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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • Please come back after you’ve worked in any customer service position interacting with the general populace. Plenty of smart folks out there, but just as many people that absolutely are not.

    I have, people are enraging sometimes but also people are fucking stressed as hell these days, I think overall people try to get along as best they can, even when working customer service where you meet insane people and need to rant about them after work because it breaks your brain how stupid they are from your perspective…. but that is life, a lot of people are hurting at least in my country (US). I don’t blame people for falling apart or making stupid choices because they don’t have the energy or alacrity left in their bodies after work to function.

    Yeah there are assholes, I am not some naive fool who trusts everybody, but I am sorry I just aggressively don’t agree with this endlessly repetitive narrative that the average person is a lazy, dumb piece of shit. I know people like that, but the real ones, who could have lived a much easier life but chose to be an asshole just because, are actually pretty rare.

    Plenty of people are landscapes of trauma (like me) even just from the trauma of always being stressed about money, and I just don’t feel like when that pushes people to do stupid irrational things that that really is an indicator those people were stupid, morally deficient or lacking in industriousness.



  • It doesn’t matter where you live, we are all the same species of animal and the brain in our skull that we like to lament as stupid when we make general statements about the intelligence of the public around us is an extraordinary thing.

    I get people’s cynicism and I am kind of annoyed people think I live in a fairytale lol, I just see humans around me trying to live their lives and being mediocre humans…. and the intelligence of mediocre humans is nothing to dismiss.

    People are smart as fuck, conservative and hateful ideologies do make people behave like idiots but I mean I don’t fault the human brain for getting brainworms when the brainworms are firehoused (one might say trickling down at a rapid rate) at everyone by the wealthiest people in the world 24/7.

    Also yo are you seriously looking for me to give you the average IQ of the population around me? This feels like two steps from getting out calipers and measuring people’s skulls to determine their intelligence. I agree, let’s NOT stick our heads in the sand.




  • Yeah probably but literally that is so fucking insulting to me that companies/copyright behave this way, the human brain is extraordinarily complex, the idea that seeing a character recreated in a sandbox by a 3rd party modder could “warp” my thinking about Nintendo characters or games is basically a slap in the face by Nintendo.

    Like… if you see a dumb meme with Mario in it, do you think “huh, maybe I shouldn’t buy Nintendo games, Mario is tarnished forever for me” …?. No, and what makes me think that is *this bullshit. I will never give Nintendo money because of the way they behave like this.

    I mean I have a steam deck so I have no reason to get a switch or anything so whatever no big loss.




  • I know in steam you can set the order of controllers (player 1, 2, 3, 4) but I can’t remember if you can set controllers to the same player.

    At any rate you can map both controllers to output keyboard commands and then have the game receive input from mouse and keyboard and then the game will think it is receiving input from only one device.




  • organice is front end that runs entirely in a mobile or desktop browser that allows you to access and edit org files easily with a touchscreen or mouse and keyboard. It obviously doesn’t have full org mode functionality, but it does a have a calendar view.

    https://github.com/200ok-ch/organice

    All you have to do is navigate to https://organice.200ok.ch in your phone’s browser and then pin it to your start screen. The PWA is downloaded and you can now access a remote webdav server with the locally saved front end of organice. No data is sent to organice, the only function of the website is to give you an easy place to download the PWA to your device using a web browser.

    I love love love love org mode, it is just simple yet so powerful and there really is nothing else like it, I can’t really recommend anything else in good conscience here, especially since most other options (except for logseq https://logseq.com/ which I am not sure does everything you want?) are commercial and who knows what the hell will happen when the company goes out of business or is bought out by someone else?

    I recommend Spacemacs or Doom emacs as a nice starting point for emacs, or you can just start with basic emacs and build it yourself as org mode is included in the default distribution of emacs.

    An additional thing to think about, there is an android release of emacs coming up, so org mode might get much more accessible on the go in the future!

    No worries if you aren’t interested, I am just providing some additional context.

    https://www.spacemacs.org/

    https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs

    This video is a great thorough but approachable explanation of why org mode is so special:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEeStDz_imQ


  • NYC and other cities briefly dropped some cop funding and all that did in the end was for crime to go up. NYC subway now needs metal detectors and the national guard was called in recently due to the uptick in violent crime.

    I am sorry, but you viewpoints are clearly based on your desire to engage with a narrative rather than the facts

    https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2023/manhattan-violent-crime-record-levels-trump-fact-check/

    https://www.ahdatalytics.com/dashboards/ytd-murder-comparison/

    The only spike in violence New York City saw was from the pandemic making desperate people even more desperate. There was a spike and then it subsided because people got less desperate.

    At best some shallow, meaningless changes like a mural or a rainbow or BLM flag painted on a street, hell, maybe even a street name change or something akin to that, and in some cases, it just increased crime and looting statistics in the aggregate in numerous cities. Sorry bro, this is reality.

    The reality is that the people with the power in the US political system are like you and will categorically not accept less police violence, it is a feature not a bug. Meanwhile, crime has been decreasing and will keep decreasing no matter how much rightwing figures make a bunch of noise about crime and scary immigrants to try to distract people from noticing they aren’t actually doing their jobs and passing legislation to meaningfully improve people’s lives (that addresses REAL problems like unaffordable healthcare or lack of access to affordable housing, not whether hypothetically a transgender person might have a slighttttt advantage in sports??)

    It also increase social tension and some distrust between races, which ain’t good, either. I dare say that racism, from all races went up since 2016. Won’t fully blame BLM for this but the movement sure did not help.

    Cite your sources bro. If anything has changed it is that rightwing extremists have become less capable of hiding their racism under a veneer of acceptability politics and have become more openly violent as they realize the general public is beginning to see rightwing extremists (which is effectively the whole damn party, since it is a party of cowards that just follows the loudest, angriest person) for the losers they are. In this sense, yes maybe tensions have increased, but if they have the overwhelming evidence points to conservative rightwing extremists specifically escalating tensions in the vast majority of cases.

    Perhaps more existentially for the conservative movement in the US, the general public is also beginning to realize how irresponsibly rightwing extremists behave in policy making (again which is essentially every Republican in office because they all just fall in line no matter how hateful their leader is) because their basic sense of empathy was utterly lobotomized by spending too many hours in front of the tv watching the likes of New Gingrich and Bill O’Reilly. Republicans are the dog chasing the car and the car is hate, and we can only hope that they have finally caught the car in banning abortions and overturning roe vs wade (which the numbers are looking promising, my fingers are crossed :) ).


  • I think there is a big piece missing if we want to make lasting change. Protests should be the first part and we have missed many opportunities by skipping the second part.

    Certainly so, but also I think an important difference between the civil rights movement with MLK and current day is the public is actually much closer to siding with the civil rights protestors now, MLK and others were not necessarily anywhere near as accepted during their time as a political activist figures though their ideas may have won out in the long term. We forget this when we see people like MLK as “popular figures” now.

    I think the current problem is not that the majority believes in defending the racist structures of society, we don’t need an MLK to convince us that systematic and direct racism are abhorrent. The majority of us know, but the other difference between the civil rights movements of the MLK era and now is that we are far more powerless as a public body of normal people to actually wield power politically and enact the changes Black Lives Matter advocated for. We can’t change the laws, the rich and powerful WILL NOT let it happen, and we live in a time period where their power is near absolute.

    We can’t judge the BLM or Occupy movement for failing to create policy changes when both movements were specifically born out of a desire to directly express the unsustainable nature of disempowerment in the US of the average person. We have reached a maximum point of powerlessness against an entrenched, corrupt political system and at this point policy just isn’t going to happen unless we all collectively keeping threatening to shut it all down.


  • Exactly and as time goes on I have shifted from a perspective that Occupy Wall Street was an unfocused failure to a perspective that the control of the finance industry and money on politics is absolute and those in power will not tolerate it being questioned, so Occupy Wall Street could never have resulted in immediate policy changes, Wall Street would have prevented it any cost even if it meant physically walking into the street and shooting protestors until they went back to work. Of course “financial instruments” would probably be used instead of guns, but murder is murder and the weapons the finance industry uses to make their living make mass shooters with assault rifles look like amateurs playing around with toys, see the 2008 financial crash as example A.

    The role of Occupy Wall Street was thus to lay bare this power relationship and the associated threat of violence towards those who seek to modify it. The impact of Occupy must be understood in terms of how the internal psyche of the US was irrevocably radicalized from a collective witnessing of this truth.

    In the same way that a crowd of fans will remember a ref on the soccer field making horrible calls that screw their team over (…and even though the crowd has no actual codified power to stop the ref from making bad calls and swinging the game), the crowd will remember:

    the injustice itself

    the collective shared awareness of the injustice among fellow strangers in the crowd

    the disempowerment forced upon the crowd in that moment to preserve the status quo of the injustice

    These are not things that crowds forget easily, in sports or in broader political contexts. Movements like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter have to be understood as acts of reality crafting that first and foremost validate individual’s feeling that the majority of the public understands the power structure of the status quo as an existential threat to the common good.

    Once people have seen the validation from essentially 1 out of every 10 people in the country showing up to Black Lives Matter with them it flips a switch in their head and talking heads on tv permanently lose a degree of power to manipulate people into believing their feelings are fringe in regards to rejecting police violence and systematic racism.



  • dumpsterlid@lemmy.worldtoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlWere the BLM protests of 2020 a success?
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    3 months ago

    I think a better question to ask is whether the groups and ideologies involved in the BLM protests (which were MASSIVE) were ever allowed to have power?

    If BLM failed to enact significant policy change than I don’t think it is because BLM wasn’t focused enough, had unrealistic goals or was handled badly, I think it is because in terms of law enforcement policy it really doesn’t matter what voters do or don’t want. Any kind of noise made by voters and the public about police violence and the inherent problems with police (and their vital role in maintaining economic injustice and inequality through state violence) will be aggressively pushed back in the opposite direction by the political forces of law enforcement, and because the average person has no power and their vote is useless this will result in a broad push in policy in the opposite direction of BLM’s goals.

    However, the function of BLM must be seen for what it was then, to lay bare the true nature of the power relationship between voters and cops and in the minds of countless, countless people living in the US it delegitimized the authority of law enforcement to commit violence wherever and howsoever it chooses. It sent a massive crack through the entire structure of policing, jails and systematic divestment from minorities and the poor. Just because BLM didn’t create significant policy changes doesn’t mean that the battle hasn’t already been lost for the legitimacy of law enforcement in the long term in the US, and I call that a victory.


  • Migraines….

    …but also… seeing my mom lose all her patience and yell at my dad for having aggressive late stage dementia and not being able to function properly.

    Seeing that and being broke and unable to materially change the situation was by far and away the most cynical, insufferable thing I have ever experienced in my entire life and hopefully I will never experience something as awful again or I fear I would shatter into a million pieces.


  • The important question is why smartphones are designed around not having root access and computers are?

    What are the incentives at play?

    The answer is obvious, tech companies wouldn’t have given users access to root control on their computers either if they knew what they were doing and thought they could have gotten away with it.

    It is just circular logic claiming smartphones have to be this way, circular logic that provides a rhetorical smokescreen for the process of corporations taking our agency away from us over our lives and the tools that sustain us.