James Gilligan: Unequal societies are not only the most violent; they are also the least productive. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote5532
James Gilligan: The political rhetoric of the ruling class claims to want to decrease the rate of violence. It advocates making the deadliest weapons, from handguns to assault rifles, freely available to as many people as possible; increasing the rate of capital punishment; imprisoning as many people as possible; and making the conditions in which they are incarcerated more and more brutalizing; depriving prison inmates of the opportunity to acquire education which could help them to renounce their criminal violence. All this is pursued in the name of being "tough on crime" and "tough on criminals"; but however "tough" these policies may be on criminals, they are, in fact, the most effective way to promote crime and violence. This deceptive rhetoric still fools millions of voters. This brilliant strategy also labels those policies that would decrease the rates of crime and violence, as being "soft on crime. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote5533
James Gilligan: The traditional defense of class stratification and the existence of a "leisure class", ever since the rise of civilization, from both Plato and Aristotle as well as from more recent social thinkers, is that a leisure class is needed in order to have the time and energy for the specialized intellectual development and technological skills that are necessary preconditions for civilization; and "leisure class" has always meant a group with a guaranteed income — i.e. those who did not have to work for a living. Implicit in this argument is the assumption (which I happen to think is correct, as I think the history and development of civilization proves) that when people are freed from the necessity to work — that is, when work is freely chosen rather than slavery or wage-slavery (i.e. "work or starve"), they do not just vegetate in a state of "passivity and dependency." Rather, they engage in much more creative work. Coercion creates an incentive for "passive aggressiveness," because when overpowered and helpless there is no other way to express the minimal degree of autonomy that people need in order to maintain any semblance of self-esteem, dignity, and pride. Furthermore, when work is a means to and end — working in order to eat — then it is, in Marx's terms, "alienated" labor. Labor can only be liberated from alienation when work is an end in itself, entered into freely as the expression of spontaneous and voluntary creativity, curiosity, playfulness, initiative, and sociability — that is, the sense of solidarity with the community, the fulfillment of one's true and "essential" human nature as "social" and "political" animals, to be fulfilled and made human by their full participation in a culture. In short, the contradiction in the old defense of class stratification is that it defends leisure for the leisure class, but not for the underclass. With reference to the underclass, leisure is said to destroy the incentive to work, leads to slothfulness and self-indulgence, and retards cognitive and moral development. When applied to the leisure class, the concept evokes an image of Plato and Aristotle, whose leisure was based on slave labor, creating the intellectual foundations of Western civilization; or patrician slave-owners like Washington and Jefferson laying the foundations of American civilization; or creative aristocrats like Count Leo Tolstoy or Bertrand Ear Russell; or, even closer to home, of our own sons and daughters (or of ourselves, when we were young adults) being freed from the stultifying tasks of earning a living until well into our adult years so that we could study in expensive universities to gain specialized knowledge and skills. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote5534
I'm going to be a very mild troll here...
Hey y'all! Say Hi to my delightful sister! @emilie_stims
She's new to the whole fediverse thing and a little overwhelmed. If you want to catch her interest, I recommend talking about birds, ren faire, singing, and folklore as some easy topics!
But do me a favor and let her know how friendly the fediverse is ❤
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So the root thing behind this that we only relatively recently figured out is that much of it comes from us having value based identities (as opposed to organization/association based identities).
Allistics tend to have much more fluid relationships to their values, because while important, their values aren't fundamentally who they are. Instead their identities are based off of their social structures (think things like "team spirit", "hometown pride", etc). Their values shift based on whether people are watching and how their actions relate to the groups they associate themselves with.
We on the other hand typically root our value purely in our values: the choices and actions we make. We're consistent regardless of whether someone is watching, as well as whether or not the thing impacts groups we're a part of. (things like "If it can be destroyed by the truth then it should be")
So of course we're angered by injustice... it's people and groups around us betraying their own values constantly. And so often one of our key values is "stand up against oppression", so we'd be betraying ourselves if we didn't get infuriated.
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I might actually end up using Signal.
My issue has always been how it takes over your phone number...
https://theintercept.com/2024/03/04/signal-app-username-phone-number-privacy/
Signal’s New Usernames Help Keep the Cops Out of Your Data
Ephemeral usernames instead of phone numbers safeguard privacy — and makes the Signal messenger app even harder to subpoena.Micah Lee (The Intercept)
Shiri Bailem
in reply to Lolita • •Edit: Incorrect, see Fabio's response
@Lolita as far as I'm aware there's no user level language option, it can only be set for the server.
So for a different language interface you have to find a server in that language.
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Raroun
in reply to Lolita • • •@Lolita
you can add
?lang=en
to the url which will temporarily switch the displayed language.Example:
https://friendica.opensocial.space/?lang=en
for englishhttps://friendica.opensocial.space/?lang=de
for germanShiri Bailem likes this.
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Marco R.
in reply to Lolita • • •Friendica Support reshared this.