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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: September 10th, 2023

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  • Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

    In this case, the law being freedom of speech, the protection being to say what they want and the binding being to prohibit others from curtailing that. Naturally, the push for inclusive language is part of a movement to curtail that freedom and needs to be reversed and pushed back against.



  • I understand. I assume you paid them well for fair work hours under good conditions, provided for all the safety precautions, worker’s compensation, proper healthcare and all the good things a decent employer would do? Paid taxes on your income to fund the infrastructure you’re using?

    In that case, yes, you’re a good samaritan and got shafted by an unfair system.

    Doesn’t change the fact that scientific data suggests all those Covid measures had some impact, but I’ll take back my cheap labor comment then.


  • all not of legal status

    Ah, you used cheap labour from undocumented workers and it came back to bite you? There goes my sympathy.

    As for the science, there are studies to suggest measures like shelter-in-place had an impact, and the fact that literally every form of mask reduces risk of transmission at least slightly has been established long before the nature of viral infections was understood. You could easily find these things online or through a university library, given how scientifically versed you are. But I suspect you’d cherry-pick the ones you like anyway, so why bother?




  • Agreed. The more we argue about the “how” of the protests, the more we’re distracted from what they’re actually protesting about. The most effective way of stopping people complaining about something isn’t to shut them up, but to fix the thing.

    If someone’s poor and can’t afford to buy food, no amount of fines or jail time will prevent them from going back to stealing food the second they get out because - guess what - they’re still fucking poor. There’s a food bank near where I lived a while ago that notoriously had long lines. Slowly shuffling forward in a queue that screams “I’m poor” must be uncomfortable, but they’re still not stealing food while they have an alternative.

    If you want people to stop vandalising shit in their outrage over exploitation and greed, fucking do something about the exploitation and greed. I’m sure those people could have thought of more pleasant ways to spend their time than creating their cornflour pigment, driving out there and getting arrested to make a point without leaving lasting damage.





  • I imagine the answer is “what’s the real world?”

    I’m being facetious. I don’t want to assume they all fit the stereotype of nerd that never leaves his room if he can help it.

    They can probably either mask their hatred well enough, or they’re in a place just as bigoted, which may have fostered their convictions in the first place. They go through their interactions with the real world seething with anger and bitterness, then seek relief in video games.

    At their heart, they’re no different from anyone else seeking to escape the unpleasant reality through some media - be that through building a peaceful farm, fighting powerful enemies, reading a gripping story or watching sports. They can’t actually fight the circumstances that cause their pain (or at least think so), so they flee instead.

    It’s reallly just the source of their pain that’s so much more toxic, which in turn leads to a toxic result that ends up poisoning their joy in life even more. Most likely, they’ve been fed that poison by someone exploiting their vulnerability and unhappiness by giving their aimless frustration a target, reassuring them that someone else is to blame for their misery. It didn’t lessen their misery, but at least it gave the question “why am I suffering?” a satisfying and concrete answer. “It’s not you. It’s not some random and unpredictable circumstance that you have no control over. It’s these people that you can do something about.”

    Except you can’t actually do anything about “these people”, but you can at least construct a fantasy of an ideal world without “these people”, where naturally you’re doing much better too. In the specific case of the toxic gamers, they’re looking to video games for manifestations of that world, for places they can immerse themselves in and be free from the troubles of the real world.

    If these games fail to sate that fantasy, to provide an environment they seek where they’re powerful and “safe” from all the things that make them upset, that rage is taken to the forums and echo chambers where they share their suffering with each other to ease and validate it. It’s one thing if there’s some niche indie game made by “these people” - they’re on the outskirts of the gaming world, you can easily ridicule or ignore them. It’s another thing when there’s a game placed front and center, getting all the attention and hype for a moment, and that game is full of things that hurt you.

    For a twisted comparison, imagine if a new game got all the hype and (positive) attention, despite being full of Nazis, presenting them as entirely normal or even good people. You’d (rightly) be upset too. The difference - aside from the subject - is that your upset lilely isn’t born from a stock of thoroughly curated hatred and anger. You’ll probably not muster the same rage as these people, because you don’t have it bottled up already.

    I say this because I’ve been a hateful person too once. Not as bad as some of these specimens, but bad enough to know the spiral and to guess how much unhappier I could have been, how much unhappier they must be. They’re victims turned abusers, and while that doesn’t excuse their behaviour, it may help us understand where it comes from and give us an idea of what to fight:

    Bigotry is born from misery seeking an outlet, fertilised by ignorance, nurtured by confirmation bias. The better our lives get, the less reason to look for someone to blame. The more we learn to think critically and question the lies we’re fed, the less that “someone” will be a convenient target keeping us in the spiral. The more we’re exposed to things that contradict our bias, the weaker it will get.

    The last bit is what broke me out of the loop, the second is what saw me crawl back up the spiral and unravel my convictions.

    Life’s still tough, but at least it has gotten a lot less hateful and miserable since I stopped feeding the hate and blaming others for my own deficiencies and started working on myself.





  • Sure, but the common consensus seems to be that you shouldn’t be annoyed at the constant updates when that’s an explicit feature of that system. Maybe that’s just a misreading, but I assume the expected reaction would be “Not now” rather than “Not again”.

    (I’m not taking a position, as I’ve never worked with a rolling distro and can’t really comment on either stance, just trying to navigate the confusion here)



  • I’m far from OG, unless you count my dad’s SUSE that I “used” as a child for a while. I fondly remember SuperTux. But I didn’t really interact with the system much beyond starting games or a browser.

    Later (about six years ago, I think) I started dual-booting Ubuntu as a side piece for productive stuff while gaming on Windows. Gradually tried gaming on Linux too, then made the jump to Linux (Ubuntu) exclusive late 2021.

    Since a recent PC upgrade, I’ve used an additional disk to try Nobara and am happy with it so far. I’ve now got a spare disk and more time to try new distros, so I plan to explore the distroverse some more, but all in all I’d consider myself more of a newcomer or at best a resident than an OG.


  • I had the opposite once, years ago: I don’t know the cause anymore, but somehow Windows disappeared from my grub.

    By the time I had finally secured all my data with the intent to make that absence permanent, it did reappear (again, no idea why), but I was committed. Steamrolled the entire drive with a new Ubuntu install and haven’t used Windows privately since.

    I did need to use tools that don’t run on Linux (even with wine - believe me, I tried) for uni and used a windows VM, my work laptop is Windows because I need the same tools and get no say in it anyway, but haven’t had a direct Windows install on my system since 2022.

    My private OS of choice is by now Nobara, though I also intend to use an obsolete SSD to try more distros with.