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Cake day: August 10th, 2026

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  • A Republican mind always oscillates between “he’s just kidding” and “he tells it like it is”.

    It's pure doublethink

    To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself—that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word—doublethink—involved the use of doublethink

    • 1984, George Orwell








  • Just because a system is designed a certain (amoral) way, doesn’t mean you HAVE to use it in that way.

    Trump and many others may think it’s smart to not pay taxes because of the immediate advantage of having more money. But I’d argue, it’s actually a stupid thing to do. Especially for wealthy people. They profit more from government services like a well equiped police force, good infrastructure, health services that keep their employees healthy, etc. They are just to stupid or shortsighted to factor all variables in.

    Also I think societal norms and individual identity plays a big role in such decisions. I mean, why are you on lemmy and not on reddit? Isn’t it smarter to use reddit since there is more content, more users who read your comments? Maybe reddit just banned you and you have no viable alternative. But there is also the possibility that you are aware of the shortcomings of reddit and arrived at the decision that it’s actually smarter to use lemmy.

    In the end, it’s your descision who you want to be. Do you want to be they guy who doesn’t pay taxes and brags about it? Or the guy who thinks it’s so smart to bribe the president? Do you want to be the guy who reads bot comments on reddit all day and gobbles up their rage bait? Even if society deems certain descisons as smart, they are very often not.