I totally agree, but I think they could have managed to capture the simple nuance of “in order to care about people and make their lives better, we make a special exception for evil assholes, and we do not care about those people or make their lives better”. If I live on an island with ten people and one of them only wants to beat up the others all the time, there’s not really much hypocrisy in me saying “I want to make everyone’s lives better, but this one jerk won’t let us have that, so I guess we have to settle for making everyone’s life better except for his”. Nothing stops the Democrats from knocking it off with the warmongering while still at least speaking harsh words about the true failings of their political opponents.

Nice strawman, but I’m not saying he’s a pussy for feeling bad for cursing. I’m saying, let me be very clear:

1. The worst in him is apparently calling for Democrats to bully Republicans, which is a silly level of worst to apologize for on account of the fact that:

2: The people he’s calling to bully are fascist, homophobic, xenophobic, racist, corrupt, evil powerful people who are currently dismantling the country

3: It’s ridiculous to say “I should have been nicer” when obviously they didn’t lose because they were mean, and if anything being more mean would have helped them, or at least…

4: Being more mean maybe would at least have driven more people to take aggressive action that may have prevented the current situation

It’s just ridiculous for someone who was 20x nicer than the victorious competition to say they should have been even more nicerer on top of that. Why? What good would it have done? Would you rather your mom be kind to a criminal trying to rob her, or hateful? (See how uncool and ineffective that is to try to drag your mom into things?)

So if I didn’t make it clear enough. I’m not looking down on anyone for “having a conscience”. I think Walz doesn’t have enough of a conscience to bolster himself to do what needs to be done and overcome the paradox of tolerance and hate the opposition enough to make himself a strong opponent rather than a polite little pushover.

I couldn’t snore harder. The worst in you is asking other people to be mean? Oh me oh my I’m quaking in my booties. I’m sure if only you had been a kindler gentler gooder boy you would have won the election. Whatever

Zooming in on tiny drops and saying XYZ PLUMMETS is my #1 pet peeve of all stock analysis

Absolutely there is, but unfortunately the solution to CP is having moderators who can delete content, and that alone is enough to cause all the problems with moderators. It seems largely intractable to me. The only thing I could see maybe working is some system where moderators can be removed by community vote, but then you rely on systems preventing fake accounts from being created or account age to stop those votes from being botted, etc… I just don’t see how to technically solve the problem of moderators having power to delete things. It’s the classic issue of who watches the watchmen. Humanity has never had a great solution to this.

The problem is that if you actually have no or insufficient moderation then people just start using the site to post child pornography. And then you visiting what used to be a site you like becomes basically illegal and dangerous, not to mention potentially traumatizing. I’m not exaggerating, there was a small game fan forum site I used to love along with many others, but someone caught on to the fact it was run by just one guy and kept signing up with fake accounts and posting child porn or links to it. Luckily I had already fallen off using the site by then, but one of my Internet friends who still visited it kept me updated on the drama. First everyone normal stopped visiting. Then it eventually got so bad the owner had to shut down the site.

People lack imagination when it comes to what will happen with no moderation. It quickly becomes horrible.

Big insult chains like that only hit home for me if each one adds a new dimension or sense to the insult. This is just saying stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid over and over again. Reminds me of le epic reddit insults like “fuckwaffle” or whatever the hell it was. I hate conservatives and fascism as much as anyone, but it’s tiring to see such circlejerky posts that basically just say “conservatives dumb, upvote below”. I don’t need my opinion circlejerked, I’m already convinced of it without some random man telling me it’s true. And there’s nothing cathartic about reading this either because of how try-hard the insult sounds. Bleh.

I think the problem is that certain views are much stronger indicators of someone being willing to eventually shove their views down your throat. If I was a big corporation shopping for, say, spam filter software, I’d rather sign a 3 year contract with a regular company than, for example, a company that is openly fundamentalist Christians. Why? Because the Christians are much more likely to start randomly making ridiculous changes that only make sense to other Christians, like spam filtering out anything with the word “Allah”, etc. They may not do that now, but I need to look further than just right now because I don’t want to get locked in to an ecosystem that is going to turn sour. Sure I can always switch, but why not just choose the one that has less risk of that at the onset?

Now some beliefs that I disagree with are less like this than others. For instance if the devs disagreed with me about their favorite movies, I’m not going to take that into consideration, because that’s not the sort of thing or the sort of person who is likely to abuse their power to aid that cause. But transphobia? That is exactly the sort of thing that someone, as has been proven many times now, will sit on and downplay until they are given power and influence to act on it. Using their software contributes to their influence, especially in the browser world.

Lastly, all other things equal, I’d rather use the product of a smart team full of smart people, than a dumb team full of dumb people. Transphobia is a dumb belief to have, it is a result of being unintelligent. Many smart people (and let’s be honest, especially developers) won’t want to work with someone like that. Whether you think that’s reasonable or not, it’s hard to deny. It’s certainly hard to picture any great trans developers wanting to contribute. So a lot of things add up, especially when looking a few links down the causal chain, to make it more than just a matter of whether they believe differently than I do.

Yeah same. I respect the huge amount of work it takes to make a suite like that, but… I’m lucky I’ve worked with Blender a lot to give me a good impression of open source software. If Libre was my first thing I experimented with in the open source world (and I think for many, many people it probably is), I would probably think “wow open source software is a joke, I guess you get what you pay for after all”. It really makes a horrible impression. I wonder why LibreOffice has so many usability pains vs Blender, despite the fact that both applications have very high demand. Maybe it’s just that LibreOffice seems really dull to contribute to?

No, it’s actually the worst name possible. It’s the latest in a long line of giving things names that force them to be talked about like they’re good. Big Beautiful Bill. Patriot Act. It’s like if I name my proposal to make every human on Earth my personal slave the “Best Idea Ever Act That Only Stupid Evil People Disagree With”. What’s sad is that it’s actually effective. There are people out there stupid enough to really think “How can you be against the AMERICA party? Aren’t you an AMERICAN???”. It takes advantage of linguistics to manipulate psychological response to the topic. And even if you say “well actually the big beautiful bill is actually not beautiful at all” then you sound like a silly hair-splitting moron who doesn’t have an actual argument and can only attack the name.

Furthermore it creates an ambiguity. I can no longer say “I’m proud to be an American” without tacking on “but not the Elon Musk Party kind”, which then spreads and reinforces the dominance of his term.

The left should really try to start some sort of social media trend of saying we’re proud to be Americans just to try to undermine the ambiguity before Musk’s marketing bots get into full swing and co-opt the term.

Post-Zuckerberg? I’m confused on the eras of Facebook I guess. He’s still CEO isn’t he? Wouldn’t that make the whole history of the company the Zuckerberg era?

I think there is a substantial difference though. Meat processing is done in a measured, considered way for a benefit (meat) that cannot be obtained without killing the animal. It is done in isolated facilities away from people who find the process disturbing. Just because people find something gross doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done - we have sewage maintenance done out of the public eye too - but it does maybe mean it should be done where people don’t have to see it. The only benefit this man gets from killing the animal is some sort of “revenge”. But this is in principle completely contradictory to meat processing, where animals are seen as less capable of higher order experiences and therefore more acceptable to kill. To seek revenge, you would need to be assigning more higher order experience to the seagull than we typically see it as having. You have to see the seagull as selfish, stealing, criminal, rude, etc., even though in reality a more reasonable person understands that it’s just an animal looking for food. Meat processing is not done out of some emotional vendetta against the animals, rather it is the cold detachment of it that is exactly what makes it acceptable. Can you imagine if we killed the same amount of chickens every day, not to eat them, but just because we hate them? This is much more horrifying! Because that would mean we think chickens are having complex enough inner experiences to warrant hatred, yet still we kill them.

Meat processing maybe isn’t great, but it’s still much better than this seagull killer. It isn’t impulsive, it isn’t disproportionate in response to the situation, it acknowledges and conceals its own horrors; thereby paying respect to important social codes. The actions of this man, though, disregarded the well-being of children and others around him, in an impulsive and disproportionate response - your average meat-eater is indeed better than that, I think. When I have a craving for some meat, I don’t drag a calf down to the nearest playground, cut it in half and spray blood over the children, and proceed to mock the calf’s weakness and inferiority as I beat it to tenderize it before consumption. I just want some food, dude. But what’s this guy’s beef? It’s not beef, and it’s not even seagull meat, but rather some frightening notion of swift and decisive revenge, which reveals that he is just waiting for any excuse to get away with brutalizing things around him.