Ask Lemmy

In physics lab we had 2 linear polarizers and by varying their relative angle, could polarize or block all light.

I also used a circular polarizer, but that didn't feel as polarizing to me.

An economy that relies on basic human needs being treated as an investment is a failed economy. (Housing)

Circumcision is genital mutilation.

"I understand why terrorists attack the West."

Having been in a long-time resident of a region of brown people that the West sees as subhuman, I don't condone terrorist actions, but I sure do understand why some of them do it. Some people just see an action, read or hear the words, without context and judge a person based on that, but they forget that humans are the sum of their experiences.
Just like a small-town bumpkin in Australia might hate brown people for how they brought up, a refugee hating the West might've lived in constant fear of being bombed by a drone, seen the consequences thereof, and been pointed at a generic Westerner as the source of evil.

People that I've talked to who have lived outside of Western countries understand what I mean, but many Westerners think I'm saying terrorism is justifiable or even good.

I would say the most polarizing thing I've ever said at least in an online community is that there should be spaces specifically for men to congregate where they can talk about their issues among like-minded men.

This was in response to me discovering that of the eight gyms within a 10 mile radius of my home, three of them are all gender gyms and five of them are women's only gyms.

Of the associations in my area, places where people of like-minded orientation congregate, 4 of them are all gender, 12 of them are female only.

There are no male only semi-private spaces that I can find within a 25 mile radius of my home and I live in a city of over 500,000 people.

Of the multitude of homeless housing, homelessness support, soup kitchen, and other resources for the incredibly poor and disaffected, roughly half of them are explicitly female only, and all of the remainder are all gender with a preference for supporting women.

To me this is especially terrifying because of the homeless population that I have encountered only a vanishingly small fraction of them are women. The great majority by and far of the maybe 40 or 60 homeless people I have seen in the last year have been male.

If it is okay for women to have women only spaces why is it not okay for men to have men only spaces?

If it is okay for women to receive women only support, why is it not okay for men to receive men only support?

Two space indent is better than tab indent.

It hasn't gone well the times that I've said that it is better to not feed stray pets if you are not going to take further care of them. In the sense that helping the chances of more uncontrolled offspring just means more suffering in the end.

Horse riders should have to clean up after their horses on trails.

I'm a big believer in leave no trace in the outdoors. To the best of your ability, everything should be as you found it when you leave the woods.

Wild horses have been extinct in north America for many thousands of years, in my local area as far as fossil and archeological records can show any native horses that might have existed here were long gone before the first native Americans set foot here. They are not a part of the ecosystem.

I don't care if it's biodegradable, I wouldn't leave apple cores and banana peels behind either.

The environment in my local parks isn't so delicate that a few entitled rich assholes leaving behind horse shit probably isn't going to make a significant impact, but there are other places where it absolutely could, throwing off the chemical composition of the soil, contaminating ground water, causing algal blooms, introducing non-native parasites, bacteria, and pathogens, etc. and you should be following best practices across the board. Treat every inch of the outdoors as if it were potentially vulnerable and don't try to bend the rules just because you think you can get away with it.

And it's just an eyesore and detracts from the natural beauty.

The horse people fire back about how they can't carry a shovel with them, or how they may not be able to safely get on or off the horse. This is the shit horses were bred for- to carry people and stuff, I can find you an avalanche shovel and a small folding step stools that will break down plenty small and light enough to fit in a backpack or lash to the saddle with some rope to pull the stool up after you get on, and it's all gonna weigh a lot less than the armor, and rifles, bedrooms, etc. that people used to ride horses with for a lot longer and harder than the couple house you're spending plodding along the trail. If you can afford to go horseback riding you can afford the hundred bucks or so for a shovel and a step stool. If that's not enough for you to get on and off your horse safely on the trail, maybe you should take that as a sign that you shouldn't be riding a horse there, stick to a dude ranch where some big strong cowboy will help you get on and off of the horsey.

prosecuting hateful speech is a very slippery slope. It effectively gives the government the authority to decide what speech is allowed, which can't end well.

Rotated a horizontally polarised antenna to vertical polarisation because the contractor wasn't listening.

I vaguely support eugenics when it comes to prevalent genetic diseases.

If you have an incurable genetic disorder and choose to have children I judge you with the utmost disgust at your reckless selfishness.

Condemning another person to suffer as you have for the sake of "fulfillment"

Became an atheist and quit going to church. After decades of being very involved in church. My experience wasn't nearly as difficult or traumatic as it is for many who go through this. But it still sucked. I pissed off some friends and family members. And some folks I really liked froze me out, which is not fun. Atheist friends were supportive, which was a big help.

Depends on where you say it but my most polarized take was: investment based on interest (usury) is just a legalized form of fraud.

You can always make the argument that charging money on money is literally how much of the global economy functions, but from a purely ethical perspective, it has the same if not worse effect of how a landlord rents land.

Yeah it can work, but often times it just goes unregulated and becomes a form of abuse designed to milk you dry.

Everything relating to loans these days is backed by some mega bank, which is in cahoots with every other bank, which also runs the federal reserve in the USA, so they basically have overwhelming control of the economy, which happens to be built on trillions of dollars of debt servicing (35t for the government).

The 2008 market crash was a result of fraud at basically every level of the economy from a single person all the way to the board members of banks like BofA, Chase, etc and even the SEC. Realtors were selling faulty and risky adjustable rate mortgages, which were then being packaged into mortgage backed securities (MBS), which were then being misreported as AAA value by every rating agency who were also in cahoots with every bank, which were then being packed into huge collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) which they themselves were being repackaged into even bigger CDOs and synthetic CDOs which every bank was basically gambling money on.

All it took was for the faulty mortages to start to fail past only something like 8%, and every thing backing that (MBS, CDOs) collapsed and lost value.

Except because about the only people who were trading these massive gambling pools were banks, so they lied about the value of the assets (particularly the MBSs via aformentioned ratings agencies) which they sold and then promptly shorted to protect themselves from the problem they created.

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Sharing this sentiment will basically get you laughed out of the room from any finance program because so much of the economy is fundamentally based around interest, ie the cost of borrowing money. Even genuinely safe options like credit unions still have interest, albeit at much much lower rates that are much more practical.

But to me, it will always seem like a form of fraud.

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In case your wondering, the reason its polarizing is because there is a significant portion of people that actually do believe the above, notably a lot of Islamic countries. They have lots of banks that do not engage in interest based transactions, which is interesting but often seems to lack any research about it compared to a typical system.

The global market also doesn't take them too seriously because most of those countries (controversially) also have regular banks too, that also just so happened to be involved with schemes that caused economic turmoil, especially countries that take IMF loans. Most of them have shot themselves in the foot already and have nothing much to stand on now.

I've got two.

• The US has arrived at the stage where an entirely new constitution/model of government, probably down to the very borders of the states themselves in the 48, needs to be implemented, just to let off the pressure of just how large a scale the US operates on in every dimension compared to what the original 13 were looking at.

• The two state solution has been rendered untenable by Israel's settler shit, the best way to protect the interests of Palestinians is to break down the border entirely and make them voting citizens with a say in the Knesset, and at this point I am convinced the only way that can be established is with an occupation force from outside both nations ready and willing to haul off anyone doing anything to threaten the coexistence and execute them. They won't coexist in peace, so let them coexist under the sword of Damocles. If I had my way honestly, Jerusalem would have a nuke installed under the temple mount, with a switch set to destroy the city entirely if they're going to insist on continuing to try and total victory wipe eachother out.

If they can't have the land together, they'll have the ashes together.

For the most part, defending free speech. It's been watered down to be interpreted as "speech I agree with".

Polarization fed by poor education fed by poverty in the US over the last few decades has left people believing in false dichotomies; if you're not with me you're against me. See it on Lemmy a lot actually, people being nervous when you don't clearly support or agree with them and then get defensive as they assume you must be "the other" group.

We live in a world now where money and scale supporting shitty and /or dangerous ideas hardly make it the traditional town square of ideas though. I have my own internal struggles with it.

in reddits terms, Wear Cat/Bunny ears to highschool school and then complain about getting rape threats because of it.

Yes I did receive quite a bit of backlash on reddit for just- wanting to wear a fucking headband. With some even saying It warranted the bullying or that it was deserved or that I should expect it. Bullying is one thing, I was referring to rape threats and straight up harassment.

Academia Is Not Law, especially when it comes to subjective things involving marginalised groups. There can be and are massive systematic and institutional failures that mean many papers are misleading.

Most people broadly agree that the treatment of people with mental conditions, black people, lgbt people, etc was shocking and unacceptable even 50 years ago... And yet some people assume we've "fixed" that nowadays and everything is above board and perfectly fair and ethical.

I have been baptized again. Three times in total.

Free will, the sense, that you could have done otherwise, is an illusion.

We make choices based on either what we have to do, or what we want to do. There's no freedom in having to do something, but you're also not free to choose your wants. If you felt like having tea this morning instead of coffee, then having tea is the only thing you could have done. You wanted tea, not coffee. Now, if we rewind the clock back in time to the moment before you decided, you'd pick tea again, and again, and again. Everything else being the same, your desire for tea will override the desire for coffee every time. And you didn't choose that desire.