A contest of ideologies is nothing new nor inherently despicable. To declare an opposing ideology an enemy is nothing new nor inherently despicable. That’s how war has always worked, and defending yourself against those seeking to overpower you is nothing wrong. In that respect, both sides are the same, and that is the nature of opposition.

But I did not skip diplomacy. I did a lot of arguing, online and offline, and still do. I tried reasoning, and still do.

What makes me different is that I don’t think people should be oppressed for things they can’t control. I don’t think being poor makes you a worse person, nor rich a better one. I don’t think people born in marginalised demographics that are denied the same opportunities to prosper, tautologically lacking the prosperity to improve their lot, should be stuck in that cycle. I don’t think civilians should be bombed by imperialist fascists for their ethnicity.

More critically, I don’t think a burger flipper working full time should make less than I do. I don’t think people should have to fear for their existence. I think we all - you included - deserve a happy, pleasant life. You shouldn’t have to worry about affording medical care, having a roof over your head or having enough food to survive. Luxuries, we can talk, but bare necessities shouldn’t be an issue.

This is what separates me from the people spreading bullshit about Haitians, inciting racial violence, privatising healthcare, propping up the oligarchy while bleeding the people for every last ounce of labour they can get away with:

I would rather have people I hate live comfortably, if it means that all the decent people can live comfortably too, rather than seeking to tear down everyone else for my own benefit.

I want you to be happy, along with the rest of us.

An open society that doesn’t want the intolerant to undermine and topple it must be ready to defend itself - by reason and argument if possible, but these may fail because the intolerant reject reason itself. Force should be the last resort, but if all other means prove fruitless, it should be a resort still.

Isn’t it fascinating how different humans can be?

Can we have both? A concise textual description and a video exemplifying the features?

Thanks for that correction then. I wasn’t conscious of that detail.

In any case, the issue remains that, if the vendor’s default repositories push for a type of package I don’t want, I either have to manually find and vet third party repositories I trust or find someone else to rely on for defaults I’m fine with.

The difference between “I want a different source for a single package, so I’ll manually select a different source for that one” and “I don’t trust Canonical to select sources I agree with anymore” is one of scale. I’m fine with manually pinning the transitional package, uninstalling it and the snap (hopefully remembering to back up my profile before realising that it also deletes user data) adding a ppa, reinstalling it and reimporting my profiles just for firefox.

But if I feel like I have to fight my distro vendor over not using their preferred package distribution system, it’s probably better to jump ship - other vendors have beautiful distros too.

(Also, “you can just use a different source” is part of the reason people prefer not to use snap, where you can’t do that)

Correct me there, but wasn’t the “select source” thing intended to be about different deb sources?

The issue is that what you expect to be a deb package manager ends up redirecting to snap anyway. It’s not a different source, it’s a different system. If I have to manually take steps to avoid using the distro vendor’s default sources because they just redirect to a system I don’t want to use, I might as well look for a different vendor.

And so I did

IIRC, the issue was that - unless you take steps to explicitly prevent it - Ubuntu would occasionally reinstall the snap version. I don’t remember the details, been a while since I had to dance that dance, but I recall it being one of the things that put me off snap in particular, Ubuntu in general and sparked my search for a different distro.

I’m now on Nobara, a Fedora-based gaming-oriented distro maintained by GloriousEgroll (who also maintains the popular Proton-GE)

Are you trying to argue that laws and treaties are worthless unless enough people abide by them and are willing to enforce them?

Because, yes, that is the fundamental principle of society: We need to work together to survive and thrive, so we agree on rules by which we work, and enforce them on those that break them. If you disagree with something but take no steps to oppose it, your disagreement is just as worthless as a law nobody cares to enforce.

So what point are you trying to make here? “If China enforced their claim and nobody stopped them, their claim would be effectively valid”? How is that relevant to the situation if all they’re doing is protesting, but nobody else cares to back them up and they don’t actually take measures to prevent the passage?

“If I put pineapple on my Pizza and nobody stops or punishes me, it’s legal”? Yes. Congrats. You understood the very basics. Want a sticker?

This post gave me cancer.

XcQ, link stays blue

That would be perfect, yes

On one hand, I think it perfectly acceptable and reasonable to oppose the enemy’s employment of some measure on the grounds of them being your enemy and you wanting to defend yourself while simultaneously employing the same measure for your own policy goals. That’s usually how war works, whether cold or hot: weapons are employed if they’re effective, regardless of whether they’re fair for the other side, because you can’t really trust the opponent to also refrain from using an effective weapon.

Mutually Assured Destruction works as a nuclear deterrent because its sheer destructive power risks killing your own people too, and most countries’ grand strategy prioritises their own preservation over the enemies’ destruction. Chemical weapons were “banned” because they were of little value to the major powers’ military system, which has less people hiding in foxholes and trenches, generally making conventional munitions blowing up moving targets more effective than denying an area to your own mobile forces in the hopes of dislodging a dug-in enemy that might have protective equipment anyway.

On the other hand, I resent the damage warfare does to civilians, whether in the form of actual destruction or just sowing division and strife between their factions. Arguably, it might be defensible if you’re simply exposing the truth and hoping to convince a sufficient majority to act on those revelations, but who would be the judge? Who could vouch for that? How could propaganda even account for the nuances and complexities of the issue they’d hypothetically expose without neutering its own effect?

So yes, I’d prefer to see money spent on fixing issues, education in critical thinking, communicating nuances the enemy’s propaganada glosses over or misrepresents. Making your opponent’s situation worse doesn’t help your people. Even if it might “defeat” the enemy in some sense - render them unable or unwilling to oppose you - it creates misery.

The only winners are those that profit from the issues and/or the conflict and don’t care about the individual peasant: Corporate executives, large shareholders, politicians campaigning on them…

(I don’t think I needed to spell that one out, but given the topic, it felt appropriate to be clear)

“but what if <unrelated situation made up just to be contrarian>?”

Trump is trying to get her to mud-wrestle in a pigsty: Even if she wins, she’ll be smeared with shit all over. The only winning move is not to play. Nobody who supported her is gonna think “wait, what if she lied about working at McDs? I’ll better vote for the other guy, who definitely is more working class (and also never provided any documentation for literally anything unless by court order)”

“Nobody” probably isn’t literal here, but I imagine some manager scheduling a meeting where they want a report on the game’s performance and feedback during the beta. Some higher up is going to sit in for the first few minutes for the KPI summary.

The sweating analyst jokes about the heat in the room, the higher up dryly remarks that the AC seems to be working just fine. The presentation starts, the analyst grasping for some more weasel words and void sentences to stall with before finally switching to the second slide, captioned “Player count”. It’s a big, fat 0.

They stammer their way through half a sentence of trying to describe this zero, then fall silent, staring at their shoes. The game dev lead has a thousand yard stare. The product owner is trying to maintain composure.

The uncomfortable silence is finally broken by the manager, getting up to leave: “I think we’re done here.” There is an odd sense of foreboding, that “here” might not just mean the meeting. The analyst silently proceeds to the next slide, showing the current player count over time in a line chart.

Devs be applying like “Hi! I’d like to join your development team! My professional qualifications are that I’ve spent eight years working on a failed game!”

Of course, it won’t be the individual devs’ fault but I don’t have any difficulties imagining that some of them have a harder time finding new jobs than people who were let go after the launch of more popular games.

Linux is free and open source software ecosystem. It’s like handing people free brushes, canvases and paints - sure, removing the financial hurdles may enable talents otherwise unable to afford indulging their artistic streak, but you also can’t really prevent anyone from painting awful bullshit. Best you can do is not give them attention or a platform to advertise their stuff on.

That’s the price of freedom: It also extends to assholes. We can’t start walling off Linux, so the best we can do is individually wall them off from our own life and hope enough other people around us do it too.

I’ll plug an interesting blog post on the topic of using chemical weapons. The post concerns itself mostly with lethal weapons, but I feel like some of the points apply here as well.

The essence is that for modern military systems, mobility and the relative cost of manufacturing, storing and employing (lethal) chemical weapons compared to protective equipment render them much less valuable than conventional explosive munitions. They see usage mostly between weaker static armies, which lack the equipment, training or command doctrines for modern warfare.

The banning of chemical weapons was done because they weren’t generally very useful for the modern systems of the superpowers at the time. Russia cracking them out again suggests they no longer have all the capabilities of a modern superpower. Which probably isn’t super new for most people, but might be worth spelling out anyway.

How does suing in a different country work, for instances in Europe? Do they actually have any leverage?

Good luck finding “all the domain names”. IDK about suing, but unlike centralised monoliths like Facebook, you’d have to sue every instance violating your rules separately, and that’s assuming you can pin down who and where to sue for each of them.