I’m mostly half-serious.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 15th, 2023

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  • There are a lot of claims here, but I’m going to focus on one in particular. I don’t think we have any moral obligation to reach our potential as a “creator race”. Taking into account your initial starting point, consider the following argument:

    1. Either intelligent beings were created or intelligent beings arose by chance (at least once).
    2. If intelligent beings were created, then there is already a creator.
    3. If intelligent beings arose by chance once, then it is possible for intelligent life to arise by chance again.
    4. Therefore, either there is already a creator of intelligent life or intelligent life can arise by chance again.

    If this argument is sound, then the possibility of intelligent life does not depend on us. To me, this weakens any suggestion that we are morally obligated to fulfill our intellectual potential.

    Perhaps one could object to my argument above on utilitarian grounds. If we can create more intelligent life than already exists, then we will be increasing the total amount of good in the universe. We are morally obligated to increase the good in the world (however “good” is defined) and so we are morally obligated to create intelligent beings. But this is a non sequitur. It isn’t clear that the creation of more intelligent beings will result in more happiness than misery. In which case, on a utilitarian analysis, it could turn out that we are morally prohibited from creating intelligent beings.

    I know this isn’t the crux of your post, but I wanted to engage philosophically since posts in this community often go unanswered.








  • I don’t understand. If a mod from memes.world bans me from a meme community, I can still comment on memes.world from another instance? Or are you saying just go to another community on another instance that has the same kind of content? Because if it’s the latter then Lemmy’s userbase number problem comes into play. Even popular subjects only have like one or two big communities.






  • balderdash@lemmy.zipOPtoPolitical Memes@lemmy.worldSafe Space
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    2 months ago

    This is a completely disingenuous response that I keep hearing. Yes, it being an election year intensifies the problem. But Lemmy’s intolerance to criticism of anything left-wing pre-dates 2024. Go back a year ago and look at the posts on politicalmemes@lemmy.world . Same shit different day.

    The fact that everyone is paying attention to politics right now actually makes it a great time to call the democrats on their shit in the hopes that they will at least promise to make more foundational changes. But that’s not going to happen: we continue to settle for the status quo.





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    2 months ago

    This is a great comment and I agree with everything you said. At the risk of sounding contradictory, let me state that I’m not arguing against voting for democrats. Sure, my hopes for the democratic party continues to dwindle as I get older, but the cost of an afternoon to cast a ballot isn’t much to ask for. And (I feel like I have to say this on Lemmy) the Republican party is a non-starter. So we both agree on those points.

    My issue is with the obvious bias in political posts or political memes (see: literally all of politicalmemes@lemmy.world). Lemmy has decided on a simple formula: pro-democrat post=upvote, anti-republican post=upvote, everything else=downvote. Doesn’t matter if the article linked is any good or if the meme is funny. This community is completely unable to acknowledge the flaws of the democratic party because that hurts “our team” and somehow makes you a republican.


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    2 months ago

    Your comment is ironically self-righteous. Memes on Lemmy don’t determine the fate of democracy. No one is campaigning against Harris here. What I’m saying is this place is so intensely one-sided that it’s hard to see these memes and headlines as anything other than propaganda. These online echo-chambers are exactly what got us here in the first place.


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    2 months ago

    Mods allowing a post to stay up doesn’t mean it’s tolerated by the community. But we’re getting into semantics at this point. I just wish I could find an online community that didn’t lean so hard in one direction. Everywhere I go is extremely right-wing or left-wing. These online spaces just parrot the party talking points.