dreadgoat

The crux of this is whether Us vs Them is instinctual or learned. I don’t think we yet have a definitive answer, but certainly Us vs Them is so ingrained in our ways of life that removing it would be extraordinarily difficult.

Again, I may be excessively cynical, but my belief is that some people, maybe even most people, WILL take these mental pathways you describe no matter what, and the best we can do is provide distractions. Bread and circuses. At their best, these distractions channel our self-destructive tendencies into harmless oceans of impunity. At their worst, they are hijacked by ne’er-do-wells to transform the apathetic into frothing zealots of a cause they don’t even care to understand. It becomes the responsibility of those who are paying attention to design a system that is resistant to abuse.

Presuming I am wrong, that means that there is a path for society to eliminate competitiveness from its apparent nature. I agree that would lead us toward utopia, but I am very skeptical such a path exists, and that those who attempt to follow it will simply be eaten by the wolves they believe they can train.

I basically agree, but I think we should also think about this in a solution-oriented way at a large scale, beyond just personally opening one’s own eyes.

Tribalism is part of our nature. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, and it’s fun. It makes us feel good to belong. The sports analogy is frequently brought up and is the example of tribalism being leveraged for entertainment and social bonding. It’s a clever way to us to short-circuit our instinct for tribal warfare and use it for something constructive and fun instead of destructive and tragic.

Politicians and media outlets have started using this insidiously for their own powergames. Maybe this is too cynical, but it seems to me that the circus has been poisoned. You hear about all these people who “aren’t into politics” but will repeat their CNN and Fox soundbytes. There’s nothing terribly wrong with being personally apathetic about politics, in fact that’s the norm for those people currently benefitting the most from existing policy, but it’s terribly dishonest and destructive to lure such people into the political arena when they have no sincere interest in the impact of their political decisions, but a few powerful people benefit and countless powerless people suffer.

How do we reclaim our circus? Do we really just need more ESPN and less CNN? Can we punish politicians and news sources for the pervasion and perversion of information as infotainment? Can we educate people to source their identity from their family and culture instead of from their senator?

Then it should be obvious to you that inflaming those emotions isn’t a productive way to engage. What point are you making other than, “yeah, he’s a moron! fuck him!” Good for you?

I’ve just been on the internet a long time and pride myself on writing with precision. I am a rather bot-like writer, Narrrz.

Hijacking to point out to both the dumb lefty lemmies and the dumb righty lemmies that this is an amazing case study in the failure of people to separate their culture from their politics. I apologize for using you as a prop, vector_zero, but you signed up in this thread so I assume it’s all good?

Here we have a person who believes that are right wing, but lives in a decidedly left wing location. What examples do they provide to demonstrate their right-winged-ness? Gun culture, cooking, sewing, quilting, home projects. Note the absolute lack of policy. When pressed about actual politics further in the thread, we get things like “yeah we need to fix gun violence, healthcare, and the economy, but I don’t think any of the solutions I’ve heard will work.” Essentially we have here a person who is completely disengaged from the reality of politics, but places high value on their culture and identity, having confused one for the other in the process.

This is all reinforced by the fact that this person lived in left wing area and is active here on a left wing website, where their self-identification as “right wing” earns them demonization, along with some doomed attempts at political discourse. Since vector_zero only really cares about their identity and culture, the demonization is all they notice, internalize, and respond to. It provides a pressure that actually validates and encourages their perceived need to stand up for and defend their cultural values. The political discourse is entirely ignored because vector_zero does not actually care about or understand politics. Meanwhile, the attacking lefties are blind to this miscommunication, characterizing it as “convenient dismissal of the real issues.” No, it’s not convenient dismissal, it’s literally a disability: Our supposed “right wing” friend actually does not have the capacity to see beyond their shoelaces and understand how their emotional reaction to being personally attacked translates into large-scale impact for the rest of the world. So they go out and vote red (or not, since they are “powerless”) without any understanding of what the consequences may be.

Perhaps the lefties as well are so blind to the importance of identity and culture that they suffer from the same “convenient dismissal” of the content of the discussion that vector_zero values. That’s harder to say, but it’s an interesting supposition. If that is the case, then we’re doomed to go around in circles and continue beating each other until morale improves. But maybe not, maybe one or the other can recognize the tragedy for what it is and learn how to engage with it in a more constructive way.

It’s painfully obvious to me that everyone involved here actually wants the same things, and there’s a very clear education plan to get us all together on the same track. vector_zero simply needs to be made aware that left wing culture and identity is actually almost the same as right wing culture and identity. That absolutely nothing of themselves would be lost or reduced by voting for a democrat every once in a while. The difference is the policies, and since vector_zero doesn’t actually understand or care about those, there isn’t really any reason for them to hold up the label of “right wing.”

You can just be a guy who likes guns, simple living, enjoying the day-to-day with the wife, and wants to retire one day.

Signed: A guy who also likes guns, simple living, enjoying the day-to-day with the wife, and wants to retire one day, but also votes democrat every time because I don’t want anybody else to get hurt along the way.

That’s the malicious banana. Everything happens for a reason, but that doesn’t mean it’s reasonable

I actually love this one, because it’s technically correct but not in the way people who use it mean, so you can turn it around easily.

Yes, you did get cancer for a reason. Because you insisted on maintaining your suntan every winter. Or perhaps merely because you pissed off the wrong banana.

The determining question for whether or not it’s the same is this: Are you the physical matter of your brain, or the electricity running through it? In the first case, sleep isn’t death. In the second case, it is. I would argue that you’re closer to the electricity than the brain matter, since an unpowered brain is how we define death.

But REALLY it ultimately doesn’t matter, if you think about it. An exact clone of you created after any kind of destruction of consciousness is no different than the original you had the destruction never occurred. We just intuitively really do not like that idea.

You don’t need a distant science fiction MacGuffin for this. Every night you lay down and “die” for 8 hours or so, then your consciousness turns back on and you simply trust that it wasn’t altered too much in the interim. We know very well that the way we think can change from one day to the other, so who’s to say you’re really the same person?

I’m a bloodsucking corpo dev and honestly my read of this was very sympathetic to the FOSS dev.

Pretty much all of my FOSS contributions have been to software that I’ve integrated into my for-profit projects. I will find a nice helpful tool, see it doesn’t have all the flexibility or functionality that I need, I’ll improve it, write tests, submit a PR, and do my best to fulfill the requests of the maintainer.

INEVITABLY I will start getting messages from MY COMPETITORS saying “hey we saw you added this feature to this tool, that’s great but doesn’t quite integrate with our software, can u plz fix?” It’s comical. Like, I’m already leveling the playing field by making my improvements to the FOSS tool freely available to you, and now you want to pay me zero dollars to improve your competing product? This happens all the time, it’s a funny nuisance to me, and I expect a massive headache for popular maintainers. Nobody is under any obligation to help you with integration problems - you can ask, but you aren’t entitled. Fix it yourself, adhere to the maintainer’s standards, and put it out for everyone to benefit from.

Excuse me but you are interrupting my dopamine flow. Your response appears to be neither a meme, rage bait, justice boner, nor even a pun. I hope you learn from this experience and do better.

Disclaimer that I am completely talking out of my ass and speculating, but I have a personal theory.

COVID has been around long enough to have two interesting effects.

1. Almost everyone has gotten it by now. Some of us got it really bad, and/or acquired long-term secondary conditions. Some of this likely caused impaired cognitive function.
2. Kids had their school schedules totally fucked up for years, and those kids are now the young teens on the internet. Young teens on the internet are already by default a disruptive demographic, but now add the effect of years of desocialization and missed education.

One of my favorite Redditisms was picking out incredibly obvious sarcasm with massive downvotes. Bonus points if replied to with a huge angry essay.

And due to the voting patterns, I learned to be suspicious of my own comments that were highly upvoted. I started to see it as a bad smell. My best work was the controversial stuff.

Xfce is a great example of how solving a problem in the best way results in low adoption.

People tend toward extremes. There is something in particular they really want, and they will gravitate toward the product that gives them the most of that thing.
I want total control over configuration: KDE Plasma
I want maximum performance: LXDE
I want something that looks good and I don’t want to think about it: GNOME/Cinnamon

Xfce isn’t on this list! It’s not the best at anything. But it’s pretty good at everything. It’s an overall best (in my opinion) but because it’s not beautiful, nor lightning fast, nor incredibly flexible, nobody will ever take it as their first choice. And the majority of people make a first choice and then never change, as whatever they start with is probably good enough for them. I’ve tried all of the DE’s listed above, but I’m the crazy guy: that’s a lot of work and churn! Any and all of them work well enough, why bother installing 5 separate environments?

If you want to develop something and have people adopt it, then your goal is to have a killer sexy feature at the expense of all else, rather than to be satisfactory in every metric.

This particular version is more about the characters depicted (Denji and Power from Chainsaw Man), who are famous for being endearingly stupid.

The more earnest versions you tend to see on TikTok are mostly posted by, or at least targeted at, actual kids who don’t yet understand how vision works. Nobody on Lemmy is under the age of 30.

used for things it wasn’t created for

I think Python gets a point here, as it is very good at doing what it was created for.
Javascript even sucks at its stated goal.