London-based writer. Often climbing.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • No. You’ve taken one thing - the BBC pressurises their journalists to cover Israel positively, which I agree is true - and assumed it means a second thing - that (1) the BBC (2) smeared Corbyn (3) as an antisemite (numbers here because these are three separate claims that you haven’t justified, within the broader claim you also haven’t justified). You’ve then additionally taken that bundle of unproven claims as evidence of another different claim: that ‘the media’ as a whole, i.e., not just the BBC, ‘smeared Corbyn’ because he ‘opposed Israel’.

    With respect, this is exactly what I meant about conspiracist thinking: you’re taking loosely related ideas (some of them true, some of them not) and bundled them together to claim a vaguely defined malevolent entity (‘the media’) is out to get someone. This is conspiracist thinking! That’s what that is!




  • 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.





  • This is not inconsistent with anything I said yesterday or, indeed, this morning.

    There was not an organised media smear campaign against Corbyn. ‘The media’ is not in any sense a group of people who said ‘Let’s all agree to tell lies about Corbyn’, which is what an organised smear campaign would have to look like. The media has always been persistently unfair, to the level of insanity, about everyone to the left of the Conservatives, but there’s nothing organised about it, it’s just powerful people representing their own interests.











    • 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.


  • frankPodmore@slrpnk.nettoFuck AI@lemmy.worldOn Effort
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    5 days ago

    You don’t need an uncritical belief in the Labour Theory of Value to think that human labour has a special value and dignity to it. The people who want AI to replace many kinds of intellectual labour just don’t believe that there’s a value to human labour, and I do think this is fundamentally an antihuman, misanthropic way of looking at the world.