In my experience weed can be a gateway drug when you have to buy it from a drug dealer. As an analogy, lots of people end up buying something other than what they went into Target to buy.

Clearly against the spirit of the law but not the letter. I like your style.

Obviously the people who would benefit most from this technology would prefer a doctor and pharmacy to be involved as well. The point is that personal preference doesn’t really mean much when the preferred option is inaccessible and the alternative is death or a dramatically reduced quality of life. You do the best with what you have.

Theoretically that’s true. Can you tell techbros and the media to shut up about AI until it happens though?

The only thing I’m convinced of is the fact that you’re talking like a Russian psy-ops agent. You may not be one but at minimum you’re doing their work for them.

reddit is not the entire internet. Your inability to find info without using Google to search reddit posts says more about your habits than it does the state of the internet.

I don’t know what you guys are talking about. It seems to me there’s always been this many political posts here. Maybe there’s been a slight uptick for the election but it’s not much different than it has been for the entire year I’ve been around.

Fuck tiktok

It’s pretty easy to be in the office and not working. Especially with all those different places to get lost. I really doubt that works out the way they want it to

Well they’re violently protecting their illegal mining operations so violence is certainly part of the equation. Violence isn’t usually profitable on its own though. It’s part of a larger plan to exploit some situation or resource.

They didn’t skip those steps. The market just ignored the fact that they’ve been stepping through those options for the last 30 years because that’s what the market as a whole has been doing. As cliche and annoying as it sounds, this is exactly what late stage capitalism looks like. Once growth through sales becomes difficult, usually from approaching monopolistic size in a market, they only have two options left. They can either cut corners and headcount to save on operational expenses or they can decrease revenue growth. Considering the fact that the central thesis of our economy is the idea that infinite growth is not only possible but the only valid pursuit of any corporation it’s easy to guess what they’re going to do when faced with declining sales or any other detriment to growth.

Why don’t we all help them out? Everyone crank up your AC and open the windows. We’ll kick global warming’s ass in no time.

Gotta make that line go up somehow

And yet they still regularly have a right wing government fucking things up for them. Perhaps turnout is not the primary issue after all.

meating

Nice one

Clearly we disagree about how to evaluate comedy, which is perfectly fine, but I think we’re running into a wall at this point. I think most of what you’re saying is reasonable, we just have different perspectives. I think this quote highlights that best:

It’s not his lived experience, so what could he possibly have to add as an insightful observation?

I don’t think you need to experience something firsthand to make jokes about it. I also don’t think comedy needs to involve insightful observations. That might be the kind of thing you find to be the most funny but that doesn’t make it a rule that needs to be followed at all times. Something you find unfunny, or even offensive, can be a genuine attempt at making people laugh. The fact that you find it offensive doesn’t necessarily mean they’ve done something wrong. In many cases it just means that you don’t like that style of comedy. A comedian telling a joke during a comedy show is not the same as a politician or other public figure justifying a bigoted statement by calling it a joke. Choosing to interpret comments that are clearly and obviously presented as jokes as some sort of expression of a deeply held belief does not seem like a logical approach to me.

“Kyle does not wish Trump harm” and “Dave is transphobic” are both judgments that you’ve made. You’re entitled to hold those opinions but it is important to recognize that you’ve used the same kind of evidence (jokes they made) to reach opposite conclusions about the two men. You dismissed one as a joke that does not reflect the character of the speaker and used the other as indisputable evidence of a character flaw.

The fact that these conclusions line up with your own political beliefs is absolutely relevant because it helps you understand why you are doing it. It’s probably subconscious but you’re viewing the world through a distorted lens when you make inconsistent value judgments like this. Correcting those distortions and becoming more consistent is part of what it means to mature as a human being.

OK, let’s assume for the sake of the argument that everything you just said is 100% correct. Why aren’t you also saying Dave Chapelle is a pedophile, or a racist, or a homophobe? Children, racial minorities, and gay men are all other groups he made jokes about and they all fit your criteria of “people at danger in our society”.

The fact that transphobic is the only descriptor I hear about that show suggests to me that this is not really the criteria you’re using to evaluate the situation, it’s merely convenient cover to give when pressed that will pacify most people. At minimum it means you’re giving those other comments a pass as jokes and choosing not to do so with his trans jokes and that is absolutely inconsistent no matter how you try and spin it.

You say that like “no punching down” is an unbreakable rule of comedy. Maybe in your opinion it should be but I don’t think that’s ever been true in reality, certainly not for big name comedians as a collective.

Besides, that’s only your interpretation of the situation and it requires that you assume Dave actually believes everything he says in his comedy shows which is demonstrably untrue for other subject matter he covers. You don’t assume he rapes kids even though he made a joke in that same special where that was the premise. Without that assumption there is no controversy so maybe we should stop assuming the worst about people’s intentions. That way we don’t have to concern ourselves with pointless conjecture.

Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t think much of his trans material was very funny, but that doesn’t mean I have to jump to the conclusion that he’s a piece of shit like the internet wants me to. He’s a comedian with an incendiary style which makes it quite literally his job to say stuff like that.

I get what you’re saying. I’ve got a similar background and it sounds like we have a lot in common in terms of perspective as well.

You’re right, consistency is clearly not important to the more conservative among us. That ship sailed long ago. However, that’s one of the things that I strive to be as much as possible. If one of my beliefs can’t be defended in all circumstances then I do my best to let it go, or at least recognize the fact that it’s situational and therefore not deserving of being presented as unassailable. The subject at hand is pretty inconsequential, all things considered, but I feel pretty confident in making the blanket statement that all jokes should be interpreted as such and not subject to the same scrutiny that the same statement would warrant in a different context.

Of course there are still such things as jokes in poor taste, racist jokes, mean jokes, etc. but at the end of the day a joke is what they are. It’s not a life motto or a campaign slogan it’s just something that’s supposed to make people laugh. Whether or not they accomplish that goal is largely irrelevant as long as that was the primary intent of the person who said it.