Are_Euclidding_Me [e/em/eir]

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: May 1st, 2023

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  • What’s your definition of propaganda? I’d like to invite you to spend some time in this thread thinking through why this article is, in your mind, so clearly propaganda that it’s not worth engaging with.

    Of course, I can’t (and wouldn’t want to) force you to spend any time or mental effort thinking about this. But if you’d like someone to (kindly and calmly) ask you questions that could help you come to a deeper understanding of your thoughts about propaganda.

    Because this piece seems, to me, interesting and worth reading and thinking about. I also don’t think that the two categories “news” and “propaganda” are totally disjoint, instead I think there’s a huge overlap, with most “news” being delivered as “propaganda”.



  • Well I did read the F-22 page, as I said before. You’re right that I didn’t read the rest of them because at that point in the conversation I was extremely confused as to why you’d linked them in the first place.

    I see that the US built a total of 195 F-22’s. That number isn’t any of the ones you listed in your one comment that had some numbers.

    To be charitable to you, I might be able to find the 1000 warplanes and 70 nuclear sub numbers somewhere in the wikipedia pages you linked. I’m not going to read them, I’m really not into military hardware, but if you tell me that’s where you got the numbers, I’ll go ahead and believe you. It would be better practice, though, to quote a passage that includes the relevant figures, then link to the place you’re quoting from.

    Now what about the numbers for Russian warplanes and Russian nuclear subs? What are your sources for those figures? They surely aren’t found in a wikipedia article about the american military


  • Now we’re finally getting to a real argument! Now you’re arguing that the US is better prepared for war than Russia is, not just that the US spends more money on war than Russia does.

    I do notice, however, that you have linked not a single article or source for the claims in these comments. Where are your numbers coming from?

    You might be right that the US is more prepared for war than Russia is. I’m not convinced, and also I think m532 has a good point that nukes (which both the us and Russia have) change everything, but you could still be right.

    I’m actually not that interested in whether the claim “america would easily beat Russia if they actually tried” is true. My entire reason for engaging was simply to point out that “the US spends more on war and hence is necessarily better prepared for war” is not a good argument; the conclusion does not follow from the premise.

    If you want to convince people on the internet, you should practice making better arguments, and sourcing them properly. Your argumentation in this thread has been abysmal and I wanted to help you see that and make improvements


  • in this case spending 10x more than everyone else is resulting in a bigger and more advanced army

    This is the part I think you haven’t shown, even a little bit. First you linked a wikipedia page which was a list of countries with the highest military expenditures, then you linked wikipedia pages for a bunch of american military hardware. At no point did you try to compare american military hardware with Russian military hardware, either in quantity or quality. The only comparison you’ve made is in terms of expense.





  • Can you please explain how a list of countries with the highest military expenditures is evidence that weapons used by the US aren’t bought/produced for a ridiculous markup?

    Like, the claim m352 is making is “the american military spends unreasonable amounts of money on weapons for no benefit, because of how much graft and how many middlepeople exist in the american weapon supply chain”.

    And the evidence you use to counter this claim is “the US spends much, much more money on weapons than Russia”. And like, yeah, no kidding the US spends much more on its military than Russia does, but I don’t see how that has anything to do with m352’s claim.

    So can you please draw the connection for me? How does your response here address the comment you’re responding to?






  • I love lemmy, having been here since the very earliest hexbear days. In my view, the devs are doing the best they can. They’re a tiny team surviving on grants, trying to produce software that the users, for some reason, expect to have feature parity with reddit, a large corporation with a large paid dev team. It’s weird to say the least.

    My understanding is that nutomic and dessalines survive solely on that 4000 euros per month, because all of their time goes to lemmy. How do you want them to survive? They need to eat and pay rent, you know. The real world exists and they’re humans in it, needing food and sleep and shelter.

    It seems to me you want magic. You don’t want the lemmy devs to be humans, you want them to be magic coder gods who are infinitely patient, with boundless time and energy. But that’s completely unrealistic, you surely must see that, right?



  • what, on the surface, is a pretty trivial ask

    I don’t think having my real life phone number tied to a website or game account is a trivial ask. I’d like my data to be private, especially something as real-life and tangible as a fucking phone number. Sure, there are ways around these things, you can get a fake phone number for cheap (or possibly even free), but that’s rather more effort than I’m willing to put in for most things. If I need to enter a phone number to sign up for an account for something, chances are very extremely good I’ll just decide I don’t need the account that badly. I don’t think I’m alone in this.


  • For years I used vanilla vim before finally switching to spacemacs like 4 years ago. I’ve never used neovim, because it just didn’t seem stable and mature enough before I switched to spacemacs and at this point I’m happy with spacemacs and will probably stick with it for the foreseeable future.

    My issue with vim, and the reason I switched, is that vimscript was an absolute nightmare. I was doing easy stuff, writing LaTeX, but getting vim to compile LaTeX and talk to my pdf reader (as you need if you’re going to be working with LaTeX in any kind of serious way) took way too much configuration and my setup would break fairly often as well. Spacemacs is significantly easier. I was shocked when I went from “I’ve never used spacemacs before” to “I’m comfortably writing LaTeX here” in about half an hour. My setup still breaks occasionally and sometimes it’s a bit difficult to figure out why and how to fix it, but it’s much easier than vim was, that’s for sure.

    I also just like the emacs workflow. I like helm, I like being able to change how the editor works on the fly just by writing some elisp anywhere, I like how easy it is to access the documentation on functions, variables, keybindings, whatever else you might need. I like org-mode. I like that emacs has been around for decades and will be around for decades more.

    I’d never heard of doomemacs. I’m pretty happy with spacemacs so I probably won’t switch, but I’ll at least read about it some more.



  • Sounds like you’ve gotten good answers about your formatting question. For the steam proton question, the answer is that yes, steam installs it automatically. You might have to mess with the proton version for specific games, so check https://www.protondb.com/ for your game if it doesn’t work immediately.

    Congrats on trying out Linux! I hope you enjoy it! I’ve never used Mint myself (I don’t like ubuntu-type package management), nor the Cinnamon desktop (although I’ve heard good things), but that’s part of the beauty of linux, there’s so much to try! Mint is definitely a good starter distro, but if you find you enjoy messing around with it, you might consider a bit of distro-hopping.


  • Wait, you think hexbear “gives little regard to class consciousness or worker solidarity”? You think we’re only claiming to be socialist? You think we have a “pathological obsession with identity politics”? I would disagree about all of the above, honestly. I will grant you that I’m not a big fan of patriotism, because I live in the imperial core, and there is nothing good about america. Also, could you give me an example of what “lumpen behavior” you think we’re defending?

    I just realized, I have no desire to get in Yet Another Internet Argument. Please do not answer the above questions unless you really, really want to for some reason. Thanks for explaining your thinking, I very much disagree with you, but that’s ok! This is a 2 day old thread at this point and I’m trying to be less of an argumentative butthole online, so I’ll just say, I hope you have a great day!