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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 22nd, 2024

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  • You appear to be conflating Capitalism with the concept of free markets. They are wholly different and distinct concepts, regardless of what Capitalism’s propagandists would like everyone to believe.

    Capitalism, being an economic dogma that worships private ownership and relentless pursuit and hoarding of wealth, actively incentivizes behavior that destroys free markets: trusts, monopolies, oligopolies, regulatory capture, sabotage, patents, union busting, mergers and acquisitions, financialization, and more, gradually eroding any free market until it no longer meaningfully exists.




  • The problem is that ignorance is a decision more often than not. If someone is already at an inflection point and open to making changes - and to your input specifically - then it’s best to try to help them expand their experience. Information alone often isn’t enough, they need lived experience. If you are in such a position with your family member, you are in a better position than most. But if they are already compartmentalizing then you may have to accept that you have very little sway. A person always makes up their own mind, one way or another.


  • You can’t. A person must choose to value objective truth. Likewise, they must choose to change their minds.

    The book The Authoritarians by Dr. Bob Altemeyer covers this topic well. Some people compartmentalize to support their preferred foregone conclusions, and will dismiss absolutely anything that conflicts with their desired conclusions. They cannot and will not compare the things they have compartmentalized if it threatens their outlook.

    Dr. Altemeyer points out that you cannot get through to people like that, no matter what. The only way to reduce their compartmentalized and authoritarian tendencies is through direct and prolonged exposure to diversity. This does not change the compartmentalization or predisposition to force their will on others, violently if necessary, it simply curbs them slightly. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink, as they say.










  • Since I mostly use computers for entertainment these days I keep coming back to Bazzite. It’s fast, stable, kept up to date, reliable, and “just works”. I’ve created custom rpm-ostree layers to faff around, but it’s not actually necessary for anything I need.

    I used to keep a second Kubuntu Minimal partition around but I realized I just don’t need it. If I wasn’t so happy with Bazzite, I would probably go with openSUSE or Endeavor.




  • Using the term “politically correct” as a pejorative is a dog whistle. It is not literally political but communicates a right wing frustration over social consequences when they engage in overt racist, sexist, hateful, bigoted, or exclusionary speech or behavior. In more recent parlance it has been largely supplanted by a pejorative usage of “woke.”

    Any AI that is trained on the internet – which is ostensibly all of them – will provide a broad reflection of the public zeitgeist. Since the prompt specified “politically incorrect” as a positive attribute its generated text reflected the training data where “politically incorrect” was presented as a positive trait. Since we know that it’s a dog whistle, by having lived through decades of it’s use in mass media and online, it comes as no surprise that an AI instructed to ape that behavior has done exactly what it was told.