Stirnermaxxing

@atax1a@infosec.exchange I think he is very weak on crime. /s

@mxchara@seattle.pink On gold's value: The fact that gold possesses utility rather than merely value is precisely why I compared cryptocurrency to dollars & rupees but not gold. Also, it is an empirical fact that cryptocurrency does have value. We see it being sold in exchange for other goods. This actually disproves the idea that gold's value as money is solely derived from its use to industry, which was already disproved by fiat money & representative money which both proved that social relations can produce value in useless objects. Fiat money is called "fiat" for a reason. On crypto's scarcity: It does not mimic scarcity, it HAS scarcity under a given set of conditions. Assuming the majority of the hash power is from entities who enforce that the cryptocurrency can only be produced under specific conditions, & these conditions are ones which cause scarcity, than scarcity is enforced. The majority of hash power is typically from people with a vested interest in preventing hyperinflation, which means they enforce scarcity. If the majority of has power falls into the hands of a malicious actor, then they have a vested interest in hoarding the power to produce currency for themselves, & thus are most likely to only produce it for themselves. The conditions surrounding cryptocurrency incentive the maintenance of scarcity, & this even includes cases where 51% of the hash power is malicious. I find it very counterintuitive that non-commodity money has demand, but not that cryptocurrency has scarcity. It is also an empirical fact that non-commodity has demand, however, even if every explanation I have heard feels hand-wavy. Taxation can't explain cryptocurrency's value, so that explanation is out the window for government-issued fiat money also in my view because it clearly is not essential to non-commodity money having value. The "non-commodity money has value because a bunch of people say it does" explanation is very hand-wavy & unsatisfying but is the only one I have seen which doesn't contradict empirical evidence. To conclude: I am not particularly knowledgeable about economics. I am very much reliant on my knowledge of philosophy combined with the 1/3rd of Capital Volume 1 I have finished, Wikipedia I half remember articles on Modern Monetary Theory & some basic, almost certainly wheel-reinventing empirical observations. I am far from the best person to be explaining where cryptocurrency derives value on, but I hope I at least provided something.

@mxchara@seattle.pink On the value of cryptocurrency: Cryptocurrency gets its value based on what people are willing to pay for it, same as all currencies do. 1 US dollar is worth more than 1 Indian rupee but less than 1 monero because people are willing to pay many dollars for 1 monero & many rupees for one dollar. Downstream from this is scarcity. Only the US government can produce dollars, so most people can not produce dollars. Monero requires large amounts of hardware & electricity to produce. A currency which costs nothing to produce & is producible by everyone would be worth nothing, because there would be no incentive to exchange a commodity for it rather than merely produce it. Thus, monero derives its value from scarcity, as does the US dollar. This scarcity is necessary but not sufficient for currency to possess value, as demand is also needed. Demand for crypto comes from people who use it as gambling chips & from people who use it as money On competing ideas for defining digital currency: I do not know much about alternatives. I also don't see any reason why an alternative would be worth looking into. Blockchain does the job fine. Proof-of-Work is environmentally destructive, but many blockchains are moving to proof-of-stake anyways, which does not use nearly the same amount of electricity or hardware. Is there any problem with cryptocurrency that you know of which is not exclusive to Proof-of-Work & which would not simply apply to digital money as a category, nor to overhyped technologies as a category?

@mxchara@seattle.pink I think Musk's X actually signifies the forbidden, like "crossed out" or "XXX" rather than "X marks the spot", "X factor" or "the cross." "X" has meant "variable" or "cross". The cross is associated with redaction as much as with Jesus' execution or with buried treasure. Elon Musk loves X for the same reason he is obsessed with Race & IQ, namely "Not allowed? Hahahaha! Legalize comedy I am become meme", to which you & I should respond "comedy is already legal, you are just bad at it & so everyone wants you to shut up. Also, Richard Lynn misrepresented data & was ignored by mainstream scholarship because his data was wrong. Some things are ignored for valid reasons". Definitely agree with your takes on the NFTs, although I would say cryptocurrency does have other uses than NFTs. Many things are illegal which I really think should not be, & cryptocurrency is genuinely useful for illegal activity. Monero is the backbone of the black market, which includes horrible things, yes, but also includes drugs. I really don't want people to get thrown in prison for using or selling drugs, & Monero helps keep these people safe from law enforcement.I agree 99.9% of cryptocurrencies & 100% of NFTs are only useful for fraud, but Monero is actually useful for things other than fraud, even if it is also technically "crime" due to offending such famously law abiding citizens as Richard "Watergate" Nixon. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” - John Ehrlichman Still absolutely love your posts, even when I have disagreements with you in certain areas! I have yet to read a better writer & have read only a handful of equal writers!

@mxchara@seattle.pink @mxchara@seattle.pink I could never learn to use paper for math because I can't write in a straight line & writing hurts my hands. Thus, all that time was wasted which I could have spent learning how to do complex mental math which is what I actually needed. In the United States we rarely teach how to do math more complex than 12 times 12 in your head, but we do teach long division. Most people now have a calculator of some sort many times MORE often than a piece of paper. We need to learn to use calculators & our brains, nothing more. Unfortunately, I was barely taught how to use the latter.

@mxchara@seattle.pink I have also used TWM in the past, mostly in 2021 on FreeBSD for I think a few weeks. I liked it. I only use cinnamon because Mint was easy to install & I was in a rush to get something working at the time(2024) & never got around to changing it. I use Sway because it is probably the ideal desktop for me besides Unity, which I couldn't use without major hassle due to being on Fedora rather than Ubuntu. I would have set up Fedora in 2023 on my desktop & again, never changed since. I don't mess around with computers nearly as much. I was literally developing a web browser forked from Basilisk in 2023 & stopped, due at first to illness, later to the sheer difficulty of updating a downstream browser which was barely maintained for 2 years by the time I was in good enough health to work on it, & I eventually just abandoned the project due to being more interested in philosophy than programming at this point. Hence, it never saw a public release & I had to switch back to off-the-shelf browsers despite me always being very annoyed by them. I haven't really done much computer stuff since ~2024. Now I use Mullvad Browser for ephemeral stuff & Brave Browser for accounts. I am displeased to find out from you that Mullvad leadership are donating to racists. Brave cofounder Brendan Eich ALSO was fired from Mozilla for bigoted politics, namely opposition to same sex marriage. Thus, I unfortunately only use browsers ran by bigots due to abandoning my own browser project.

@mxchara@seattle.pink Cinnamon on my laptop, Sway on my desktop.

@elgringomexicano@mastodon.social Agreed! Even if I personally lack interest in sports, the disparagement of athletes is wholly unjustified. There are certainly problematic aspects with lots of sports culture, but the same can be said for any culture. How many scholars have we seen demonizing trans people lately? Too many to count! Dorian Abbot, John Armstrong, Peter Boghossian, Maarten Boudry, Alex Byrne, Nicholas Christakis, Roger Cohen, Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins, Niall Ferguson, Janice Fiamengo, Solveig Gold, Moti Gorin, Karleen Gribble, Carole Hooven, Geoff Horsman, Joshua Katz, Sergiu Klainerman, Lawrence M. Krauss, Anna Krylov, Luana Maroja, Christian Ott, Bruce Pardy, Jordan Peterson, Steven Pinker, Richard Redding, Arthur Rousseau, Gad Saad, Sally Satel, Lauren Schwartz, Alan Sokal, Allesandro Strumia, Judith Suissa, Alice Sullivan, Jay Tanzman, Abigail Thompson, Amy Wax, Elizabeth Weiss & Frances Widdowson all contributed to a single book, published on July 29, 2025, called "The War on Science" promoting anti-queer ideas like binary gender or intersex denial & defending various racists against "cancel culture" & "political correctness". That is just one book. Countless more, highly respected scholars have espoused anti-trans views, such as Norman Finklestein. I lost a lot of respect for Finklestein, who I previously respected very deeply, after reading his horrible blog post called "Transgender Cult", published on June 14, 2023 at https://www.normanfinkelstein.com/transgender-cult/ Prejudice is no more "treating X like sports teams" than "treating X like geopolitical blocs" or "treating X like political parties." Prejudice is a fundamental human tendency. Prejudice co-exists with & is balanced out by the countertendency that is allophilia, the love of groups one is not a member of. Varying levels of prejudice & allophilia exist between individuals & cultures. Humans have many tendencies & countertendencies. We have the tendency to sadism & to sympathy, to envy & symhedonia, to love & hate, to friendship & enemyship, to struggle for existence & mutual aid, to domination & mutuality. It was especially common during the Cold War, post 9/11 wars & such for people to treat geopolitics with great prejudice, but in recent years the eyes of the people have been being opened as warcrimes are increasingly being livestreamed on social media, making support for one's own country often untenable except for the most unsympathetic people. The frequency of prejudice against other teams, women & so on within sports culture is certainly a problem, but prejudice also exists within other cultures. In scholar culture, we often see prejudice against people without degrees, against women, against racial minorities, against queers, against heterodoxers & very especially against heterodox queer racial minority women without degrees. Double-blind peer review is intended to prevent this, but only applies to journals & is a work around for, rather than an abolition of the prejudice of the culture. "Sports are only for dumb jocks" is just as much a manifestation of prejudice as "we are the best team even though we keep losing" or "women are bad at everything." I would like to confess that I used to engage in the prejudice against athletes myself when I was less wise, & I regret this wholeheartedly. It has been more than a third of my life since then & I am now a better person. No one is wrong forever, even if bigots are unwilling to admit it. We all either self-correct or we die within no more than 122 years. Many people believe prejudice is less harmful if does not result in systemic bias. These people would say that it is okay to be prejudiced against athletes but not black people, because prejudice against the former does not result in systemic bias unlike the prejudice against the latter. I answer that: the fact that harms are small enough not to result in systemic bias does not make a prejudice any less harmful at an individual level, only at a systemic level. Systemic bias comes from a large number of individual behaviors, especially from powerful individuals. A single nerd supremacist of equal power, whose volition differs only in target of prejudice rather than in willingness to act on prejudice in a given way, does not do more harm than a single white supremacist. Given white supremacists are more influential as a group, they cause more harm as a group, but not necessarily as individuals. When they do cause more harm as individuals, this is due to either 1) greater power, such as leading a country, megacorporation or police force or 2) more will to harm, such as a willingness to commit a hate crime. Please check out @mxchara@seattle.pink if you haven't already seen them, they post great things & are one of the best writers I have ever seen, on par in the beauty of their prose with Friedrich Nietzsche, which I was certainly not expecting from a mastodon account. I love you comrades all & have a nice day! 😻 #sports #politics #bigotry #racism #transphobia #transrights #philosophy #sociology #humanities #waronscience

@atax1a@infosec.exchange You don't want Georg Willhelm Friedrich Hegel memes?

@atax1a@infosec.exchange The truth is neither yes nor no, but rather that yes has passed over into no & no into yes – 'has passed over,' not passes over. But the truth is just as much that they are not without distinction; it is rather that they are not the same, that they are absolutely distinct yet equally unseparated and inseparable, and that each immediately vanishes in its opposite. Their truth is therefore this movement of the immediate vanishing of the one into the other: yesn't, a movement in which the two are distinguished, but by a distinction which has just as immediately dissolved itself. /s

"Those who are really convinced that they have made progress in science would not demand freedom for the new views to continue side by side with the old, but the substitution of the new views for the old." - Vladimir Lenin, "What is to be Done?", Chapter 1, Section A, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/i.htm | Please stop pretending Lenin wasn't an authoritarian from the jump & only became so out of civil war necessity. Lenin was always anti-pluralist & supported the suppression of views he considered incorrect. He also asserts this as if it were universal among people who believe to have made progress in science. I don't personally remember Darwin sending letters to the IWA saying to expel creationists nor Einstein writing in "Why Socialism?" that the chief task of the socialists is to ban Newtonianism due to it being outdated physics. #lenin #authoritarianism #freedom #politics #communism #socialism #marxism

@freediverx@mastodon.social @elgringomexicano@mastodon.social Agreed on Obama. Also, AOC is topping 2028 Democratic Primary polls for President, so we will likely see the tide turning towards better candidates, an end to the second gilded age & a second progressive era. Things seem to be finally getting better, but they will get worse before they get better.The 2030s will likely be an amazing decade, & but we have a hard 2 years ahead. The current order is on its last legs & the eyes of the people are being opened.

@freediverx@mastodon.social @elgringomexicano@mastodon.social @avilewis@mstdn.ca Anything he wanted to do was probably getting blocked if he was. They blocked even the neoliberal Obama of our timeline a lot. The president is only important with congress' approval.

@Oldfartrant@mstdn.ca @VeroniqueB99@mastodon.social @anneguisinherba@universeodon.com @Natsura@catgirl.center @HappyCrow13@mastodon.social @em_and_future_cats@mastodon.social @jhooper@techhub.social I don't say to turn the other cheek. I say not to indulge in needless cruelty. Joking about desecrating the body of a politician is not effective violent resistance, it is just needless cruelty. 100% agree that the left has been turning the other cheek for too long, especially in the period between 9/11 & the BLM protests, but what is being done in this thread is just not helpful.

@VeroniqueB99@mastodon.social I really think sadism against bad guys is not a good thing to indulge in at all! All it does is make you more like them, it actively impoverishes you! Don't give in to the urge! You will be better off for it! Please cultivate sympathy even for the worst if you don't want to end up just bringing yourself down to their horrific level. I am begging you, I am begging you, I am begging you! Please do not do this, you are throwing your soul into a burning pit of garbage for quick laughs. Know that whoever replaces him is just going to be another republican of equal depravity, so his death will be in vain anyways. "Diddly dong, the mitch is dead" is fun to say but will just make you into a cold monster. Knock it off! All you are doing is hurting yourself! You guys are hurting yourselves! Mitch McConnell is unaffected by dancing on his grave, whilst you are degraded. @anneguisinherba@universeodon.com @Natsura@catgirl.center @TidalFlats@mastodon.coffee @HappyCrow13@mastodon.social @em_and_future_cats@mastodon.social @jhooper@techhub.social @Oldfartrant@mstdn.ca #sympathy #compassion #empathy #kindness