Even that started as “abolish the police.” That was too radical, so they went with “defund the police.” That, too, was too radical, and turned into “fund them more, but include sensitivity training.” The sensitivity training was not included; too radical.
It is truly impossible to make any kind of prediction for what will happen in the US because of this. I think a lot of people not from here don’t realize how bad it actually is. It’s really, really bad.
It is pretty much the singular online chat app in use by most English-speaking spaces, replacing the niche Microsoft-owned Skype used to fill. The way it works is, similarly, an inscrutable black box by design, developed and headquartered in the USA. There is no question that it is compromised.
It’s implicit. I’ve been a lurker for some time; check any of the social megathreads and you’ll certainly see people constantly going on about gatherings, restaurants, organizing this and that in person. These people are not masking. The ones that are will be talking about it, because it is impossible to be masking in the current year and also be social without noticing the dissonance. Any pushback to this point will be met with apathy at best, hostility at worst. It seems to be treated like veganism, where there is an unspoken policy that everyone acknowledges it is the correct stance to take…but if someone is not following it through for whatever reason, they just aren’t going to mention it at all, and doing so is breaking decorum. In this case “don’t ask don’t tell” doesn’t work when you still mingle about going to bars or concerts or whatever else like nothing is going on. This itself is a form of (normalized) violence, which is where “this site is pro-eugenics” comes from, a sentiment I am in agreement with because the base of modern society is pro-eugenics.
While this is despair inducing, we can’t give in and sink to the lowest depths. There is a need for moderation throughout the site when it comes to the eugenics (subtle or over) and covid denialism, and it needs to come from US, not the mods!
What do you do when the “help” is unwanted? At best, we can do agitation, and I have been barking up this tree IRL and online since the early years. People won’t change. They don’t want to change. If they do, they are an outlier, and I have not met a single one of them. The only time any of them did anything was when it was policy and under threat of consequences—visible consequences that they can’t wave away like degrading health. We won’t get there again without it. Even then, not everyone would abide. People were on their deathbeds decrying the existence of COVID. All I, a human being of “the community”, have succeeded in doing is burning myself out while no one listens and the party outside goes on unimpeded. What then? As someone else here put it, someone needs to be COVID Stalin to shape the discourse. It will not happen for our part. We have no authority, a fact that is easily confirmed by trying to talk to anyone about COVID whatsoever.
You’re 100% correct. I’ve been daily driving some flavor of Linux for nearly 20 years, since way, way before it was even half as good as it is now to use on the desktop. I am sympathetic to hospitals, pharmacies, and other institutions where the grip of Windows and other crusty, proprietary systems on the various equipment and processes they require is virtually iron-tight and genuinely the difference between life or death for the patients under care. I have no sympathy for everyday desktop users who complain like this and simply don’t want to change. In a lot of ways free software (specifically A/GPL software) is the closest thing we have to genuine Marxist principles in action in our current mode of living, and if someone doesn’t want to pick up on that and support it then I can only guess what they’ll think about what the rest of the world needs to go through on the way to “fully automated luxury gay space communism”…
I don’t see how the two are related at all. One hallucinates more-or-less-fingered things and is used cynically for profit motive regardless and the other is a gag about a common and intentional stylistic choice in many cartoons.