Notices by Dallas (Join Something IRL) (1dalm@deacon.social), page 2

@seanbala

At the risk of being eurocentrist, I think there is one very convincing reason why the industrial/scientific revolution and the "enlightenment" (as we call them in the West) probably wouldn't have been replicated anywhere else: the movable type printing press.

The moveable type printing press dramatically decreased the cost of sharing information. Before the printing press, mass sharing information was prohibitively expensive, after it's cost drops to nearly nothing.

No other culture could have created a moveable type printing press because their writing system simply don't allow for it. To create a moveable type printing press in Chinese would require a warehouse of symbols for the press. Functionally it would have been easier for printers to just carve out their stamps one at a time -which is exactly what they did. Similarly, just looking at Arabic script and it's obvious why movable type printing press were never developed for Arabic, it just doesn't work. You can't do it.

Without the printing press you don't have the cheap mass sharing of information and you don't have an industrial revolution. (You also don't have a Protestant reformation, or an Atlantic slave trade, or an "age of discovery".)

In an alternate history timeline, do you think the industrial revolution happens without the Protestant movement?

#althistory

One of the worst lies that social media promotes is that getting upset and complaining about something is doing something.

@aral

In Texas, young boys are taught to build up a tolerance.

Why don't websites have "site maps" anymore? Remember those, how there used to be a page that was just a master table of contents?

I miss those.

@GottaLaff

All those hundreds of judges and juries and criminal prosecutors were all a part of of the woke deep state and all paid off by George Soros.

The #HarryPotter and #JKRowling issue has been absolutely fascinating to watch over my life.

I was raised in a conservative Evangelical-ish community and reading the books was an act of subversion. There were people that legitimately believed that the books were cultist, and they weren't all that wrong if they used the academic definition of a cult -a small community religious practice. What made Harry Potter subversive, where as other fantasy stories like Star Wars weren't, was that the whole youth culture was happening outside of adult view on the Internet. This was before Facebook or Reddit and before just adults really had a presence online. Teens would spend hours and hours in their online community that their parents weren't a part of. And this worldwide online community operated like a cultist religion. They were creating their own language, mythologies, mores, taboos, and rituals in real time. And it had it's priest, who often personally participated in the online communities (in fact she created them). And she borrowed from and contributed to the myth creation. It provided a form of spiritually that many of the teens involved were lacking in their lives.

Fast forward a generation. Today the stories are complete. A young adult picking up the books for the first time today isn't involved in the subversive online cult of the 1990's and 2000's. There are no more speculation or fan theories being created. That's now relegated to nostalgia. Today, a young adult can read the complete stories and judge them not for what they were, but for what they are now. And they are finding many problematic errors. Racism, antisemitism, ableism, slavery, plot holes, etc. The stories are complete and are now being critically read as complete stories.

And the priest, who was lauded as supportive and wise while the cult was growing, is being judged by a new generation that wasn't involved in the myth creation. She is being judged for what she is now, not was she was back then.

What we are seeing in real time, and this is fascinating, was the creation and deconstruction of a new religion in a post-Christian America. It's also not just Harry Potter, but also techno-utopianism, and other sub-cultures. I suspect that this generational rise and fall of new cultish religions will accelerate as the tearing down of other people's beliefs and communities becomes a more popular pastime.

#religion #cult #millenials #genz

@feditips

You can also just ask your admin to increase the character count if you have a lot to say.

@GottaLaff

Okay, we clearly have different definitions of "Moderate".

What you described is exactly what I would define as "moderate".

(Except for the switching parties thing. Switching parties really shouldn't have any meaning at all and candidates should be able to switch for any number of reasons. Or at least that would be the case if one of our two parties wasn't evil.)

@CharJTF @GottaLaff

He is a moderate, but so is Joe Biden. It's not like AOC is at the top of the ticket.

@GottaLaff @CharJTF

I don't know what a ConservaDem is.

Yes he was a pain in the butt on family stipends, but if you look at the rest of Joe Manchin's actual voting record, he votes with the democrats virtually every time. He voted to remove Trump twice. He's voted for every Biden judicial nominee. He dragged his feet but eventually voted for the IRA -the biggest anti-Climate Change legislation ever passed by any nation on Earth.

Joe Manchin isn't the villain progressives act like he is.*

*subject to change based in the event of an independent Presidential campaign announcement.

@fuat2mb @golemwire @royal

I'm sorry, don't mean to insult your work, but Uconnect suuuuuuucks.

Also, what changed their minds on the EV Jeep?

@royal

Switch to EV as fast as you can. You won't miss the gas car nearly as much as you think you will.

@jlroberson @OhNoSheTwitnt

He was the Gen-X celebrity version of a liberal. Gen X'ers love their shock jocks.

It's pretty funny that cops got a reputation for liking donuts. You know who else likes donuts?

Everyone.

@arstechnica

Yes, COVID still exists. It always will. Forever. It's never ever going away.

But the important statistic you aren't sharing is not how many people got COVID but how many people attending got a severe case?

@markusl

The biggest problem I have with the press on long covid is that long Covid is really not very well defined. Long covid seems to be defined as any COVID infection where any symptom symptom last longer than 2 weeks. That mean if you have a lingering cough for a few weeks after you have COVID then you had ”long covid" even though that doesn't negatively impact your day-to-day life. Certainly there are some instances of long covid that are very traumatic but those seem to be very very rare

@markusl I would like to see a better statistical explanation of what the risks of severe long covid are. That seems to be hard to come by.

@alex

How is it possible that there is not a real viable open source alternative to Adobe Pro yet?

@alex Or, heck, even a closed source alternative.

I would PAY for a viable feature matching alternative (one time, not monthly for gawd sakes).

Really, I would pay a one time fee for a software that just allows me to split up and merge PDF documents in a easy to use and light weight GUI. (PDFSAM used to do that, but they've moved to a monthly payment subscription plan.)