Ask Lemmy

If you're a juror and you vote guilty, knowing that the person you're voting guilty for will be executed, if they are later found not guilty, your head should be next on the chopping block.

I am fundamentally against the death penalty. It is not a power the government should ever have.

A society's moral character is best judged by how it treats its least, not by how it treats the average, or median, or best.

I was going to say "Copyright is theft" but I see that's basically OPs take, so I'll settle for 'same'.

Want to know something fun about US parents??

Patents don't really protect new inventions. They give people a right to sue for financial damages and there is no criminal force of law (this is a generalization and I am not a lawyer). So courts don't really go "hey, stop using invention ABC, someone else has a patent on it." They just say "hey, that other guy invented it first, give him some money."

Patents (not other forms of IP) are made to be wildly public so people can invent things on top of previous inventions.

Does it always work like that? No. But it's one facet of US federal law that I find interesting, and a little bit hopeful.

People should be jailed for violating a DNR order.

Paying for your porn is righteous (assuming the money goes to the actual actors).

Buy local goods, even is it cost more... most people will go for cheapest price, even if you're handing your money to warlords and human trafficking.. same argument every time "There will always be ".

It

My perspective on what rights are and how they work sometimes has people looking at me like I'm literally the devil. But it's really not that crazy.

First off, rights aren't absolute and have to be balanced against each other. Spend an hour or two following along with mundane SCOTUS cases and you'll see all kinds of examples where two reasonable principles come in conflict with each other and it's not immediately apparent which one should take precedence. I would actually argue that, if you want to treat principles as absolutes, you only get one, because any two concievable principles can (at least theoretically) come into conflict with each other. You can't serve two masters.

Moreover, what rights actually are are a theory about maintaining order and keeping people satisfied and content. The theory goes that people were reasonably content in a "state of nature" and that if they become discontent in civilization, it must be because they're lacking something that they would have naturally had. As a general rule, it works well enough - but viewing it this way means that you're viewing rights as a means to an end, rather than an end of itself, which is a very important distinction. What that means is that if you're in a situation where you have to choose between upholding rights and the end goal that rights are meant to achieve, then it makes sense to prioritize that end.

Again, something that makes people look at me like a demon (or call me a "tankie"), but like, there was a point in the Civil War where Abraham Lincoln suspended habeus corpus in response to the genuine, existential threat posed by the Confederacy, and it was probably necessary for him to do so, or at the very least he had good reason to think it was.

The well of discourse on this subject has been poisoned by politicians leveraging imaginary threats for self-interested purposes, and the fact that we in the first world are so used to basic security that we take it for granted. Certainly, there's plenty of people who say, "The ends justify the means," but who aren't really following that principle, they just want to do illegal things for other reasons, like torture being motivated by cruelty, hatred, or revenge but justified on the pretense of extracting information to save lives.

However, just because people use imaginary/exaggerated threats like that, that's no reason to think real existential threats don't exist for anyone ever. And when you're facing a legitimate existential threat, all bets are off, you should give it 100% and do whatever it takes to survive and win. If you're not prepared to do that, you should give up the fight and walk away. Otherwise, how can you ask others to lay down their lives while you're pulling your punches, just to feel good about yourself? A guilty conscience is a small price to pay.

Somehow, we've got all these people with martyr complexes who have got everything mixed up, that your job as a moral agent is about serving these abstract moral principles as an end to itself, rather than your job being to do the things that lead to the best outcomes and the principles being guidelines that generally, but not always, help you find that course of action. It at least makes sense if you believe following those principles will get you into heaven, but many people still act as though that was their chief concern even without believing in such an afterlife.

I'll just keep being a nuisance here and say it. I genuinely do like this instance but I can't make sense of the infatuation for the AI here when isn't this part of the problem? AI "art" generators are fundamentally wrong and harmful to the artistic community. Artists are part of the nerd crowd too. We studied like crazy to hone our craft. There are a few traumatic historic events that the use of AI art theft machines harken back to. In more recent history, fascist regimes have tried to erase art altogether, or covet it for themselves. The same can be said for colonists, and it was to our chagrin a casually accepted part of Western culture to incorporate all sorts of bastardized appropriations of beautiful things they'd seen that didn't belong to them. It's just something to think about.

At the end of the day, people are thoughtlessly using a machine that takes the hard work of countless artists (of all different walks of life, different classes, backgrounds, mediums) to spit out uncanny, empty slop.

I'll keep saying it. And it may take years to undo this shit if ever. That's fine.

Okay, a pretty decent amount of people feel similarly as I do on this topic, but here I just feel like an outlier at times due to the number of pro-AI slop communities. Then again, I also notice that only a handful of the same people run those communities and contribute to them. I guess it's because we're a smaller community and I'm also a negative Nancy, so I tend to notice those glaring issues more here. I think it's important to get this message across on here, because why do we want to emulate even one ounce of Musk's energy here? Fuck that. Reddit already has their Midjourney sh-stuff. And they are not like us. So, we should strive to be better than Reddit.

Zoos suck. Put those animals back where they belong. Or eat them.

Your feelings are not facts.

Being offended, doesn't mean you're in the right and the other person is in the wrong.

Just because your religion says something (or claims it does), doesn't put you in the right.

Religious people who push their fake shit on you.

Can you just NOT!

If I wanted an imaginary friend WTF makes you think I'd pick your asshole POS of a god?

That was rhetorical.

hunting an fishing when a man needs to feed their family is is fine no matter where you are. A person has a right to survive and eat without being molested by the police and greedy judges.. A person with no money is still a person.

You can't direguard anyone's humanity. Even billionaires. There are no universally bad people, negativity is always relational.

Though I do think you can weigh a billionaire's comfort against the folks they made billions from, and that may just be potent enough for the death penalty.

However, I don't think punishment is a humane solution. Rehabilitation and integration are always preferred. Though again, some folks integrate best as corpses.

If I had no say in the creation of a system I should not have to participate in said system for the benefit of others.

Copyright is bad and this includes AI breaking copyright laws. Unfortunately people are too emotionally driven to come to a rational position here.

As a rapper, I totally agree. I'll go with: decentralized community defense would be far more effective than the police. And, you know. Wouldn't be them.

Understanding disability thought and theory is one of the foundations of marginalization justice but one of the most invisible such that, once you understand certain tenants, it's impossible not to see the impact of their ideas in everything in daily life.