Skip Navigation
InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)OP

A contrarian isn’t one who always objects - that’s a confirmist of a different sort. A contrarian reasons independently, from the ground up, and resists pressure to conform.

  • Naval Ravikant
Posts
18
Comments
621
Joined
3 mo. ago
  • Young men are struggling badly, and almost no one seems to take it seriously. A lot of them want to man up - but the message they get from much of the media is to man down. I saw a Reddit thread asking who young boys could look up to as a role model, and the top answer was Aragorn. You literally have to turn to fictional characters to find someone broadly seen as decent.

    They gravitate toward people like Andrew Tate (and Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Jocko Willink, David Goggins, etc.) because those are some of the only public voices telling them it’s okay to be a man - and to embrace masculine traits - without apology.

  • You’re moving the goalposts again.

    This discussion isn’t about killing children - it’s about war crimes, specifically Hamas targeting Israeli civilians with indiscriminate rocket fire. That alone meets the definition under international law, and I’ve already explained why. You haven’t addressed it - you’ve just dodged, reframed, and shifted the subject every time.

    At this point, it’s clear you’re not engaging with what I’m saying. You’re cycling through bad faith tactics - redefining terms, demanding irrelevant proof, personal attacks and pretending I haven’t answered you. If you can’t acknowledge even the most blatant example of a war crime, then you're not here to discuss - you're here to deny.

  • You're the one who asked for an example of a war crime, and when I gave one, you shifted the goalposts. Criticizing Hamas doesn't mean I'm pro-Israel. I can just as easily point to Israeli war crimes like shooting civilians and aid workers. Instead of engaging with the example I gave, you're dodging the substance and resorting to personal attacks and false binaries.

  • What do you actually get out of being rude to strangers online for no reason? We’ve never even interacted before. You just show up in a space that’s meant to be about good vibes, and your first instinct is to insult someone - not just for being wrong, but even more for admitting it.

  • We started with a simple question: has Hamas committed war crimes? I answered with one of the most straightforward examples - targeting civilians inside Israel with unguided rockets. Instead of engaging with that, you’ve dodged into historical grievances, vague accusations, and tried to redefine civilians out of existence. That’s not a discussion - it’s deflection.

    Even if you believe Israel was illegitimately founded, that has zero bearing on whether it's lawful to intentionally attack civilians. Nothing in international law, Marxism, or basic ethics permits that. Squatting on someone’s land doesn’t make it legal to kill their children.

    If your position requires denying the civilian status of an entire population and justifying war crimes as resistance, then you’re not debating in good faith - you’re rationalizing atrocities.

    The more we are aware of the responsibility that falls on the party of the revolutionary class, the more resolutely must we oppose terrorism.

    Lenin, 1906

  • You’re moving the goalposts. I was clearly talking about civilians inside Israel’s 1948 borders - people Hamas has indiscriminately targeted for years, including with rockets and the October 7th massacre. Shifting the focus to “settlers” is a red herring.

    Even then, the claim that settlers aren’t civilians is legally false. Under international law, civilians are anyone not directly participating in hostilities. That includes settlers, however one feels about the legality of the settlements. Civilian protections don’t vanish based on where someone lives.

    Targeting civilians - whether in Tel Aviv or an outpost - is a war crime. The right to resist doesn’t override the laws of war. Trying to justify indiscriminate violence by redefining who counts as a civilian isn’t just wrong - it’s morally bankrupt.

  • You're misrepresenting international law pretty severely here. The UN Charter does support the right of peoples to self-determination, and yes, that principle has been reaffirmed in various General Assembly resolutions, especially in the context of decolonization and occupation. But nowhere in the Charter - or in any binding international legal document - does it say it's lawful to target civilians, including settlers, with indiscriminate weapons.

    That claim usually stems from a misreading of UN General Assembly resolutions which acknowledged the right of occupied peoples to resist. But even those non-binding resolutions do not override the Geneva Conventions, which are binding and universally recognized. The Geneva Conventions make it crystal clear that civilians are protected from attack at all times, regardless of their location, nationality, or political status.

    Launching unguided rockets into civilian areas is a textbook example of an indiscriminate attack, and it's a war crime under international humanitarian law. The right to resist occupation doesn’t mean you get to ignore the rules of war.

  • Choosing to filter out political content from your social media feed isn’t necessarily about denial or apathy. For many people, it's a conscious decision to preserve their mental clarity and avoid being constantly pulled into emotionally charged, tribal, or manipulative discourse. Being well-informed doesn’t require immersing yourself in an endless stream of outrage, nor does stepping back from that mean you’re turning a blind eye to anything.

    There’s a difference between ignoring reality and choosing how and when to engage with it. Most of what passes for political content online isn’t a sober presentation of facts or ideas - it’s performance, manufactured outrage, and algorithm-driven noise. If someone wants to stay sane and focus on things they can actually influence in their immediate life, I don’t see that as sticking their head in the sand. I see it as setting healhy boundaries in an environment that’s often designed to provoke rather than inform.

    People aren’t morally obligated to be constantly exposed to negativity just to prove they care. In fact, thoughtful action tends to come from those who can step back from the noise and think clearly, not from those who are perpetually consumed by it.

  • I agree. I’m getting pretty tired of your condescending tone. I’ve looked past your false accusation about me supposedly downvoting you, ignored the rude “explain or GTFO” remark, and even politely asked you to clarify what you were asking so I could give you a more helpful answer - but you just keep going with the same behavior.

    You have a nice day.

  • It’s about as effective as talking about it on social media all day, every day. The people making real change are out in the real world doing concrete things - not just posting about it online. Shaming people for not wanting to be miserable 24/7 because of the constant firehose of bad news isn’t just unproductive - it’s counterproductive.

  • I just told you. I'm speaking of the human brain.

    Wetware is a term drawn from the computer-related idea of hardware or software, but applied to biological life forms.

    The prefix "wet" is a reference to the water found in living creatures. Wetware is used to describe the elements equivalent to hardware and software found in a person, especially the central nervous system (CNS) and the human mind.

    Source

  • You could be a brain in a vat - what you experience in that case would effectively be a simulation running on wetware instead of silica. But that still wouldn’t change the fact that what you’re experiencing is happening right now from your subjective point of view. Even if this were just a pre-recorded memory from someone else, it still feels like the present moment to you.

    Everything you perceive could be smoke and mirrors, completely fake - but the one thing that remains undeniably true is that it feels like something, not nothing. Even a psychedelic trip, as bizarre or unreal as it may seem, is still just another appearance in consciousness. And for that to happen, your biological body needs to be alive. If you're dead, there’s nothing left that could have - or host - that experience.

  • Lemmy Be Wholesome @lemmy.world
    Opinionhaver @feddit.uk

    I got sent a screenshot from a local Facebook group where someone was thanking "whoever" cleared the fallen tree from the trail around the lake near me.

    As someone who's been dealing with a lot of low mood lately, it really brightens my day to hear someone express gratitude for my anonymous, unauthorized trail maintenance.

    Text blurred for privacy reasons.

    Dull Men's Club @lemmy.world
    Opinionhaver @feddit.uk

    I fixed my gf's thongs

    Nice to know I hadn't been saving all those different size keyrings for nothing. Fast fashion? Not on my watch.

    Dull Men's Club @lemmy.world
    Opinionhaver @feddit.uk

    I cleaned the birdhouses on my yard

    It’s been a few years. I chuckled a bit at this - it looks like a couple of nests stacked on top of each other. Also, it makes me feel weirdly proud to see that birds have accepted my self-made houses for nesting.

    Woodworking @lemmy.ca
    Opinionhaver @feddit.uk

    Best way to attach PVC pipe onto plywood on my custom toolbox project?

    I'm still not quite happy with my current toolbox, so I’ve decided to design my own. I intend to follow the “first order retrievability” principle, meaning every tool should be accessible with one hand, without having to move anything else out of the way. I’ve made fixed tool holders from PVC pipe before - it’s a familiar, readily available material for me.

    I haven’t settled on the final design yet - this sketch is just to get the idea across. My main issue is figuring out how to secure the pipes to the plywood frame. I can screw the first row into the sides and central divider, but the next row would either need to be attached to the surrounding pipes or mounted from the bottom. I’ve used screws thru the base before, and while it works, it tends to deform the pipe. I’m wondering if there’s an alternative I’m overlooking - ideally something that can also be disassembled later, since the design will probably go through several iterations.

    I’m also open to any tips or ideas on what els

    Showerthoughts @lemmy.world
    Opinionhaver @feddit.uk

    I've never said "I love you" to my sister

    pics @lemmy.world
    Opinionhaver @feddit.uk

    What people online think I drive when I mention owning a pickup truck versus what I actually drive

    Dull Men's Club @lemmy.world
    Opinionhaver @feddit.uk

    I tried so-called "hot mud" for drywall repair for the first time, and it changes everything

    Drywall jobs are a common occurrence in my line of work. I was fixing a cracked seam at a customer's house and had about a 15 mm deep gap to fill. Generally, I've just used the pre-mixed stuff from a bucket, but that dries so slowly and shrinks so much that a job like this would have needed to be spread over at least four days.

    Decided to give the quick-setting bag stuff a shot, and wow - what a difference. Not only could I pre-fill the gap in one day, but I also managed to get the tape over it, leaving only the finish coat for tomorrow. This will save me literal months over my career.

    I love discovering good new products and tools.

    Showerthoughts @lemmy.world
    Opinionhaver @feddit.uk

    It's quite strange that I can just go online and say a thing and probably atleast a thousand people are going to read it.

    My school used to have 600 people. 1000 is a huge crowd and it can easily be many times more than that. If it was like 300 years ago, then how would you even get 100 people to hear what you have to say?

    Imagine walking onto a stage, in front of a thousand people, and just saying a random thing in the microphone, that you just thought of while stoned and then simply leaving. Alternatively, you could stay by the door and start arguing with the audience members as they're leaving like I'm now probably going to do.

    Ask Lemmy @lemmy.world
    Opinionhaver @feddit.uk

    We now have undeniable proof that one of your core beliefs is objectively wrong. Which one do you think it is and what is the new difficult truth for you to swallow?

    So, in other words: which of your core beliefs do you think has the highest likelihood of being wrong? And by wrong, I don’t necessarily mean the exact opposite - just that the truth is significantly different from what you currently believe it to be.

    No Stupid Questions @lemmy.world
    Opinionhaver @feddit.uk

    How would "banning encryption" even work in practise?

    If a country like the UK decided to ban end-to-end encryption, how would they even enforce it? I understand that they could demand big companies like Apple stop providing such services to their customers and withdraw certain apps from the UK App Store. But what’s stopping someone from simply going online and downloading an app like Session? I mean, piracy is banned too, yet you can still download a torrent client and start pirating. What would a ban like this actually prohibit in the end?

    Showerthoughts @lemmy.world
    Opinionhaver @feddit.uk

    Black and white camera would mostly be sufficient if you're going to the moon

    Unpopular Opinion @lemmy.world
    Opinionhaver @feddit.uk

    Journalists and news platforms should be held accountable for the accuracy of their speculative articles

    If someone writes about things they think will happen, but those things never materialize, they shouldn’t just get to brush it under the rug and act like they never said it. You’ve made millions of people worried over literally nothing. That should come with reputational consequences - not just for the journalist, but also for the platform that amplified their speculation.

    Now obviously, there are things worth writing about even when many unknowns remain. But in those cases, acknowledge the uncertainty - lay out the improbable worst-case scenario, the more likely outcome, and the possibility that the whole issue might just fade away. Just don’t present speculation as certainty when you can’t possibly know, or if you do then own it.

    Ask Lemmy @lemmy.world
    Opinionhaver @feddit.uk

    What is something good you did or regularly do when nobody is watching?

    The Japanese have this term "intoku (陰徳)" which roughly translates to good deeds done in secret. What are some examples of intoku in your own life? Doesn't matter even if it's something minor like picking up trash.

    Bicycles @lemmy.ca
    Opinionhaver @feddit.uk

    The front tire replacement was long overdue

    The bike has over 7,000 km on it, and this was still the original front tire, while the rear one has already been replaced twice. I got lucky - the tire I had been eyeing on was 60% off, so I managed to get two for the price of one.

    The new one is 5.05" wide, compared to the original 4.8". It fits the front just fine, but I’ll have to see if it works on the rear once the current tire wears out. I’d really like to get this wider tire on the rear too - I love how mean it looks.

    The knobs on this Snowshoe 2XL variant are almost twice the length of those on the Avalanche model on the right (when new). I bet that, combined with studs, it would give infinite traction on just about any kind of snow or ice.

    Unpopular Opinion @lemmy.world
    Opinionhaver @feddit.uk

    Most people are hypocrites - especially online

    They say they value truth and honesty, yet they lie when the truth becomes inconvenient. They pride themselves on being accepting and understanding of those who are different, yet they’re the first to label and generalize anyone whose values don’t perfectly align with theirs. They see all the nuance and complexity in their own personality but reduce others to simplistic judgments based on the smallest bits of information. They expect understanding for their own mistakes and shortcomings but are quick to criticize and condemn when someone else slips up. They claim to hate drama and negativity, yet they actively seek it out. They demand to be heard but want to silence those whose opinions they oppose. They call themselves independent thinkers who don’t just follow the crowd, yet they fiercely defend beliefs they’ve never truly questioned.

    I heard someone once say that "It's not a principle if it's not costing you any money" and I think there's a lot truth to that. People aren't holding

    No Stupid Questions @lemmy.world
    Opinionhaver @feddit.uk

    When making a post that fits multiple communities, should I just pick the most relevant/popular one or repost to the other ones as well?

    I guess what I'm essentially asking here is wether you mind seeing the same post several times in your feed? I've done it in the past, but also tend to feel that duplicate posts are a bit annoying.

    You Should Know @lemmy.world
    Opinionhaver @feddit.uk

    YSK: If your house has a split AC unit it probably could use a cleaning

    I had one installed eight years ago when I bought my house. I’ve used it to heat the entire place, but this winter, I struggled to maintain even 20°C indoors on really cold days.

    Well, today I finally brought my air compressor inside and gave the guts of the indoor unit a thorough blasting - and now it feels like an oven in here. I’ve been lowering the thermostat all day, and it’s still way too hot. It literally feels like it’s putting out twice the heat now. I was expecting a slight improvement, but nothing like this.

    Dull Men's Club @lemmy.world
    Opinionhaver @feddit.uk

    I built a zip tie holder

    It's not the first iteration and probably wont be the last either but now atleast they're all in one place.