You sure bailed from your entire argument pretty darn quickly to now argue “there’s no way to rigidly define it.” There is. It’s “wet.” It behaves in the way wet things do. There’s no reason to say otherwise than to be contrarian. The only way to argue otherwise is to create a strict definition of wetness, as you just have, which ultimately fails when put up against reality and a more human use of language.

I’d say wet and dry are relative terms here but ultimately, yes, you and I are in agreement that water is wet.

Actually fire is the byproduct of a chemical reaction. The material being combusted is the one doing the burning. Fire (rather, extreme heat) can cause combustion in other materials, given an oxygen rich environment, but the fire is not itself doing the combustion or burning.

Wetness is not a chemical reaction, so it’s kind of an apples to oranges comparison.

It’s not “less than meaningful” if you understand wet as a relative term. There can be a normal level of wetness where if it is exceeded we then call that thing wet, and if it’s under that threshold we call it dry relative to the norm.

If you somehow came from a perfectly dry environment, yeah, you would probably consider our world pretty wet. You would have a pretty hard time describing your experience to others if you couldn’t use the word wet to do so. The word doesn’t lose meaning just because you go all reductio ad adsurdum with it.

It’s not useless if you understand wet as a relative term. There can be a normal level of wetness where if it is exceeded we then call that thing wet, and if it’s under that threshold we call it dry relative to the norm.

I never got it either. I think they’re just contrarians. They just want to feel like they discovered something novel that all the people before them got wrong so they can indulge in pedantic arguments about it.

That is, when it’s not engagement baiting like the tweet above.

I mean. The molecule itself isn’t a solid or liquid, that has to do with the behavior of the molecules in dimensional space. Your argument is based on water as a substance, not as a molecule, completely avoiding the basis of their argument.

Besides that, most liquids you could easily mix with water are themselves water-based and therefore would be totally dried up into a powder or perhaps a jelly without their water content. To add water is to make them wet, and then they exist as a wet incorporated substance. As liquid substances. In fact, they could not dry up if they were not wet in the first place; to become dry is to transition away from the state of being wet.

You know what else dries up? Water.

I don’t think you’ve spent much time here if you think that “fuck cars” is being said without empathy. None of us think that nobody should be allowed to own a car and that there aren’t legitimate use cases. Just that the vast majority of cases are Not That and for how dangerous and inefficient they are, along with infrastructure that only considers the experience of people in cars, the extent that cars have taken over and define our lives (again, as non-single-mothers-of-seven) is ridiculous.

Also, station wagons used to exist. Mini vans still exist. You could transport this many kids and not have to drive a massive truck that’s likely to mow one of them down in the driveway before you even notice they’re unaccounted for. There are other “real solutions” for this person. In fact, that single mother would have a far more peaceful time transporting her family if the cars around her were both smaller in size and fewer in number. Our interests are aligned, you see.

Have you tried having some empathy for those that are strained by the financial burden of owning a car? Society should consider people that don’t want and shouldn’t need to own a car just as much as it considers people who do need to own a car. Go project your lack of “real empathy” somewhere else cause it’s definitely misplaced here.

Yeah but straight up I’m not getting out of bed in the morning in those temperatures

Sounds like you’re just as comfortable being a member of this passive society as anyone else you named, even if you took the long way around to the same conclusion.

cool. What are you doing to introduce it to others?

Does the amount really matter if the effect is the same?

If you had all the levers of wealth and power in the world, or if you as an individual had access to just one of them, wouldn’t you do your part to build this kind of passive society too? Otherwise you might have to worry about your access to these levers and therefore your power being usurped. There are many ways to manipulate a person to work against their own interests, which are almost entirely concentrated into the hands of the wealthy owning class.

This is a problem of class antagonism, not the complicity and/or ignorance of the individually powerless. As a class we have to rise beyond these antagonisms; their manipulation of us into a class that passively allows them to profit from our labor and pays no mind to their corruption; by teaching class consciousness to the other members of our class. That is just as much on you and I as it is on anyone else.

I mean. Empty promises for things to be paid for by somebody else are kind of his Thing. Walls, Tariffs. It makes perfect sense.

Don’t forget the heritage foundation wonks and oligarch-adjacent folks that debrief him and write all the orders for him to sign. I see the people directly in his administration having much more influential power than any foreign diplomat.

We already had bribery in politics, the media just doesn’t talk about it like they do with Trump and other particularly egregious ‘fall guys’ like Clarence Thomas.

I still think most people are pro-good stuff, just that capitalism incentivises the worst behaviors and makes quite a few bad things overwhelmingly good for whoever is perpetrating them. This includes influencing/manipulating others to believe backwards, bad stuff; which one would have to do by telling them that stuff is in some way “good” actually. Whatever your framework for determining “good” from “bad”.

May I ask what “Chinese censors” have to do with anything? It’s completely feasible to me that this is an all-American problem, imposed on us for the sake of brand friendliness; same as it’s been for other instances of censorship like network censors on television or the YouTube adpocalypse; and carried over into our language now more generally to end up in a place like lemmy. It’s perfectly explained by the attitudes and surface-level friendliness of “polite society” in western culture. I don’t see the point in using a foreign adversary to explain it away, or pretending that censorship is anything different when it’s done by a government vs private entities that shouldn’t have that kind of unchecked authority over what we’re allowed to communicate in the first place. I also have no reason to believe China gives any fucks about the vulgarity of English speakers on the English internet. It just seems weird to me to bring them up here.

There’s always the option that they believe he’s the antichrist and are just rapture accelerationists

tbh I think that’s kinda the point, it’s corporate doublespeak.