• 14 Posts
  • 208 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 31st, 2023

help-circle



  • There are different ideas about the purpose of imprisonment but the ones I’m aware of are exclusion, deterrence, punishment and rehabilitation. The second two are predicated on prison being worse than freedom, which obviously doesn’t hold for people in a lot of situations. In fact I’ve heard of people comitting minor crimes so they can be let into prison.

    Unless prisons can get really good at rehabilitation then the only way they can be effective is if life outside of prison is healthy and prosperous.




  • You know I think just the freedom of people is enough. People will naturally share and talk about what is important and interesting if they can go where they want and say what they want. They move the information as well as filter it for relevance.

    The internet as we know it today is coercive; most of it is designed and run with opaque, narrow and self-interested goals. It has penetrated our thoughts, feelings, behaviour and culture, with very limited accountability or critical evaluation. And even just the sheer bandwidth of it on a user level is paralysing.

    The internet interacts with the human appetite for information in the same way as processed foods do with our impulse to eat. We’ve freed ourselves from the limitation of supply but do not moderate our demand.

    My own imagining of a better and different internet would be based on people and places rather than screens or other abstractions. We would have plenty of comfortable and non-exclusive public places to meet, excellent train services to get between those places and each others homes (trains are pro-social and have unbeatable efficency) and a system and philosophy of education that is based on critical thinking rather than arbitrary tasks.

    Information technology would be peripheral to our relationships and experience and would be used as a tool to serve our own free interests rather than being an end in itself.









  • Complicated to answer properly but I think that on the whole religion offers a good package. There’s so much variety though and of course not everyone who identifies as religious is sincere; all institutions are attractive for those looking to exploit their influence, whether it’s a religion, government, business etc. I’m interested in the social, moral, philosophical and spiritual aspects of religion but I’m also a bit allergic to institutions and am not humble enough to fit into the sorts of hierarchies that most religions seem to insist on.




  • Excellent post. I hope everyone reads this.

    I’d like to reinforce your point about RSS feeds. I think that being in control of the amount and type of information that infiltrates your thoughts is a form of privacy that we all we need to exercise.

    For those who don’t already know; one great thing about the fediverse is that you can follow hashtags via RSS. You can literally only see the things you want to see, if you want to!