The_Terrible_Humbaba @ The_Terrible_Humbaba @beehaw.org

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2 yr. ago

I can feel my comment will not be popular, but I felt like saying this.

I mean, you can only carry niceness so far; there's always going to be a limit. This example will be extreme, but that's the whole point: if someone showed up trying to justify a genocide, how easy would it be to remain nice and politely disagree with them? We can all agree that there's a line, the question is where that line sits.

I feel like a lot of people in this thread are talking about being nice, all whilst ganging up on the admin, being very uncharitable, and not really seeing things from her point of view. As I said earlier, if there was something you were vehemently against and thought was completely and highly immoral, how easy would it be to politely and nicely disagree with someone defending it? And you might not think something is "completely and highly immoral", but maybe someone else does; they think it's a line that should not be crossed. Of course it's going to be hard to politely disagree about something like that.

Some topics are obviously going to be a lot more sensitive, and it's unrealistic to expect people to be able to remain fully composed. I feel like the "be(e) nice" aspect applies to more everyday things, you know? Conversations about things like video games or TV shows, for example, which even on Reddit would quickly become very toxic. I think it's unfair to expect people to remain so composed and collected when talking about something as sensitive and controversial as "when are civilian casualties OK?". If I carry out a conversation like that, I fully expect it might not stay completely emotion free, so to speak.

• Paradise Killer : One of the best Detective/Mystery/Investigation games that I have played, and I've played quite a few; I've essentially spent the last couple of years trying to collect more of them. It took me a while to try because of the art style, but of course you shouldn't judge a book/game for its cover/art style, and actually the style grew on me as I played. The soundtrack is quite nice as well, making the general vibe and atmosphere of the game pretty great, and that's another big reason I still think about that game.

• Heaven's Vault : Mystery/Investigation and Fantasy/Sci-fi in which you play as an archaeologist and where the main gameplay mechanic is translating ancient texts of an ancient language, in order to decipher the history of the galaxy and uncover its great mysteries. And I mean you, as the player, translate them; the game only tells you whether you are right or wrong after you have attempted to translate the same symbols several times.

• Planescape: Torment : Finally got around to playing it, and it will definitely stay with me. It was apparently one of the inspirations for Disco Elysium - which should say a lot - but it's actually a Fantasy game based on D&D 2e. There is about 1 third of the game which was developed by a different team who took a very different approach and so the quality doesn't really match, but still a great experience over all. I'd say the first two thirds are 10/10, the last third is 5/10, and the end was 8.5/10.

Well, I'll put it this way:

I've been away from Linux for a few years (several reasons), but this year I heard of NixOS and decided to give it a try, and I had a blast playing around with it. With how easy and quick to configure it is, and how stable it also is, it encouraged to tinker with it more than I ever have with Linux, and I never had any really frustrating issues like I had with some other distros that I barely tinkered with.

At the very least, I think you should play around with it for a while just to see if it's something you like.

PS: For anyone who does not have experience with Linux, NixOS is probably not a good first distro. I meant easy more so for people already familiar with Linux.

There have been examples of anarchy working. Unfortunately, most of the ones I know of were around during World War 2 and got crushed between 2 larger opponents, or backstabbed by one of them.

• Anarchists - and other socialists in Catalonia - during the Spanish Civil War, were stuck between the fascists and the republicans (Soviets), sided with the Soviets and ended up being betrayed. Homage to Catalonia by Orwell is a good book about the civil war and the anarchists.
• Korean People's Association in Manchuria were destroyed by Japan a few years before WW2 during a war between China and Japan IIRC, and apparently some of its leaders were also killed by "Korean communists" (the same ones that ended up forming North Korea).
• The Black Army of Ukraine fought the Red and White armies at separate times; one time they joined the Red Army against the White Army, and were betrayed.

You might have noticed a pattern there, which is also why a lot of anarchists are not found of Marxist-Leninists or Stalinists.

A "Democrat" is a member of the "Democratic Party" of the USA, it is not a political ideology in itself. Democrats are usually economic Liberals and don't care that much about workers or the environment, but some are Social Democrats (Bernie Sanders). They are also usually socially progressive.

The Republican Party is also composed mainly of economic liberals; however, they are typically socially conservative.

There is such a thing as a "Libertarian Socialist", which seems to be what you are looking for. A lot of Libertarian Socialists also just call themselves "anarchists"; and "anarchism" essentially just means something like "anti-authority" or "anti-hierarchy".

If you want to maybe explore it a bit:

• Homage to Catalonia is a book written by George Orwell where he tells of his time in Spain fighting alongside the anarchists and socialists in Spain (against the fascists supported by Hitler and Mussolini, and against the republicans backed by Stalin).
• The Dispossessed written by Ursula K. Le Guin; it's a sci-fi story about a society living on a moon, who are anti-capitalists and supposedly anarchists (whether they are anarchists or not is one of the focus points of the story).

If you just want to read theory instead, you can also search for Pyotr Kropotkin, and Emma Goldberg.

Completely understandable. Not that I agree necessarily, but I understand.

My main issue is, would that really change much? At the end of the day, companies show up and survive by meeting people's needs/wants, and politicians climb to the top and stay there by having people on their side and not doing things those people would disapprove of. This means that if all those powerful people just went poof one day and disappeared, they would be replaced by new companies and new politicians doing all the same things as before, as long as people want and do the same things.

This means the only way things can really change, is if the culture itself changes and people begin to want and do different things. One way or another, whether people believe it or not, people are in power. The question is in whether they organize and use it, or just sit back and give up control and let themselves be taken by the flow.

Off course, there's a counter-argument to be made about how much influence those powerful people also have on everyone else's way of thinking, but then that just makes it a closed loop, and someone needs to break it.

No worries, it happens. I've also done it a few times, and even re-rewrote comments from scratch after I realized I was being too mean, haha.

I do agree with your point, though. People are a lot more forgiving of CDPR than they would be of other companies doing the same things. CDPR did build up a lot of good will with the Witcher series, GOG and their position on DRM, and other things, but at the end of the day they are still a company, and their main goal is making money.

Just a friendly reminder that Beehaw's one rule is "Be(e) nice". You have a lot of comments on this thread, and at least a few are responding to people in condescending and snarky ways instead of engaging in any real discussion. Right now, just as an example, you could have tried to explain how good AI can make a game better.

Let's please not let this place become like Reddit, where often people can't have civil discussions and try to dunk on each other with snarky one-liners.

You really haven't contributed anything to the conversation so far other than repeating several times how disappointed you are, and how disgusted you are at people here. Do you want to perhaps expand on that?

For my view, here is a comment I essentially made addressing comments like yours.

To everyone who is against this, and call the people supporting it "disgusting":

Here is a post on Beehaw about climate activists who spray-painted a yacht. Posted about 10 days ago but only has 68 upvotes, and 15 comments at this time; meanwhile this post sits at 182 votes and 151 comments just 1 day after. Off course, you could argue it's because c/environment isn't as big as c/news; although that could be said to be a demonstration of the problem itself. But the real questions are: why did it not spread further, and why did you almost certainly not hear about it?

Because no one gives a shit about that. It raises no eyebrows. Because it's meaningless and doesn't really inconvenience anyone. She probably just had her yacht cleaned, and it never bothered her for more than the 5 seconds she was made aware of the spray paint. It's not going to stop any other rich people from buying yachts, and it's not going to raise the awareness of the average person and cause them to reduce their consumption either. In the end, it accomplished absolutely nothing.

Climate activists have been trying peaceful protests for 50 years, do you need a reminder of how bad things are getting?

And before the arguments about how this affects "working class" people, but all of it is really the billionaire's and companies fault and that governments need to act: What do companies stand to gain from ruining the planet? Money, which the people give to them while offering each other excuses to consume. What could a government do to stop it? Well, they could introduce carbon taxes, stop subsidizing meat, and invest in more bike lanes and public transport; which would all result in higher gas prices, higher prices for anything made of plastic (among other goods), more expensive energy, much more expensive meat, a lot more bike lanes with smaller roads, and more public transport. Are these all things you're okay with? If yes, then there's no reason to not get "ahead" (although we're far behind) of the problem and start organizing; and if no... well, then you might have stumbled into the problem.

Finally, here is a picture from two posts on c/news that I think illustrates the problem quite well.

Do they need to repress anything, or do people just not care? The yacht news was shared on here, I was literally in that thread. After 2 days, it had less than 60 upvotes and about 10 comments.

In one day, this post is already near 200 upvotes and has 148 comments.

But I guess let's just keep pretending we're all angles and that the 1% and leading class are acting in complete isolation. Let's just keep pretending they are the only problem.

People only care when something might affect them directly, and people messing with theirs cars seems a lot closer to a possible reality to them then being affected by climate change. Which is why everyone claims to want for there to be action to stop climate change, but they are incredibly stubborn about having to change anything about their way of life.

I can easily go without using my phone for extended periods of time, and always have been. I've never really been "phone addicted", and never used my phone during class - despite having one for the entirety of my school years.

That still never stopped me from not paying any attention in class. Drawing on a book/desk, talking to the person next to me, looking out the window, or just spending time with my imagination were things I did too often, and I never needed a phone for any of it.

I seriously doubt banning phones would make much of a difference, other than pissing plenty of kids off. You're essentially being forced to go to a place, every day, where you will be stripped of your personal belongings and are not allowed to be in contact with the outside world.

I'm talking about first and third party websites tracking you. I don't use Chrome or Opera, but I'd rather only have to trust a browser of my choice, than having to place my trust in thousands of different websites.

The point is, if you care about tracking and privacy, you shouldn't be using Vivaldi in the first place.

According to this Vivaldi protects you from tracking about the same as Chrome and Opera, and both of those provide less tracking protection than even Edge.

When this topic comes up people usually bring up search engines that still use either Google or Bing's index, so if you want to look at something completely independent of those:

• Qwant
• Brave Search
• Mojeek

But if you can't get anyone's attention in the first place, then it's impossible to bring them to your side at all. Besides, as was already said, they never actually attempted to deface art.

You're essentially buying into propaganda designed to discredit climate activists and making them out to be terrorists.

Can I ask what you typically think about protesters, and things like the pride parade? Your thought process and the narrative you are using reminds me a lot of the people who complain about protesters occupying roads and blocking traffic, and who say they should go somewhere else and that they are actually harming their cause (I used to think like that). In reality, your narrative is what is actually damaging and is designed to make them look bad, and your advice would result in their message never being seen or heard by anyone. The whole point is to be disruptive and making it so that people hear the message.

"""Defacing""" valuable art is just a means to get eyes on you so that you can deliver the message. Spray-painting the back of a billionaires yacht is not going to get any eyes on you.

The whole point of protests like that is to gather attention in order to spread the message, and it worked. I would guess that this will not become as big of a story. Just using this post as an example: it was posted 2 days ago, but it only has 54 upvotes, 8 comments, and I'm only hearing about i now. Meanwhile, the protest with the works of art spread like wildfire.

You seem to be happy about maybe getting the attention of 1 billionaire, but will this really achieve? She can afford to get it cleaned pretty easy and quick, and it will barely register as a blip on her radar. It has no real effect on her, and no one else will care or even hear about it. How will this change or save the world?

You need the masses on your side to actually change things, but to do that you first need to get their attention and make them aware of the scale and reality of the problem. As "pretty" and "clean" as this might be, it will most likely achieve absolutely nothing.

Sort of, it depends on implementation. There are some techniques (which I don't really know) that will allow a 32 bit OS to address more than 4GB, but natively it can't for the same reason that the process will still be limited to 4GB.

Perhaps you already know this but: 32 bits can only represent 2^32 numbers (4.294.967.296), which is how many bytes 4GB is equivalent to, and so anything after that cannot be reached. This also means 64 bits can address up to something like 17 billion GB, or about 16 EB.

You don't need the friends, that is just one example. You have to think of the general concept and logic; Lemmy, as well as kbin, have communities. If one place manages to secure all or most major communities, they can pull the same thing. And Threads is meant to be a Twitter replacement, so you do have the bit about connections, as well as influencers. It's like Mastodon, but completely centralized.

So the same logic applies: if Threads joins the Fediverse and most people go to Threads, then most users who are not on Threads will still end up having a lot of discussions on Threads and following a lot of people there. Then some day, once Threads gets big enough, it will stop federating and Fediverse users will be forced to move if they want to keep those connections. Meanwhile, Mastodon dies. Lemmy and kbin might survive because they fill a different niche; however, if instances start federating with Threads and making it possible to follow people on there, then the same exodus will happen.

We can learn from history, or we can let it repeat itself. Federating with Threads would mean a huge failure to learn from history. And then maybe ten years later you'll be the one trying to warn someone else as they tell you how that time it's totally different.