Doc Avid Mornington @ docAvid @midwest.social

Not actually a doctor.

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Joined

2 yr. ago

Insert "always has been" meme here.

Wait did GitHub retroactively change existing master branches to main, or was your stuff insanely fragile?

The only reason you think "master" makes sense is because you're used to it. It's actually quite a weird connection to make, if you aren't used to it. "Main" is much more straight forward. And nobody is really demanding people stop using "master", so far as I am aware, it's just that people are making that choice themselves.

That's kind of inevitable, and not such a bad thing. The president is one person. One person shouldn't be deciding what is right arbitrarily. For the president to be looking at what the people want, that's a good thing. Now, our democratic systems are deeply flawed, so that "what the people want" and "what improves electoral chances" are not as closely tied as they should be, but that's another matter.

Interesting assumption that the military would not be divided.

That's not how things work, though. Sure, some of them would wind up in prison. So? A negligible impact.

Do you think January 6 was organic? If so, you haven't been following the investigations. It was an attempted coup, and the more people the extremist right can get riled up and ready to commit violence where directed, the more likely the next attempt is to succeed.

Who said they weren't?

If some fool killed Jones, his followers would say his name for generations, talking about how he was killed by the deep state for telling the truth. They would spread his words further and more than they do now. People who don't think much about him, or people who think he's probably full of shit but like to listen to him for fun, and entertain his ideas a little, would suddenly take him more seriously, becoming followers as well. People who would argue against his lies now, will feel uncomfortable speaking out. For at least a while, anyone who tried to debunk his views would suddenly be painted as disrespecting the dead, at best, and viewed with suspicion. What it's possible to talk about would shift right, extremism and conspiracy theories becoming more acceptable, facts and reason becoming less so. In the midst of it all, some new spokesperson for the lunatic fringe would rise up and replace him seamlessly.

And maybe they are cowards, but cowards are motivated by fear, and people motivated by fear often lash out violently.

It is, and this kind of thing is a big part of why Trump's cultists love him so much. Every time they see us all making fun of something like this, they feel like they're being attacked, like "liberal elitists" are looking down on their guy, and by extension on them, for no good reason. Instead of talking about how he's a dangerous authoritarian nationalist, a pompous rich man who despises his own voters, and a threat to the future of democracy, we look like a bunch of bullies forming a circle to point and laugh at the kid who doesn't test well.

I dunno, I'm probably not gonna remember those words in five minutes...

I get it. I'm frustrated, too. I've tried so many times, too. If you think that somebody can't be swayed, then it's probably best not to waste time on them at all, but think about the other people - the ones watching the conversation play out, who may never say a word - what will move them? Sometimes, I do think being confrontational and telling someone off can be the best option, because other people are watching, and it's what they see that matters. Other times, for the same reason, it's not a good choice. And sometimes I just get mad and I say what I say, even though it might be doing more harm than good. And still other times, I don't say anything at all, because I don't know how to say something useful. It sucks. Giving a shit really sucks sometimes.

I try to remember how Hillary Clinton said "basket of deplorables", absolute political malpractice, that was. When you give someone a choice between thinking of themselves as being bad, and thinking of you as being wrong, they'll always make the same decision.

Fuck being friendly.

Maybe this’ll teach them

You can decide for yourself, of course, whether being friendly and listening is more or less effective than lecturing, but it sounds like you're choosing not to pick the best of bad options, but just let it burn, to show people who think differently from you how wrong they are. This could be described as:

threatening to take the ball and go home

If I'm not saying what you were prepared for, maybe you are the one with a script. It's LBJ. LBJ was significantly more left than Biden, but can you name one since?

But that just isn't true, he didn't move further right, he has moved left. Not nearly as far as I would like, but definitely left. He's turning out to be the most progressive president since LBJ. Admittedly, that's more of a criticism of how right wing the office has been in that time, than it is high praise of Biden, but it is true.

And it has a whole set of options based on common ls options. Classic and brilliant.

What actually surprises me is that the right hasn't already been releasing a barrage of easily-debunked deep fakes just to undermine the public confidence in evidence and make it easier to claim a real recording is fake.

What shell is that? Bash and sh use Emacs bindings, C-y. Or if you meant terminal, urxvt and I'm pretty sure xterm use C-M-v. Maybe that's the gnome terminal?

Ah, I see you're a nerd of culture as well.

I was actually about to upvote for that first paragraph, but downvoted because of the rest.

And hey, I mean, ACAB, I'm not defending cops. Cops are selected for stupidity and aggression, trained to murder, and held above the law. Even the best of them are still part of a system that is oppressive by design.

But what that trainer was saying was true, and an important thing to acknowledge for anybody who is likely to be in life-and-death situations - firefighters, paramedics, even social workers. Go to the Snopes link he included and read the whole thing.

Sex is a normal reaction to danger. It doesn't mean that cops are going out and killing people just to have better sex, that's stupid. They're killing people, yes, for lots of reasons, but that's not one of them. It's almost as dumb as the QAnon quacks talking about adrenochrome.

Weird. Booleanish isn't a built-in, I'm pretty sure. I'd like to see the definition.

That's a fair take. I don't really agree, as to me, it is just a popular idiom meaning that people reacted negatively to something and either criticized it or mocked it harshly - I don't think it has to carry a lot of weight - but I do think it's perfectly valid that you think it does. That's not, however, what I get from the comment I was responding to, at all.