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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: April 1st, 2022

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  • As for the title question:

    Do we need more users ?

    We don’t need more users. It might be nice, there are benefits, but we don’t need it. I agree with you on not caring much about growth-as-a-target, “growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of a cancer cell”. I was here years before the first big reddit exodus with the third-party API changes and I was having a good time back then too.


  • comfy@lemmy.mltoFediverse@lemmy.worldNew PieFed instance: MULTIVERSE
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    7 days ago

    I’m not a soulist like the user you replied to, but for another perspective, mine is that rights are imaginary constructs which mean nothing if unenforceable.

    People have some rights to not be murdered; that’s not an opinion if we have a compatible definition of ‘rights’, it’s written in law, it’s ingrained into mainstream liberalist social norms and ethics. So the right exists as a social idea which sometimes manifests in real consequences. However:

    • I can get murdered by the government or law enforcement who proclaim to enforce my right to not be murdered! It’s a conditional right, not the idealistic universal right it’s often made out to be.
    • And there are some people who I wouldn’t really care if they were murdered. I don’t weep for Wnssolᴉuᴉ’s lynching. I don’t mind that Ken McElroy’s murderers weren’t charged. Sometimes we just don’t have the luxury or power to go through the ideal routes of justice. And to be clear I also don’t advocate for murder for a big long list of reasons, many of them are obvious. For example, I think the assassination of Brian Thompson was morally just and cathartic, it stopped an antisocial social murderer who would not have been held accountable by law, and the fear it created may feasibly have saved some lives of UHC customers in the short term, but ultimately I do not advocate for such adventurism as it’s proven historically to do little to create long-term systemic improvements, and can easily go wrong and cause more damage than benefit, as we saw with the “golden age of Propaganda of the Deed”.

  • The sealion in the comic overheard someone being racist against them, and stepped in to say, “Hey, why are you being racist?” And for some reason is wrong because… they’re persistent? Or because they’re annoying? How is that not literally just every “anti-woke” argument?

    I think the point is that the sea lion is feigning civility while harassing someone over a casual opinion.

    My response would be that if we extend the metaphor, like you did, and substitute the absurd ‘sea lions’ for a race, then harassing the racist doesn’t bother me. Bigots don’t deserve peace. It’s absolutely harassment to stalk and interrogate someone who doesn’t want to talk, I just wouldn’t care that they’re being harassed for airing such bigotry.

    (On the other hand, if we assume the original opinion is not a metaphor and replace it with a similarly absurd statement, like enjoying pineapple on pizza, then the sea lion would be acting unreasonably. If someone followed you around online and kept bringing up how you prefer pizza to be prepared, demanding a calm discussion and insisting on peer-reviewed proof that pizza tastes better a certain way, while you ask them to stop, that harassment would obviously be uncalled for. For what it’s worth, the author made a comment that it wasn’t meant to be “analogous to a prejudice based on race, species, or other immutable characteristics.” - but I say it’s a though-provoking interpretation to explore regardless)



  • I’ve come across some people who have no idea what “sealioning” even means. There used to be a hb user “Ulysses” or something, like three years ago, who accused me of doing it after I replied to their reply to my reply, and that’s the only conversation we’d ever had. I pulled up the definition of sealioning and the comic which the word originated from, and they just say “no that’s not true, stop sealioning”.

    I feel like some people just think sealioning means “this person keeps replying to my posts”, as if conversations on a public forum are somehow uncalled for, or unusual.








  • You can’t just say “The USSR was bad because of communism, end of story”, for example. It was never communist, and I would argue it eas never trying to get there.

    On one hand, I know you’re right that socialist rhetoric is abused. It’s vitally important to be alert to it, and fascists have a proven history of trying to exploit socialist sentiment, given their rise in response to a string of 1920s socialist uprisings in Europe.

    On the other, I can’t look at the decades-worth of writings and actions of the RSDLP and Bolsheviks and conclude they weren’t honestly trying to build a vanguard party with the aim of building a communist society. I’m open to critique of whether or not Leninist theory has been shown to be right or wrong, but I struggle to see how Lenin could have been pretending to be a communist full-time for 20 years at extended self-sacrifice. An opportunist wouldn’t have chosen a path with such little opportunity. The Bolsheviks were evidently a vanguardist party trying to eventually achieve communism - a ‘communist party’.

    You’re using all these fraught terms like “socialism” and “liberalism” incorrectly

    I’m using them in a way consistent with political dictionaries.

    Fascism is, openly, anti-liberal. This is not a contested fact, they say it openly. It’s one of the few consistent parts of fascism, along with being anti-socialist (‘socialist’, in this context, meaning in support of social ownership of the means of production - a very standard and common definition in English dictionaries and encyclopedias alike).

    Summary of nine dictionaries all with similar primary definitions of 'socialism'

    You accuse me of using those terms incorrectly, so what would you consider a correct usage?

    The Nazis rose out of National Bolshevism, after all.

    No, they didn’t.

    A cursory look at the Nazi Party’s history clearly shows their utter disdain and scapegoating of Bolshevism as a grave evil. The Nazi Party founder (Anton Drexler) was an anti-Marxist. Drexler emphasised the only thing ‘socialist’ about the party was social welfare for those deemed Aryan. The Nazi Party considered nazbols to be a strand of Bolshevism and therefore part of a Jewish conspiracy.


  • No, fascism and communism aren’t “opposites”

    I don’t believe politics is simple enough to allow opposites, but if there were such a thing, those two ideologies would be pretty close. Fascists are ideologically anti-communist and communists are always among the first they mass murder. Communists (along with anarchists) are consistently the foundation of anti-fascist action.

    while communism is a highly ideological philosophy that’s never existed

    “Yes, and,”

    This is where terminology plays tricks:

    • A communist society is the ultimate goal of the ideology called ‘communism’.
    • You’re absolutely correct that no country has a communist society; in fact, it’s a contradiction, since a communist society is stateless by definition.
    • The countries that are labelled ‘communist’ (by themselves and others) are states with a communist government in power. This strategy of vanguardism is strongly debated among communists: many would agree with you that it’s a contradiction, while others consider it a necessary transitional phase in order to defend from capitalist counter-attack. If we assume that the vanguard government is not corrupt (and we shouldn’t assume that without evidence!), then it’s a government that aims to create the material conditions that would cause itself to wither away, piece by piece. Obviously none has succeeded in that goal, but it’s not wrong to call those governments ‘communist’, in the same way a person who supports socialism is called a ‘socialist’ - it’s about a school of thought, about ideology, rather than describing the current situation they govern over. And to characterize authoritarian communists as fascist is ignorant about how fascist systems develop - fascism works to kill socialism and liberalism with the backing of the owning-class. No matter how many similar characteristics one may try and find on the surface, the two concepts are foundationally incompatible and opposed, and will act very differently. It’s fine to hate them both, but they are not related.

  • I read an old thread documenting the opinions of Lemmy maintainers

    For what it’s worth, that thread is openly biased with many of those examples being strawman quotes and misframing events, like a non-sequitur troll post ban being framed as “support for Ukraine”. And frankly, some of those points are cm0002 themselves intentionally trolling, like dubiously reporting a political meme as “Propaganda”.

    Personally I think the main devs are terrible at forum moderation. I’m aware that they’re chronically overworked, and that .ml is not intended to be a neutral or liberalist general-purpose instance, and I’m aware that it’s very normal for moderators to be bad at moderating, and yet that doesn’t detract from my belief that they’re technically bad at moderating a forum. For example, simply writing “rule 1” as a ban reason allows people to misinterpret bans as we’re seeing here. Automate that shit, prefill ban reasons with the rule list! Make clearer rules and FAQs describing how memes and talking points considered normal in the US are actually chauvinistic propaganda!

    As for a fork or rewrite, like others have said, alternatives already exist, but I also don’t think this is a case where maintainer opinions are harmful to the user or project (even if I disagree with some). They’re devout anticapitalists, which makes their FOSS and anti-enshitification positions clear, I know it won’t sell out in five years. They only have power over their own instance, which one is welcome to not join or block.



  • I found it fun to do amateur gamedev, for my own little enjoyment (e.g. making a super-basic FPS with a gun that shoots a thousand cubes like a shotgun, then making it shoot a thousands spheres that explode on impact like a grenade launcher). Lots of engines are accessible that you don’t need to learn much/any programming skill to make something fun. You can do plenty with free assets, I never paid for anything, but if you are willing and able to pay small amounts for premade assets, then it will be even faster and easier to make something more pretty.

    I’ve also done level design (and LoC) for some open-source FOSS games. This is easier for some games than others, but it’s also rewarding. I was particularly known for making experimental or puzzle-like levels, so it was nice to get feedback from others and improve. I’ve mostly grown apart from games these days, but I don’t regret the time I enjoyed making them.


  • Like some already said, how long ago is “a few years ago”? Because last year my installation had an annoying issue which is now fixed. And maybe five years back, some (newer or rarer) hardware/devices needed a fix through the terminal, but now work perfectly by default.

    I haven’t tried Bazzite, but I’ve heard good things about it and what I know about it so far sounds good. Although @jlow mentioned some alternatives which I wonder if they’re even more suitable since you didn’t mention gaming. Out of habit, I still recommend Mint to former Windows users. But I haven’t needed to input a password for web, graphics tools or office apps, only have to type a password when updating, installing new apps or doing special terminal stuff (which I do by choice!)


    On one hand, Mint’s default experience (Cinnamon desktop environment) generally resembles Windows which can make the switch smoother. On the other hand, some other ones fix a lot of defaults Windows chose wrong. Even little things, like moving the taskbar to the top (closer to other options) or to the side (takes up less space), so even if you pick a smaller leap to start with, it’s good to casually look around once you’re comfortable.


  • Yep. Although…

    Is it safe to use the OK hand signal again?

    Words and symbols cannot be divorced from context. Like @SineSwiper@discuss.tchncs.de hinted at, putting a date of birth in a username is common and there are so many other meanings for these numbers so it would be ridiculous to jump down someone’s throat for simply using them, or using common gestures. Unless that friend in the story was also saying some reactionary things in their comments, I think it’s silly and careless that someone challenged them on their name.

    I been told by some international friends that one of the political flags over in Australia, the Eureka flag, has a similar situation where both trade unions and white nationalists try to claim its legacy, so it’s common to see in both the pro and anti immigration rallies. Context is what makes it either a potential nationalist/racist dogwhistle or a symbol of workers’ rights.