The Trump or Biden decision is not democracy

You’re 100% correct there, unfortunately. It’s become the choice between a firing squad, or death by a thousand cuts.

I’m one of those people “privileged enough to not already be suffering”, as you put it; unfortunately I’m also terribly empathetic. Four years of Trump did a lot of damage to the social fabric here; emboldening the worst our society has to offer, appointing three conservative SC justices to overturn Roe, tax breaks for the owning class, and so forth. The country is becoming increasingly hostile to women, queer folks, and other minorities… Hell the MAGA crowd has even convinced a good chunk of the working class to hurt itself in it’s confusion.

I suppose I see any means of staving that progression off, even if I’m repulsed by the choice, as a net neutral. Perhaps I’m naive, maybe another Trump term is exactly what we need for people to wake the fuck up and take it to the streets; but I have a feeling it’s going to be a much more violent struggle fighting against bloodthirsty fascists over milquetoast liberals.

I’m rambling too now lol. Sorry for dragging the conversation out, I think I just enjoy talking about this stuff in a non-combative environment for once 😅

Yeah, kinda beating a dead horse here, but it’s giving “2024, Year of the Linux Desktop, inadvertently sponsored by Microsoft.”

Sure.

Then you get the occasional fun experience of a maintainer fucking up a package definition or two, and all of a sudden you can’t update your system or run a program because there’s a tangled mess of dependency conflicts and you get to spend the afternoon force reinstalling system libraries. Love ya’ Void :')

Been trying NixOS which is great for avoiding that kind of thing, but it comes with it’s own set of annoyances. I really ought to just settle on a more stable distro like Debian lol.

From the MS website:

Recall utilizes Windows Copilot Runtime to help you find anything you’ve seen on your PC. Search using any clues you remember or use the timeline to scroll through your past activity, including apps, documents, and websites.

A “feature” coming to Windows 11. Essentially a keylogger on steroids… Powered by AI of course, because what isn’t these days.

Cute bait, little guy. Keep it up :)

Apologies for the America-centric response, I know these ideas aren’t limited to the states, it’s just what I’m most familiar with.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m no fan of neo-liberals and I think they get a lot of justified flak for not doing enough, or what’s right, and I absolutely understand not “voting for people who are able to shrug off my very existence”. If I were in your shoes, I’d be in the “burn it all down” camp too.

In 2016, I wrote in Bernie Sanders out of principle, because he felt like the only candidate who genuinely cared about what was best for regular folks. I also thought the rhetoric around Trump was overstated, particularly, I thought the whole Antifa crowd was super cringe. I grew up in a conservative environment and none of the people I knew were actually fascists after all… Well, 8 years later… I have the hindsight to know that I was wrong. Fascism is alive and well, and it’s thriving in my backyard.

I don’t want to vote for Biden, his administration’s handling of Israel and it’s genocide is an affront to humanity and one more thing to add to the list of shit that makes me ashamed of this country; it’s just that, in my eyes, the only other viable option is so much worse…

I wish I had the answers, any policies that could bring meaningful change to a two-party system are in the hands of people who have everything to gain from keeping things the same. I’d like to think that enough overt acts of civil disobedience could change things, but I don’t think it’s bad enough for most people to gather the numbers necessary to bring it about. We’ve been given just enough luxury to keep us placid, but not enough to allow us the time, money, or energy to air our grievances. It’s a sorry state of affairs.

Anyway…

TL;DR, I respectfully dissent, but your experience is valid and I don’t blame ya, hopefully things start looking up in our lifetime :P

Edit: I missed a word

I get where you’re coming from… but when the alternative is mask-off clerical fascism, it ain’t a hard fuckin’ choice.

Voting democrat is just plain harm reduction at this point, as laughable as that feels to say given present circumstances… But this shit show is what we’re stuck with unless we can somehow convince the feckless bastards to implement a better system than first-past-the-post, so other parties actually stand a chance.

It won’t happen, but neither will convincing over half of the population to vote third-party; and abstaining, while principled, only yields more voting power to Y’all Qaeda.

True.

I could maybe see an argument being made in favor of having these kinds of security measures for the first month after release to protect sales, since it’s usually the period in which most sales are secured; devs do need a sustainable income after all. But that would also necessitate ignoring the potential performance degradation resulting in a poor first experience for players, and many publishers just leave it in for the lifetime of a game, which is a disaster waiting to happen (as seen here).

Overall, I think piracy is mostly a pricing issue above all else. With AAA titles getting increasingly more expensive and being released in broken states, it’s not surprising that people don’t want to spend $70 on a game that they might end up hating and opt to “demo” the game first. Refund policies can help alleviate the issue, but are hardly a silver bullet, with games inserting tons of fluff at the beginning to ensure you exceed the playtime threshold.

Either deliver the games you promise, or price them according to what’s actually there, and I’m sure the majority of gamers would be content in paying full price. DRM only serves to increase friction for the honest people paying for your games.

I mean the premise already feels a bit absurd, but I’ll play…

I’m not a vegan myself, and I don’t really hang out in vegan spaces that much, so my answers may differ from your typical vegan, or not… who knows. But I suppose if the general goal is to preserve life where possible, then you should absolutely try to find some place for the animals to live out their days in peace. If we can manage to stuff them all in neat little boxes on the land we have now, I doubt it’s some intractable problem. You don’t have to let 'em run free and “out of control” per se, repurpose the land of the now defunct factory farms and slaughterhouses, build a number of sanctuaries all over the place, and plop 'em there. Of course, no one can possibly know all of the variables involved, so I’m not saying this is a well thought out solution, I’m just spitballing… but we’re not exactly hurting for land, to my knowledge.

However, suppose I granted you:

Realistically the amount of livestock is not sustainable and they’d need to be culled in gargantuan numbers

Why would that necessitate this outcome?

And then you get the slaughter without the benefit of feeding billions of hungry people.

Veganism isn’t some virus that physically prevents you from eating meat, and plenty of vegans have been meat eaters at some point in their lives. If it came down to it, I imagine there would be a steady supply of folks who would opt to revert temporarily instead of letting it go to waste. Vegans may disagree with me here, but I think it’s certainly a more ethical choice if the animals are already dead, can’t let the sacrifice be for nothing.

The vegan viewpoint on animals really just boils down to eliminating unnecessary suffering and death. Many are fine with the prospect of hunting, fishing, or raising livestock for food when there aren’t other options (eg. environments with insufficient crop yields to feed everyone or infrastructure to get other food), the problem arises from the fact that those of us privileged enough to live in a land of abundance continue to needlessly slaughter. Do we need to eat? Of course. Do we need to kill things to do it? Fuck no.

All that said, I think a more realistic transition scenario would be something like the meat industry halting slaughter operations, exhausting their existing supply until either there are no animals left to kill, or there are a small enough quantity to where we can just yeet the rest onto some farms somewhere. Not that vegans would be entirely on board with that, being anti-slaughter and all, but it’s at least a reduction in harm and a more believable way for things to play out… I think.

Never made the comparison. As I’ve stated in two other comment threads already, two sets of stats, two distinct conclusions. That third sentence has been there since the inception of this post, the edit was added after two people blatantly ignored it.

Me saying they aren’t comparable isn’t “hiding behind” anything. It’s an acknowledgement that there are far too many variables involved be able to draw anything conclusive between the two. To not acknowledge that would be a disservice to anyone reading and would ultimately feed into confirmation bias in both directions.

Moreover, I could completely nix the info on bears and my point would still stand, the point of the hypothetical isn’t about the god damn bears.

Y’know… I thought more about this comment, and my response to it. I went back and re-read my post, and yeah, I can see how it was interpreted that way… It certainly wasn’t my intention to mislead or come off as dishonest, but admittedly it could have been composed more carefully. I went back and edited the main post to, I hope, be a more objective and accurate representation of what I meant overall, and why I decided to leave both of those things in, even with the acknowledgement that they were not analogous.

Gotcha… misinterpretation on my part then. Apologies.

The

demonizing half of the humans because penis is not justified tho

Along with

I can’t believe that is a sentence that needs to be said

Came off to me as a sort of “not all men” argument.

I mean, I feel like that goes a lot deeper than some perceived slight by women…

Entertainment, and subsequently our culture, has crafted this notion that if you’re kind to a woman, she’s obligated to be your girlfriend or fuck you, and when it doesn’t pan out like that in reality; young men are justifiably depressed and angry, just… at the entirely wrong thing. This is further expounded by the ever growing disconnect by people in general, a lot of young people feel lonelier than ever and end up turning to shit like dating apps, which are inherently superficial and not a good way to build authentic relationships. Failure on these platforms can lead to young men feeling like they aren’t “good enough”, and when a grifter like Tate comes along to tell them that it’s actually just the women that are the problem, it’s an easy dose of copium to ingest.

Suicide is a multi-faceted issue, and while the struggle to find meaningful relationships is certainly a contributor, I’d wager that the general sense of hopelessness, lack of opportunity, and increasingly fewer prospects for the future are far bigger factors to many young adults going through higher education or entering the workforce.

Already addressed this in another comment, just read the next sentence I wrote…

They’re not comparable for a variety of reasons, even if you account for population; I kept both in, with that caveat, because they make two distinct points. And my “conclusion” was really only in respect to the violent crime statistics presented.

Nobody is demonizing “half of humans”. Do you honestly think these women believe that 100% of men are rotten? Of course not.

There are a ton of decent men in the world, and if we’re to take the statistics at face value, that’s most of us.

But there are also a ton of men, all across the world, who are liars and manipulators at best, and monsters who commit unimaginable atrocities at worst. I’ll say it in a slightly different way, men are disproportionately the perpetrators of violent crime, this is a problem.

If we profess to be good men, and the best that most of us can muster is to sit idly by while bad men wreak havoc in the world, or to tell people to pipe down when they point out the obvious, then can we really call ourselves “good”?

Clearly no law in a book, or half-assed enforcement of said laws, is a sufficient deterrent. Our problem is a cultural one, and if we continue to allow it to proliferate, we’re culpable too.

Now obviously, people don’t go traipsing into bear country every day, and we’re constantly around other humans, among a litany of other differences like population, motivation, or intelligence; so the stats on their own aren’t truly comparable.

Literally just had to read one more sentence, my guy. The point of bringing up the stats wasn’t to compare them directly, rather I looked both up out of curiosity, and individually I think they make distinct points. The first being that bears aren’t necessarily dangerous as we portray them to be, and the second being that men are more dangerous than we’re willing to admit.

As a dude, I used to have the same knee-jerk reaction to these kinds of discussions: “Well I’m not dangerous, and none of the men I’m friends/family with are dangerous, so this must just be some man-hating tirade perpetrated by ignorant people”.

But then you dig into the statistics, and you start talking to the women in your life about their lived experience, and you realize that far too many of us are fucking animals. The prospect of bringing a daughter into a world that not only ignores an obvious issue, but actively shames the people who are victimized and try to speak out against it, is terrifying. Do I always agree with the way women present their criticism? No, a portion of it does veer into senseless hate. But that doesn’t mean that what they’re saying on the whole is bullshit.

Bear, easily.

A couple minutes of searching the web, you’ll find some variance in the stats, but the general notion is that bears don’t seem to be as dangerous as we portray them to be. The data aggregated here suggests that there were 48 fatalities in North America, in the span of 17 years. A few other places claim there have only been around ~180 bear fatalities in NA since the late 1700s, but I couldn’t find any definitive sources, so take those with a grain of salt.

Bear in mind, this factoid isn’t something we can stack up against men to answer this question, we don’t encounter bears with the same frequency or density that we do people, nor do bears have the same nature or motivations as humans, but it’s something I found along the way that I thought was interesting, and at least lends some credence to the idea that if you leave a bear the fuck alone, it will probably leave you the fuck alone.

On the back of that detour, I did a separate search, looking at the latest murder statistics I could find in the US. (Again, forgetting the bear stuff, making a different point here)

Personally, I found the data disturbing, 10,335 murders perpetrated by men in a single year, 7x that of women. Other violent crimes like rape are also tracked, albeit without offender sex, of which there were 122,822 in the same year; in a relatively “safe” country. If you look at it in relation to the entire population of ~328 million (at the time) you may be inclined to say “it’s not that many” or “it’s just a minority of men” (duh), but fellas… as someone with a dick and balls like you, I’ve never sat down and thought to myself “You know what sounds great right now? A good raping.”, and I’m sure the majority of you haven’t either, 1,000 rapes a year is too many, Nearing 123,000 is fucking egregious.

When I look at numbers like that, it’s apparent to me that people are capable of being selfish, violent, motherfuckers in ways that some random bear in the forest never could. And unfortunately, men are overwhelmingly the perpetrators of that violence. If you take offense to that fact, and aren’t an awful person yourself, then you need to wake the fuck up and take a look around. No one’s accusing you specifically of being a rapist or a murderer, but there’s a non-negligible trend here, and an uncomfortable truth that has yet to be sufficiently addressed; and that’s the whole point of this thought experiment in the first place.

Edit 2

After receiving a few comments with similar criticisms, and after some additional reflection on what I initially wrote, I reworded and reorganized a solid chunk of this post to, I hope, clarify what my views are, include additional context, and ensure that people are clear that the two points of data (ie. bear fatalities and murder rates) are not intended to be compared, but rather they individually address separate statements I’ve seen echoed throughout this thread. My position hasn’t changed, the conclusion hasn’t changed, but hopefully this comes off a bit less inflammatory and more intellectually honest than before, it’s not my intention to mislead anyone; just to get the cogs turning.

There’s truth to that. None of us is free of blame, and there’s always going to be a cost associated with the luxuries and comforts that many of us enjoy; but it’s not about “feeling morally superior”, it’s about doing the right thing, reducing unwarranted harm and suffering as much as you reasonably can. And changing your diet, eating more fruits and veggies and less meat, is probably one of the least obtrusive ways to do so (save for folks with rare medical conditions, or people who live in an environment without an abundance of arable land). Even if you don’t give a shit about the suffering of animals or the environment, you at least ought to care about your own well-being.

I’ve eaten meat my whole life, still do… but I’ve cut back a lot, and it really hasn’t been that difficult. Every time this conversation comes up, nothing annoys me more than the hive-mind crawling out of the woodwork to dump on vegans for daring to speak out against something that is demonstrably harmful in several ways, and then claim that vegans do it only for the purpose of moral grandstanding. Moreover, the absurd amount of appeals to nature and the lazy “bacon tasty” retorts make all of these people look like fucking dorks.

You don’t have to flagellate yourself for eating meat, you don’t even have to give up meat entirely… But don’t be a jackass about it, acknowledge the harmful reality you’re contributing to and you can either accept it for what is, cut back and reduce your contribution, or choose to lead a life that doesn’t enable it at all.

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Potatoes, pasta, bread, legumes, nut butters, vegetables, fruits, jelly, jam; all things that many people already eat with some regularity.

Time and resources are hardly an excuse, you don’t have to spend two hours a night preparing some 5 Michelin star meal with the most organic, non-GMO, [insert buzzword] ingredients in order to make better dietary choices, at least not in the first world where we have ample options… Shit, even just reducing your meat intake by 10% is a net harm reduction that adds up.

The slave labor thing is valid to an extent, but not entirely analogous. For better or for worse, modern society is increasingly dependent on technology; folks rely on it, in some form, to find/perform work, pay the bills, stay in contact with friends and family, survive the climate they live in, travel, etc… This isn’t typically the case with meat, it’s often just carnal desire which results in the death of something to the tune of ~80 billion (with a “B”) animals every year that didn’t really need to be slaughtered.

People absolutely should be upset about the conditions of workers being exploited anywhere in the world and advocate on their behalf where possible, but our position shouldn’t be: “Oh, some bad shit happened over here, so I guess it’s fine to allow this bad shit over here to proliferate as well”… just sayin’.