• 2 Posts
  • 79 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 10th, 2023

help-circle
  • I was a Teamster when I worked for Sygma, and out of all the unions I’ve been a member of (four, now), the Teamsters were the motherfucking worst. If they were actively trying to take a revolving door of 18- and 19-year-olds just getting their first big-boy jobs and turn them into all into die-hard anti-union voters for life, they couldn’t do a better job than they’re doing right now, and I told my steward that before I quit.

    They designed the whole contract specifically to offload all the real work onto the new guys, protect the older guys when they decided to throw hands on the loading dock, and give as much overtime as possible to the ancient, divorced boomers with no family to go home to, that they could spend pretending to sweep the floors while the trainees finished the actual loading. Guys would bid order picking, then use seniority to bump bid loads/receivers off their jobs and wouldn’t pick a single case for the whole contract, while getting paid picker bonuses and shift differentials.

    And just to rub salt into the wound, those perks (bumping lower guys off their bid jobs and “sweeping the floor” during overtime) were specifically written out of the latest contract, so only the guys hired under the previous contract would ever get to do them. They straight robbed those kids of even anything to look forward to if they toughed out the low-seniority years. They also negotiated a different pay scale for under 5 years, 5-10 years, and 10 years in, and you can guess which end of that they weighted the raises toward. It was a complete shitshow, and when kids would quit, the Teamsters would keep their initiation fee (taken out of the first three paychecks). You could call to try to get it back, but the best they’d do would be to put it towards your initiation fee for your next Teamster job, as if any of those kids would ever willingly subject themselves to that shit ever again.

    AND THERE’S MORE. I just don’t feel like typing up a fucking novel on it. Don’t even get me started on the shady shit they did during the contract negotiations I was actually present for. It was worse than maddening; it felt like it was specifically crafted by the senior guys to make sure that ladder was pulled up as high as they could behind them, while not actually making any waves for the company. And the safety issues they ignored and covered up, and the fancy fucking “union meetings” they never told anyone about so that they were only attended by the office reps, because they were being held at the most expensive restaurants in the city, on the union’s dime, and the number of stewards who were literally fucking floor supervisors, and on, and on, and on…

    UIW was kind of spineless and milquetoast, but they took care of us. The Teamsters are fucking old-school mob racket motherfuckers who are single-handedly responsible for an entire generation of workers who think all unions are a scam.






  • This is Ohio. The Republicans will just keep calling referendums on the same thing over and over again until they get the results they want. They don’t care. They literally use dirty tricks to circumvent what the citizens want every year. Just look at how medical marijuana played out.

    First try: The governor gets the bank to cancel the account of the pro-weed side, because the organization had the word “marijuana” in its name. No bank account, can’t be a real group, can’t put something on the ballot. Sucks to be you.

    Second try: The legislature tried and failed to keep the legal weed issue off the ballot. So instead, they put their own weed issue on the ballot that would forever prevent legal weed in Ohio (even if the first issue passed), and then gave it a name that was almost identical to the pro-weed issue. I seem to remember that neither ended up passing because voters were, as intended, confused, and just having the second issue on the ballot split the vote.

    Third try: The issue got on the ballot, the polls were high, everyone in the state basically was ready to stand out in the rain and vote in favor of medical marijuana. So the legislature called a special session and passed their own legal medical marijuana law, and then convinced the courts that their law made the ballot issue obsolete, so it was thrown out.

    BUT, the legislature’s version was a clusterfuck in that the legislature had to personally approve applications for grow ops and dispensaries. A few hundred businesses applied for the permit, and, last I checked, 0 were approved. This led to a situation where it was legal to have medical marijuana, but not legal to buy or grow it, or bring it in from out of state. Which means if you get caught with weed, the cops couldn’t cite you for having weed (if you had your med card), but they could site you for buying or transporting that weed, because there’s no way to legally get it in the state.

    That was like six or seven years ago, and I haven’t kept up with it, but if there’s a single legal dispensary in Ohio, I will be incredibly surprised. The whole point was to not approve any.


  • I believe the lack of charges for lying to Congress does lend a little credibility to the story he tells.

    The tobacco execs who testified to Congress that nicotine was harmless and non-addictive didn’t get charges, either. Does that lend credibility to the claim that cigarettes are good for you?

    Fuck no, it doesn’t. Because nobody has ever been charged for lying to Congress. Even when they’ve been bald-faced directly lying to Congress.




  • And from images of ice cascading into the sea, you genuinely drew the conclusion that Antarctica would be completely ice-free in less than 12 years?

    So, nobody actually told you that, you just decided it was true after seeing video of ice falling into the sea. But that decision was firm enough in your mind to cause you to believe that, since there is still some ice in 2023, the doom-sayers of the Discovery channel were wrong and we had nothing to worry about?

    Fascinating. I wish I had the ability to make those kinds of amazing leaps of reasoning on subjects I know absolutely nothing about and then believe them hard enough to post snarky shit in public.





  • All of my bitterness and cynicism in my previous post is actually, now that I sit down and think about it, motivated by concern. For you, for our community, for all of us. I’ve gotten to a point where I have nothing left to fight with; I can only use the privilege that comes with my specific level of social function and direction of hyperfocus to hide (as much as possible) and pass as a slightly-weird member of NT culture.

    As worried as I am that you and others will come to the same fate, I’m also glad that there are still people with some fight in them, who love talking about the community and trying to spread their knowledge with those outside of it. You’re doing a good thing. I just worry about you while you’re doing it, and I’m not hopeful that it will help in the long run.

    But I would love nothing more than to be proven wrong.


  • We are literally “in peril” either way.

    Yes, you’re right.

    How about NT have some personal fucking growth and acknowledge that they have not given half a shit about how much ND people have contributed to society while being shat on CONSTANTLY for being socially different.

    Great idea. Will never happen. Not in a million giggity years. It’s like saying the best way to stop mountain lion attacks is to teach mountain lions to not attack.

    Treating NTs and the society they built like they are all rational actors who give a fuck is the most dangerous, naive, and stupid thing I ever did in my life. We must treat them like impersonal, implacable forces of nature that cannot be educated or reasoned with, only prepared for so that we can mitigate their inevitable destructive effects on our lives.

    I spent most of my life trying to “inform” the NT-society hurricane about how much it hurts me. It’s pointless. Give up, spend your energy and your focus on figuring out how to protect yourself from them. The results on your everyday life will be far better.


  • The keyword doesn’t make the statements credible. This is exactly what I’m talking about. The description of the fallacy is just as credible as the name of the fallacy. You’re doing the same thing I’m criticizing in other people; thinking that the latin words are the important part, rather than the concept of what makes a fallacy.

    The definition of a word isn’t in doubt if the word itself isn’t listed on the same line.


  • Probably has its roots from way back in the day so that women couldnt effectively run away from the men and get very far.

    Can’t speak to Muslim culture, but European culture way back in the day didn’t want women riding horses because of sex.

    There are a lot of branches on that tree, but the biggest one is that since horseback was believed to be capable of rupturing the hymen (hymen science has progressed quite a bit since I last looked into it, so I don’t know if that’s actually a thing), it was the same thing as having sex for women. They believed that women got sexual pleasure from it (which, I guess, was a bad thing), that they’d start craving horses as lovers instead of humans, and all sorts of weird shit that only twisted, perpetually horny dudes would think of.

    So the sidesaddle was invented. It allowed women to ride horses while, literally and figuratively, keeping their legs closed.

    Unfortunately, riding sidesaddle is a massive pain in the ass, so that fad didn’t last long. Maybe about fifty years or so of general popularity (because, obviously, you can still get a sidesaddle and learn to ride in it today, if you want, for whatever reason) over the course of all horse-domestication history.

    Of course, like so many things from European history, this primarily applied to rich/noble people. The poor didn’t have the luxury of giving a fuck about most of it.


  • VoxAdActa@kbin.socialtoAtheist Memes@lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    10
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    11 months ago

    It’s also difficult to point it out when someone is doing it. Pointing out that they are participating in a fallacy never turns out how we want hahaha

    This graphic would be more effective if it didn’t include the fallacy names at the end of the commandments. It’s not the concepts that get laughed at, it’s the keywords they’ve been trained to jump on and make fun of. They don’t understand the concepts behind the keywords at all.

    Dumbass culture has done excellent marketing/propaganda work in making the word “fallacy” a joke. Fortunately, there’s an easy workaround: you just don’t use the word or any of its terminology. They can’t tell you’re accusing them of a logical fallacy if you don’t actually use the handful of words they’ve learned to meet with thought-terminating cliches.

    Examples (from “more polite” to “less polite”):

    Incorrect - “That’s a false dichotomy!”

    Correct - “What makes you think those are the only two possibilities?”

    Incorrect - “I won’t fall for your straw man argument.”

    Correct - “Nobody but you actually believes that. That’s not even what we’re talking about.”

    Incorrect - “That’s not an argument, it’s just an appeal to popularity.”

    Correct - “Most of us grew out of the ‘but moooom, everyone else is doing it!’ at about 14.” or “So if everyone in this thread thinks it’s cool to just punch you in the nutsack, we should go ahead and do it because that makes it right? I’ll go first.”

    They won’t recognize your rebuttal if it doesn’t include one or more of those keywords right up front. Like an AI chat bot, they don’t understand the meaning of words they’re criticizing (or, often, even the words they’re saying). They just know that [X]% of the time, saying [Y] when someone else says [Q] ends the argument and gets them upvotes.

    It’s a lot like how a song can’t be included in the Christian Music genre if it doesn’t drop the word “Jesus” every second line, no matter how Christian the lyrics are otherwise.



  • So if someone is not familiar with your social rituals then they are not to be trusted?

    Yes. This is the basis of pretty much all Western human interaction, from the observations and data I have collected over the last 30+ years. It is the root of all inter-group conflicts in the country, from the lofty halls of politics to the “that group’s not really a metal band!” subreddit pettiness.

    Humans are ritualistic and their interactions are so rigid as to be almost mechanistic, when you get down to the base of them. Every person isn’t so much a unique individual as they are a unique combination of common parts, and their communication ceremonies reflect that.

    Because someone who doesn’t want to shake hands because it is taboo in their culture is the same thing as someone refusing to check the flaps before takeoff.

    Yes. That is exactly correct. If you don’t do the ritual right (or right enough, within a margin of specification), you will not be trusted.

    Does it make rational sense from the perspective of a sapient being capable of examining their own actions? Fuck no. But that’s the world we live in. We refuse to learn it and adapt to it at our peril.