arken

We need to stop calling these sites and services "free". Anything that's financed by ads, spying and profiling is not free, the user is paying with their attention, integrity and right to privacy. This is not nothing.

Presently, it's a shady and dishonest practice since the terms of the transaction are rarely transparent to the consumer; in other words, it's a scam.

Lots of greenwashing going on here too. The nordic countries are just as capitalist as anywhere else, we just had a strong labour movement in the 19th and 20th century. And sadly, a lot of what was won has been slowly whittling away in the last decades due to the complacency and inaction of the generations after.

Well, but what does "caring" mean? It means that their well-being affects your emotions.

That would be an extremely reductive definition that doesn't really tell us much about how caring for others is actually experienced and how it manifests in the world. How would this for example explain sacrificing yourself to save another person, if the very core of caring is to create positive emotions in yourself? Dying is a pretty negative thing to experience and there will be no more positive emotions for you after that. I guess this idea that caring is in its essence transactional feels profound to people because we're so ingrained with capitalist ideology... but it's a lot more complex and multifaceted than that.

Of course, you only ever do things because there's something in it for you,

No, sometimes you do things because you care about other people and want to help them. That you also probably feel better about yourself than you would if you did shitty things all day doesn't mean that feeling is the only and single motivation.

We hear that argument a lot, and though some people's charity may be motivated purely by egoism I don't think it applies to the majority at all. The argument assumes that if doing something makes you feel good, then that feeling must be the sole motivation for that action, which is dubious. And if we follow this logic to its natural conclusion, every action that does not make you feel bad is egoistic, and the concept becomes completely meaningless. Saving a child from falling down a cliff? Egoistic! Intervening when someone is treated unfairly? Egoistic! Giving up your chair for an elderly person on a crowded bus? Egoistic!

Let's take this last (admittedly small, everyday, non-dramatic) example. Sure, you could give up your seat purely because you want to look like a good person to others (although it's doubtful anyone would even notice). It's also possible to experience this feeling called empathy, to see an elderly person struggling to keep their balance while standing up and to want to alleviate that particular suffering. Everyone else is sitting down looking at their phones, so there's no community pressure to speak of. No one would call you out if you just pretended not to notice. And the discomfort from standing up on a really crowded bus on a bumpy road could easily outweigh that little buzz you get from doing good.

I'll go even further; it's even possible, in a scenario like this, to not even think about how it's going to make you feel or your self-image or whatever. You just want to help someone else because it's in your power to do so. If this isn't an example of not being egoistic, what would be? What would be the opposite of egoism? To act completely dispassionately?

And what about someone sacrificing their own life to save another? Striving to do good in the world does feel better, yes, but empathy is also a burden. Still, there are genuinely good people out there, that do good deeds and do not take any credit for it, even do it anonymously. And I can tell you from experience, not all of them walk around on clouds feeling like saints. Some of them even experience crippling guilt because they feel they do not do enough. How is that egoism?

Food service and retail needs to exist, (~~commercial~~ sales) call centers should be banned and their owners shunned from polite society.

I wish I could give this comment more than a simple upvote. I want to mail you a freshly baked cinnamon bun.

As they say, horniness is the stepmother of invention.

Fair point, but I would argue that if you had that kind of experience on twitter, you're weren't really the target demographic.

Desperate and out of touch, yes, but deliberately fucking up a platform and ruining his "Iron Man" persona? He's too stupid and too invested in what people think of him.

There's a version of this conspiracy I could buy though: the Saudis gave him money and stroked his ego knowing that there was no way he wouldn't fuck the whole thing up. Everyone except him knew how this was going to end. That conspiracy I could get behind.

I don't buy this conspiracy theory at all, 1) twitter is disinformation heaven, which is very useful to authoritarian regimes and 2) Musky would never intentionally do anything to harm his public image, he's a textbook narcissist after all.

"I hate that site, I hope someone Musks it up soon"

You mean embedding posts or something else? https://fedi.tips/how-to-embed-mastodon-posts-on-a-website/