Generally speaking, the statement “Tankies made the X face the wall” is true for all X. Anarchists, monarchists, fascists, capitalists, Mensheviks, Jews, Doctors, poets, authors, musicians, peasants, soldiers, factory workers, Marxists, Bolsheviks, wives and children of all of the above, and eventually even Stalinists.

I feel like libertarians would love the concept of FOSS and decentralization, and I don’t think anyone would argue they skew left.

Yup, there has always been a large libertarian contingent in the OSS community.

Yes, the TLD belongs to Mali. But the reason why the creators of lemmy.ml picked that TLD is because they’re Marxists. They’re also the creators of Lemmy itself, which is another reason why Lemmy communities tend to be pretty far left: the first instance was literally Marxist, and presumably most of the early users leaned in that direction.

Nice, you avoided having to think on a self-imposed technicality. Real intellectual rigor there.

Makes it easy to dismiss my argument without bothering to think about it, you mean. Just take abortion, then. Or “tax is theft”, or right to bear arms, or any of a thousand other beliefs you probably don’t agree with.

So like, if you were in a restaurant and ordered food, but it never came because a couple of the servers were blocking food from being served because the company wasn’t taking a strong stance against abortion, you’d think “these good people are taking a moral stand, good for them! The company better not take any action against them to make sure I get my food!”

Or for that matter, if Google stopped all cooperation with the IDF, the company’s Jewish employees could (in fact should) disrupt business because Google was supporting terrorism?

It seems to me that you can only support forms of protest you’d be willing to accept when the other side uses them against you. Basically the golden rule.

Yeah, I remember that being a real thing: one studio would get wind that another studio was working on a film with a particular theme, and they’d rush to put out an equivalent movie. Later on, it wasn’t even just cheap knockoffs: remember when Deep Impact came out right at the same time as Armageddon? And then like…The 13th Floor, eXistenZ, and The Matrix all came out in 1999. I wonder how much of that was strict copying, how much was scripts influencing one another, and how much was just the zeitgeist.

I remember, towards the end of the last millennium, marveling with some friends about an article estimating the current size of all the data on the internet. IIRC, it was in the neighborhood of a couple hundred terabytes. Wouldn’t fit on your phone, but there’s plenty of data hoarder types who have that kinda storage on the server in their spare room.

And when that future comes, Apple will still manage to fill 50% of your space up with god-knows-what.

Lol, it seems like there was a whole category of films made to ride the coat tails of better, more famous films by sitting beside them on the shelf at Blockbuster, waiting to be picked up by clueless parents.

My sisters still give my dad a hard time about all the knock-off movies he brought home when we were kids. To this day, a Gordy is family short-hand for a disappointing knock-off: “Hey, wait, this isn’t brie, this is ‘cheese product’…you got the Gordy cheese!”

A while back, one of the image generation AIs (midjourney?) caught flack because the majority of the images it generated only contained white people. Like…over 90% of all images. And worse, if you asked for a “pretty girl” it generated uniformly white girls, but if you asked for an “ugly girl” you got a more racially-diverse sample. Wince.

But then there reaction was to just literally tack “…but diverse!” on the end of prompts or something. They literally just inserted stuff into the text of the prompt. This solved the immediate problem, and the resulting images were definitely more diverse…but it led straight to the sort of problems that Google is running into now.

I think one of the differences (at least when I watched anime way back in the early 00s) is that anime relies on a whole different set of tropes from Western movies and cartoons, and those tropes are unfamiliar (or were, anyway) to Western audiences.

When I started watching anime, it was hugely refreshing to be caught by surprise by plot twists and dialogue, and to see characters & themes that felt totally original.

But then you watch more anime, and realize…oh, they weren’t unique, they were totally stereotypical. You just didn’t know the stereotypes they were based on.

And before long you can see plot twists a mile away, the characters are predictable, and you can describe a new series as “basically X, but with some Y and monsters instead of robots”.

It’s the false promise of that initial discovery that makes the eventual realization that much more disappointing.

I shave my head. Where’s my option?!?

You can label your devices. When formatting, do mkfs.ext4 -l my-descriptive-name /dev/whatever. Now, refer to it exclusively by /dev/disk/by-label/my-descriptive-name. Much harder to mix up home and swap than sdc2 and sdc3 (or, for that matter, two UUIDs).

I’m getting there. One by one, I’m leaving the news communities, because they’re so deranged.

It’s frustrating, though, cuz Reddit (for better & worse) was a pretty good source of news, and a good place to discuss it. Yes there was a lot of noise, but most of the time the top few comments were worth reading. Sometimes it was legit deep analysis, sometimes insider knowledge about the politics/business/culture in question. Then below that, there was the bog-standard predictable takes and the shit-slinging.

On Lemmy, you only seem to get the latter. I guess it’s just not big enough, or skews young and inexperienced.

Counterpoint: if you think the world is so terrible right now (relative to…?) that anyone pointing out anything positive must be shut down, you’re probably just a toxic asshole.

There’s like 3 regular-looking Swedes who make just about all popular music, isn’t there?

I think this might be giving the attackers too much credit for strategy. Don’t discount the simple religious aspect: don’t make the mistake of refusing to believe that devout religious people don’t actually believe their own religion.

Take ISIS. A whole lot of their actions made almost no sense, from a strategic point of view: picking fights with everybody, massacring civilians instead of letting them flee, destroying ancient artifacts (instead of either preserving or selling them) if you omit the simple explanation of religion. They wanted to trigger the final, apocalyptic battle that would usher in the end of the world. They said exactly that in their social media videos, but we secular atheists (or non-devout believers) just kinda skipped over that detail.

Things aren’t as clearly religious in the case of the Palestinians, but probably plays some role. Same with the Israeli Right, and the American Right with their unconditional support for Israel. We shouldn’t ignore the impact of religious belief.

The initial plan wasn’t to give the entire area to the Jews, it was to give some share of it (20% of the land, is the figure I heard). That area is the only place the Jews could really conceivably lay claim to. And the Arabs (specifically the Sharif of Mecca, not the people of Palestine) got huge swaths of land in exchange for their revolt against the Ottomans: Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, etc. The British made a specific exception for coastal areas, and there’s debate about whether Palestine was part of that or not.

So…not that simple.

edit: Guys, downvotes for strong opinions are one thing. Debate is fine. I’m happy to reconsider in the face of mistakes. You could recast the same facts from the perspective of the average Palestinian, then or now. But downvotes for paraphrasing Wikipedia? That’s the equivalent of plugging your ears and saying “LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU!!”

Still seems like the default in much of Europe and Asia