Wikipedia is right there in a number of languages. Not asking people to do academic research, read above a 6th grade level, or leave their house.

One of the best responses to kirk’s death said something like “This is like writing an obituary of Joseph Goebbels that goes ‘Gobbels was a gifted marketer and father of six children’”

Other people have more detailed and factual answers, but a good heuristic is “there must be outgroups for the law to bind but not protect, and in groups for the law to protect but not bind”. That’s what they want. They want to do what they want while women and queers and non-whites are subjugated. They want to say something inappropriate and touch their women coworkers without consent, and know if she raises her voice she’ll be fired.

They are scum.

They do it for money. If people had standards, they’d behave better. Imagine if every time they announced they were doing more ads, every user cancelled. There is power in solidarity.

Unfortunately, most people are some mix of tired lazy stupid short-sighted

Stuff I use the phone for in rough order of importance:

• maps and GPS
• messaging (signal)
• emulators and other quality games (none of that candy crush slop)
• ebook reading
• Wikipedia / quick research
• Lemmy

I could drop lemmy from mobile because it’s just a time waster and news source.

Wikipedia is important because too often people are interminably arguing something that can be settled with a 30 second search. Like, you don’t need to spend 5 minutes arguing about the population of NJ just look it up.

Games are nice. I don’t want to go back to carrying around a second device for games like it’s 2001. I could bring a steam deck everywhere but that doesn’t fit in my pocket.

I don’t have any notifications turned on except like direct messages, so I don’t find it much of a distraction.

Rfk Jr sucks, is responsible for misery and death, and should be removed from office.

Paradox of tolerance is resolved when you view tolerance as a treaty. If one side breaks it, they no longer benefit from it.

If two factions are fighting and call a truce, and then one side starts fighting again, it’s nonsense to tell the first side not to fight back because there’s a treaty. The treaty has been broken.

There’s a Sartre quote about that.

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7870768-never-believe-that-anti-semites-are-completely-unaware-of-the-absurdity

I think a root cause is conservative emotion driven decisions. Some people will look at facts and from them draw conclusions. Conservatives prefer feeling things and from them deciding what to do. Cities feel scary and alien to them so they must be full of crime and danger.

It’s probably not a coincidence that religion, the kind that prioritizes feelings and faith, is also popular among the right.

They’re shitty people by most reasonable metrics.

Thanks for the reasonable response.

In essence I’m contesting that strict language standards are necessary to be understood. I mean, of course some standards are still required, just not strict enough to be all uptight about it when people start to bend them.

We agree on this, I think. I’m mostly a linguistic descriptivist - that is, language is what people speak more than what’s written in a rulebook somewhere. I’m not a linguist but I have an undergraduate degree that required some courses on English language.

It can be annoying when there’s a word for something (eg: enshittification, gaslighting, woke) and people then over extend it to mean “things i don’t like”. There’s not much to stop that, other than as an individual trying to be more precise in language. I think it’s not good for one’s brain to only have a few catch-all words for stuff.

I think “slop” specifically is a very old word (1400ce, if etymology online is to be trusted). But like if there was a word for “low quality LLM content” (let’s say… slopplement), applying that to any low quality writing would kind of suck. it would almost certainly happen, though, because all of us humans are kind of lazy.

Anyway. We mostly agree. I would just recommend being mindful of one’s word choices, because a narrow vocabulary can be a drag on thinking and communication.

You say it’s foolish to enforce strict language standards, but the most important thing about language is that it is understood. You buried that point in the middle of your second paragraph.

Did you read 1984? It has a major thread though it about how collapsing language reduces the ability of people to think. One of the first and most prominent examples in the book is replacing the many words for “good” and “bad” (eg: great, amazing, excellent, terrible, atrocious, etc) with simply “good” and “ungood”. Similarly, the dispossed has some writing in it about how language shapes thought. For example, the prevalence or absence of possessive forms (eg: my house vs the house I stay in)

The reason I used “good” and “ungood” is because those are the preeminent examples in 1984. They’re not a judgement of your post.

I’m not sure why you’re dismissive of “high school reading lists”, but you are coming off as someone who might actually be a high schooler. Your last emoji didn’t render, so maybe that would’ve changed the meaning.

Switched to PopOS on my desktop and Mint on the ancient laptop my gf had laying around. No real complaints. Games run fine. Browser runs fine. I had some trouble getting mint installed on the old laptop, but the internet had a solution.

I think the install process is kind of daunting for many users, but once it’s going I think the average user won’t have any problems. Windows, by contrast, is kind of aggressive with its “GOING TO UPDATE NOW” and “don’t you want to use one drive???”

So long as you’re understood, it’s fine.

Burying the lede here.

But also like language shapes the way we think. If you just let all your words boil down into “good” and “ungood”, you’re reducing your tools for thinking. 1984 and The Dispossessed are great books, by the way.

They don’t care about what words mean. They will say anything, anything, to try to secure power. They are bad people. They are bad people.

This small community way of thinking you’re describing is kind of a bad system. It doesn’t scale well and is extremely vulnerable to injustice. It shouldn’t be held up as a gold standard or even an acceptable way to think. I thought most people accepted the law should apply equally to all, but that “small town” mode is going to produce “sure Jimmy stole the car and crashed into the deli, but he’s a good boy. Give him probation. But that [slur] parking in the fire lane? Throw the book at them!”

right? they could’ve just said nothing

Oh that’s a neat library. Type annotations in python are really nice, and you don’t have to add tooling like when you switch from JS to TS.

This is like a fractal of stupid. Any portion of it is just as stupid as any other portion. I suspect it’s a joke.

I feel like everyone knows the ownership class is ruining everything, but no one wants to do anything.

But that’s not true. I just hang out with people with more class consciousness, I guess. The average idiot probably blames the queers and the non-whites. “They had to raise the price of CoD because of all the money spent on sensitivity and diversity!” is probably something a dud sincerely believes.

Sometimes I wish real life was more like some video games, and I could just crouch behind those people, snap their neck, and dump the body in a bush with no consequences.

“Man covered in blood sick of being asked about blood soaked knives in locked cabinet in home” ?