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The desperate need to try to wave away any possible negative effects from social media by people heavily dependent on social media comes as no surprise. It’s like trying to criticize fast food to a fat person.
Some will acknowledge it’s bad for them and eat it anyway, but most will just get extremely defensive about it and try to rationalize or downvote. It has vitamins! If you only eat the unfried vegetables and only drink water, it’s actually good for you!
I appreciate you letting this go. It does seem pretty silly to be getting upset about, and I’m speaking for myself as well. I can understand why it seems unlikely. Don’t worry, I don’t usually bust out my Ghost in the Shell fingers for Lemmy posts.
You are free to believe whatever you want. There are two comments posted back-to-back because I switched to a keyboard and decided to write them both while I was on the keyboard. Writing in Word, with its autocorrect features, makes producing relatively error-free prose fairly easy. Also, typing at 74 words per minute is not particularly fast—I typically type faster than that. There’s no question that I type faster than average though; it’s a hazard of writing being a central part of my job. I find it funny that four quickly written paragraphs seem so unbelievable to you that it makes you question reality.
Regardless, I have no intention of continuing to justify how quickly I write. This conversation is pointless.
Also, I usually comment from my phone, but I switch to a laptop for more detailed responses. I actually found parts of that comment a bit repetitive, but I didn’t feel like spending the extra time revising it. I imagine if I were using an LLM, it would have produced something with better flow and polish.
Accusing someone of using an LLM just because they presented a well-articulated response is a sad reflection on the critic, not the writer. I wrote that using a keyboard, not some gimmick; I also have advanced degrees and can draft out my thoughts in Microsoft Word without relying on AI tools. It’s really telling that you think any robust, complex response must be “fake news” or generated by a bot. Just because a response isn’t reduced to shallow platitudes or memes doesn’t mean it’s not genuine.
Frankly, that comment took less than five minutes to compose. Maybe it’s time to re-evaluate your assumptions about what people are capable of when they’re not locked into oversimplified, knee-jerk responses.
The suggestion to discredit publications like The New York Times because they “platform disagreeable opinions” misses the point entirely. The goal of engaging with diverse viewpoints is not to validate every perspective but to understand them, deconstruct them, and refine our own positions through the process of critical reasoning. If we retreat into echo chambers that reinforce our pre-existing beliefs, we’re not just hiding from ideas we find distasteful—we’re deliberately choosing intellectual cowardice. It’s akin to thinking that if you simply close your eyes, the problem ceases to exist.
This approach is not only self-defeating but fundamentally immature. Refusing to engage with what you perceive as “extremist rhetoric” doesn’t reduce its presence; it only blinds you to its evolution, making it easier for such rhetoric to gain traction unchallenged. To use a crude analogy, it’s like seeing blood from a wound, covering your eyes, and believing the wound is healed. Refusing to look at the problem—or pretending it doesn’t exist—does nothing to solve it.
The notion that simply discrediting entire publications based on a few disagreeable viewpoints will somehow rid the world of those opinions is laughably naïve. In reality, it reveals a shallow understanding of how discourse works. Ideas don’t just vanish because you’ve decided not to look at them; they fester and grow stronger in the dark. This strategy isn’t just ineffective—it’s actively harmful, promoting a kind of self-imposed intellectual infantilism where one’s worldview is limited to only those thoughts deemed “safe.”
The suggestion to stop reading publications like The New York Times because they platform a range of opinions assumes that people are incapable of discerning between well-reasoned arguments and extremist drivel. This assumption is not only insulting but speaks to a profound lack of faith in people’s ability to engage with, analyze, and refute arguments on their own merits. It’s this very stunted intellectual development—the notion that the world will be better if you downvote things you don’t like and only read things that already agree with you—that cultivates ignorance, rather than addressing it. In short, refusing to engage with challenging or disagreeable views is the hallmark of a mind that fears it might not have the reasoning capacity to withstand genuine debate.
It’s ironic to invoke Godwin’s Law to stifle conversation, given that its original purpose was to call attention to the degradation of language and thought that occurs when Nazi comparisons are overused and misapplied. By cheapening such comparisons, the law sought to maintain the weight and specificity of historical evils like the Holocaust, which lose their impact when these terms are used flippantly or with little regard for context. This phenomenon is akin to Orwell’s warning in 1984 about the dangers of language simplification, where words are stripped of their meaning and are ultimately used to obfuscate, rather than clarify, reality.
Interestingly, even Godwin himself has noted that invoking the law to shut down discussions does little to foster meaningful dialogue. Instead, he argues that Nazi comparisons can be justified if they are “thought-out and historically informed” rather than “poorly reasoned, hyperbolic invocations” that trivialize both the history and severity of such terms. The overuse of these comparisons not only dilutes their impact but also reflects a broader trend of linguistic manipulation that mirrors Orwell’s Newspeak: a language designed to control thought by reducing complexity and nuance. When words are allowed to encompass everything, they ultimately mean nothing at all.
This loss of linguistic precision can also be seen in modern political rhetoric, where phrases like “concentration camps” are debated not based on the context but on who is using them and against whom. This constant redefinition erases historical distinctions, blurs moral boundaries, and makes it easier for anyone to dismiss any accusation as mere hyperbole. In this context, we see a perverse evolution of Godwin’s Law where the very comparisons meant to be avoided are applied more liberally, often to dismiss, derail, or discredit rather than to enlighten.
The deeper problem is that invoking Godwin’s Law as a rhetorical cudgel or attempting to justify its non-application when “actually” talking about fascism in the overly broad ways it’s now deployed is itself a form of linguistic reductionism. Rather than encourage thoughtful argumentation, it often forces discussions into binary categories: acceptable or unacceptable, on the “right side” of history or not. Such polarization undermines the very principles of debate and inquiry that Godwin initially hoped to preserve. In the end, it’s not the Nazis who are being compared to everyone—it’s the chilling realization that our language is being systematically eroded, making it ever harder to speak with the precision, integrity, and weight that serious topics demand.
Yes, frankly I don’t trust anyone to be able to think critically about what they read. I think we should outlaw disagreeable opinions. So much easier, I hate homework. But I love burning things! Let’s start with books! My library has a copy of mein kampf in fact. Let’s go burn it! That will take care of those damn nazis!
What?? Op-eds can be disagreeable??! This is incredibly irresponsible. What if I just believe every opinion I read? This is so ugly and awful. I can’t believe journalists would trust people to draw their own conclusions about a diverse spectrum of opinions!
Typical failing New York Times. So despicable and unethical.
I totally get it. Good luck though, make sure you find a landing space first. WFH jobs are decreasing and are getting much more competitive. They’re also, unfortunately, prone to be suddenly or slowly shifted to in-office positions. Trying to work a mandatory period of WFH into your contract might be useful, but that’ll be pretty difficult.
As long as you are very employable and in the right field you should be fine. Using “transitional WFH” as a way to entice workers is becoming more commonplace and employers are often not transparent about it.
A friend works in HR at a place that hires as “WFH” and doesn’t mention at any point that there is already a timeline in place for two days in office after six weeks and then full time in office after three months. It’s not stipulated anywhere, it’s a “new policy” that comes down… on the same timeline… for every new employee. Lol
This is a hyperbolic article to be sure. But many in this thread are missing the point. It’s not that photo manipulation is new.
It’s the volume and quality of photo manipulation that’s new. “Flooding the zone with bullshit,” i.e. decreasing the signal-to-noise ratio, can have a demonstrable social effect.
Yeah for sure, a vast majority of people in the United States receive financial help from their family. 70% or so. Less than a third don’t.
Which I guess swings us back to the surprising fact that a broad majority of millennials can afford a home and a simple majority already own one. Just seems crazy.
Roughly 3% of Millennials have inherited money according to the findings in Northwestern Mutual’s 2024 Planning & Progress Study.
I don’t want a cybertruck and I think Elon is an ass, but it would pretty cool if you had a tent like this that didn’t suck on a truck that wasn’t stupid and you could hook the tent up to the climate control and have it vented through the tent. Like, winter camping, toasty warm, summer camping, nice and cool. That would be pretty baller. Is that a thing already?
You should see the videos of model Y owners (a model they’ve had many iterations on) roll down their window during rain to get a drive through order and the water pours into the open window directly onto the, you guessed it, button console used to open/close the window and DOOR. I’m sure that won’t eventually cause problems. With OPENING THE DOOR.
And it’s not just falling rain, it literally channels rain from the glass roof directly into any open window. It’s hilarious.
How else can I buy the newest Ford “own the libs” truck with the lift kit and coal-rolling accessories?