MaeBorowski [she/her]

Bye! As you slink away, embarrassed to have been so schooled, I want to thank you for proving once again that all "rUzZia is the AgResSSSSoR!" libs are intellectually vacuous and willfully incapable of learning anything about the real world whenever something challenges their simplistic, infantile understanding of it.

Do you know what an ad hominem even is? Apparently not, since nowhere in my comment did I use one. Like there was nothing I said that even came close to an ad hominem but even if there was, this isn’t junior high debate club, nerd.

As for you wanting me to explain to you the fact that Russia is not the aggressor in this conflict, it’s hard to know where to even start, in part because I don’t know how deep your ignorance of history and geopolitics is or what specific pieces of propaganda you believe, but also because there is a hell of a lot of history and context there to cover when answering such a broad question as “why is Russia not the aggressor?” It’s a huge thing to ask someone, not unlike saying to some stranger on the net “Hey, I believe that aliens actually built the pyramids. No? Well if you want to explain that they didn’t, I’m all ears.” It’s saying “My mind is made up on some bullshit, but you challenged it, so feel free to explain ancient Egyptian history, their socioeconomics, their technological capabilities, and other entire disciplines as the necessary context that together would make it clear that my belief is based in ignorance.” Just like in that scenario, there is quite a lot I could talk about to try to get you to recognize the reality of the situation, even though it’s not my job to educate you. So without going into detail, off the top of my head, here are some of the things I could talk about.

I could talk about NATO and how even since the fall of the Soviet Union (which was the ostensible reason for the existence of NATO in the first place) it continued to threaten and antagonize Russia, encircling it with military bases and encroaching upon it with missile systems despite Russia’s requests for economic alliances and even to join the bloc, but how the response of NATO was to ramp up using military threats. I could elaborate about how this was to force Russia to bend the knee even more than it already had, the ultimate goal being complete subjugation to western economic interests agsinst the interests or will of the people of Russia. But I don’t expect that would impress most western liberals who already have their mind made up that Russia is, was, and always will be made up of bad guys, so instead I could talk about the openly US-backed coup in Ukraine that removed the democratically elected party from power and replaced it with literal neo-nazi fascists specifically for the reason that those nazis were anti-Russia. I could talk about how that fascist regime is who is in power now (as they were when Russia entered the conflict) and how they banned all opposition parties, making any that are even remotely pro-Russia illegal and also indefinitely suspended elections. I could talk about how even before the coup, for years NATO had been arming and training neo-nazi terrorist militias as proxy fighting forces (a very common tactic btw) in Ukraine for the purpose of provoking a military conflict with Russia. I could talk about how that fascist regime immediately started an ethnic cleansing campaign in eastern Ukraine of the Russian-speaking populace there. I could talk about how this was escalated into civil war long before February of 2022 and how those regions attempted to become breakaway republics, with Ukraine (rather, the fascist regime ruling Ukraine, but who we all mean now when we talk of “Ukraine” as a political entity) continuously shelling these regions and murdering the civilians that lived there. I could talk about how Russia repeatedly tried to get all this to stop through diplomatic means, including the signing of famous agreements - agreements that not only Ukraine and their NATO backers ended up completely ignoring, but that even western leaders openly admitted they had no intent of honoring and were only made so that they could delay Russia from taking any action to stop the ethnic cleansing, allowing the fascists more time to militarize and slaughter Russian-speakers unopposed. I could talk about how Russia was finally forced to intervene in an ongoing civil war, but how all the dumbass western libs call this an “unprovoked invasion” and instead of seeing the complex economic and political history, let alone the fact that the US had been trying to force something like this to happen, like to pretend it was some ravanchist scheme of that dastardly Putin. And there’s still a ton that that I forgot to mention even as a topic I could talk about. But an actual understanding of these things should make it clear to anyone who is both honest and paying attention that Russia is indeed not the aggressor.

The facts of the matter are that Russians are the aggressors here

I’m glad you let us know in your 3rd sentence that you have no idea what a fact even is and that the rest of your gibberish comment can be immediately discarded. What a cringe, foolish thing to say.

but it also removes human bias element from the equation

That is not possible, and to pretend that it is is itself a significant bias.

Like so many others who get their understanding of events from mainstream western media, you really don’t have a clue as to what’s going on. Here are some things for you to consider.

The fascist Ukrainian leadership is gang pressing civilians on the street into unmarked vans to be sent off to the front lines to die as cannon fodder. This is well documented and is open knowledge. Forced conscription is rampant and even many of those civilians in Ukraine who are against Russia (and not all of them are by any means) are now actively sabotaging the Ukrainian military. (see more on that below).

All along, the US and NATO have demanded that this war continue, despite the fact that Russia has offered reasonable peace terms numerous times, and despite the fact that it was never winnable for Ukraine. NATO (the US) does not give a shit about throwing Ukrainian people into a meat grinder if it means they can take out a few Russians too and continue the grift of enriching western arms manufacturers while plundering the country by privatizing every public asset that once existed there.

What you call a Russian invasion was actually Russia entering into a civil war that was already in progress, a war where the Kiev regime (that took power via western-backed coup by the way) was shelling the Donbas (eastern part of Ukraine), murdering civilians, burning trade unionists alive in their union halls, and trying to ethnically cleanse the Russian-speaking populace that lives there. Most of eastern Ukraine did and still do see Russia as coming to help liberate them, and are fighting against the Ukrainian regime as they have been long before February of '22, but since then have been doing so alongside or as part of Russia.

Ukrainians are dying because the (literal) nazis in control of Ukraine along with their masters NATO, will not allow the war to end so long as any Ukrainian with the ability to fight still lives. And it’s not just Russian weapons and military that is what ends up killing them, regardless of the fact that it is the interest of western imperialists that is ultimately responsible for sending them to their deaths. Ukrainians who refuse to fight have been getting killed from the start by Ukraine, some of them literally shot in the back as they try to flee, or bombed in train stations as they tried to get out of the country. And now children, many of them the children of parents who were already killed, are doing things like sabotaging Ukraine’s military vehicles. And guess what… these kids are getting executed on sight for doing so:

Resistance to military conscription deepens in Ukraine as leaders talk of role as a mercenary power

…

The “twisted world we’re living” in is the real one, not the propaganda-spun fake world you mistakenly believe to be reality. Pry your head out from under the propaganda spigot and look around, you might even then consider joining us in understanding what is actually happening in the world.

Typical hexbear reply

Unfortunately, you are right

Yes, typically hexbear replies are right.

It’s not unfortunate though, it’s simply a matter of having an understanding of the world and a willingness to accept it and engage with it. It’s too bad that you seem not to want that understanding or that you lack the willingness to accept it.

My science is not. I like my bubble.

How can you possibly square that first short sentence with the second? Are you really that willfully hypocritical? Yes, “your” science is political. No science escapes it, and the people who do science thinking themselves and their work is unaffected by their ideology are the most effected by ideology. No wonder you like your bubble - from within it, you don’t have to concern yourself with any of the real world or even the smallest sliver of self reflection. But all it is is a happy, self-reinforcing delusion. You pretend to be someone who appreciates science, but if you truly did, you would be doing everything you can to recognize your unavoidable biases rather than denying them while simultaneously wallowing in them, which is what you are openly admitting to doing whether you realize it or not.

find possibilities how ML can support people with certain tasks

Marxism-Leninism?

Oh, Machine Learning.

Science is not political

in an ideal world maybe, but that is not our world. In reality science is always always political. It is unavoidable.

I just know that my liberal The Guardian-reading parent is going to see this article and think “Ahh, so that explains why Mae has been telling me Biden is even worse than Trump and that North Korea isn’t actually an evil hermit kingdom, even though I know it is. She’s fallen in with these Trump supporter commies. It’s so sad she thinks she’s on the left when horseshoe theory is obviously correct.”

Hinkle being a communist is a psyop. Everyone who benefits from smearing communists and muddying the waters as to what communism even is, like to call him that. And so they do.

Yeah, this is silly (and fun) but avoids the real problem of course. The question can be like you said, “which came first, the chicken or the chicken’s egg?” And for those that still want a literal answer, wikipedia says:

If the question refers to chicken eggs specifically, the answer is still the egg, but the explanation is more complicated.[8] The process by which the chicken arose through the interbreeding and domestication of multiple species of wild jungle fowl is poorly understood, and the point at which this evolving organism became a chicken is a somewhat arbitrary distinction. Whatever criteria one chooses, an animal nearly identical to the modern chicken (i.e., a proto-chicken) laid a fertilized egg that had DNA making it a modern chicken due to mutations in the mother’s ovum, the father’s sperm, or the fertilised zygote.

As an alternative, though it’s a bit more of an ungainly mouthful, I like: “which came first, the first species to lay an egg or the egg of the first species to lay an egg?” That one is a bit harder but you might still be able to tease out an answer. That way I think it gets a bit more into the problem of qualitative vs quantitative when you do (which is partly why I say below that this is related to the problem of the heap). Of course it’s really meant to be a philosophical problem anyway, and in that sense, it remains a paradox. It’s a way of making an analogy for a “causation dilemma” and gets at the idea of infinite regress and the paradoxes that brings up. It’s also related to the sorites paradox or the problem of the heap, which actually is an element discussed in Marxist (more because of Engels) dialectics.

How can a biological male, who was never a female, know the feeling he feels is that of a woman?

How can a biological male who was never a different individual biological male, know the feeling that he feels is that of another man? He can’t! He’s never been another man, only the individual that he is. So he can never know that the way he feels “as a man” is anything at all like how another man might feel “as a man.” However, since as a social species we have empathy we can make reasonable assumptions about how other people feel, in part based on what they say they feel, and no less so because they have different bits between their legs than if they have a different color of hair.

None of us can unambiguously know what it is like to be another person. This is an obvious truism. The way you’re trying to use it to draw this arbitrary line between what people can know about their own feelings, but only as determined by what kind of genitalia they were born with… it’s gross. And whether intended or not, bigoted. People of any and all genders can have empathy for anyone else of any and all genders. We can also know how we feel internally when society around us sees us as we feel we are, versus how we feel internally when society around us sees as as what we feel we are not. The former is good and affirming. The latter is painful and dejecting.

Their biological mechanisms have also been studied and partially understood by science. “Gender feelings”, not so much

Btw, there has been scientific research on transgender issues. Famously, there was a great trove of it that was burned by the Nazis in Germany. You know those infamous book burnings? Yeah, that was transgender scientific research. Fortunately, there has been a lot of other valid scientific studies done since then, too. All of it confirming the things people in this thread have been trying to tell you, even when you call it “fickle” or insist that your society isn’t empathetic enough to ever accept (which I categorically reject.)

It’s easily falsifiable and therefore much harder to definitely call it an observable material concept.

This may be a bit of a nitpick, but you have this backwards. Falsifiability is a prerequisite for any kind of hypothesis to be scientific. If a hypothesis, theory, or model is not falsifiable, what that means is it can never be shown to be wrong (false), and so it is fundamentally not scientific. And in this case, it is the difficulty (the impossibility, even) of falsifying what a person says they’re feeling that puts statements like that on shaky ground, scientifically speaking. Having to take someone at their word is not “easily falsifiable,” it is unfalsifiable, and that’s where the problem lies. If someone says “I feel sad today” then there is virtually no way we can ever prove this statement false: hence it is unfalsifiable. However, given the understanding of that caveat we do scientific studies all the time that involve the subjectivity of a person’s experience, even as a focal point. From the efficacy of depression medication to the polling done in order to sell more products/candidates, countless scientific studies still rely on people self reporting their feelings. The subjectivity just has to be recognized and factored in as part of the study.

In short, the unfalsifiability that is inherent in dealing with human experience doesn’t suddenly make it impossible to study human experience. We just have to control as best we can for things like bias in self reporting and recognizing and taking measures at eliminating reasons participants may have for saying things that aren’t accurate about their experience, and including relevant error margins.

The excuse they’ll use, which actually does has some truth to it, is that bathrooms that get used require upkeep like cleaning, TP, water/electricity, etc. The poor widdle businesses need to recoup their losses. But even with that aside, requiring people to pay in order to do something that everyone needs to do can bring in more money. Like if a person needs to go, especially if it’s urgent, are they going to grab the nearest product and pay as quickly as they can so they can get to the damn toilet, or are they going to run to the next establishment (or more likely in burgerland, get back in their car and drive to the next establishment) that probably also requires them to pay to piss? On top of all of that, it’s a way to discourage unhoused people from existing in the vicinity and “driving away customers.”

Yeah, nothing humane about the people who make up the instance where every user says that food, housing, and healthcare are human rights and should be made accessible to every human being, period. The one that loudly shouts the fact that trans rights are human rights and has provided one of the best safe spaces on the internet for trans people (as the large percentage of trans users that make up hexbear will themselves tell you). The one that frequently has mental health check-ins for their users and offers support to them. The one that uses its mutual aid comm to give real life material support to comrades in need. Nothing humane about them at all, no sirree.

Talking about hexbear here, but lemmygrad is almost as based.