Alex Vranas @Alex@vran.as

So next time someone dumps some ridiculous "just my opinion" statement, follow up with a "why?", because they'll likely go on to prove that their opinion wasn't worth respecting. Opinions, even pure opinions, can be based in BS and discarded.

6/6

But what if someone answers "Vanilla! They don't want you to know this, but chocolate is made from geriatric dog feces from farms upstate where they send old dogs. Cocoa beans aren't even real, wake up sheeple! Chocolate is just dog shit!"?

Immediately you understand that the opinion of vanilla over chocolate in this context is based on an easily debunked conspiracy theory. That's enough for me to at least determine that this opinion is invalid, as it is rooted in a clear falsehood.

5/6

Following up with "Why?", and get might neutral answers like "I prefer vanilla because I find chocolate bitter", or "I prefer chocolate because it is richer than vanilla", or even "I don't know, I just like x better than y". None of these are invalid or wrong. They're still solidly in the realm of pure opinion.

There's no belief here to be challenged, only subjective statements of preference that extrapolate on the original question.

4/6

But what about a pure opinion, like the answer to the classic question "Do you prefer chocolate or vanilla". There are only 4 real answers to this question (Chocolate or Vanilla, or less frequently Both or Neither), and none of them are based in disprovable belief.

Or are they? What if you followed up with the question "Why?" - would the answers still meet the definition of pure opinion?

3/6

Take for example, a political opinion like "Universal Basic Income will make most people stop working".

This is far from "pure opinion", it is basically a hypothesis. The only way to prove it right or wrong is to test it, and absent a controlled test we can discard the opinion as baseless.

That's good enough for me to call an opinion wrong. Claims require evidence. For this example claim, there already exists some experimental evidence to the contrary.

2/6

I've been mulling over the question "can an opinion be wrong?". It's an interesting question to answer.

It seems dependent on what kind of opinion we're talking about. If the opinion is pure opinion, like an aesthetic or other personal preference, it seems pretty ironclad, but opinion rooted in belief can definitely be debunked if the beliefs are demonstrably untrue.

1/6

Never let yourself fall into the trap of defending a freedom if the person begging the question hasn't offered their explanation as to why the freedom shouldn't exist.

"I am happy to offer a rebuttal to your reasoning for banning x" is a great way to force a conservative troll to give up that they have no valid arguments. They wouldn't start with questions if they had answers.

Conservatives fighting their dumb culture wars love the question "Why should x be allowed?"

The only acceptable answer is "Because we live in a free society and nobody has presented a rational, truthful, constitutional, or democratically agreeable reason for why x should be banned."

We don't live in a country of allowances, we live in a country of freedoms, and the burden of answering questions on whether or not something should be allowed lies with those that wish to implement a ban.

Deleted my Lemmy account. It's a solid Reddit alternative, but it's a little too much like Reddit now.

I mean, it's nice to have an ad-free federated Reddit alternative with numerous third party frontends, but it just feels, you know, full of Redditors...

All of his recent videos look like this starting on 4/19, but prior to that he was actually digitizing them correctly instead of pointing a camera at himself.

Not sure what prompted the change in style here...

Shout-out to this young mutton-chopped archivist on @internetarchive who has no idea how to digitize a VHS tape.

One day the future will know what it was like to watch a few minutes of a VHS tape together with FlickaLova2000.

The problem with capitalism is that this headline is representative of the average person's understanding of economics.

"Free as in beer" means "gratis"? C'mon now, 99.9% of the beers I've had in my life cost me money. I propose we start saying "Free as in air". Air hasn't really ever cost me anything, and climate change hasn't changed that yet.

"Free as in speech" at least makes sense.

Posting this from a laptop running NetBSD 10. I have very little understanding of what I am doing here, but at least I got this far.

I did an image search to see if anyone had done a photoshop of such a silly thing, and I absolutely was not prepared for this... (NSFW)

Audio cable standards should NEVER change. I demand a cell phone with a 6.35mm headphone jack.

So the timestamps seem weird, and the Irish Sun says the plane was coming from Venice, so either this happened more than once yesterday, or the sources reporting on it are mistaken.

But EI0169 from LHR to DUB yesterday absolutely aborted landing on the runway with me on it yesterday.

Clip: https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxBU9_FrdgpwHb7J74zqPRoSdhaEitT2zK?si=cr0WDLUFoqcDH6Uv

I was on this plane, lol. https://www.irishmirror.ie/news/irish-news/watch-plane-forced-abort-landing-32528120