Oh, don't get me wrong. For these particular people, since they're my political opponents, I am glad that we can pounce on this slip-up that they made and get them cancelled. I just don't think there's anything objectively wrong with making politically incorrect jokes, and it'd be a double standard for me to think it'd permissible only if they were politicians I liked.
Of course, in 2025, we don't really have the luxury of trying to apply a consistent standard to our opponents. These days it seems like we have to take what we can get when it comes to political warfare. (/genuine, in case there was doubt.)
I don't think it's possible, within the context of a private chat, to take any particular string of words and declare them verboten. What matters is the context and meaning. If it's ironic or sarcastic? I don't really find it especially problematic personally.
My larger concern is more with the gradual erosion of irony which happens in some groups. I think this happens more on public forums and in large groups, say 4chan, than in private chats, but I don't have access to large numbers of private chats, so I can't know.
Even a joke about murdering people in a gas chamber can be funny in the right context. Arrested Development had jokes about this, and it aired on prime tv and got extremely high ratings. What's not funny is, ado of nothing, "let's just murder x demographic in a gas chamber." That's not really a joke at all.
tbh I don't especially care if people want to make politically incorrect jokes in their private chats. Obviously, not wise for a politician to do so. But my friends and I have made politically incorrect jokes in private that obviously don't reflect our actual beliefs. For instance, I am queer, and I make queer jokes all the fucking time for example, but never with strangers.
What is the problem with techno-solutionism? Is it just that under capitalism techno-solutionism often results in corruption? Is the development of lemmy not techno-solutionism (to the enshittification of reddit)?
that's very pragmatic, but you can also flip this around -- almonds are a luxury compared to other more practical foods, whereas LLMs can help a coder net an income if used properly. I don't think you can justify almonds if you're going to claim AI usage is unethical on purely environmental grounds. And dairy milk is twice as much as almond milk in terms of water, so if you have dairy in your diet, cutting that out is going to be a lot more effective for reducing your water footprint than not using LLMs.
Anyway, check out the third link for more info on the total water usage of data centers; it doesn't really add up to much compared to much larger things like golf courses. I don't get why anyone would use water usage as a reason to agitate against AI for given that there are so many worse problems AI is causing.
Does it even matter that/if this guy wasn't a leftist? The left has been celebrating and condoning the murder -- isn't that what actually counts? (I say this as someone who's mostly leftist, slightly liberal.)
Edit: to be clear, I'm not saying that condoning violence and committing violence are morally equal. I'm saying: we can't simultaneously celebrate and condone the murder and also act like we have the high ground for for not being the party of political violence. That's having the cake and eating it too.
But remember, one almond uses at least as much water as two requests to ChatGPT (sources: almonds, queries, data centers), so if you're eating almonds at all then you're being inconsistent.
yes, but everyone already knew they had such attitudes.