They probably have to recite a standard company line, gritting their teeth as you both know it’s bullshit.

I don’t envy customer service reps. Most of them probably didn’t apply for the job because they love Microsoft or enjoy the prospect of fielding frustrated customers’ calls.

I had to fall, to lose it all

Reddit went from “I append site:reddit.com when querying google for well-founded and nuanced info” to the opposite.

You’ll have to be more precise on the definition of God. There are quite a lot of them.

The existence of an abstract concept is provable by thinking of it. If there exists an idea that you call God, then a God exists. However, that proves nothing about its properties beyond its mere existence as an idea, including whether it pertains to any real thing. Likewise, all attributes you ascribe to that idea become part of the idea, but do not automatically prove anything about reality.

Thus, the question whether there is an idea called God is trivially answered by asking it at all, but has little bearing on anything at all.

What makes ideas useful is that they group properties, and what makes them real is that there exists an actual thing having all those properties.

Thus, the question whether a real thing exists depends on the properties of that thing, so let’s tackle one:

Do I believe that there can be an omnipotent entity? No. The typical argument here is “Can God create a rock so heavy, They cannot lift it anymore?” Either answer contradicts the premise of omnipotence, unless that entity can create logical contradictions, in which case all argument and reasoning is moot anyway.

In particular, do I believe that some variation of the Abrahamic God exists? No, or at least none of those I’m aware of. That doesn’t mean I’m not open to being shown otherwise.

However, the idea of an omnipotent, omniscient and all-loving God runs decidedly counter to the existence of suffering, even if we ignore (or exclude) the contradiction about omnipotence.

Me, if the goats use me for parkour exercise

Meanwhile, you’ve been cheerfully dodging all the directly pertinent things like conservative platforms and spaces deleting opposing voices or disabling comments entirely, cries to “kill the X” where X is anything from libs to slurs and right wing acts of violence like shooting up clubs, churches, or storming the congress because your favourite TV show host no longer get to use the POTUS twitter to commit acts of stochastic terrorism.

But sure, not fighting strawmen designed to scare the gullible into fear of the “other” is the real fault. Nevermind the gross misrepresentation of what we mean by hate speech. “You won’t let me use slurs, you’re literally Hitler!”

The systematic persecution of jews started out with an increasing tide of hatred, misinformation and propaganda against them. We don’t need to wait until isolated acts become a systematic pattern to see the signs on the wall and try to fight them before it comes to that point.

Nobody sane thinks that forcing people to suck your cock is anything but rape, and in the famous case of a trans woman setting weight lifting records, she was competing in the male category. You’re getting mad over nothing and turning a blind eye to actual deception.

No, if I find something offensive, I will combat it. Because the other side does the same, banning dissenting voices in their spaces, calling for violence against the libs and such.

I’ll not engage the transphobia point because it’s a reductionist take that strips context to make strawmen fit.

You’re projecting pretty badly here, and since you keep using the suppression of differing opinions as qualifying trait to consider people fascists, I’m guessing the systematic killing of ethnic and sexual minorities seems like the lesser of their evils to you?

I’m not going to stand by idly while they encourage each other with calls to violence. I don’t want anyone to die at all, but they’re the ones advocating for it. They started this.

We all just want to live our best lives. We only ask that you don’t interfere with our enjoyment. When you do, we reserve the right to self-defense, the most natural right of all.

If you genuinely think that they’re fine to call for the death of my people, but I’m wrong to want to silence that sentiment, then you’re complicit in their violence.

Just leave us in peace. You can have your little circle of supremacy where you reaffirm how awesome you all are, as long as you don’t bother anyone else. That’s all we ask: Tolerance and respect for one another.

Oh I have tried the rational argument often enough. I still do, where I see the opportunity. I spend way too much time trying to convince people of my point of view even when I’m pretty sure there never was any hope in the first place.

But the type of hate speech and stochastic terrorism we’re talking about “censoring” is beyond rational discourse. If “Don’t use slurs, please” drives you to say “Fuck you, I’ll hang with the bigots then”, then tolerance can’t have been that important to you.

You don’t need to keep touching the stove to realise it’s hot. Many platforms have tried the free speech angle and realised that it leads to an influx of hate, devoid of reason, and they’ll either introduce some moderation or have all other people leave because nobody wants concentrated vitriol on their feed, except for those toxic enough to thrive on it.

We can debate rationally when both parties are being rational. If you can’t “debate” without spewing hatred, then I shouldn’t have to waste my time playing by rules you never gave a fuck about in the first place.

That’d be a wack premise for a crazy scientist story

I don’t think the Nazis care about what I think they should or should not be allowed to do. They’re going to use violence, whether or not I hold a gun or a white flag. If I say “No, force is bad!” they’re going to say “Suit yourself!” and use it anyway. How am I going to stop them?
An ideology is worth only as much as the people defending it. If I am so concerned with the letter of the law if tolerance that I refuse to defend its spirit, I’ll be condemned along with it.

That’s the point of the paradox: If we deny ourselves the use of force, we’re essentially conceding that right to them.

This an ideological conflict. We each believe the other is in the wrong, so whatever rules the other attempts to impose have no bearing on us because they’re wrong. Hence: We should try rational argument first and hope to keep them in check by public opinion, but when that fails?

You can go stand in the middle and be proud of your enlightenend and nonviolent convictions. And when they next shoot up a gay night club or a black church, you can go and look the dying victims and their grieving loved ones in the eye and say “Aren’t you glad these people get to freely encourage each others’ bigotry?”

So when it comes to dealing with fascists, I’ll listen to the guy that watched the rise of the original fascists, the failure of democracy, and took notes

If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.

(ibid)

I googled about lemmy, found a blog post to introduce the whole concept, they linked an instance recommendation thing based on (if I understood correctly) the uptime, (de)federation and user count of the instance, and I just clicked one of the suggestions. So many posts claimed that it doesn’t make a great difference that I eventually decided to toss my overoptimisation habit and take what was suggested to me.

But I’m still learning my way around here, who knows if this will stay my forever home.

Absolute big brain move

Wolfman dies, kills some monkeys, does some rope stuff, performs eye surgery and kills himself (depending on what ending you go for).

Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/720/

Image for hotlinking https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/recipes.png

Yeah, that’s the Paradox of Tolerance. Short version: If you’re being intolerant, why should I tolerate you?

To paraphrase Karl Popper: A society that values tolerance to the point of indulging those that oppose it will effectively be defenseless against that hate. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to reason with them first, but we need to reserve the right to shut them up, by force if we have to.

We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.

Karl Popper, 1945, The Open Society and Its Enemies

Suppose I have a javascript file for a node server’s backend access named db.js

Suppose I write tests for those functions and name the test script file db.test.js

Suppose I tar and gzip that file (bear with me), now named db.test.js.tar.gz

Suppose I sign that file with PGP, now named db.test.js.tar.gz.pgp

Now suppose I want to hide that signed compressed tarball of a javascript tests file for my db functions, and to do so, I name it .db.test.js.tar.gz.pgp

Now I have a file that looks like it consists of nothing but extensions. I’m sure you could push it even further though, if you tried.

but but but but you’d get something good for it! You would never have missed it, but maybe you just didn’t know you wanted it? Come on, I’m sure consuming shit that will make you happy twice for two minutes each (once when clicking buy, once when getting and opening the package) will fill that hole in your soul! Spending money on stuff you don’t actually need is good!

(That was sarcasm, if it wasn’t clear enough.)

What, 2023-223 for the 223rd day of the year 2023? That… is oddly appealing for telling the actual progress of the year or grouping. No silly “does this group have 31, 30, 29 or 28 members”, particularly the “is this year a multiple of four, but not of 100, unless it’s also a multiple of 400?” bit with leap days.

You’ll have oddities still, no matter which way you slice it, because our orbit is mathematically imperfect, but it’s a start.

…and if I don’t need the year, my eyes simply skip to the dash and continue to read from there.