SwingingTheLamp

Apparently not. ¯\(ツ)/¯

If you have the privilege to ignore “politics” while people are gravely suffering in real life, is it so hard to just ignore it in your Lemmy feed?

Yes. Very much so. Calling it a “virus” is an analogy to simplify the concept to a sound bite, and an author like Neal Stephenson made a “mind virus” central to the plot of his book, Snow Crash. But strip away the literary liberties, and it’s based on real neuroscience. See, for example, this article from a few years ago.

Quote:

It is well-documented that for example words like “reptiles” and “parasites” were used by the Nazi regime to compare outsiders and minorities to animals. Strongmen throughout history have referred to targeted social groups as “rats” or “pests” or “a plague.” And it’s effective regardless of whether the people who hear this language are predisposed to jump to extreme conclusions. Once someone is tuned into these metaphors, their brain actually changes in ways that make them more likely to believe bigger lies, even conspiracy theories.

I have this pet theory that the fact that some of the first TV broadcasts were Hitler’s speeches is more than just a historical curiosity. Broadcast media (i.e. radio) had come along just a few years before. Right after it provided a way for authoritarian leaders like Hitler to reach great numbers of people with their spoken words., the world saw an explosion of right-wing populism at a scale never seen before. I suspect it’s not just a coincidence. (The Nazis certainly understood the propaganda opportunity.)

It certainly resembled a viral outbreak.

Would that be a human with ostrich legs, or an ostrich with a human body? Indeed, there are a lot of philosophical questions, but if we’re allowing technological augmentation, then Todd Reichert is indisputably human and managed 144 kph.

Kinesiologists and mechanical engineers are the who. Ostriches have a radically different body plan than humans, one that’s mechanically much more suited to running fast. Add long, lightweight legs which bend the other way and hence have advantageous leverage and a stride length of 3 to 5 meters. (Usain Bolt has a stride length of less than 2.5 meters, and he’s an outlier among humans.) Even if we genetically engineered a hyper-fast-twitch muscle fiber and springy tendons, those would just tear apart our joints when paired with the body mechanics and locomotion style we’re working with.

Bubba is aroused.

No, they told me I could stop.

Come to think of it, the word they used was “should”. They were really quite emphatic about it.

If Québec would be open to making poutine with deep-fried cheese curds, it could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Nah, Wisconsin is too purple, sadly. This is the state, after all, that voted for the semi-sentient bucket of pig shit named F. Ron Johnson over Russ Feingold. Maybe Douglas County and blue parts of LaCrosse could sneak in there on the edge of Minnetoba undetected, though.

I have to give it this much respect: When I logged in to office.com (for work) recently and was confronted with the Copilot chat-box, I asked it how to disable Copilot. It was honest, and told me that it’s not possible because this is Microsoft’s new product strategy. Then, I asked how I could never see Copilot again.

It (no joke!) told me to install Linux.

Try https://noai.duckduckgo.com/.

Look, just three weeks ago, complainers were bitching that Americans were too complacent, and a general strike would never happen. Now, a general strike is happening, and you’re complaining that it’s only a day? Even this was allegedly unthinkable at New Year’s!

We don’t know the future. Let the momentum build.

I dunno, when was the last time Japan dismembered a reporter at one of its consulates?

I saw that post, and honestly, part of the issue is that the pain of messing with mode-lines in /etc/XF86Config and worrying about physically damaging your CRT monitor with out-of-spec frequencies was a very real thing 30 years ago. Hence, the idea that configuring displays on Linux is fraught and difficult has stuck around, even though it hasn’t been true since the advent of DDC, and multiple displays for most use-cases has been sorted out for at least the past 15 years. Non-Linux users will still occasionally talk about displays on Linux as if we were still editing mode-lines in vi.

It’s a sore point, I guess I’m saying, and you poked it inadvertently. When I read the post, I just kind of smiled, because a few days before, I plugged the HDMI cable from a conference room display into my Thinkpad, and it lit up with an extension of my desktop. I started LibreOffice Impress, hit ‘F5’, and the presentation appeared on the big display, and the presentation notes on my laptop screen. (Actually, I was surprised and impressed at how smoothly it went.)

It’s no surprise that issues remain here and there, though. Glad to hear that folks wanted to be helpful!

In my mind, I can’t checkout, because it’s a noun or an adjective. I always do verbs, so I check out.

So if this person no longer works for Pfizer, spill the beans! Tell us about all of the cures that it killed.

On climate change, I gotta disagree. We have two major drivers of climate change: Greenhouse gas emissions, and land-use changes. The land-use changes go way back. We’re in the geological epoch called the Anthropocene, one in which humanity is the dominant force in shaping the biosphere. There’s some debate about it, but some scientists place the beginning of the Anthropocene as much as 15,000 years ago, driven by habitat destruction and resource extraction to support growing human populations. It takes a lot of natural resources to support each human to the standard to which we’ve become accustomed, and even the poor people in Western countries live a lifestyle that the Earth cannot sustain. It’s not just billionaires, it’s all of us.

Similarly with fossil fuels. We know that a handful of mega-corporations produce the fossil fuels responsible for the majority of greenhouse gas releases, but they’re not the ones releasing the gases. We can’t just abolish them and expect nothing to change about our daily lives. We’ve reached a point at which even working class people in the United States can order up a taxi for their beef burrito.

Instead, we can say that this wanton shredding of our natural inheritance enables flows of wealth that allow unscrupulous hands to skim criminal quantities off the top for their hoards. Even if we depose them, though, we’d still have the climate change problem to tackle.

Next martyr, then. You in?

Fine, next martyr, though you knew what I meant. In any case, magical thinking (you just have to want it hard enough) has never worked. If you have suggestions for what to actually do, bring it. Anything short of actions that’ll get you killed never seem to be good enough for the complainers.

Are you volunteering to be the first martyr?