I’m sure some of the maga hats saying kill the homeless would change their tune if they became homeless. No empathy. No ability or willingness to think about other perspectives. They are, simply, stupid.

Something should have been fired, that’s for sure

RFK sucks and is probably in the top 10 most harmful people alive right now.

But if you say anything unkind about the republicans, you’re the real monster! /s

Every maga hat is a danger to society. Fuck them.

Many people are driven by feelings. We all are to some extent. But for many people feelings are primary. This comes up all the time.

You can show charts and studies and everything, but they don’t care. You have to make them feel good about it.

Frankly I’m kind of sick of pandering to overgrown toddlers, but there’s no escape from it.

I honestly missed that in the list. We have too many huge problems :(

Climate change should probably be on there, too

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

Kirk was a piece of shit. Everyone defending him at the very least is shit stained by association

There’s too many people that are going to say stabbing a Nazi is inappropriate and we have to remember their family.

Never played the original, but I don’t feel a need for remakes.

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.

Charlie Kirk was a piece of shit and the world is better without him. I will cheer for every unrepentant maga scumbag that dies.

Did the onion write a piece about how we should reflect on Unnamed Nazi #342 in Indiana Jones’s life and family yet? “Sure, Unnamed Nazi #342 willingly joined an organization focused on subjugation and mass murder of people, but it’s important to remember that he also had a family. They were looking forward to living in a house stolen from the people he helped murder, and living off the fruits of slave labor.”

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.