So I’m not entitled to my opinion? It’s a little disingenuous to act like I’m worshipping Linux when I literally just denounced that behaviour.

I know it’s a crazy thought, but people are allowed to appreciate creations on an emotional level. I’m not shaming you either way whether you like it or not, I’m just laying out some reasons for why people treat Linux the way they do. People are allowed to like their tools and the work put into making them, and so the same thing goes for any software.

It seems to me like you’re just having a hard time understanding that people tend to feel sentimental about their interests, which is what, y’know… Humans do. Your principles aren’t universal imperatives. You’re entitled to them, but you’re treating them as objectively as any Linux snob treats their favourite distro.

Funnily enough you’re also not entirely consistent with your holier-than-thou attitude towards any biases. This whole back and forth started with you calling Linux boring and dumb, facetious or not.

I agree that there’s a lot of overexaggeration in the Linux sphere about how great it is (along with the snobs that come with it), but it’s not entirely without merit either. Linux has a big emphasis on user choice and configuration, and it’s pretty much the only OS in the world which can run on basically any machine that has the specs for it.

It tends to go relatively underappreciated how big of an impact Linux has had and continues to do so in how diverse & ubiquitous it is, so it’s not too surprising that insecure users tend to compensate by dunking on Windows/Mac and its users whenever they get the chance. That’s not to say it doesn’t have its shortcomings (it certainly does) but Linux is one of the few software creations that managed to maintain the majority of its principles over its lifespan without enshittifying itself. So there’s also that moral factor which makes many feel justified in glorifying it.

Overall I’d say it’s balanced between being overrated and the rise of RNGesus. It’s a great ecosystem to take part in (albeit with an occasional degree of confusion) and as long as you treat the Linux supremacist crowd as unserious (which they are when it comes down to it) there’s really no reason to dislike it in general. Especially if you want to stick it to Microslop or Slopple :)

Did Linus Torvalds sleep with your wife or something

This made sense until the insinuation that intelligence and autism are mutually exclusive

That’s the thing though. The US is already a highly fascistic state and has been for more or less over a century. If we go over the standard criteria, there’s relatively centralized autocracy with the President, militarism which has pervaded American culture and politics for essentially its entire existence (especially apparent in globalized media such as Hollywood productions), suppression of opposition through shunning of any political ideologies left of the centre (clear in tactics seen throughout the red scare), belief in a natural social order with the working, middle, and upper classes, along with “undesirables” like the homeless and other marginalized communities, alignment of the economy with the state through the military-industrial complex, and explicit conditioning of individual identity to be aligned with the national one through the pledge of allegiance and US-centrism.

The only thing that’s up in the air is the President’s status as a dictator, but I would argue that’s simply a result of the US government’s focus heretofore on soft power, i.e. focusing on diplomacy and relatively peaceful occupation as opposed to force or violence. The ability of the President to have such drastic effects on the economy and current policy is already tipping the scales against the non-dictatorship argument in any case.

I’m not necessarily trying to make a call to action, that would be narrow-minded. I’m simply pointing out that real change on a societal level doesn’t truly happen until people realize things are getting desperate, and at that point the already long-standing problems were made a whole lot worse by believing they could be managed with less overt means.

Coughing Baby (annoying YouTube popup trying to make me to turn off ad-block) vs. Nuclear Bomb (right-click block element with uBlock Origin)

This should be in a Mad Libs at this point

“If you ____ I have ____ to sell you”

The problem is that US politicians are not acting with voter’s futures in mind, and the “progressive” ones & their constituents seem to believe that the only way things will get better is if they continue to bend the knee and cater to a constantly devolving status quo. Progress doesn’t happen when you reduce your goals, and change doesn’t happen without force. If reality doesn’t account for you, you need to make it so. I suppose it’s just a matter of it needing to get so bad that you realize the future was never promised to anyone to begin with.

And yet the illegal alcohol market boomed and it gave massive rise to organized crime and government corruption to allow it. It doesn’t “work” in any practical sense, it just concentrates the problem and makes it even harder to control.

They probably think the US prohibition didn’t work because they just didn’t try hard enough

You basically said Hanlon’s razor is “complete bullshit” based on your own subjective view which is very much a denialist way of thinking. Not only that but I applied the principle to this most recent assassination attempt, not the current administration as a whole. It’s not mutually exclusive with any malicious acts in the past year and a half. Real events aren’t neat narratives, things that happen don’t have to reflect any theses or character traits 100% of the time.

Did you try the medicine drug?

“Nuh uh” is a very interesting standpoint to have but you do you I guess

See, this is the problem with the average person’s understanding of people who get therapy. For them, it is a matter of life and death. They wouldn’t be going to therapy if they felt otherwise. An illness like depression, bipolar disorder or even general anxiety can be just as valid and severe as any cancer or disease. Please reconsider the inherently fallacious standpoint you’re following of categorizing mental issues as less severe than physical ones. It’s incredibly harmful.

Not neglecting general self-care is highly separated from fighting mental illness. Imagine if someone had a brain tumour and their neurosurgeon told them they had to “put all the work in” to challenge their body’s sickness. It’s a pretty ridiculous mindset to have when someone’s physiology is literally preventing them from doing that without external help. Why even bother giving the time of day to a practitioner if their advice directly implies that their suffering is entirely their fault?

I think it’s more appropriate to apply Occam’s & Hanlon’s razor logic here tbh. I doubt these simpletons would go to such lengths to paint themselves as victims of violence in this case, it’s highly probable that they’re just too stupid to take the proper precautions as opposed to the whole thing being a malicious attempt at perception manipulation. Plus they oh so love their headline-speak as we all know.

Completely missed my point. There’s nothing beneficial about a retributive standpoint based on distrusting an entire identity group because of statistical averages. Cathartic I’m sure (on a purely non-thinking and surface level), but then you’re no better than the people you’re criticizing in that regard. It’s entirely emotional, quite like the people in charge of the US right now.

I’ll always be baffled by the blatant hypocrisy on display in sentiments such as these. As if an eye for an eye has ever led to anything more than two blind people.

Makes sense for people to think that (boy who cried wolf and all that), but it’s really not all too questionable that a leader with such a low approval rating on top of being in one of the most pro-gun nations in the world is subject to relatively frequent assassination attempts. I’m honestly surprised it hasn’t happened more.

https://www.startpage.com/ is based in the Netherlands, works really well too in my opinion. I’ve been using it ever since I started actively avoiding Google.

Edit: One caveat is that it’s majorly owned by an American parent company.