So you can’t just describe the entirety of conservatism as part of a fascist mechanism and get a good result.

Why not?

It’s not true and it will back fire.

It is evidently true that conservatism usually leads to fascism, the ideologies share essential elements.

I would say treating conservative snowflakes with kid gloves is what has backfired.

Shame them for hiding behind hateful and cruel ideologies, point out their ideologies are childish and have been tried repeatedly over history never to the benefit of the average person, and don’t let them ever say they’re dumb bullshit unchallenged.

“Reaching across the isle” doesn’t work (Do you need MORE proof of that?), these people don’t want to have a conversation, they want to take away my healthcare so I die, they want to take away my girlfriends birth control and abortion access so she dies in a child birth complication, they want to take environmental protections away so they can poison the land and destroy the nature that supports us all, they want to destroy clean air and water, they want to give all the power to the rich, they want to hurt trans people they have never even met, they tend to be racist af in the policies they support if not the flags they fly… need I go on?

Sorry I don’t respect conservatism, it is and will always be the gateway drug to fascism.

When people talk about a cannonball causing destruction, they often don’t focus on describing the gunpowder and wad loaded into the firing chamber, just the cannonball.

Oh thanks! I didn’t even realize factorio wasn’t real!

facepalm silly me

Thank you for the thoughtful response

It’s also kind of interesting to consider the impacts of the biters themselves, they aren’t really a life form, they’re more akin to a bacteria, just on a macro, insect scale. They literally only do something productive for themselves once you get in their way. Their entire evolutionary lifeform is predicated on you being a negative influence on their environment. They consume your pollution, and use it to grow and become stronger. However, left to their own devices they seem to spread across the entire planet, almost like a cancer, just without the consumption of life that is typical, because biters seem to be magic?

I mean I would accept magic, but anything less of an explanation of the biters behavior seems like a problematically reductive view of life.

Even the behavior of bacteria is complex and more nuanced than a cancerous process.

I get that it is a game, but I think these things do matter, especially for computer minded people who want to understand everything as a computer programs and recklessly ignore the reality of the environment around them. Media like this severs the salience of the surrounding landscape to people, and contextualizes it simply as a resource to exploit.

Idk, I mean factorio is amazing, I totally get why people love it, and I know the focus of the game isn’t on this but still…

I loved windows phone, the UI was so clear (I still use square home on android to this day), the camera app was superb and it was a very efficient operating system for low end hardware.

It didn’t have a ton of apps but honestly I don’t know, sometimes that doesn’t feel like a bad thing for a thing I am always trying to make more into a tool than an addiction….

Sure windows phone wasn’t going to grow rapidly for years, but it was well situated to take advantage of an opportunity in the future when apple or google stumbled and created an opening. I think for a company as large as Microsoft just abandoning it entirely was a massively stupid move. Now Microsoft has a gigantic blind spot in mobile, and they are stuck in that position.

I said this earlier in the thread but I am very confident at this point that Microsoft already lost this battle to Linux in the longterm. Particularly because Linux operating system devs don’t care about AI and Microsoft is obsessed with it like all other dumb massive tech companies and honestly it is going to lead nowhere in terms of providing a useful basis for an operating system especially if the foundation you are working from sucks (glares at Microsoft and Windows). So volunteer Linux devs actually have a huge lead here even though Microsoft has wayyyyy more resources and money because Microsoft is firehosing it all at the stupidest shit while they fire core team members left and right destroying their longterm capability to create quality products.

You really have to understand AI as the dream come true from sociopathic tech CEOs standpoint, they can finally get rid of the humans, fire most of the programmers and suck up so much data that they can create an UBER AI that knows all…. except reality doesn’t work like that. No matter, reality is kept safely at bay always at least 4 kilometers from the Microsoft C-suite at all times.

The shift just hasn’t happened yet like a dead tree limb hanging on until that gust of wind comes along and the whole limb comes crashing down abruptly weeks after the storm that weakened it.

I guess but Microsoft truly feels like it is abandoning any commitment to making Windows function well for users.

They basically seem to think people have no choice and that they can focus their entire business on turning Windows into a surveillance advertisement platform.

In this environment, launching a windows handheld would be a laughable joke honestly.

The numbers don’t show it yet, but in the longterm Windows has catastrophically lost the home user operating system market and they deserve to for their awful stewardship of the market.

I mean if you get an xbox series x/s controller used off eBay for ~$30 and then the armor x pro

https://www.aliexpress.com/i/3256804278375316.html?gatewayAdapt=4itemAdapt

You have a mad decent gyro capable controller with four back buttons. Basically the controller Microsoft should have made.

Probably the best deal on a premium gyro capable controller on the market right now so shrugs.

The Sea Will Claim Everything

https://store.steampowered.com/app/337720/The_Sea_Will_Claim_Everything/

I like factorio but the game never even asks the question of whether destroying an entire planets ecosystem just so you, one person, can get home is ethical or right.

I don’t know, it is a small thing, I totally get why people get addicted to factorio’s gameplay loop not disputing how amazing that is it is just the basic premise of the game makes me uncomfortable in it’s disinterest in the planet you are on being anything but a resource to conquered and consumed or in thinking about how you are actually the villain in this situation from the planet’s perspective.

This hurricane season is going to be nuts, and it is going to smash the comfy Republican consensus around climate change denialism into pieces.

People will still deny it, but it will be more of a desperate mantra of denial than a casual hand waving “it will be fine” kind of denial.

Squirrels aren’t just good climbers, squirrels are professional circus performers who are constantly putting on free shows for everybody.

Squirrels are hilarious, they don’t get enough credit.

I was not trying to dispute that Democrats are the “good cops” to the Republican “bad cops” and often implement just as draconian and cruel policies in the name of austerity of whatever dumb bullshit as do Republicans.

I consider centrist democrats conservative, especially from a perspective of leftism that is bigger than the US both in geography and time.

I think it is darkly hilarious and ultimately wonderful symbolism that geologists rejected the Anthropocene label only for everybody else to laugh at them and keep using it anyways.

At this stage in the game acting like there isn’t enough proof that we are in the Anthropocene is something you only believe if you hope to one day get a cushy job at an energy or oil company :)

Social Conservatism is a moral cesspool of hate not because that’s inherent to it

Please cite your sources because I have never seen a scrap of evidence that social conservatism is anything but thinly disguised hate and fear of the other weaponized into political ideologies.

They believe, as part of fiscal responsibility, that everyone is responsible for themselves and their family. That the government helping them actually reduces that family’s ability to get out of poverty. The important thing to notice here isn’t the logical imbalance, but that they believe they’re helping

These beliefs are just a thin veneer of bullshit, both for conservatives and for rightwing extremists because the hate and exclusion is the point. I see no evidence that rightwing extremists are ideologically any different than normal conservatives at a fundamental level, they just have different ideas about tactics and the tone/rhetoric they actually are willing to publicly commit to (instead of doing it behind closed doors like normal conservatives/republicans). Conservatives will always roll out of the red carpet for fascists, they are intellectually lobotomized by their ideology in a way that has been shown throughout history to be essential for the rise of fascism to power, thus my cannon metaphor.

I consider it all part of the same firing process even if the cannonball is usually the fascists.

First problem, that URL link goes to a dead website for me, which is a major issue given the name of Paint.Net is it’s URL…

But yeah I mean sure Paint.Net is good in terms of functionality!

I wouldn’t recommend it over Gimp though, sure Gimp is annoying but Paint.Net is a shovel where as Gimp is a fully featured construction crew with excavators and equipment. Different uses and design goals but the important bit is you can easily ask a construction crew to dig a random hole for you whereas it is much harder to ask a shovel to clear a building site and dig out a pit for a foundation for you… so I tend to recommend familiarizing yourself with Gimp and just skip Paint.Net unless you have a specific need where it fits better.

Learn Gimp once and use it the rest of your life, shrugs it is the nature of successful Open Source projects like this that after they reach a critical mass of functionality from two decades of development or so there just isn’t a great reason to go with anything else in my opinion (unless you want to drop money on a paid image editor from a company less shitty than Adobe).

Gimp will be around, being developed and used all over the world long after you are dead. Paint.Net mightttt be if it continues to grow.

The three biggest warning flags have been a collective ideology held above helping the poor/disabled/marginalized,

Explain conservatism to me in terms of the specific real world policies it pushes for in opposition to progressive policies specifically designed to help poor/disabled/marginalized people with a better social safety net?

Because y’all are literally on the wrong side 99% of the time with this, conservatism is fundamentally a “fuck you I have mine” philosophy dressed up by hacks like Jordan Peterson to seem intellectual and thoughtful. It is a joke on the whole at least in places like the US, it is no more than a mask used by selfish broken people to spread suffering.

The far right has been very successful at getting normal conservatives to cover for them over the last 50 years. The actual ideas of fiscal and social conservatism are only partially aligned with fascism.

I suppose you could say packing the wad into the cannon after the gunpowder is an indirectly related development to the lethality of the cannon ball subsequently fired from the cannon….

….but I prefer to see it as one continuous gigantically stupid process beginning with centrists priming the chamber with gunpowder via repeated thrusting of a neoliberal austerity rod to crush the working class and then packing in a wad of rightwing conservatives to shape the social upheaval towards meaninglessly violent vectors when the inevitable explosive juncture is reached.

The cannonball loaded last is the dead brain weight of all the fascists gleefully rolling down into the breach of their fiery demise.

The cannonball is what kills people usually (though many a centrist has died in the process of packing the gunpowder in and setting off a premature explosion), but all the steps are necessary to firing the cannon.

Don’t forget Inkscape!!!

Inkscape is amazing for vector editing

https://inkscape.org/

Krita

https://krita.org/en/

GIMP

https://www.gimp.org/