Always has been :(

I had put off reading it because I assumed it would be mostly preaching to the choir, but there are some challenging chapters to think about.

Ex. the idea that all the people who believe in aliens, and reject vaccines, and wear tinfoil hats, they’re all doing the first step of science: which is to doubt. The problem is that people are generally untrained on what to do next.

The question is whether this modern era of science is an anomaly, or if there’s something about the scientific method that gives it an advantage. If we fell completely into a dark age, is it inevitable that we find our way back? Or was this time period just a fluke?

It notes that throughout history, the dominant nation has always been the one who wields science most effectively. And the US wouldn’t be the first to fall because it failed to.

I did like the book, it’s not a 10/10, but it’s fun and I like weird fiction. I think both SCP and the Remedy Connected Universe are delightfully mysterious.

I hadn’t watched that short yet, just did. I see what you mean, but it was relatively true to the first chapter of the book. It’s really hard to do this genre justice in video form I think. Partly due to budget, but partly because what you didn’t like about it is a perfect description of the entire SCP universe: a giant, very serious conspiracy theory that fans swear is completely true and “THEY” don’t want you to know about it…while obviously being a absurd work of fiction. It’s like 80s horror, you have to embrace the campiness to enjoy it.

The notion of an anti-meme is interesting to think about too. Not really in a supernatural sense, but in a sociological/anthropological one. Are there things in this world that people have trouble wrapping their head around, things we can’t seem to pin down and understand and assign an easy-to-proliferate name to, but nonetheless hurt us?

Non-fiction:

• The Demon-Haunted World
• The Fourth Turning is Here

Fiction:

• There is No Antimemetics Division

Curious what went wrong with your Reolink run. That’s what I’ve got. Doesn’t require an app or account, and works with home assistant.

It’s not a matter of privacy vs UX. I actually think Plex has ruined their UX. But if you have friends and family, some are tech-illiterate, some have their own media servers, and you all want to share with each other quickly and easily, Plex is the only viable option. Same if it’s just you, but you travel a lot, and want to watch something from your home server without lugging around a device that has access to your VPN and a screen/hdmi-out.

Jellyfin is really only viable if it’s just you on your own network.

To add on to the top post: with Plex you only need 1 account and can exchange access to multiple servers. I can browse all the media my account has access to with ease.

Jellyfin needs an account per server. If the client multiplexed between them seamlessly, that would probably be fine enough. But it would be nice if they supported some method of federation.

And Jellyfin has a list of CVEs that they haven’t addressed in years, which makes not want to make it visible outside my network.

I want to ditch Plex, but this is the primary sticking point for me. No criticism to the Jellyfin devs btw, they’re doing the lord’s work, I have nothing but respect for them.

Another minor one is that the Plex app works with a controller on my bazzite HTPC, but the Jellyfin one was hit or miss. I could get it to work once, and then the next day the controller would do nothing and the UI would be acting weird. I will go back and try it periodically to see if it’s ready, but last time I checked it wasn’t.

/lemmy

As someone who doesn’t keep up with the Republican bubble, I think Atrioc had a good breakdown of this whole situation.

tl;dw

• Depsite Massie voting Republican 91% of the time, only breaking on topics of War, Debt, and Pedos, there is a concerted effort to paint Massie as a secret Democrat.
• Massie is one of 4 Republican congress people to push for a release of the Epstein Files. Without them, we wouldn’t even have what little we got.
• the GOP ran a fully AI generated ad showing Massie hanging out with Democrats to besmirch him (with a tiny “this satire is AI generated” disclaimer that boomers won’t notice).
• Trump’s description of Ed Gallrein is that he’s “a warm body” and “central casting” (Trump’s phrase for “looks the part”).
• Ed’s credentials are that he’s endorsed by trump. He never talks about any issues. He never showed up to a debate with Massie.
• KY has “Sore Loser” laws which prevent Massie from running as an independent in the actual election.
• This was the most expensive primary in US history, over $32 million was spent. For a state primary.
• Total corporate spending in US elections is now over $1 billion per year, and will likely skyrocket this year, so $32 million on a primary is nothing. Expect to see mass manipulation during midterms. (Thanks Citizens United!)

As a lifetime owner, the number of features they’ve deprecated is probably the worst part.

• Photo support (luckily Immich came along)
• Tidal integration (no idea if that was Plex or Tidal’s decision)
• Plugins (god forbid anyone add the functionality they keep removing)

It’s close between that and the last app overhaul that removed a bunch of functionality.

This was an unknown unknown for OP. Again, it’s completely fair for a new user to see the alias feature, think “ah, that’s built for aliasing one thing to another, let me try it for this directory name”, and be confused when it doesn’t work. OP can’t know what they don’t know.

And the open source community is just that, a community. Asking questions in forums is the accepted practice. And “basic” is hard to define. What is basic for you isn’t basic for someone else, in the same way that what is basic for someone else isn’t basic to you.

Highly recommend remapping common characters to easy-to-access hand movements. The keyboard is a tool to make things easier. I never use caps-lock, but I use esc all the time, so I regularly swap them (or just have a second esc bind).

It is worth acknowledging that this probably seems unintuitive to a new user. Makes it look like the shell has two different aliasing systems.

It makes sense the more familiar you are with bash, though. If you ever tried to cd /some/other/path-with-docs/in/the/string you’d end up accidentally running cd /some/other/path-with-/media/docs/in/the/string.

Which would be confusing at best, or a security issue at worst. Better to see that $ in the cmd and know you’re injecting a var’s value.

So you said “If you don’t vote things will get worse” but you’re not willing to say “If you do vote things will not get worse”. At best this is sophistry.

I know it was a few days ago, but the full statement was “if you do all of the [door knocking, etc.], but no one does any of the voting, things will get worse”. This was an attempt to find common ground to build from. I’m noticing this is not a mutually shared goal. I’m aware you are not able to hear this from me right now, but one day, you should consider that you are practicing preaching, not debating, not convincing.

Misattribution

Literally the same argument I’m making about your position [regarding why people vote vs why they don’t get what they want]. You’re speaking from your own POV. I believe your POV doesn’t align with the data. If you are able to produce data to the contrary, you are welcome.

The USA is uniquely flawed because it is the only settler state in history to become the seat of the empire that birthed it.

Why is that a flaw, though? If it had done this, and none of the rest of the stuff, and immediately gone full communist, you would say this same action makes it uniquely the best, no?

Sources:

Thanks

No. It’s not. It’s extremely difficult.

Is incongruent with

That’s how it’s always worked. From the dawn of society.

Which was my point. Starting from scratch happens far more in history, at the cost of many lives. Gradually working toward and maintaining a system that protects the people very rarely happens. By definition, that indicates one is clearly easier to accomplish (by humans).

China is not a settler colony founded on genocide.

Could you inform me on the state of Muslim minorities in China, and what is going on there, though?

Your position is equivalent to a “both sides” argument that everyone’s evil/terrible & does bad things

This is another example of something you gotta stop doing. To me, it feels like you’re willingly ignoring reality. When I point that out to you, you reduce my position to a meme you’re more familiar with. You will not convince anyone this way. You need to be able to work toward common ground to build from. Otherwise you’re just wasting your time. Do you see that? From the get-go, your attitude has been one of, “where do we disagree, I want to highlight ways we disagree. Oh, you think we agree on something? NO, we disagree on that too!” If that’s what all of your typing has been for, and in the end we haven’t been convinced of anything, what was earned in that time? I surely hope this is not your strategy when you go door knocking.

This is because you are in the US and you have been raised to believe that the Chinese are all imprisoned by an autocrat and suffer under brutal authoritarianism

Another example.

No, as I stated, I believe china has served their older generations well. But from what I hear from younger generations, they do not like their uniquely intense education/vocational system that is being dominated by the ability of the wealthy to use blackmarket tutoring, and they do not feel like they can afford a house, same as the rest of the world right now. I do think the Chinese govt has the ability to unilaterally solve this problem if they want to, and if they do, it’s going to make everyone else look silly. But unlike you, I do believe there is a whole lotta wealth influencing Chinese politics, and just like everyone else, they’re also going to find it difficult to appease the people and the wealthy. We will surely see…

In essence, you are ignorant about the topic and you patronizingly express hope that one day they’ll be as free as you are.

Do you see it yet? Unless you can convince me you’re not here to waste both of our time, I think we’re done here.

Any others?

I don’t agree that voting prevents things from getting worse…You are literally saying that if we vote for the right people in an informed way that things will not get bad.

But you recognize that’s not what I said, right? I said if you don’t vote, things will get worse. P->Q doesn’t imply ~P->~Q. Classic fallacy of the inverse.

People don’t vote for Democrats because Democrats have terrible policies and terrible behaviors. It’s not that Democrats have terrible policies because people don’t vote. The two party system is just a PR show by the ultra wealthy and that’s why people don’t vote at all. It’s not the case that the two party system is just a PR show by the ultra wealthy because people don’t vote.

But it’s clearly both. It’s a vicious cycle. The data shows that the boomer generation still votes more than any other generation, and as a result, they always get their way. 4 boomer presidents in a row, topped off with Biden from the Silent generation! Yes, the boomers currently hold more wealth than the rest, and yes there is a correlation between being wealthy and being able to cast a vote that matters, but if non-boomers showed up at the same rates as boomers 10-20 years ago, we would be in a much better situation right now. So far, the ones who vote are having their wealth protected.

Now your task is to actually work through your social indoctrination to come to your conclusions based on reality instead of instilled beliefs.

Hey man, don’t sink to that level, please. I’m trying to have a respectful, constructive conversation. Whether intentionally or not, you’ve repeatedly misinterpreted my position.

For ex.

This is the best you can imagine for democracy?

I never said that, you’re arguing against a straw man.

Consider the extent to which you’re upset with reality. The US is not uniquely flawed. Find me a time in human history where none of the crimes against humanity you mention were being committed. But chart crimes over time and I assure you we’re trending better as a species.

And I know you’re capable of seeing that, because in spite of the crimes against humanity committed by the USSR and China, you’re able to see all the good they did too.

They wrote about it explicitly

I’m very interested in any sources you have for this. I would love to have those in my back pocket for future discussions.

not because we voted for the right set of presidents or senators but because we deposed all of those leaders and took control, cratos, back into the hands of the people, the demos

But you see why that argument can always be made to justify throwing out an imperfect system, right? It’s easy to start from scratch, but it’s also the most costly (in terms of lives). It’s much harder to work diligently to make positive, gradual change over time, but historically, we’re doing that. Sure, we can go the overthrow-the-government route, but there’s no guarantee that what replaces it will adequately serve the people. So we’ll overthrow that one too? How many times should that loop happen? As many as it takes? As many lives as it takes?

And what if, when you try to take a stand against the state, the government quashes the attempt using violence, and then punishes anyone who ever so much as mentions the incident going forward? I assume you have examples of that happening in the US. Are you aware of any famous cases of that in China? I wouldn’t presume that this is “the best you can imagine for a democracy”, though.

Again, I’m not here to say the US is any better ethically than China. I’m not going to take the bait on whether china is a democracy, or whether they even claim to be one. But we have to be fair: they’re both guilty of a huge number of crimes against humanity, they’ve both gradually improved the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people, and both of them are underserving their minorities and younger generations right now in favor of late stage capitalism. But I would feel more confident about being able to affect meaningful change both in policy and party in the US than in China today. Though I ernestly hope that one day the Chinese are able to affect similar change there too.

I put my labor into deconstructing white-supremacist patriarchal capitalism in the hearts and minds of my people in my neighborhood and online, and when I do put in physical effort equivalent to door knocking, it’s doing food distribution for the people around me who need food.

That’s great!

But vote. It’s literally the least you can do.

And yet you agree that if everyone does all of the first part, but none of the voting, things get worse, right?

with a simple “vote for the good guys and bad things are because of the bad guys” narrative.

I’m sorry your teachers taught you that, I agree our public education system is in shambles. I was raised to believe democracy is the worst option, except for all the others. And that even if my options are between “Turd Sandwich and Giant Douche”, informed voting is critical to a democracy.

And that’s my point, you can’t both think we don’t live in a democracy AND think that voting is important. You can be cynical about the electoral process, or the direction of the country, but that’s just called living in a democracy. This isn’t even the first time the world has tipped toward fascism, and as dire as it looks, I maintain that until a system breaks apart completely, the only way we make a “more perfect union” on the other side is by voting.

All that other stuff is vital too, particularly when it comes to crossing the critical “when everyone knows what everyone knows” threshold. That’s the “informed” part of the equation.

And how 'bout that Mamdani? Balanced budget! And he’s not the only Democratic Socialist gaining steam. Maybe I’m naive, but it feels like people are finally figuring out which candidates they need to push for if they want to survive late stage capitalism.

I am curious, what is one country you would be willing to call a democracy?

Tell me not to go vote in midterms, then.

Removed by mod

The difference in what we’re saying is semantic.

They fundamentally want the US to continue

If this means a government “of the people, for the people, by the people” that maintains a monopoly on violence to ensure no one is above the law/Constitution, then I disagree.

If this means a puppet state that the “elite” holds oligarchal control over, but maintain whatever facade of democracy they need to, then I agree. But I would not call that the US govt. You could say that because they call it the “US Govt” it’s still the US govt, and you could say that because they call it the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, it’s a democratic republic. But I would disagree on both points.

Yeah obviously they’re not going to personally crown themselves as supreme ruler on a towering citadel constructed where the whitehouse once stood like a caricature of a villain. But if the structure of “government” that we end up with is completely powerless against them, then it’s objectively not the US anymore; it’s just the “elite”, the govt is whatever they say, they are the govt, wealth only flows wherever they say it’s allowed to in order to maintain power.

And that’s always their goal, to become the govt, that’s what I mean.