20 year olds are not generally getting night terrors from watching disturbing content on tiktok. They’re not losing sleep, or coming away with genuine psychological scarring. We don’t need government regulations to control media content for the sake of literal adults. And children in theory should already have their content moderated by the correct degree by parents, not the government.

It’s just content I find dumb

If you watch anything on YouTube that you don’t think is dumb, there is stuff on TikTok you also wouldn’t find dumb. I don’t use TikTok either, but I think you genuinely underestimate how much content there is, and overestimate how uniform that content is.

Considering the country that runs it (…)

ByteDance already stores U.S user data within the U.S, allows third party firms to scrutinize its data privacy policies far more than any other U.S media group, and has come back with a clean bill from groups like Citizen Lab (a Canadian research lab). No U.S userdata goes to the Chinese government.

Government officials know this, they’re just putting on a show. Leaked phone calls have made this clear, the actual issue is the lack of policing around the kinds of content served. ByteDance is not aligned with U.S foreign policy interests like Meta/Google are. They are more than happy to showcase the horrors of the apartheid, genocidal state of Israel, and that’s having a real impact on the literal more than half of Americans that use TikTok.

It’s clearly against the YouTube T.O.S

Videos against YouTube’s T.O.S of the October 7th attacks have been on the platform since October of last year. They’re much more strict about removing videos showcasing the much larger-in-scale violent acts done by Israel than anything done by Hamas. TikTok isn’t. This isn’t a coincidence, and the U.S needs TikTok to fall in line here.

If they don’t young people will continue to hold extreme views, like bombing tens of thousands of children in an open air prison that has been violating the GCIV since 2007 is somehow problematic. They need the American public to have the understanding that Palestinians are simply human animals; they’re savages that need to be put down. Not unlike native americans.

Towards the end of the culling, when enough of the population has died to no longer pose a threat, they’ll give them small territories like the U.S did with native americans and feign sympathy. Imperialism hasn’t changed.

When we say younger, we might just be talking about different age groups. I imagine 16-30, and in that age range you’re not likely to come away with severe psychological scarring, but you will be deeply upset and that’s a good thing (we shouldn’t ignore genocide, we should be upset by it). Being upset leads to change.

If you’re talking about like 10 year olds watching it, sure I can agree. They can’t really do anything about it. They can’t go out and protest, or advocate for change, or vote, etc. Plus they’re much more likely to have genuine scarring. Issues sleeping, night terrors, trouble concentrating, etc.

As for “that content is dumb”, I assume you’re talking about tiktok in general. And again, for some people it’s definitely not dumb. People get served different things. Tiktok isn’t a platform trying to do good in the world, like any other social media platform it’s trying to drive engagement. However, it’s one of the few social media platforms outside of the U.S media interest groups, and that’s why the U.S is either banning them or forcing them to sell.

The end goal is to censor all of that raw footage of genocide, because it changes views. When you can hide behind rhetoric and not show how horrific the mass bombings are, you get a lot more leeway. That’s good for Israel, and why AIPAC and other Israel lobbies are the main forces behind this push in the U.S. In the end, the ban is bad for humanity (will allow the genocide to escalate without public backlash), but will be good for Israel and U.S elites.

Yes, genocides are emotional. Watching children being blown up is something that should upset you. That’s actually happening in the real world.

Emotion isn’t the only thing that should inform your decisions, but pretending like you shouldn’t be upset at watching kids being blown up, or begging for their parents, or whatever else have you is just foolish.

Yeah fuck people who are against animal abuse and actually live out their principles.

Like you could at least say “preachy vegans”. This is still problematic, because it ignores that everyone is preachy about issues they understand are immoral (we’re all preachy anti-racists, anti-rapists, etc.)

But just saying “vegan” is wild.

I don’t use tiktok, but some people have unusually based tiktok feeds. They can get direct footage from the genocide happening in Gaza, for example. I never get that recommended on YouTube, despite my very obvious socialist leanings, watching pro-Palestine content, etc.

This is the actual reason tiktok is being banned (if they don’t sell) after the election. One of the largest lobbying groups in America, AIPAC, in probably the most well-funded policy categories (pro-Israel policies) backs most of Congress. They’ve determined tiktok has far too much influence on American youth, and has made the Israel/Palestine divide a young/old divide more-so than a left/right divide.

There’s already a strong correlation between political leaning and age, which is problematic for the future of the fascist movement in America, but this issue falls outside the norm. You’ll find a lot of young conservatives calling for an end to the needless killing of civilians. They won’t call it a genocide because admitting Israel is a genocidal apartheid state is too far for them, but they can at least admit killing tens of thousands of children is not the right path here.

That kind of extremism (e.g not greenlighting any amount of culling of “human animals” Israel feels it needs to do) is unacceptable to the pro-Israel lobby, and they’re not used to getting this kind of pushback from the American public.

As someone who has primarily used spaces, I still use the tab key. I sincerely hope most space users understand that your editor can expand your tab key into spaces, and people aren’t genuinely going around spamming their spacebar 2->16 times for various indentation levels.

In humans there’s a psychological phenomenon called “crowding out”, essentially it’s hard for our brains to attach multiple, powerful incentives to one activity. Generally the “lesser” ones get crowded out by the more important one.

I’m still young (26), and still feel the same way about programming, I deeply enjoy it. However, I know programmers who were passionate like me when they were younger, and that passion has been slowly drained as they continue to code professionally, and I’ve seen it come back when they move into non-programming roles (be it industry change or moving to management).

Generally you won’t find yourself wanting to program 40 hours a week, 48-50 weeks a year, for 50 years without a substantial break, and yet that’s what capitalism expects of workers. Yet you’ll continue to work because there’s a more important incentive than passion, money.

You need money to survive (food, shelter, etc.) and your brain understands those are more important than fulfilling a passion, that’s why you’ll go to work even if you’re drained mentally. You’ll continue to do that forever so long as you don’t have the financial freedom to do otherwise (which is the goal of capitalists, this is why we have COL-based incomes, so as not to overpay people who live in cheaper areas as it’d allow them the freedom to leave).

Activists don’t need to be one-track minded. They rarely are. I’m a vegan, socialist, anti-fascist who is against the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and for climate justice globally. There’s very strong overlap in these positions. There’s a reason you won’t find a lot of Republican vegans, or pro-Israel socialists.

Yes, sometimes people don’t put in the time to investigate these issues, and I commend you for knowing the limits of your own knowledge, I’ve recommended to people before that it’s better to just say “I don’t know enough about this issue” instead of arriving at an under-researched position. However, it’s not necessary to criticize people who are actually activists, learn about these issues, and go out into the world and advocate for change, so long as they’re advocating for the right thing.

The topic being brought up might ostracize people, but it will also put the topic into people’s minds. People like you might not know what the correct position is here, but you hear the constant pro-Israel propaganda pumped out by the U.S and might arrive at a subconscious conclusion that aligns with the imperial core.

If you hear people speaking out against the apartheid state of Israel, especially people who align with your values, you might be inclined to look into it more, or at the very least not automatically accept U.S propaganda on the issue.

I was part of the vegan cult for years until I read this comment, thank you for saving me.

I was a wimp. I didn’t enjoy the idea of harming and killing animals, I had watched videos of animals being gutted alive and having their throats cut and squirming for literal minutes afterwards. This was uncomfortable, but only because I was a wimp.

After reading your comment I manned up and took my dog and 2 cats, strung them up while they were whimpering (which was hilarious), and slit their throats, cooked their delicious innards, and am finally able to walk again (I was only able to crawl because I had been nutrient deficient for so long despite what my libtard doctors told me).

I’m happy to live in a free country where I can do whatever I want with my property. In China I bet you can’t cook a dog because the government is just a bunch of moralizing leftists. God gave us domain over animals, and so I get to choose what I want to do with the animals I purchase.

If you’re not a vegan this is a super weird take. Hell, as a vegan myself, I don’t have a massive issue with trading pig lives for human lives. Yes it’d be ideal if we did it in other ways, but there’s an actually decent argument that it’s permissible and even good to save humans by killing animals.

Killing pigs because “mmm bacon” though? Yeah that’s a bad reason. Pleasure doesn’t permit suffering, most humans understand that unlees it’s their own pleasure they’re talking about.

No way could this clusterfuck of IP (owning thoughts), the worry of AI “taking jobs” (e.g doing work that would otherwise be done by humans), and selling of the work on a marketplace at all be tied to the idea of capitalism.

In other economic systems, having work automated would be a good thing, not an existential threat to the functioning of our entire global economy. I’m blown away that people don’t understand that.

I hate the phrasing “terrorist group” here. Not because what happened here wasn’t an atrocity, but because people generally refuse to call state-backed violence “terrorist” violence. The word terrorism is incredibly broad, easily describing a ton of things Israel does. Yet, we refuse to call them a terrorist organization.

Israel slaughtered hundreds of protesters 4 years ago in Gaza.

Israel and Egypt have been blockading the Gaza strip in violation of the GCIV since 2007.

In 2014, a triple-homicide was committed. Israel claimed it was Hamas, and arrested hundreds of Palestinians. Hamas sent rockets into Israel, killing 2 people, and Israel initiated Operation Protective Edge, killing thousands of Palestinians.

Not to mention the entire Israel-Palestine conflict can be traced back about 100 years, where imperialist Britain endorsed the idea of a Jewish homeland in Palestine in the Balfour Declaration. Eventually leading to the formation of Israel in the late 40s and the subsequent ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, forcing nearly a million natives to move to make way for Israel.

“terrorism” is politically charged language with the intent of making us sympathize with a certain side. Of course we’ll side with the “Israel state” and against the “Hamas terrorist group”. The language used to describe these groups already prescribes how we should view them. Western media will never describe Israel’s atrocities as terrorist actions, so people will dismiss the slaughter of tens or even hundreds of thousands of innocent Palestinians as “just war”.

I’m glad you brought this up, because yeah we’re all selling our bodies and time. I wouldn’t say this means we consent, though. We don’t need to change what consent means to make capitalism sound better than it is.

If you’re “incentivized” (e.g will be starved and punished otherwise) by a system to do something you hate, you can’t call that consent.

If you had a system where women were raised and then presented with the option of either having sex with you & being allowed to participate in modern society, or being discarded in the wilderness, not being allowed to even build anywhere/make it on your own because all the land is owned by either private individuals or the government, then those women aren’t free.

As we agree, just by changing the demand from “have sex” to “do manual labor” or “rent out your mind so someone else can own the product of your thoughts (IP)” doesn’t change whether or not it’s consensual.

What’s actually being punished? Would she have been sentenced to 8.5 years in prison if she pushed an 87 year old who was slightly less frail and instead of dying sustained major injuries? Would she have been sentenced if she pushed an extraordinarily healthy 87 year old who knew how to gracefully fall and sustained no serious injuries?

It seems that the act of pushing alone isn’t enough to sentence a person to nearly a decade in prison. There was likely no intention to kill, though that was the outcome. What if she sneezed on the 87 year old, and in a fit of panic the 87 year old fell over and died? Again, no intention to kill, though that would still be the outcome.

I think it’s clear this should be punished more intensely than sneezing, pushing an old person would very commonly result in serious injury, so this is definitely assault.

Yeah choosing to abstain from eating certain animals for moral reasons (dogs/cats/cows/horses) and not others (pigs/chickens/fish) is definitely weird. Though the majority of people in western society fall into this category, you just moved one more animal across the boundary due to normalization. If you were brought up with pigs, chickens, and fish you’d probably abstain from those too.

The real question to ask though is despite normalization, what’s actually the right thing to do? Is it actually okay that some people eat dogs, cats, and cows? Or is it wrong to do this?

People should put more effort into reconciling this dissonance, because slaughter and oppression is not a matter we should leave up to the normalization of society to decide. Society has countless times normalized immoral things.

Some people prefer using keyboards to navigate.

I’m an i3wm, neovim, zellij user and WoW player. I have so many bindings that I use to navigate or do things, and I’ve optimized/automated away things that are repetitive to me.

Zellij follows the unix philosophy in my book of being a good multiplexer. Sure, Intellij is also a sort of multiplexer with panes and terminal Windows, but I can’t use spotify_player and navigate around it inside Intellij like I can within zellij.

Essentially I like installing a tool for doing one thing well, and then combining tools to make my environment fully usable. It allowed me to super easily swap out tmux for zellij when I found I preferred it, but I can’t swap out Intellij’s paning system for VScode’s if I find I prefer it.

“post-scarcity” in this context doesn’t mean “everyone gets everything they want whenever they want it”. Maybe I want to own a planet, but there aren’t enough planets to go around, and nobody actually believes in a future where everyone can get their own planet.

When talking about these things, it’s best not to assume the most ridiculous interpretation of what the other person is saying. e.g instead of reading “post-scarcity” to mean “everyone gets everything all the time no matter what”, read it to mean “everyone gets what they need”.

also for what it’s worth, I’ve been an ethical vegan for several years after being a die-hard meat eater and literally convincing people close to me to move away from veganism/vegetarianism exactly for health reasons (I had the same misconception you did about veganism). After actually going vegan, doing absolutely no meal planning, no exercise, no calorie counting, still eating mostly frozen food and pickup, my blood pressure as a lean 6’1 mid 20s male has gone from pre-hypertension to normal levels. I get my blood checked regularly and I’m far healthier than I was when I was downing popeyes, jersey mikes, and five guys several times a week. And I’m not just eating salads or whatever, I’m usually having vegan buffalo “chicken” or beyond burgers.

I don’t advocate veganism based on health benefits (veganism is an ethical philosophy), but vegan diets are baseline much healthier than the baseline for non-vegan diets. You can’t go as wrong with them as the vast majority of Americans do with their diets.

As an extension to this comment, digital media is a perfect example of pure artificial scarcity. You can at least imagine a world where food or homes are scarce, it’s not our world, but it can be imagined. The same is not true of distributing digital media, and yet it’s still artificially scarce.

Without scarcity in capitalism things lack value. That is extremely problematic.

Within the context of one person’s career, socialism on its own can do quite a bit to transform people’s relationship to their workplace. No longer would your job be at risk because you’ve all done too well and it’s to “cut labor costs” while profits soar. No longer would you be worried about automating away your job, instead you’d gladly automate your job away and then the whole organization could lower how much work needs to be done as things get more and more automated.

Democracy would massively improve work-life balance.

Of course this comes with problems, all of which exist in capitalism (how do we care for people outside of these organizations who won’t have access to work, for example). But if I had to choose between market socialism and capitalism, the choice is pretty clear, and it’s something much easier for liberals to stomach.

I didn’t compare capitalism to slavery. I said the word slavery. The first paragraph wasn’t demonstrating a comparison, it was demonstrating a principle (principles are universalized, comparisons aren’t). The idea that every system has positives, but those systems can still be horrifically bad.

I don’t know if it’s emotion that’s clouding your reading comprehension, I hope it is, because then you can calm down and have a reasonable conversation. If it’s not, then this conversation isn’t worth having because you won’t understand half of what I’m saying. Literally 50% of your last message was you misrepresenting what I was saying.

A capitalist society cannot enact socialist policies. It can enact “social” policies. These policies are inspired by socialism, and often advocated for by socialists, but the policies themselves are not socialist policies. Capitalism is an economic system where the means of production are privately owned, and socialism is an economic system where the means of production are socially owned. If private (not personal) property exists, it’s not socialism. It’s not necessarily capitalism (you could have other systems with private property), but in our world it always is.

Welfare capitalism, where these social policies exist, is a well established ideology that has been around for about 80 years in any serious form, and yeah welfare can be used to address some of the negative tendencies of capitalism, but it doesn’t fix them. It’s applying a band-aid fix, not addressing the problem. In the real world what this means is there’s a class of people always working to remove those regulations and welfare because their class interests are opposed to ours.

Class distinctions cannot be solved with a regulation, they have to be solved with a societal restructuring. Our legal system does not support the idea of abolishing private property and by extension classes.