I often wonder about this with regard to right wing Americans believing such ridiculous things. It’s seem that what Trump supporters ultimately have in common is not one set of beliefs but a shared belief in things that make no sense: that all Democrats are paedophiles, that JFK wasn’t really assassinated, that vaccines don’t work, that climate change isn’t real, that Donald Trump is anything but a foolish, evil corrupt man. What do these views have in common? They’re fundamentally foolish things to believe.

The fact is that once you believe one patently absurd thing - for example, that an interventionist god exists - your thinking gets warped. When you then make this absurdity the centre of your worldview and your identity, your views on everything become warped. After a certain point, they seem to start believing things because they make no sense.

If a person believes God actually answers prayers, something there is no reason whatsoever to believe, they’re primed to believe all kinds of other nonsense. This is exactly why many religious people have stopped believing in that kind of thing, and now take refuge in the idea of prayer as comfort or as asking for ‘strength’ rather than asking for anything specific (note that even this compromise requires them to ignore the plain meaning of the words of, e.g., the Lord’s Prayer). Most people find it uncomfortable to believe in nonsense. For others, it becomes the point.

Right, but we mitigate that harm (good) by depriving people of their freedom (bad). It is necessary to do it, for the exact reasons you suggest - to reduce evil overall.

I’ve been meaning to read some stuff about how to approach criminal justice if we don’t have free will, but I keep reading other stuff instead. So many books, so little time!

I still think prisoners should be treated well, no matter the crime.

Yes, absolutely. Even for the worst of the worst, their should be rehab attempts, whether it’s anger management, getting them away from gangs - whatever it is they need. I think there are only small numbers of people, if there are any at all, who are really irremediably violent and dangerous, but even for them I’m not exactly happy about putting them away indefinitely.

Prison seems the obvious one. It’s obviously (to me, that is) not desirable to deprive anyone of their freedom, but for persistently violent people I don’t think there’s a better solution, unfortunately.

• Sport and art
• low cost and free places to do sport and art
• linked together by public transit and clean, safe places to walk, run or cycle (or scoot or skate or whatever)
• a shorter working week, so people have time to do the above
• a higher minimum wage, so people can afford the (ideally low, if necessary) costs involved

So, e.g., lots of parks with publicly accessible five-a-side football pitches, ping-pong tables, basketball courts, skateparks whatever - that’s your sport. The parks also have bandstands or outdoor theatres, where there’s space for that.

Public libraries with rooms people can hire (or use for free) for book clubs, sewing circles, art classes - that’s your art.

Good thing about the above is that all these ideas already exist in lots of forms, you just pick whatever works best for your current situation.

People are already painting his face on walls.

Assuming we’re going back far enough, antibiotics. Cure one person of the bubonic plague or tuberculosis and people will start taking you seriously.

Again, you’ve written quite a long comment, almost none of which is pertinent.

Music is not math. Some aspects of it can be expressed mathematically, yes, but that’s not the same thing.

Imagining the idea ‘I’d like to see an image of a lemming’, which is what you’ve done, does require some imagination. However, the output is not art because the process used to go from your ‘prompt’ to the image was not a creative one. (Also, this isn’t entirely pertinent, but the image output is really bad. If it had been made by a person and otherwise looked like this, I would still say that it was just ugly, bad art.)

You may well be a creative and imaginative person; I don’t know you and I wouldn’t want to judge! However, your image of a lemming was not the result of a creative process and so is not art.

Current AI is lacking both.

Only word wrong here is ‘current’. AI will never have creativity or craftmanship. It’s impossible.

You’re lazy and talentless, and you like how it allows you to steal the hard work and talent of others.

That some, most or all art is partly or wholly derivative of other art is not relevant because the process used by ‘AI’ does not resemble the artistic process. When Shakespeare wrote Hamlet (a work derived from an older play, itself derived from an older myth which itself had been through countless retellings, variations and translations), he did not do what an LLM does, which is approximately to say: ‘It’s statistically likely that the phrase “to be” will be followed by the phrase “or not to be”’. Putting together statistical likelihoods is not creativity. This alone shows that AI ‘art’ is not creative and therefore not art at all.

Additionally, instructing a machine to make things from prompts does not require creativity. Creativity is not ‘having ideas’; it’s an ongoing process. When you tell an image generator to make an image, you’re not asking it to create something, because it cannot do it. You’re saying ‘Show me the statistically likely output for this input’. Again, this statistical generator is not the same as, nor is it comparable to, the human imaginative process.

Yes. It can only exist through stealing the creative work of others.

Also, it looks terrible.

Doesn’t matter as long as they’re exactly as knowledgable as I am or, failing that, slightly less so /s

Some sort of libertarian socialism, basically. Markets with co-ops and a strong welfare system provided principally by highly democratic local governments.

Nuclear fusion, right? That’s got to be the big one.

You may already have seen it, but I’ve found Lemmy Explorer to be much more useful for this kind of search than the native Lemmy search function.

Temu. No idea what scam they’re running but I will never buy anything from them.

As other people have said, it was borrowed from the Italian fascists, who themselves got it from an 18th century painting showing a famous event from Roman history/legend. There’s no evidence that it was ever actually used in Ancient or Classical Rome.

Funny side story is that some Nazis and other German nationalists thought it wasn’t ‘German’ enough, so the leading Nazis felt they had to invent an older ‘Germanic’ tradition to justify its usage. So, it’s a fake German tradition that was in fact borrowed from the Italians, who got it from a fake Roman tradition that was actually made up by a French guy.

Yes, exactly. There are some things on this list where, if everyone opposed to fascism did one of them, we’d win tomorrow. Realistically, not everyone will, but it’s still the right thing to do, to prise every bit of power from their grasp.

There are lots of Fediverse alternatives to social media, including Lemmy (which I guess you know about?) and the ones people have mentioned here already (Mastodon, Pixelfed, Loops, PeerTube). The advantage of the Fediverse is that it can’t be co-opted by a single bad actor, in the way that Musk took over Twitter and made it into a Nazi bar.