The problem, and the trick, of this word-game regarding empathy, is frequently the removal of context. For example, when you talk about "forcing mentally ill people on the street to get treatment," we divorce the practical realities and current context of what that entails. To illuminate further, if we had an ideal system of treatment and system of judging when it was OK to override people's autonomy and dignity, it would be far less problematic to force homeless, mentally ill people to get treatment. The facts are, this is simply far from the case, where in practical reality lies a brutal system whereby we make their autonomy illegal, even their bodily autonomy to resist having mind-altering drugs with severe side-effects pumped into their bodies, for the sake of comfort of those passing by. Likewise, we can delve into your dismissal of the semiotic game you play with legalism as a contingency for compassion, actually weighing the harm of particular categories of cases, and voiding context of the realities of immigrant families attempting to make a better life.
I don't think your comment even addresses what they argue. In the case of the drug addicted homeless person with mental health issues, context doesn't change that different people have different perspectives. For example, I believe that the system is imperfect, and yet it is still cruel and unjust for both the homeless person and innocent members of society who are the victims of violent crime for said homeless person to be allowed to roam free. You might believe that the risk to themselves and others is acceptable to uphold your notion of civil liberties. Neither of us are objectively right or wrong, and that is the issue with the definition of empathy above. It works for both of us. We're both empathetic, even though we want opposite outcomes.
Maybe we don't even need to change the definition of empathy. We just have to accept that it means different things to different people.
I have empathy for the person who wants to improve their family's life and I have empathy for the farmer who needs talented workers from the global south [1] but we will lose our republic if we don't listen to the concerns of citizens who champ at the bit because they can't legally take LSD or have 8 bullets in a clip or need a catalytic converter in their car that has $100-$1000 of precious metal in it -- facing climate change and other challenges will require the state to ask more of people, not less, and conspicuous displays of illegality either at the top or bottom of society undermine legitimacy and the state's capacity to make those asks.
I've personally helped more than one person with schizo-* conditions get off the street and it's definitely hard to do on an emotional level, whether or not it is a "complex" or "complicated" problem. It's a real ray of hope that better drugs are in the pharmacy in in the pipeline
For now the embrace of Scientologist [2] Thomas Szasz's anti-psychiatry has real consequences [3]: it drives people out of downtowns, it means people buy from Amazon instead of local businesses, order a private taxi for their burrito instead of going to a restaurant, erodes urban tax bases. State capacity is lost, the economy becomes more monopolized and oligarchical, and people who say they want state capacity and hate oligarchy are really smug about it and dehumanize anyone who disagrees with them [4]
Marxism isn't when you have coops under the capitalist mode of production, because things are still being produced for the sake of profit, not for social and common, and it still has the effect of making living labour serve accumulated labour, among other factors.
That being said, worker coops are a good thing and are often more stable and efficient than conventional businesses^1 (not to mention leading to better outcomes for the workers). The problem comes with economy of scale when it comes to competing against accumulated labour (startup capital is a problem, and by the nature of taking startup capital you are working to multiply the exchange value of accumulated labour). The living labour of the worker coop will still likely be at work to maximize the exchange value of some other's accumulated labour (loans, contracts, etc) or become of the M-C-M model themselves, siding with accumulated labour class (bourgeoisie). That's capital for you.
And front-facing cameras now come with face-smoothing features right out of the box. I have a Galaxy A51 (2020 phone) and even with the default settings, the FFC photos are much more generous in smoothing out your skin, than the regular rear camera.
There's an insidious element present even at the optical hardware level: the limited arms-length distance necessitates wide-angle lenses, which exaggerates the foreground elements and caused an uptick of people thinking their noses were bigger than they "actually" are (at typical viewing distances with our own organic eyeballs) [1]. Perhaps the aggressive smoothing is an attempt to rectify this, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's some automatic computational photography pincushion warping to compensate for the larger-than-reality nose effect.
I sometimes ponder over the alternate timeline where front-facing cameras selfie cams were never invented.
Wait what, is this for real? Do phones automatically beautify photos taken with the selfie cam? Why is this legal?! Isn't this a surefire recipe to create a generation of adolescents with insecurity/body issues?
Every time you take a selfie it subtly confronts you with what could be better about you. It's like a fridge that whispers "you're a fatty" every time you open it.
It's real. In some cases it's turned on by default and some are not
https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/digital-wellbeing/m... has some information (not affiliated, just found this a while ago) . I can't find any info right now about apple or samsung or any of the other big vendors.
I think the impact is fairly damaging. I'm surrounded by people with body image issues, and the impact their issues are having on them is heartbreaking.
Sadly when I discuss this with some folks from that industry they pushed me to an academic debate about "well everything is post-processed after the sensor anyway".
There's probably some debate to be had again about whether this is creating issues, exacerbating existing body image issues, or actually just not having any impact one way or another. But I find myself believing that it is both creating and exacerbating.
And for a while I thought these were "first world issues" but many, if not most, of my friends are not part of the "first world" and they still have them.
I finally realized it after wondering why I looked 'worse' in photos with friends, when the rear camera is being used to take the picture. That's when I did a rear v front photo comparison.
The face smoothing effect is subtle, but it's definitely there. It's not as extreme as "filters" that can basically change your skin tone and texture.
And it's possible that Samsung does this and not others. My last Samsung phone had this as well, and I usually buy from them.
In 1926 Fascist Italy was no worse than the UK and French empires in terms of evil committed and potential to commit more evil. Heck even the Netherlands was comitting more evil at the time.
Fascism as an ideology had an outsized impact on the European political discourse. Partly because many democracies on the continent were young and fragile, partly because radio and cinema had started to spread the news faster than ever, partly because mass-education started at the end of the previous century had resulted in more and more people reading newspapers, partly because it was a reaction other continent-wide movements (socialism and communism) - fascism was observed/fought/supported very keenly across most of Europe since 1920. It generated very strong opinions, as you might imagine, in a context where the role of violence in political life was already hotly debated “on the other side” (leftists had been violently repressed for decades already, so there were demands to respond in kind with terrorist actions and so on - and of course the USSR had taken that to the next level). And it was effectively a negation of representative democracy systems, which were often seen as ineffective in times of deep crisis.
Fascism was heralded by some as “the next step” in political evolution, which rightly horrified a significant number of people who could see the inevitable results. It was not judged by the same parameters of an expansionist foreign power, but by the potential for “evil” in one’s own country.
Cool, posting a far right propaganda website as a reasonable source that the government should just do nothing for the homeless and the homeless will pull themselves up by their bootstraps, because after all, they're only homeless because they're lazy or something, right?
Just look into who owns this website and read some of their other articles, such as under the LGBT tag.
"John Stuart Mill says in his Principles of Political Economy: ‘It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being.’ That is, however, by no means the aim of the application of machinery under capitalism... The machine is a means for producing surplus-value."
"Hence that remarkable phenomenon in the history of modern industry, that machinery sweeps away every moral and natural restriction on the length of the working day. Hence too the economic paradox that the most powerful instrument for reducing labour-time suffers a dialectical inversion and becomes the most unfailing means for turning the whole lifetime of the worker and his family into labour-time at capital’s disposal for its own valorization."
Marx (1867), Capital Volume I, Chapter 15 ("Machinery and Large-Scale Industry")
Censorship-free? What are you talking about? On instances there are moderators that can do as they please and the largest federation doesn't allow instances like Gab in it.
You can say whatever you want on your own instance. That does not mean anyone else is forced to listen to you.
IMHO this is one of the best parts of the fediverse! Moderation is decentralized, so decisions about what is acceptable can be made at much lower levels. This allows for more flexibility and nuance then trying to globally apply a one-size-fits-all set of standards.
That's because every instance has their own rules. Many instances disallow for NSFW content, but that doesn't mean that that content is censored. It's just blocked on that instance. If you don't like those rules, you can switch to another instance.
