wopazoo [he/him]

Yesterday, I witnessed a guy exit a toilet stall and head straight out the door without washing his hands. These people exist out there.

There are lots of lucky people out there, but no one lives forever.

Isn’t this lingo kind of dated now?

Liberals don’t actually have beliefs. To them, belief is about signaling group affiliation, not actual intellectual belief.

When a liberal says that they believe in freedom and democracy, they don’t mean that they think that freedom and democracy are the best ways to organize a society, they are merely saying that they belong to WEIRD (western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) society.

Of course it’s incomprehensible for a group of people who are profoundly nihilistic that someone would actually be willing to die for what they think is right.

I’m reminded of the tale of the liberal who says big words about climate change but cannot not be arsed to give up their gas-guzzling SUV. To them, “I believe that climate change is real” is merely a statement of group affiliation (i.e. “I’m with the cool kids”), not a factual statement that implies the need for urgent action.

Hitler lost WW2.

Nobody’s getting banned for asking dumb questions, but if you come here to scold people for not licking doorknobs, you are getting banned.

What’s your objection to the term “safe space”? This is a genuine question. Is it the wrong term?

Maybe we should operate more like c/vegan where everything from omnivore apologia to overt antiveganism (analogous to the above anti-precaution/anti-max/anti-vax-apologia) is forbidden, and posting/commenting as much gets you a ban?

I agree with this. We should have at least one place where COVID can be discussed without people coming in to scold people for not kissing strangers on New Year’s Eve.

the impression i got is that soydevs are developers who create or use bloated apps or websites

Each one of my students, their parents, their family members has had COVID multiple times. They’re elementary students. They literally cannot remember a world without this pandemic. It’s a common part of life that everyone tells them if fine and normal. Everyday I act as a reminder to them that something is not right.

This is why anti-masking won out in the end.

There is no “return to normal” without anti-masking, because masks serve as a constant reminder that this is not normal. You cannot get people to return to pre-pandemic behaviors without eradicating the thought of the pandemic in their mind. Eliminating masks, the symbol of the pandemic, is necessary to achieve the ends of a reversion to pre-pandemic behavior.

I suspect that many of the people who get angry at mask-wearers are doing so as a reaction to cognitive dissonance. If they acknowledge that the pandemic is still ongoing, then they accept that their reckless behavior endangers themselves, their families, and their friends. So, they instead paint mask-wearers as delusional freaks in order to avoid confronting reality.

Keep in mind that if you actually want to make a game, make a game not an engine. Too many video game projects get bogged down in the engine development stage and never make it to completion.

a sense that it must hold or unknown terrors will consume them.

“Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t”

Dumb fuck!

copying a comment from a hackernews post about the same topic:

1. The FBI has been ruthlessly persecuting Chinese people with absolutely absurd charges. For example, “In a grant application you didn’t list that you had met for coffee with X other student from your alma mater when you visited China for Lunar New Year. This constitutes fraud and possibly espionage.” A grant application is not an SSBI application! These are genuinely absurd standards to be applying to people. The fact that the FBI has been overwhelmingly losing these racially motivated cases is cold comfort - having extremely powerful secretive police harassing you and your family is extremely distressing even if their case against you is ultimately unsuccessful, and the fact that they know they’re losing and keep doing it suggests their intent is to try and discourage you from talking to any of your friends or family back in China, or leave the country. Careful what you wish for.

2. Declared academic collaboration between academic institutions in the US and China is being cracked down on as well. People and their families are being investigated with no evidence given as to why, the federal government is contacting US universities and convincing them to end collaborative programs, etc. The reasons given, if any, are that the Chinese are stealing American technology through these academic collaborations. Thinking for two seconds about what, exactly, an academic collaboration is intended to accomplish should show how absurd the “stealing” idea is.

3. A lot of the most valuable work in academia is collaborative, and a lot of the specific career value in being a Chinese national or having Chinese family ties in US academia is that you can function as an expert go-between for the two largest and most important countries for scientific research. When the US is not just devaluing but actively stigmatising some of your skills, it can force people to choose. The US is richer per capita, has more freedoms in many respects, etc, but the persecution by police is going to impact your assessment of where you’d rather live, especially when the PRC has open arms, lots of grant money, and scientists have a good position in society there too.

4. Hate crimes against Chinese people have been increasing dramatically for years. Chinese communities know this and also see very clearly that it’s not a priority for either political party to do anything about it. Not much to say about this, it’s obvious why you wouldn’t want to live somewhere where there are enough people in the population committing hate crimes against you that most people are in community with a victim, and then there’s no political will to do anything about it.

5. There’s genuine concern about the possibility of war. If you know anyone in the American military, you know that war with China is on everyone’s mind. Different dates get floated, from 2030 to 2027 to 2025, but it’s essentially received wisdom in the US military that there is going to be a war in the westpac theatre at some point. This view (“We should be prepared”) is also essentially bipartisan in the political realm, and American media are doing their part too. Chinese people notice, they can see the current (illegal, racist) persecution by the government, and most of them have enough historical knowledge to understand that the dynamics that lead to the Japanese internment camps haven’t fundamentally changed - the camps themselves weren’t even ruled to be illegal until 2018, only 5 years ago! If you were Chinese, would you want to stay in America and take the risk that you might end up confined to a camp, or wearing an ankle bracelet with a microphone everywhere just so the government can say that they didn’t put a particular ethnic minority in literal camps? Genuinely, would you take that risk, with what you know about America? If the American government goes to war with China, and they decided on this sort of large scale persecution of Chinese people, do you think that any significant quantity of Americans with any political power would stand up for the Chinese people in America, or would it be like 9/11 where the government persecuted Muslims en masse and there was zero political will to stop them for years?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37018285

And I still think the overwhelming majority of blame has to lie with the ruling class and all the people carrying water for them who have repeatedly bombarded the public with messages expressing COVID is over for the last 2-plus fucking years and that you don’t have to worry if you’re vaccinated and that bad outcomes only happen to people who are already medically vulnerable.

(responding not to you but to the ruling class narrative about COVID)

Saying that COVID won’t affect you because you’re healthy is a very funny thought. You may be healthy now, but after a few infections you won’t be healthy anymore. There is no dividing line between the healthy and the sick; the world is in reality composed of the sick and the not-yet-sick. You are not immune to disability.

But like, I completely disagree with the notion that people can’t have their minds changed.

There is no need to change anyone’s mind. You do not need to convince people that wearing masks is good when you can force them to wear a mask. The way to restore mass mask wearing is to bring back mask mandates.

defederating from nazi instance: takes forever

defederating from socialist instance: does it before federation even starts

I read this blog post about a UKer’s experience of blocking all American IP addresses, which made the Internet mostly unusable.

https://www.nthbrock.com/posts/americaless-internet/

Select quotes:

Nine out of the ten most visited websites in the United Kingdom are those operated by US organisations. The same cannot be said for the flip side. There are zero UK-operated websites found in the US’s top 50.

A large chunk of the Anglo-speaking sphere I experience originates and is operated by American organisations. Within this sphere, we all feel any disturbances or changes made by the major players. We are all affected when an AWS data centre goes down. Our combined productivity goes down when Google publishes an enticing doodle. Any dint to Facebook’s SLA and we all find out as it hits the mainstream media.

One of the few constants in life is change. We can’t assume the internet as we use it today will last for the foreseeable future. The Internet is the most impressive distributed networks of our time. Yet its fragility isn’t in the technology itself but in the politics, geography and laws that encompass it. […]

(emphasis mine)

The author’s experience shows why the Great Firewall of China (GFW) is an essential economic protection measure. Without the GFW, the Chinese internet would be dominated by American websites, leading to Chinese social and economic dependence on American corporations and infrastructure. Mature American tech companies would occupy most of the space in the local market, stifling the development of an indigenous tech industry.