Also it’s specifically named as a reference to the gimp from pulp fiction as it originally came out around the same.

It’s fine for a hobby project but GIMP is well past that now and it’s a really bad look in a professional environment.

I swear it’s like people memory holed just how fucked Trump and the right wing’s response to covid was, and it’s a symptom of even deeper issues.

I lost quite literally 50% of my immediate family members to covid. They were conservative, and bought into all the anti mask and anti vax conspiracies, hook, line and sinker. Literally as my unvaccinated father was dying in the hospital, he would text me messages about how the vaccine was going to fry my brain or kill me, and I needed to do my own research and stop listening to the lying liberal media.

Don’t get me wrong, I had no love for conservative ideology before Trump, but I could at least have well reasoned debates and find common ground on some policies with my conservative family members. Most importantly though, we didn’t even really talk about politics that much. Now, I can’t even make a chicken salad sandwich in their presence without somehow triggering an insane rant about the woke liberal agenda.

My other side of the family isn’t even very liberal but they aren’t trump supporters, and they’re way better to interact with. The extent of our political discussions usually chalks up to “everything’s pretty fucked, wanna smoke a bowl instead of harping about it?”

You could probably ding them for fraud, but as others have said, this is fake.

I prefer it over unconfigured vim on remote/new systems. If I can bring my vimrc though, vim wins.

Leftists have a big problem with purity testing. It’s why they never seem to be able to accomplish anything. Instead of joining forces with other leftist groups that share 95% of the same views, they shit all over them for not being 100% aligned.

If they’d suck it up and work together they could actually be a political force and get some of what they want, instead of infighting constantly and accomplishing nothing.

It’s the biggest thing turning me off of leftist ideology. I agree with a decent amount of what they want, but as soon as I say something like “Maybe market economies solve real problems and are suitable for some situations like consumer products” I’m basically turbo hitler to them.

You just gotta keep it casual and not creepy. Basic small talk, talk about the lessons, what’s going on in your life, current events, etc.

If they’re receptive to that and you start hitting it off, then you can try to go for a non weird compliment or ask if they want to grab some food after the lesson or something.

As for non weird compliments, avoid physical attributes that can’t be changed and don’t be sexual about it. Nice boobs = not okay. I like your hairstyle = okay.

I have the social awareness of a brick but have managed to go from being like anon in the greentext to actually pretty decent at getting girls.

The biggest part is just putting yourself in situations where single women are present so you can practice your casual conversation skills with them, so anon is halfway there.

Coke keeps running ads because that’s how they keep the brand as a cultural staple. They aren’t trying to sell more coke right now, they’re making sure that people in 50 years will still be buying it.

For the voters, they really don’t believe it. I have conservative family members. Everything is always “Oh that’s just bullshit cooked up by the crooked Biden crime family” “Oh he didn’t mean the words he said very clearly, what he really meant was blah blah blah” followed ten seconds later by “I like him because he tells it like it is”

I just don’t get it. What makes this guy seemingly have a force field that can make people deny their own eyes and ears? Ignoring morals here, just thinking with those patterns would give me a cognitive dissonance aneurysm.

This can’t be overstated enough. There are huge swathes of the USA where the only stores within half an hour are dollar general or gas station convenience stores. You literally can’t eat healthy on those sources, and the nearest actual grocery store could be an hour or even more away.

Kinda hard to eat well when just getting the ingredients would take half a days time.

Hell, I’m in a city and if I didn’t have a car my only options in walking distance are a convenience store and a couple fast food places. Nearest grocery store is a 12 minute drive or a 3 hour bus ride if the bus even shows up.

Protip, you can cook regular spaghetti noodles in a big pan. You only need enough water to cover the noodles and it’s way faster than boiling a lake’s worth of water in a pot and doing the whole “try to fold the pasta into the water as fast as possible so it cooks evenly” dance.

I find the opposite as an ADHD sufferer. When I use a dish, it goes in the dishwasher. If it’s full, I run it. If it’s clean, I empty it before I put the dirty dish in which takes all of 2 minutes. It basically forces the routine, and I end up running it almost every night and emptying it while I make my morning coffee.

Whereas with hand washing I end up building a pile in the sink and procrastinate until it gets big enough to take half an hour to get through.

Hint: communism doesn’t work in practice on scales the size of nations. The ideology is too fragile and susceptible to corruption and outside influence and you end up with shit like this.

Before anyone says “it’s not real communism” that is the point. It’s useless if it’s too weak against other ideologies to be properly implemented.

Rolex isn’t incredibly cheap lmao. It’s mid to high price for luxury watches. The cheapest thing they sell is like $3k. Incredibly cheap for mechanical watches would be around the $100 mark for a Seiko 5 series or something.

I did a CS major at a state school and we started with ~400 students. It ended with like 35.

Honestly, a CS major has almost zero practical relevance to most tech jobs anyway beyond filtering out resumes. I can count on one hand the amount of times I used a skill I learned in my classes in my work as a jack-of-all trades dev/sysadmin.

If you wanna work in tech, any college degree works. What’s more important is a portfolio that shows you know what you’re doing.

Our spending bills have gotten absurdly bloated because it’s pretty much the only reliable way to actually pass legislation without getting trapped in filibuster land or having it killed by the speaker.

Congress has become a joke and their refusal to do anything effective has resulted in handing over way too much power to the court and executive branch. It breaks the checks and balances and huge amounts of the federal government dysfunction we see is rooted in that.

Alright dude, now you’re just misrepresenting my views and revealing your own biases and we’re going nowhere. I don’t have time to make a comprehensive response to all that, I’m just going to go outside enjoy the freedom and prosperity that my evil liberal society has provided me. Good thing I won’t have to wait in a bread line at Costco, it’s a real time saver.

Pretty much everything I order off Amazon comes in paper packaging these days. Getting a plastic or bubble mailer is pretty rare.

One disappointing thing though: the ink in almost every printing process is some form of polymer which ends up as micro plastics that long outlive the paper they were printed on. Of course, still way better than wholly plastic mailers, just not perfect.

This entire discussion is about semantics, so I see no issue with getting fiddly with it. As for authoritarianism being illiberal, I don’t see how that is tautological. Authoritarianism is when the government or ruler has absolute control and has no obligation to accept input from the populace over which they rule. This violates the consent aspect of liberalism. These are commonly accepted definitions, not stuff I just made up. They’re mutually exclusive concepts and absolute versions of either cannot coexist.

And yes, I do think there has never been a truly liberal society, just as there has never been a truly communist society or any other -ist or -ism based society. They are concepts we can strive for, but adhering perfectly to the academic definition of any of these concepts is not realistic. I think the USA is fundemantally illiberal in many regards, and we would do well to strive to correct those aspects.

As for the definitions of those specific aspects of liberalism, yes, of course it is those aspects defined under the framework of liberalism. It would just take thousands of words to provide the entire context and it’s not super important here. You seem to understand that these words have different definitions in different frameworks, and I’m sure anyone discussing political ideology in this level of depth is also aware of that.

When I’m talking about the extremist sides of the spectrum, far left and far right, I am referring to those who tread into territory where their ideology becomes ostensibly dangerous. The most common version of this is directly supporting things like oppressive authoritarian rulers and population cleansing, There are absolutely people on both the left and the right who would see those as acceptable means to their end of implementing their preferred ideology. Right wingers who want to ethnically cleanse populations they see as problematic or inferior are no better than the far leftists who want to guillotine whoever they decide is the bougouise. This is the crazy land I’m talking about. Not being in crazy land means trying your best to not support awful shit, making sure you are picking the least bad feasible options in your current situation, and revising your positions and who you support when evidence indicates that the bad outweighs the good.

And yes, I actually do have a lot of issues with the French and American revolutions, and I do not think Churchill was a particularly good guy. I don’t think they are the same as the Russian and Chinese revolutions. They all resulted in regimes of varying levels of “bad”, but the Chinese and Russian versions resulted in higher death tolls and much more unhealthy systems coming out the other side (in my subjective opinion).

I think to cover the rest of your points, there are degrees here and the real world doesn’t function in absolutes as I mentioned in the second paragraph. I don’t have time to respond to every comparison you mentioned, but Washington vs Lenin for example: Washington did not have secret police killing dissidents by the thousands. Lenin did. Washington did not implement policy that resulted in mass famines resulting in the deaths of millions, Lenin did. Washington did support slavery and ethnic cleansing of Native American populations, and it irritates me greatly that this gets glossed over. Lenin did not. Which one of those guys is worse depends on your subjective values, but for me, I’d say Lenin is the worse guy.

I’m tired and it’s almost 3am so hopefully all that makes sense.

Authoritarianism is by definition illiberal and anyone who is authoritarian or supports authoritarianism is not liberal no matter what they claim to be. Centrism is also a meme, anyone who claims to be a centrist is usually just a stan for authoritarians in disguise.

The core tenant of liberalism is respect for the autonomy and civil liberties of the individual and consent of the governed to the rules of the government through the machinations of democracy. Any system claiming to be liberal without subscribing to that is a farce.

The same could be said of the “far left”. They claim to be leftists, and they might have started out as such, but they have stepped out into crazy land and end up supporting things antithetical to the ideologies they claim to subscribe to.

Statelessness is the end goal of communism, yes. I have met so-called communists that think strongarm authoritarianism is the way to get there, and for some reason believe that those authoritarians would willingly give up their power once they’ve achieved a position where they could implement said stateless society. This is basically what happened in the USSR and China, and is decidedly not the path Marx himself proposed for achieving it. A stateless communist society in Marxist thought is simply the natural progression after late stage capitalist societies, which is not a step you can simply skip over.

I don’t necessarily agree with the idea, but I think it’s important to be educated on a wide variety of schools of political thought.