Best reply I got here tbh.

Strikes do a lot more damage to companies. I think a lot of people mix the two ideas up.

The last most successful boycotts were mostly ones you never heard of, and at least one you rather not hear of. We managed to get tuna companies to pretend to harm fewer dolphins in 1988. Before that is was things like the 1965 Delano Grape Strike and the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott. The most recent boycott that actually got a company to change its marketing and outreach was the Bud Lite/Dylan Mulvaney boycott by the anti-trans right.

If you think you can get enough people as worked up about an issue as the chuds were about a single commercial featuring someone they were scared of, then by all means let’s fire up all the engines and get boycotting. Otherwise, I would encourage people who work at these tech companies to start talking about unions and making change from the inside. But none of that does as much damage to a company as getting politicians installed who are already taking bribes from other companies. Yes this is a dark perspective, you’re welcome to disagree but in my nearly five decades on Earth this is just what I’ve seen over and over.

Boycotts are performative stunts that feel good but don’t have impact on companies and even gets more attention ON those companies.

No really, this is a phenomenon that’s known. When people were protesting Blizzard, I swear to fucking god, people I knew for years who hadn’t played WoW since they were kids suddenly decided to reactivate their accounts because all the talk about blizzard “made them nostalgic” and despite being sympathetic to the people hurt by the company, they simply didn’t have the mental value-system to draw lines between those two things. Their own desires to escape and recapture youth was far, far stronger than the social messaging they honestly just felt was finger-wagging and parental scolding, so they rejected the idea of protesting without conscious thought.

And there are far, FAR more people like this than there are people with steadfast principles and discipline to stick to them. The depressing majority of people are not really thinking, they’re just going with the flow, agreeing with popular sentiment when it’s convenient, doing whatever they want when nobody is looking because capitalism has bled our axioms out.

If we put that much energy into volunteering with groups raising funds for primaries, getting to know our neighbors and forming communities, actually talking to people in our communities, we would abolish this fascist empire in a single election cycle. (Assuming we have elections again.)

edit: I firmly stand by my claim that you can change the world a lot better by being a good, active, social person who organizes your community. If we all kinda, embraced this as a passion and cared about people who aren’t in our discord servers, we wouldn’t need to try to boycott companies who won’t give two shits about you giving them more press.

Welcome to how the world has always worked and always will. There’s gin to help wash the black pill down.

The only problem I’ve had with other dog owners in California or anywhere else, is owners who don’t pick up their dog’s shit. I see people bring dogs into stores all the time, they’re always fine, I never see problems with that.

Now when I step 6-inches off a popular trail to take a picture of a popular view and step in piles of dog feces that people don’t bother to clean because it’s technically not someone’s yard, that’s when I start to wonder if domestication was a good idea. (Of humans that is.)

And here we go treating Religion as a “group” again. I thought that was bad? Or is it only bad if you think someone is doing that to Science?

Jesus fucking christ, religion IS a group, it is an organized group seeking political power and social control. Science is a tool for finding truth.

I don’t get how you can pretend to have this neutral position and still make weird defenses like this. It’s dishonest. You are lying about what you’re trying to communicate here and I cannot stand dishonesty so we’re done.

I am done trying to pick apart who or what you’re actually condemning, I highly encourage you to re-read how you opened this fucking thread and what everyone’s pushback has been about and understand your failures to communicate, make this a learning experience.

I was raised devout and my parents wanted me to become a pastor, I know a little about religion and what it looks like out there. This is why I know the motivations of the Christian Right and the threat they pose to everyone on Earth. It’s a dangerous fucking death-cult.

I said already what your error of framing was, how you have been using the weakest, most neutral language here because you’re afraid of pushing away theists and think that being like “both sides don’t understand each other” that you will make more progress to get people to get along.

Maybe you could get a bite in a Christian forum, but it’s inappropriate in this community because most of us are not religious and see it for the threat it is. Religion is a threat to us all, it’s a scourge, a cloud of locusts that consumes the world around it. We don’t need to be told that the people who practice it are misguided and don’t understand science. We need someone to tell THEM that, because we’re the ones being attacked.

People who think Science and Religion are opposed to one another don’t understand either one.

This was your first paragraph, you are starting with the thesis that someone like me, who has defended truth from religious attacks for decades, that I simply “misunderstand” the people who are screaming that God doesn’t want us to get vaccines or learn about cosmology.

Science is on the defense against a powerful, hateful, spiteful ideology that has been wearing us all down for millenia. Religion is fucking HOSTILE so no, you need to focus your statement against the actual antagonist here. This isn’t a place to use this pathetic neutral language, we have active fucking book-burnings happening in the USA right now, as schools become defunded even more than they already are.

8-chan was a “less moderated” version of 4-chan where the founders of Q-anon got started, it was a notorious forum for trading child abuse material.

The people disagreeing with me seem to really want to use science to argue with religion

Science does not seek to argue against religion, it seeks nothing, it’s just a word to describe a system for finding truth if that’s what you’re after.

So the reason you’re seeing people using science to attack religion is because YOU STARTED IT BY EQUATING THEM. This is itself an attack on science.

You have the right premise that they shouldn’t be used to seek the same answers, but you are approaching from a dense mindset that science is a “group” actively out trying to fight religion and that we people of science need to also do our part to understand religion. This fallacy is why you’re getting attacked here and why people are saying things like “I’m 16 and this is deep” it’s because this is a tired trope, some teenager who was raised theist suddenly realizes that scientific ideas have merit but desperately wants to make them both work so he doesn’t offend his parents so he tries to make a “separate but equal” argument. It’s tired.

You don’t need religion, but religion says you need it and it actively tries to attack other systems for understanding the world. It’s a net negative in our modern world and entirely optional, and science broadly wouldn’t care one way or another if it disappeared tomorrow or if more people started believing in God, because again, it’s not a “side” and I cannot fathom why you’re being so self-contradictory in your efforts here.

You are still trying to weigh these two ideas against each other like they are neck-and-neck in a race, and again, I am saying your dichotomy is bullshit, and you should feel bad.

If you think experiments with eugenics is anywhere comparable to the thousands of years of wars fought in the name of some God or another, or the constant and unending hate that religion is using right now to justify abusing children, if you think that people make some choice like “will I use science or religion to figure this out” if you think that they are anywhere close to the same thing, you are too dense to have this conversation.

You are scared of death, I get it. We all are. Religion offers comfort, but no evidence of anything other than people like to tell stories about things they’re scared of.

I have been explicitly saying that they are not the same at all.

I didn’t fucking say you’re saying they’re the same, I am saying you’re fucking EQUATING them against each other, and you’re doing it with a fervor, and if you say you’re not, you’re either lying or unaware of what you’re doing. Again, go watch some actual atheist debates and understand that you’re not treading new ground here, you’re falling into the exact same mental fallacy that many so-called “religious intellectuals” get in. You don’t need religion or God to have a better world, a better personal perspective of the universe or anything else.

Using science to “argue” against religion makes as much sense as using religion to “argue” against science: none.

Okay here is where the crux of your stupid argument is. What exactly do you think is happening? Do you think science is waging war on Christianity? Do you believe science is trying to “kill god”? Do you think people adopt science for the same reasons they adopt religion? Do you think that if “both sides just stopped fighting it would be better”? Because if you say yes to any of these questions, again, you are radically misinformed or your perspective is tainted by religion and you are not being honest with yourself.

Science is, and I say this fucking again, a system for finding truth. It’s not designed to attack religion, it’s not competing for anything, you can indeed have both spirituality and religion and science in your life without conflict. But that’s not what Christians and theists broadly do, is it? They’re the ones trying to burn textbooks and trying to get schools to teach creation. Science is not invading churches and forcing them to teach motherfucking geology.

They do not operate in the same spheres, they do not seek to answer the same questions. They do not share and of the same purposes or goals. People need to stop treating them like they have anything in common.

I’m glad you agree, now why are you doing it?

I would encourage you to watch some of the “atheist call-in” shows on youtube so you understand better just how serious the brainwashing in religion is, and how it has a base motivation to attack and drown out systems of thinking like science and reason.

You’re not in here supplying people with a way to harmonize conflicting belief systems, because science isn’t a fucking belief system. Anyone who has already been through this journey already knows this, this is why you’re getting hammered in the comments here.

Which group is more common in this comment section?

Lemmy is a predominantly young, leftist or liberal community, religion is going to be a minority here in all regards. When you come in “both siding” religion broadly, you’re asking a lot of people who already have discarded religion to accept some part of it without giving a good reason or argument why.

You don’t need religion to come up with morality, philosophical ideas about nature or anything else religion claims to have the monopoly on. It’s fine if people want to have belief for themselves about higher powers or spirituality, but again, that shouldn’t even be placed on the same table as actual systems of reason and logic and material science.

Yah, that’s not the problem, it’s the fact that religion is designed to push itself where it isn’t, and it claims to be able to solve not just the moral problems, but the logical and societal problems as well.

If religion was just fucking “philosophy” we would all be fine with it, there would be no conflict. Science isn’t trying to invade people’s homes and tell them what they can and cannot do as consenting adults. Science isn’t trying to give people an excuse to be passive about injustice. Science doesn’t condone slavery and hate and violence and organize mass numbers of people to adopt hateful views.

There is material HARM that comes from religious ideology because it’s trying, and has BEEN trying to supplant logic and reason and the scientific process since science became a thing.

This is not a “two sides” issue and I strongly resent the framing as such. Religion is trying to drag the world down to a state of willful ignorance and subservience to magical-thinking as an entity, and science is just a word to describe a process for investigating the universe. They are not equivalent. Do better.

Edit: readers, do not pursue this, you can’t “fix” this person, they’re some kind of closet theist trying to pretend to be intellectual but they have no idea what they’re doing and will lead you in intellectual circles for hours and hours.

Really good point and in cases like this we should all be a lot more concerned with people who seem obsessive about a given subject. It’s not a coincidence that so many crackpot Q-anon “save the children from the demon vampires” nutcases were actually themselves pedos who were caught, or that Q-anon STARTED on a pedophile message board.

I am sure you know what I’m saying here, but thank you for the required-by-law pedantry that occurs every time anyone says anything.

Ah ok, so you seem to have misconstrued what I’ve said here and have added in your own assumptions and straw men.

No I literally just asked you a question which direction you’re coming from, and the fact that you had to respond with this reactionary, defensive BS instead of using the opportunity to distance yourself from the kooks tells me you don’t have good-faith stake in this and my second option is probably true. No way I’m wasting my time reading further or engaging. Have a good one kook. Go ahead and say whatever you want, you’re blocked.

Reminder other readers: science is not dying, science is in a good shape other than US funding, we are making amazing discoveries every day around the world. The academic world isn’t perfect but it’s working. There is no coverup or conspiracy. Whatever sensational BS you guys read on the headlines, it’s not true, I promise, please talk to people who actually work in science and academia before trusting headlines.

Also, the almost universal knee-jerk response that we have as a society broadly to child predation makes a helluva mask for trampling on the rights of others and making a scapegoat that will be condemned in the public court long before any charges are brought up. The absolute ease and temptation of creative editing and a thirst for views can make the producers of this content work harder to portray events out-of-context.

I’m sure there are plenty of actual predators who are worried about being hit with a sting, but I have seen more than a handful clips of these rogue pedo-hunters going after like, 21-year-old boys and their 17-year-old girlfriends, and people who looked genuinely confused and seemed railroaded into meeting someone.

I know this message will never stick with the wildly reactionary and emotional viewership who needs to hear it, but we make vigilantism illegal for a damn good reason, and just because Dateline managed to stay above the waterline for the most part, that doesn’t mean some operation of randos you know nothing about on youtube have both the best intentions and the legal acumen to actually make a difference. They may well be making the problem worse by setting up situations where stings against child predators could become outlawed.

100%.

There is an old trope about arsonists, they either become criminals or they become firefighters.

At least with firefighters, we don’t have to worry about if the firefighter is going to get the fire in a room alone later.

I work in academia, and there is quite the abundance of closed mindedness and dogmatism

Are we talking about discrimination against young or foreign academics not getting grants and degrees because of bias about who should be the ones leading research and hesitancy to invest time, money and political capital into new tech, or are we talking about “They didn’t want to read my paper about how I think the sun pooped out the Earth and why this is evidence for God”?

Seriously, that’s a loaded claim, you need to provide some context and nuance there, I haven’t met many actual scientific-minded people who are dogmatic, that is usually the exact accusation thrown out by theists who are butthurt that evolution exists and can’t be disproven.