FanonFan [comrade/them, any]

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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: September 10th, 2023

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  • I mean the idea is that good urban planning would enable shorter and more frequent grocery store trips. Rather than a supercenter supplying everyone within 30 miles, requiring long drives, you’d have things distributed by need, i.e. general food stores every couple miles, more specialist places potentially farther away. Our current layout and shopping habits are contingent on car infrastructure and massive federal subsidies.

    Would also decrease waste and increase general health, since fresher, less processed food could be purchased.








  • Empathy is probably your best bet as far as a single variable goes. But otherwise we’re talking about something that’s incredibly complex on multiple levels, making it near impossible to address as a whole.

    I like to envision human behavior and consciousness as a network of tensions and influences. (Perceived) material interests are one such tension, a particularly strong one. Strong enough that I feel confident saying that in general, people will tend to drift towards approximating an ethic that aligns with their material conditions.

    The archetypes and behaviors modeled for us in our childhood and throughout our lives are a sort of structure that these forces interact with. We may have empathetic or selfish responses modeled for us by our parents, so those are the responses that spring to our minds when decisions arise. Good behavior modeling could mean the inherent tension towards self interest may be mediated or tempered by the limits of behavior we think to enact. Parents have a big impact on this early on, but so do later role models as well as media portrayals of people.

    Social cohesion can be a big tension on people, incentivizing them to not act outside of group norms out of fear of being ostracized. Or on a more subconscious level, perhaps acting out of a “self” interest that benefits the social group, because the lines between Self and Other become blurred. Extending beyond the small self to consider the well-being of the large “Self”, sometimes even at the expense of the small self.

    Critical theory may be of interest to you.






  • Regarding the latter concern, I think a lot of this type of thinking comes from misconceptions about how evolution works, largely perpetuated by our culture to be fair.

    But most people think evolution is an external pressure on the level of the individual. Which, it is, kinda-- that’s one scope of evolution. But evolutionary pressure happens on all levels in different ways: one family against others, one tribe against others, one social group against others, one species against others, etc. And networks of cooperation are just as influential as networks of competition, all happening at the same time in a churning mass of energies.

    So rather than thinking that individual humans are losing hardiness to evolution, think of it as our species gaining hardiness through specialization and technology, evolution taking place outside of our individual bodies. It’s why we have language instead of tusks.


  • I mean, malevolent to the degree that their interests are diametrically opposed to our interests. To the NSA, more avenues of data collection are good, so they will do what they can to expand. To Amazon, more profit is good, so they will sell as many devices as possible and sell as much private information as possible for as much money as possible. To police and federal agencies, more arrests and more political control is good, so they will use information gathered by these devices to the extent allowed by law (and further).

    If you’re someone who values privacy and freedom then those entities’ actions could be called malevolent, even if they’re just acting in their best interest. If you don’t care about those things then it’s probably no big deal I guess.