ALoafOfBread

They have impure silicon there so their software dev practices had to become way more advanced to compensate

A lot of voters are pretty uninformed. And I think old folks who remember Biden in his younger days often like him more. But like I said, I don't think he'll do a whole lot of good.

He deserves it, but he is staying alive by sheer force of patriotism and duty. I don't think he knows how or wants to retire. Not while things are still so fucked up

The headline is disingenuously framed. He isn't saying he's gearing up for a presidential bid. He's saying he'll throw his weight in to build up support for the party. Idk that that'll do any good, but it isn't a bad thing for him to do necessarily.

He's an established guy who a lot of moderates and libs have historically liked. Plus, I guarantee he knows a lot of big money donors who he might be able to convince to put their money toward a more progressive candidate - that could be useful if he was willing to support a more progressive direction & agenda. Now will he do that or just insist on more of the same bullshit that ran the party into the ground...? Seems like he might not exactly have his finger on the dying pulse of american democracy, so to speak

One thing the lawyer on Opening Arguments (US conlaw/current events podcast, progressive-liberal perspective) says often that rings really true to me is that "Fascism requires lawyers", and lots of lawyers, to become established. We saw it in Germany and Italy as well - and in other fascist-lite regimes. You need people who know the law and know how to challenge and change those laws in order to take power. Usually, that means selling out & perverting the rule of law in destructive ways.

Science is proof that 99.9% people who think that, if there was a knowledge-based magic system irl, then they'd learn it and be a mage are in denial.

We legit have magic that you just have to learn & then can do all sorts of cool stuff, be it chemistry or computer science, and people pretty routinely do not give a shit about learning it themselves.

Maybe if they all teamed up and were organized to do so. But a tiny handful of billionaires control as much wealth as the millionaires. It's much harder for a class to voluntarily do good than for a small handful of people. That's why society needs to step in, tax them, and distribute to projects as needed.

they HATESss uss. they put the tAriffssss on usss!

but we loves the canadienses! we want them to be our stateses!

NOO! we hates the nassty canadienses. we give them MORE tAriffsss! make them ssuffer!

The humor is based on a seeming contradiction this guy's students exhibit.

They apparently simultaneously believe:

1. in a relativistic moral framework - that morality is a social construct (that can mean other things, too, but morality as a social construct is a very common type of relativistic moral framework)

2. that their morality is correct and get outraged at disagreements with their moral judgments.

This isn't logically inconsistent, but it is kind of funny.

It isn't logically inconsistent because, if you believe morality is relative and what is right/wrong for people in other societies is not necessarily right/wrong for people in your society, then assuming that the professor and his student are part of the same or similar societies, they should share the same or similar morality. People in the same society can disagree on who is a part of their society as well as what is moral. Ethics is messy. So, it is not necessarily logically inconsistent to try to hold others to your relativized moral framework - assuming you believe that it applies to them too since "relativized" doesn't mean "completely individualized". And, due to globalization, you might reasonably hold a pretty wide range of people to your moral views.

It is kind of funny because there is a little bit of tension between the rigidity of the ethical beliefs held and the acceptance that ethics are not universal and others may have different moral beliefs that are correct in their cultural context. Basically, to act like your morals are universally correct while believing that your morals are correct for you, but not for everyone, represents a possible contradiction and could be a bit ironic.

A good example of relativistic morality based on culture/society:

On the Mongolian steppe, it has traditionally been seen by some nomadic groups as good and proper for the old, when they can no longer care for themselves, to walk out on the steppe to be killed by the elements and be scavenged - a "sky burial". Many in the West would find this unacceptable in their cultural context. In fact, they might say, it is wrong to expect or allow your mom to go sky bury herself in Ohio or say... Cambridge. Instead, they might think you should take her in or put her in a home.

Now, if your professor said to you "So you don't think Mongolians expecting their mothers to die in sky burials is wrong, but you believe me expecting my mother to die in a sky burial is wrong in Cambridge? Curious. I am very intelligent." You could probably assume they are either a Mongolian nomad or don't understand relatvistic morality.

Palingenetic ultranationalism

And/Or

Umberto Eco's 14 points

Are relevant here as very concise and somewhat less concise definitions, respectively.

Fuckin Thomas Sowell. Unlearning Economics has many hours of content on why that guy is such a blight on economics and the world that are worth a watch

So glad I made the switch to Mint back when the EoL for win10 was announced. It has "just worked" with a bit of research beforehand. I like it way more than win10 - looks better, feels better, runs everything I want it to (except games with kernel level anticheat, but whatever), hardware is under less strain and PC no longer sounds like a jet engine. No regrets at all.

And, another perk I didn't hear as much about, it is really easy to automate stuff. For instance, I play CloneHero streaming from my PC on an Nvidia Shield on a controller with a USB dongle plugged into the shield (shield doesn't do that normally, linux allowed me to connect to the dongle over wifi with a little finagling) and I have it set up to automatically connect to my computer any time it's plugged in. I also have certain files set to automatically back up to cloud storage with a simple crontab task (automatically repeating tasks are very easy via crontab).

Mint may not be as fancy as a lot of other distros, but damn if it doesn't work well.