• 4 Posts
  • 729 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 21st, 2023

help-circle
  • I think we’re going to need a little more context on who he is and how he’s using the word “goy”

    It comes from Hebrew/Yiddish, so it’s a word used predominantly by Jewish people, and so not inherently antisemitic. It basically means non-jew, it’s roughly synonymous with the term “gentile” that you might be more familiar with if you’ve had a Christian upbringing.

    How Jews use it of course varies a lot, plenty just use it without any particular deeper meaning, just a matter-of-fact statement that the person they’re referring to isn’t Jewish.

    Some of course do use it with a bit of Malice if they value non-jews less highly than their fellow Jews.

    I’ve also heard it used, usually somewhat jokingly, by Jews to refer to other Jews who aren’t acting in a way that they think is in accordance with Jewish customs. I remember one time my one Jewish friend who keeps kosher (kind of, he definitely bends the rules more than a bit) was teasing another Jewish friend who had ordered a bacon cheeseburger or something while we were out grabbing lunch, calling him a goy and lumping him in with the rest of the non-jews sitting around the table. It was all in good fun, just a bunch of guys joking around over a couple beers.

    Again, I’m sure there’s some Jews out there who would do something like that and mean it as an actual insult.

    If the person saying it isn’t Jewish themselves, that’s where you might have a case for their use being antisemitic.

    I’m not Jewish, I could definitely see myself using goy or a handful handful of other jewish words and phrases I’ve picked up when I’m joking around with my Jewish friends. I might even call one of them a goy jokingly like in that bacon cheeseburger situation. Mostly though I’d probably use it to refer to myself, like if they were talking about, let’s say a Chanukah celebration, and I didn’t understand what they were talking about, I might tell them to need to explain it again in “goy” for me.

    But if I’m not with friends that I have a good rapport with, I probably wouldn’t joke like that, I don’t want to give the wrong impression that I’m genuinely criticizing them for not being Jewish “enough,” as a non Jew I really don’t think it’s my place to be making that kind of judgement.

    And I certainly wouldn’t be using it seriously to criticize Jews. I wouldn’t call Israeli Zionists goys (goyim I believe is actually the proper pluralization) based on their Zionist beliefs, there’s plenty of totally secular terms I can come up with to criticize them.

    I could also see an antisemite using Jewish terms like goy in a mocking fashion, which, yeah that’s pretty antisemitic, basically the same thing as a white supremacist making fun of a black person for using AAVE.

    And of course, depending on the person, the tone, how they’re using it, their target audience, etc. it could be totally non-problematic.


  • I work in 911 dispatch, so getting people to calm down, stop what they’re doing, and listen to me is kind of a big part of my job. Things are of course a bit different in-person than over the phone, but here’s generally how I’d approach something like this.

    If you know their name, use it. A lot. People respond to their name, that’s kind of the whole reason names exist. It will get their attention which is half the battle.

    Getting them to calm down from there is the other half, and it’s not easy, especially if you don’t speak their language. Body language and tone of voice goes a long way though.

    Not that they’re going to understand you in this situation anyway, but remember that no one in the entire history of calming down has anyone ever actually calmed down after being told to calm down. Don’t even bother trying that.

    Try to get them to take some deep breaths, use some gestures.

    Your hospital really should have access to some sort of translation service, either humans on location there in the room with you who speak the language, or some kind of service like languageline (not plugging them specifically, I have a lot of complaints about some of their interpreters, they just happen to be who we use at work) that you can call up and get on speakerphone. Google translate and such are wonderful tools, but they’re not perfect and sometimes you really want that bit of a human touch. I’ve also occasionally had some great interpretors who will chime in with some helpful bits like “they’re saying’this’ but in our culture that usually really means ‘this’

    If you can find an excuse to hand them something, maybe some paperwork, that can also sometimes kind of create a little bit of a break in whatever they’re doing for you to work with. They’ll probably stop screaming for a second to look at what was just handed to them, and then you can try to work on something.


  • I’m kind of wondering if the plan here isn’t to goad trump into retaliating by blurting out where our own missiles are pointed at.

    They threw some obvious ones out there like the Pentagon (duh of course they have missiles pointed there)

    And then padded out the list with some defunct sites to make the list longer because someone like Trump is going to want to one-up them by listing at least that many of our targets. Russia probably doesn’t actually have missiles aimed at most of those places, but this way they don’t actually have to give up any of their actual targets.

    And trump will probably take the bait to beef up missile defences around those defunct sites, wasting money, time, manpower, and resources that could be better used anywhere else.



  • Most veggies in grocery stores are bred for things like appearance and shelf life more than actual quality.

    I think tomatoes are a prime example of this.

    Tomatoes bruise easily, and people kind of want to buy the perfect, round, bright red tomatoes, not a weird lumpy-looking, funny colored bruised up one.

    So big farmers grow tomatoes that look pretty, and are sturdier to better handle being shipped thousands of miles, that will last better on grocery store shelves, etc.

    But there’s trade-offs there for things like texture and taste. That perfect-looking tomato may be bland and watery.

    They may also be doing stuff like picking them before they’re fully ripe and artificially ripening them with ethylene gas or something later in a warehouse.

    When you get tomatoes from a smaller, local farmer though, they don’t have to be shipped as far, or sit around in a warehouse or grocery store as long, so they don’t need to pick varieties based on shelf life and ability to stand up to shipping, and can instead grow varieties that taste good. And they can pick them at their peak ripeness because they’re going more directly from the field to the consumer and they don’t have to rely on tricks like ethylene.

    My wife isn’t a picky eater, but when we first started dating she thought that she didn’t really like tomatoes.

    But she had only ever had regular grocery store tomatoes.

    Until we moved in together and I grew some myself. Then she discovered that tomatoes can actually be really good. Now she can’t get enough of them, as long as they’re good tomatoes.

    And I didn’t even grow any particularly fancy tomatoes. That first year that I made a convert of her I just had some regular ol’ beefsteak, Roma, and cherry tomatoes that I picked up as pre-started plants from Walmart or home Depot or somewhere like that, and grew them in pots on the patio of our apartment. Basically entry-level gardening, but that was enough to blow her mind.

    Another year I grew, I think the variety was called something like “mucho nacho” jalapenos. We love jalapenos to begin with, but holy shit. That particular variety was everything we ever wanted a jalapeno to be. We had one or two other varieties going that year to have a comparison, but that one stood head-and-shoulders above the others, bigger, a little hotter, and just plain tastier.

    And farmers can probably get their hands on even better varieties than whatever I could get at a big box hardware store, and have the know-how to really give them ideal growing conditions.


  • That’s a map of the magnetic “dip” pole not the geomagnetic pole. They are slightly different things.

    I’m a bit out of my depth, so I’m not gonna try to explain the distinction because I don’t really understand it very well myself, it’s just a fun fact I picked up somewhere.

    But AFAIK, the geomagnetic pole is still supposed to be somewhere around Canada/Greenland

    Also, not for nothing, but those are two different map projections so with how things get distorted around the poles in the OPs map,it’s a little hard to directly compare them. Remember that with cylindrical projections the whole top edge of the map basically represents a single point (the geographic north Pole) so things are often a lot closer together than they may look on the map. Just from eyeballing the two maps as an amateur who uses maps more than the average person but doesn’t exactly study them, I wasn’t 100% confident that the dip pole wasn’t in one of those higher spots of the puffin’s range (it’s not, I confirmed on a couple other maps, but it’s closer than you might think just from casually looking at these two maps.)




  • My computer is basically the same computer my wife built around 12 years ago, as she did upgrades over the last decade or so I just saved her old components and eventually stuffed them into a new box. It was a beefy rig when she built it, and still runs most of what I throw at it with (what I think is) pretty acceptable performance and settings.

    So that old motherboard and processor aren’t windows 11 compliant and with the windows 10 end of life I decided it was time to make the switch. Don’t quite have the wiggle room in the budget for a major upgrade right now.

    And truth be told, even if I were to do a major upgrade, I probably was looking at Linux anyway. I don’t like the AI bullshit and a lot of the other dumb crap Microsoft has been pulling with 11. I want to get away from the corporate overlords in general. I’ve always been pretty big on FOSS, so really it was just gaming that’s been holding me back and I felt like proton and such the state of gaming on Linux has finally reached a place I can be happy with.

    And not for nothing, it’s free, and I’ve always felt like MS charges too much for windows. I’m a bit of a cheapskate, if I can save a buck I’m going to. The F in FOSS is a huge draw for me.

    And I’ve had half-baked plans to turn this current rig into a home server/NAS whenever I get around to building a new rig, so that meant Linux was in the cards for it at some point anyway, and I might as well start getting my hands dirty with that now in preparation.


  • Not a fan of the bait and switch, and I haven’t really looked into her beyond this article so I can’t say if this is the case

    But I kind of wonder if this isn’t actually a pretty good strategy.

    A whole lot of Texans aren’t going to vote for anyone who doesn’t have an R next to their name, regardless of if they actually like their policies or not.

    So maybe if you just do everything as a Democrat would do but register as a Republican and don’t talk about it too much, you can slip one by them and get the idiots to vote for an actual RINO.

    Of course the trick is getting the word out there to get Dems to vote for someone without a D next to their name as well without clueing in the Republicans that that’s what’s going on. The Republicans are a little more used to listening for dog whistles than Democrats are.


  • No, that’s the opposite of what I’m saying.

    I do believe you’re being 100% genuine.

    But your genuine self looks a hell of a lot like a troll to the vast majority of people who aren’t going to comb through your comment history and realize that you have mental health issues. They’re just going to treat you like a troll and move on with their day.

    And regardless of whether you’re genuine or trolling, at the end of the day, your intent doesn’t really matter, if it’s annoying, disruptive, etc. the mods are going to treat it as trolling, and they are right to do so.


  • OP, after scrolling through your history and the modlog a bit, I don’t get the impression that you’re a troll, but you absolutely do come off as one or at least as a real asshole in nearly everything you’ve posted to Lemmy since creating this account. In fact, I can see that I’ve personally downvoted you a couple of times for it.

    But going through that history, I can see that you have some mental health/neurological issues. That kind of makes things fall into place.

    I have a few friends in similar boats. If they were more-techy people I suspect their comment histories from when they’ve had an episode or gone off their meds or what-have-you would look a lot like yours. They’re good people, who unfortunately have issues that make them sometimes seem like they aren’t. And I feel like that’s the case with you.

    I won’t pretend to know what the best course of action for you here is. I don’t know you, I don’t know what kind of help you’re already getting or what different kinds you may need, or what you would ideally like your life to look like on or off of Lemmy.

    But you’re on here complaining about getting banned by mods, so I think it’s safe to say that you don’t enjoy that.

    So I think you need to realize that if you act the way you have been, that’s going to continue happening. It feels very trollish, annoying and disruptive, and honestly maybe even a bit dangerous in some cases. I definitely get why mods have felt like they need to step in with you, I’d probably do the same in their shoes. Their role isn’t to cater to you, but to protect the community as a whole. Sometimes they step out of line to be sure, but I’m just not really seeing that in your history.

    So you gotta change something, man. Maybe it’s something small, like exercising a little extra mindfulness and taking a moment to think about what you just wrote before hitting “post”

    Maybe it’s something bigger-therapy, medication, inpatient treatment (all easier said than done, I know)

    Maybe it’s something else entirely.

    But if you don’t like the bans and having your comments removed and such, the fix is something that needs to change on your end, not the mods’.

    I doubt you’re going to be too interested in taking that advice from a stranger on the internet, but I figured I’d al least try.


  • There was a thread I saw not too long ago where someone brought up a little conspiracy theory I think I may subscribe to

    There’s a new Alzheimer’s treatment, Lecanemab/Leqembi, that was given accelerated approval in the US by the FDA this year in January, so just as trump took office.

    It’s given by IV every 4 weeks. Trump has been seen with what looks like makeup thats covering up bruising from an IV

    It also seems like he has highs and lows where he declines for a couple weeks then perks back up a bit before declining again, and you can maybe kind of match those up to a similar 4-ish week cycle.

    And it also calls for regular cognitive tests and MRIs to monitor if it’s effective, and, well, trump has been doing that.


  • That is just not the case.

    The case that people tend to cite when this comes up is Burdick vs United States, that determined that people can choose to decline a pardon.

    And one of the reasons they gave for why someone may choose to refuse a pardon is because it can be seen as implying guilt.

    Basically, some people will see you take the pardon and think “if he’s innocent, why is he taking a pardon instead of seeking exoneration?”

    But of course, if you know anything about the US “justice” system, that argument falls apart pretty fast.

    Actually admitting guilt is not part of accepting a pardon, it’s just that a lot of people think that it means you’re guilty, and the pardoned people don’t want to have people think that about them.

    And of course spreading this kind of misinformation only makes that issue worse.





  • I tend to think of and describe myself as a conservative, but don’t align myself with the Republican party at all (I am registered to vote Republican to try to weed out the worst of their lunatics in the primaries, but it’s gonna be a cold day in hell before I vote for one in a general election with the way things are going)

    In my view, which absolutely isn’t the view of the Republicans or conservatives as a whole, the point of conservatism is to just pump the breaks and slow things down to make sure all the "I"s are dotted and "t"s crossed to make sure things are actually going to work as intended.

    Liberals/leftists/progressives should basically be the “idea guys” coming up with big general plans for what they want to happen

    Then the conservatives would be sort of the bean-counters/logistics/nuts-and-bolts sort of guys. They shouldn’t be there to outright oppose the liberal ideas, they’re there to point out the problems with their plans and make sure they’re addressed before we commit to some half-assed plan.


  • I’m certainly no expert on Namibian history and culture, most of what I know comes from just now skimming the Wikipedia article

    But a couple things jumping out at me

    The area was at one point a German colony (and also at one point they carried out a genocide against the Herero people that some think may have been sort of a model for the Holocaust)

    They also had apartheid similar to South Africa.

    And to this day a whole lot of Africa doesn’t exactly have stellar access to education, the internet, etc. and even in some parts of the world that do have better access, there’s a lot of people in other parts of the world outside of Europe and the Americas who don’t quite grok* just how bad the Nazis were because it’s not something they cover so extensively in their history classes. I feel like every couple years I see some story come out of Asia somewhere where some business opens up with a Nazi theme and they don’t get why so many people in the West are mad about it.

    So kind of taking a couple stabs in the dark here

    It could be that his father named him after Hitler maybe trying to soften things up for him, like maybe the white people at the top of the apartheid heiarchy would be a little nicer if he was named after the biggest whitest racist he could think of.

    Or maybe they were in a bit of an information bubble where he just really didn’t fully understand how bad Hitler and the Nazis were and went with it because he thought it had a nice ring to it

    Maybe it was a way to give a giant middle finger to racists. Sort of a “haha, how do you like your leader’s name when it’s on a black kid? Suck it Nazis.”

    Or maybe it was something else. That’s just a couple thoughts off the top of my head.

    *fuck muskrat for trying to steal this word for his own bullshit.