COBOL

Well, I was surprised at the time…

The Democratic Party is an Iranian insurgency.

Fragging- whoops wrong link, Fragging is an established tradition among invading forces, and one the IDF soldiers would be smart to learn if they want to avoid this suicidal PTSD from perpetrating crimes against humanity on innocent citizens.

I actually tried flatpak uninstall --unused and it didn’t remove these ones. So there’s something odd going on there. My guess is maybe Mint manually installed them through the driver manager program? That’s a wild guess, I don’t know how it works.

If I had no idea who he was, I could give extreme benefit of the doubt and say it’s spin. Claiming a loss is really a win.

But we do know who he is, so I’m going with imbecility.

I agree, it’s very tactless.

Mint took a while to handle flatpak decently in the update manager, and now it’s a nice experience.

Plus I found on my install flatpak wasn’t cleaning up the flatpaks autoinstalled for older versions of nvidia drivers, they were all still listed as dependencies. Not sure who’s to blame but that was taking up a few much needed GBs.

Where is that constraint coming from? “Death to [x]” is a statement of a desire.

“Death to Americans” would be a call for the deaths of citizens. Obviously Iran doesn’t consider the typical American citizen to be oppressing them, so they are not interested in calling for that.

Someone yelling “death to America” could still be supporting the death of George W. Bush or Donald Trump, who are Americans. It could even involve combating many in the US military. That’s still very different from calling for “death to Americans”, because the target is the regime, not its citizens simply for being citizens.

But I still think you’ve raised an interesting discussion to have so I’ve tried to answer it.

In an ideal world, regime change. Relatively peaceful dissolution is preferable and possible (consider the death of the Soviet Union).

However, given the ruthlessness of the people with the most power in the US, I suspect they would gladly kill millions of Americans before even considering a peaceful surrender. People are shot by the state in regular protests, let alone one directly threatening the state (case in point - Jan 6 had a protester killed by police). So unless some interesting lucky opportunities open up (such as a military coup), the USA will (continue to) kill Americans to maintain stability, regardless of whether those opposing the USA kill a single American.

Given that situation, it sounds like any resistance to the US is bad because will likely involve deaths of innocent people. Yes, but the other side of the story is that to do nothing ‘‘also’’ results in the deaths of innocent people. To the people running the show, it’s completely normal to oversee the constant atrocious social murder of many thousands each year through poverty, artificial scarcity of food and medication, healthcare denial and other neglect in the name of profit. We overproduce enough food to feed everyone, there’s enough land and property to house everyone.

To do nothing is to allow many Americans to keep dying each day from easily preventable deaths. To fix that system will most likely kill many Americans in the process. You can almost simplify it down to a trolley problem - there’s no clean solution whichever choice you make. But, for each of us, there is a correct decision.

Definitely. On one hand, I don’t enjoy celebrating war deaths at all, especially with all the generalizations and complexities at play, but on the other hand, those are active soldiers in an invading army and the bottom line is that their deaths means Gazan lives saved and less power for the genocide project. It is reassuring to know that the resistance is still having victories.

DO NOT BURN THEM

This reminded me of a lovely video series of ‘flag disposal methods’, was either US or one of the other British colonies. Trump says 51 states, the old flags have got to go!

In my tired daze I mistakenly read ONLYOFFICE as OpenOffice and was about to yell No!

The article does well and links to their other article on the OO 9.0 release, which explains why it’s probably a smarter choice for this office situation when compared to LibreOffice:

ONLYOFFICE is one of two options that comes to mind when I think of a solid Microsoft Office alternative on Linux, the other being LibreOffice. Both offer a range of useful features and support a wide range of document formats. What sets ONLYOFFICE apart, though, is its focus on collaboration and generally reliable compatibility with Microsoft Office files.

When someone says “death to America”, they aren’t saying “death to Americans”. A government/state is a regime, not all it’s people, despite how much as nationalists love to stoke that sort of patriotism. So I have no problem with the slogan, I call for the fall of the US imperialist regime.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_to_America#Interpretation_and_meaning - has some confirmations from various Iranian politicians and a travel writer.

A work can have multiple meanings, even unintended meanings. It can even have no intended meaning.

Its creators define its intended meaning, if any. Valid interpretations can create other meaning from it.

Yep, crack economics. Give product out for free until they’re dependent, then exploit them.

its own little isolated forum

Well, biggest Lemmy* instance at the time by a big amount.

Yeah, this matches my experience as a lemmy.ml onlooker. People in the federated instances were mostly used to more diplomatic answers from the .ml socialists, or at worst one of the three tactless accounts of the mostly-fine Lemmygrad crowd, then bam, suddenly they could barely make a liberal take without ten Hexbears telling them off, and inevitably a few just badposting or PPB like they would to a liberal tourist trying to set up camp on hexbear.net. These rudeposts were a small percent but the scale of Hexbear accounts and the sudden arrival made people notice, cry “Russian Bots”, all that stuff. To go from one or two accounts making political rants to an oversized PPB in reply to a “normal” post is a big jump for a community, Hexbear was considered a malicious troll instance by many. (citation: the site taglines)

If anyone does, make sure to check out guides like https://specificsuggestions.com/ (use filters)

I’ve found that when I’m deciding to try out something creative or artistic, I start to look for techniques in other people’s works when I might otherwise just be enjoying them on a surface level. Anyone can look at a work and say if it’s pretty or not, if it seems well-designed, how it makes you feel, but when you start to ask how an artist does that, you quickly discover techniques that you may be able to apply to your own art, your own writing. You can even look at a list of techniques [1] and then start to identify when creators are using them, and how to use them effectively. The more you experience and the more you think about it, the more understanding and the more tools you have at your fingertips. And by forcing yourself to get into D&D, you’re throwing yourself into a game that will help you develop that variety of skills, and probably into a scene where plenty of people know enough of those skills that you can rapidly learn from them, see what they do brilliantly and see what they could do better.

As for games, I admit I haven’t tried many of them but the Explorable Explanations I have tried are great, particularly the ones by Nicky Case (Parable of the Polygons , the Evolution of Trust , the Wisdom and/or Madness of Crowds). I’d call these short games even though they lean strongly towards elements of education and simulation.

Rat