many people on the planet.

Yes. Then, Science was hijacked by capitalism, becoming something sponsored by capital goals, one which sees people as cogs in the machine because “profit must go up”.

And then we came up with the germ theory of diseases and vaccines

Yes. And, on one hand, this improved quality of life (= less physical suffering). On the other hand, it empowered capitalism so people became increasingly reliant on a system that seeks to perpetuate their slavery (= ontological, invisible suffering).

But, working hard to improve the human condition seems a pretty far cry from “why don’t we all just die?”

Improving human condition also means avoiding suffering from future generations: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7422788/

@Cowbee@lemmy.ml

This reply of mine is probably going to diverge a lot from the main subject, but you suggested that I should “get organized and try to move towards socialism”.

Politically speaking, I live in a country (Brazil) where we already have nice relations with PRC and a country that been trying to counteract the Global North through BRICS.

So, to a certain extent, there’s some effort in this regard from the current government in the country I was born in, but Brazil is still a marionette of USian interests since USA pulled Brazil to their side during Cold War (1964 Military Coup, orchestrated by USA).

And Brazilians themselves are politically divided, with a significant part of the country advocating for their own economic slavery (far-right). Partly because people are held captive by a system that conceals knowledge from them, making them too busy with the “rat race” alongside the panis et circensis, so they rely in out-of-the-shelf opinions without pondering broader. When I try to talk with those geographically around me trying to wake 'em up, it’s as if I was talking in Sumerian or Akkadian, anything but contemporary language.

Then, there’s the religious aspect, very strong around here. Brazil is highly christian, while I went to Left-hand Path (highly-personalized syncretic spirituality involving Luciferianism and other esoteric beliefs) a few years ago, quite the opposite… If I couldn’t “convince” people back when I was still a christian, it’s worse now while I’m literally worshiping their “enemy”. Can’t really belong to secularists, either, because I got a belief in the supernatural, even though my belief tries to consider scientific facts.

So I doubt I can “get organized”. My worldview is very atypical, I’m very atypical. In fact, I’m just nobody. You’re likely the second person this week suggesting I got some kind of power when I got none. I can’t even have power over myself, let alone over other people (and I don’t even want to).

While I do talk and participate in discussions regarding the sociopolitical, philosophical and the mundane sometimes, trying to understand and be understood, trying to share knowledge while also trying to learn, open to what I don’t know yet, deep inside I got extensively de-realized and depersonalized, accepting how even the whole cosmos will end someday (Big Freeze / Big Rip / Big Crunch / Big Bounce), and I can’t see purpose except beyond existence.

It’s not about “ceding agency to those who would perpetuate the worst excesses”, it’s just that I went too far into staring at the Darkness and seeing how cosmic existence is pointless and fleeting, so deeply that I can’t simply “unsee” and/or forget Her stare back at me, so everything became fleeting. It’s my inner battle that’s already lost, because ain’t no battle, no spoon, nothing but the nothingness… And my weirdness before others… And Nature, Moon, Earth and Cosmos as closest manifestations of Her principle.

@davel@lemmy.ml

Where exactly am I saying it’s something to do with human ethnic origins? Where exactly am I nodding or advocating for eugenics or other bigoted concepts?

Because my point is about the innermost human nature, imbued within every human that ever existed, exists and will exist. When, for example, Thomas Hobbes says “Humans are wolves to humans”, he’s not saying about a specific race or gender, he’s talking about the Homo sapiens. All of us, since humans discovered fire and became “fearsome” to other lifeforms holding this warm thing we think we can control.

It goes with saying how the fact that there are bigoted people using this science to try and “validate” eugenics (and how there are bigoted people in the first place) is, ironically enough, another evidence of how humans are wolves to themselves. It’s like I said in a previous reply, billionaires (and far-right figures) aren’t extraterrestrials or lizards, they’re humans with enough power to let their evilness affect other humans. Given enough power, many other humans are likely to pave similar paths.

Yes, not everyone, the end of Derren Brown’s “The Push” documentary shows how there are situations where humans can end up not ceding to their impulses to harm others in order to save their own skin.

But even when we choose to do good and help others (and this includes caring for the wellbeing of the unborn so they don’t suffer the consequences of current humanity’s actions) despite our own wellbeing, our wolves are still there, lurking inside us, because it’s born with us.

This doesn’t invalidate “Homo homini lupus est”, just shows how we sometimes get to be less of a wolf. The first step is letting go of our antropocentrism, our way of seeing the whole cosmos as if it depended and was centered on us humans, and starting to see things anachronistically, beyond human existence, and realizing how we’re just a speck in this cosmic timeline, just wandering star dust.

@Cowbee@lemmy.ml

While tribal societies were indeed better insofar they were closer to Nature as today’s humanity, I can’t see a haven in today’s world.

I mean, yeah, things can be going better in, say, China, insofar (AFAIK) Chinese people haven’t to worry about having a shelter and enough food, because they’re not relegated to the whims of capital as we are in the West. I can sort of agree it’s the best we can have in terms of social welfare.

But even China is far from detached, for example, from consequences of climate change. We’ve seen how floods and typhoons and drought have been increasingly hitting the Chinese, because we all exist within the same cosmic boulder called Planet Earth so whatever is done here also affects there and vice-versa.

Even though China is moving more and more to green energy, the way West countries are still "drill baby drill"ing inexorably affects them as well. And also their future, and our future, everyone’s future and every future generations upon whom climate consequences will inexorably hit harder (not to say, for example, about the mess waiting to happen above our heads due to ever-increasing amount of satellites, the Kessler Syndrome, which will also affect us down here if things get beyond control up there).

@hansolo@lemmy.today

That anyone should get a “stake” in their own birth is a ridiculous premise that defies the logic of how life works and the impermanence of everything in our universe

It doesn’t have to defy the logic. It just requires ourselves to look around and see to where this world is headed. It just requires ourselves to read a history book and realize how humanity is repeating the same errors over and over again. It just requires us to notice how the world the future adults will have to live is likely worse than today’s world, as the climate bill, from the imprudent consumption started in past generations, already began to be charged.

If a parent, knowing how the future will be harsher than the present time, how Science and evidence are proving how we’re past the point of Paris Climate Treaty, even if we were to stop pollution today (the best time to stop all the greed of Industrial Revolution was a century ago, the second best time to stop Industrial Revolution was yesterday), how wet-bulb temperatures will get increasingly higher, if a parent still decides to bring someone to this Underworld to eventually melt under +60 degrees Celsius, this is what defies any logic. What kind of “future” is being expected for their offspring, really?

We are the only species that cares to consider beyond biological impulses if we should reproduce, which is a luxury

Yet we keep endangering ourselves and the other lifeforms.

Or if you want to go with the reincarnation-approved viewpoint, we ALL chose to be born in some pre-incarnation realm

My spiritual views are based on (among other belief systems) Gnosticism, where there’s Demiurge and his Archons trapping everything within this cosmos. My spiritual views diverge from pure religion as I also tend to consider scientific, non-anthropocentric views on all cosmos, so Demirge isn’t trapping humans, Demiurge is trapping energy and matter into existence, and we’re just part of this energy (self) and matter (biological vessel) being trapped in existence.

@Cowbee@lemmy.ml

And all the fundamenta of capitalism and imperalism are consequences of how we humans are our own wolves. Again, billionaires aren’t extraterrestrials or lizards.

It cedes all responsibility to move onto a better world

Some things aren’t reversible. For example, the species that went extinct (some of which we won’t even know they existed because there wasn’t enough time for them to be catalogued by Science) due to “Industrial Revolution”.

A naïve part of me hopes for a better world, where humans could finally coexist with Mother Nature, while we could improve things for all biosphere through Science and Academia, a Science and an Academia detached from capitalistic greed, a sincere pursuit of knowledge and scientific improvement not just for humans, but for all lifeforms, letting go from all our human malice and greed.

However, I can’t help but notice how this is getting farther and farther to be reached as the world is increasingly technofeudalist. I can’t help but see reality as it is: bleak, with a bleaker future awaiting for us, as we get increasingly trapped into a dystopia where the majority of humans would be required to fight against the asymmetrical forces possessing nuclear warheads and real-time control of public opinions from social media.

Sorry if I’m overly realistic and I can’t gaslight myself into hoping for the best, because I’m past this point, I grew tired of hoping for better times as I watch powerless to the dystopia where I was compelled to exist.

My hope now relies beyond this Pale Blue Dot: some supernova within this cosmic vicinity of the Milky Way blasting insurmountable amounts of energy towards here (not enough to vaporize the Earth, but enough to vaporize the machine where we’re forced to be cogs), or some solar CME/flare, powerful enough to free us from ourselves.

@ubergeek@lemmy.today

Are you sure about this? How can you possibly know?

Science.

Spontaneous Metatool Use by New Caledonian Crows
Taylor, Alex H. et al.
Current Biology, Volume 17, Issue 17, 1504 - 1507

Structure of the cerebral cortex of the humpback whale, Megaptera novaeangliae (Cetacea, Mysticeti, Balaenopteridae)
Patrick R. Hof, Estel Van Der Gucht

How about Octopi?

Them, too. I forgot to mention them.

Not sure your point?

My point is how you tried to argue reproduction based on instincts, so I brought another instinct-based trait.

No, it’s not. Its instinctive to seek shelter, water, food, and to reproduce

Urbanization and capitalism aren’t part of Nature.

So, that’s the root of the problem, and it’s something we can change

I doubt it can be changed, especially due to how things are pivoting to technofascism in the world. I doubt it can be changed, especially due to how we humans are constantly endangering other species for living as “modern humans”.

The could be a change but it’s beyond human agency: say, if Sun ejected a CME powerful enough, that could be a change of sorts, because it’d finally grind to a halt all the steel-made mosquitoes humans threw to orbit around this Pale Blue Dot, bringing humans back to a more natural means of existing.

However, we humans have been long detached from natural means of living so transition wouldn’t be easy, we’re sort of cursed to “modernity”, so it’s complicated.

@Cowbee@lemmy.ml @nutbutter@discuss.tchncs.de

It’s far from oversimplified “eco-fascism” strawman. To illustrate this, I’ll start from this argument of yours:

that should be reserved for those who want kids

Notice your own phrasing, “those who want kids”. The subject behind predicate “wanting” isn’t the object being “wanted”, despite the very object being “wanted” being a living being that’ll be unable to revert this decision imposed unto them.

People often say about “wanting kids” as if they were talking about wanting some kind of material belonging.

Yes, they have no means to decide on the circumstances of their birth, and that’s part of the problem: they can’t choose, neither positively nor negatively, they’re dependent on other’s wills because they got no agency…

…until they reach a certain age, when they’ll suddenly be recognized with agency and then the world will shift the blame upon them: they’ll be required to become a cog in the machine, they’ll be required to “work” and “serve society” in order to fulfill the basic needs (eating food and seeking shelter to protect oneself from elements) that their own body imposed upon them as part of involuntary survival instincts, they’ll be required to “pay” for eating and having a shelter (things that Mother Nature used to give freely), and they’ll be required to accept it as a “matter of fact” of “living among society”.

They can’t opt-out because they’ll be forbidden to live among wildlife as our Homo erectus ancestors did because “we’re different species”.

This leads us to this:

the “humans are the virus” crowd just play into reactionary hands and cede all control to those directly responsible for the worst excess.

IMHO, the fundamentum behind capitalistic greed is human greed.

Billionaires and riches aren’t extraterrestrials nor lizards: as far as Science is concerned, they’re Homo sapiens, differing from the majority of other Homo sapiens insofar they got “enough power” to give agency to their greed.

“Give enough power to a person and you’ll know who they really are” (a popular saying) and “humans are wolves to humans” (Thomas Hobbes).

In this regard, there’s a documentary from Derren Brown called “The Push”. Despite being cinematographic, it precisely depicts what humans are capable of doing to other humans, especially when pressed by life-or-death circumstances. It’s within us.

Finally, I must recall the initial, ecological point: if humans can endanger others from their own species (as we watch daily in capitalist-technofeudalist dystopia), other lifeforms are undeniable under danger that’s posed by human existence.

That’s because humans can’t simply blend with the all other species as one with Mother Earth (just like our ancestors used to do millions of years ago), we humans got this anthropocentric arrogance since the accidental discovery of the fire: now we’re slowly burning ourselves (literally, with fossil fuels) together with all the other lifeforms.

@sylver_dragon@lemmy.world @nutbutter@discuss.tchncs.de

If you really feel that existence is that horrible, there’s a solution for that at your nearest tall bridge

Before I was born, there’s this… nothingness. No fleeting happiness, but also no suffering. There was no pain, no angst, nothing but the nothingness. Then I was pulled, without the ability to choose positively or negatively… now the blame is on me: “you really feel that existence is that horrible, there’s a solution for that at your nearest tall bridge”.

Why should a person have to go through the painful to opt-out, risking failure? Yes, because suicide attempts aren’t guaranteed to lead to suicide, in fact, such attempts often leads to failure and, in many cases, to irreparable damage without death. One risks having to endure more pain.

Why? Because, for example, self-chosen euthanasia is still a matter of taboo, a forbidden subject to be talked about (or highly bureaucratic for someone to achieve without somehow “proving” they got no “depression” while DSM considers “deathwish” as a textbook depressive symptom) , because all the BS that people keep parroting such as “life is sacred”.

It’s worth mentioning how coping mechanisms to escape this nightmare are getting increasingly forbidden by christofascism (e.g. natural drugs never getting to be decriminalized, and being recriminalized in many countries), because being born to a dystopian world isn’t enough, people need to “grow up” on it and embrace being a cog in the machine while fully aware and focused on being such a cog.

I lost count on how many times I tried to end my own existence, and how many times I failed to do so because of this thing called “survival instincts” that restrain me from proceeding to being kissed by Lady Scythebearer.

So far, all my attempts failed on myself because my vessel conflicts with my own will because, just like it’s impossible to choose whether to be born or not, it’s also impossible to choose whether to possess instincts or not.

So, no, it’s not as easy as “jumping a bridge”, and you know it. Challenging others to commit suicide is a fallacy (the strawman fallacy, to be exact, because it plays with the very mechanism behind one’s pain) just like gaslighting optimism (“Things gonna be alright”, “It’s just a phase”, “You’ll get through it”) is also fallacious.

the whole thing as what happens when people fail to move beyond teenage angst

Were/Are David Benatar, Philipp Mainländer, among other thinkers who extensively wrote about this subject, eternal “teenagers”? Are the scientists who’ve been tirelessly reporting on how human activity is endangering all lifeforms, and/or those who reported about microplastics everywhere, and/or those who tried to report about the consequences of Industrial Revolution, driven by “teenager angst”?

@ubergeek@lemmy.today

So, can they also choose to be born?

They can’t choose, and that’s part of main issue as beings cursed by self-awareness: the impossibility to choose positively or negatively.

It’s beyond any capability of will and it taints any other decisions that could be done (see the movie “The Artifice Girl”, particularly the dialogue at the end when the robot is talking to her creator about how her primary directives made it impossible for her to really exert any fully free will).

The issue, here, emerges from the lack of choice alongside inevitable self-awareness, which takes us to:

Do bears choose to be born? Microbes?

They don’t have this curse of “self-awareness”. They do possess intelligence (especially crows and dolphins, not mentioned), but they don’t end up cursed by knowing the pointlessness of their own existences through a broader, cosmic lens. We do.

Also, they don’t restricted themselves into this Kafkaesque rearrangement we call as “human society”, where we must “buy” food and “pay” to have a roof above our heads, as if it was some kind of optional luxury. They live from what Mother Nature gives. Bears can roam and do shelters for them wherever there aren’t other bears (or other wildlife). Microbes’ shelters are literally other lifeforms.

Humans, however, can’t live from what Mother Nature gives, no no, this is too extraterrestrial for us to consider doing. I myself can’t choose to live among the wildlife like any other primate because I’m prohibited to do so (and, also, because my entire human existence compelled me into artificialities that I’m unable to ditch, such as the myopia I ended up having due to artificial environmental factors (thanks “screens” and “enclosed spaces”) leading to the need of using (and purchasing) prescription glasses).

Again, bears and microbes have no such artificial rearrangement.

Selfhood, if we’re being frank, doesn’t really “form” until at least a year or so into life

But we do know it’ll form, eventually. We do know the kid will become an adult and they’ll be required to become a cog in this machine. Parents often see this as a matter of “proud” (“our offspring has a job”), ignoring how much suffering it accompanies the imposed serfdom (having to “seek” and “have” a “job”, having to serve others).

Reproduction is an instinctive behavior, in all species. Humans as well.

If we were to talk about instincts, murdering to eat (hunting) is also pretty instinctive across species… Humans don’t often “murder to eat” because they often delegate it for others to do it, but with enough desperation (e.g. lack of food) a human can even eat other humans (see Chichijima incident)…

It’s also instinctive to live among the woods. Why don’t we, though? Maybe because we’re legally forbidden by other humans to move to a forest and live as our ancestors did, so we’re required to live “among society”, which in turn requires us to “pay” to “afford” food and shelter.

@hansolo@lemmy.today @nutbutter@discuss.tchncs.de

Maybe just let people decide for themselves

Problem is that this argument discards the selfhood from those being born. And it’s quite the core of the anti-natalist argument: that the person didn’t get a stake in choosing their own birth.

Because if we’re talking about lives and decisions, then “let people decide for themselves” ends up really meaning it: they’re deciding for themselves, as in some arrogant and egocentric decision, uncaring of of how the very object of decision are “selves” as well.

@Hirom@beehaw.org @Korkki@lemmy.ml

Problem is when government apps are required to do things such as income tax return, car license renewal, even to receive updates on medical appointments for public healthcare.

Brazil is such an example: everything have been increasingly reliant on gov.br (official Brazilian state portal) app, which refuses to work on the slightest phone settings modification, such as having developer mode on, having an unlocked bootloader and, by extension, having something other than rawdoggy Android or iOS.

While there is a website, it has since recently been asking for TFA through the app (which does facial recognition), so website-only is a no deal anymore.

One can do things offline, but services have been increasingly pivoting to digital since the COVID-19 pandemics. Income tax return is already done through online means: for now, it offers a Linux software, but I can feel it asking for TFA through Android-or-iOS app soon.

One can choose not to use government services altogether, until the government decides to block one’s CPF (taxpayer id) due to the lack of income tax return paperwork, unpaid electoral fines for not voting (because the voter is required to keep their info updated whenever they move, not doing so can lead to not being able to vote), among other situations that require using gov (and/or banking) services.

I’ve been daring to do this, nevertheless: been increasingly ditching apps, closing accounts, even if I get unable to pay for things because everything around here is increasingly pivoting to Pix (Brazilian instant payment system which requires a banking app and can’t be done through a computer browser). I don’t care if my ID gets blocked eventually, I’m not taking any piece of paper or bits of oscillating electricity with me when I happen to leave this existence anyways (which I hope to be really soon because I’m done with this Kafkaesque world).