ChickenOverlord
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User ID: 218
ChickenOverlord
4mo ago
In 1944, before the actual, everyone-can-agree-they're-fascist fascist states of Italy and Germany had been defeated, George Orwell wrote an article highlighting how the term had devolved into an insult and lost any useful, shared, descriptive meaning of any actual political system: https://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/efasc
It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.
Yet underneath all this mess there does lie a kind of buried meaning. To begin with, it is clear that there are very great differences, some of them easy to point out and not easy to explain away, between the régimes called Fascist and those called democratic. Secondly, if ‘Fascist’ means ‘in sympathy with Hitler’, some of the accusations I have listed above are obviously very much more justified than others. Thirdly, even the people who recklessly fling the word ‘Fascist’ in every direction attach at any rate an emotional significance to it. By ‘Fascism’ they mean, roughly speaking, something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class. Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’. That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come.
But Fascism is also a political and economic system. Why, then, cannot we have a clear and generally accepted definition of it? Alas! we shall not get one — not yet, anyway. To say why would take too long, but basically it is because it is impossible to define Fascism satisfactorily without making admissions which neither the Fascists themselves, nor the Conservatives, nor Socialists of any colour, are willing to make. All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword.
ChickenOverlord
4mo ago
Back when SBF was in the news for massive fraud etc. I made some random comment about him having a Jew-fro. My sister was quite offended by this and said it was a rude thing to say, even though I first learned the term from a Jewish friend in high school who rocked a pretty awesome Jew-fro (unlike SBF's nasty greasy rat's nest).
ChickenOverlord
4mo ago
9 times out of 10 I assume it is "woman owned" because the owner gave 51% of ownership to his wife specifically for the purpose of gaming such contracts. My brother-in-law works at a factory where the owner did just that, and I have similar plans if I start a business.
ChickenOverlord
4mo ago
Some groups are so proud they'll even adopt exonyms their enemies created
4chan has wholeheartedly adopted "chud" and even taken the wojak variation originally designed to mock them and made it their own, it's beautiful to see.
Personally, I don't believe it's possible for one person to produce 1000x the value of another.
I have numerous coworkers that produce negative net value, so it's possible to have one person produce infinitely (or undefined, or NaN, or whatever) more value than another.
But someone like Jim Keller absolutely provides 1000x more revenue to his employers than, say, an offshore code monkey in Mumbai writing JavaScript.
ChickenOverlord
4mo ago
airlines are a cutthroat awful industry to be in with 3% net income margins (5% operating) which can be seen by them constantly getting bailed out
One of my favorite jokes:
What's the easiest way to become a millionaire?
Start out as a billionaire and buy an airline
ChickenOverlord
4mo ago
I can't speak for the rest of Europe, but when I lived in the Czech Republic their TP felt like sandpaper. American TP, even the cheaper stuff, is consistently nicer. Only the super cheap one ply stuff used in public restrooms in the US is comparable in awfulness to what I experienced of European TP.
ChickenOverlord
4mo ago
I might be pulling a mathcel move (so somone correct me if I'm wrong) here but it looks like Bluesky's decline has slightly accelerated in the last week: https://bluefacts.app/bluesky-user-growth?t=7d
Compare the last 7 days to the last 4 weeks. I would expect the figures for the last 7 days to be roughly 1/4 of the figures for the last 4 weeks, but in most categories it appears to be almost half.
No idea if this has anything to do with the CEO waffles nonsense or if it's for completely unrelated reason. Bluesky was already in decline anyway
ChickenOverlord
4mo ago
and look at a 4channer
There are a decent amount of anons here, actually. /pol/ is where I go for a fun roll in the mud (and to add to my edgy meme collection), this place is where I go when I want some actual substance and intellectual stimulation.
ChickenOverlord
5mo ago
All good bro, thanks for all you do to run this place!
ChickenOverlord
5mo ago
I mean Somalia is especially terrible, but none of their closest neighbors (nor subsaharan Africa as a whole) are doing particularly great either, so I'm not sure that argument holds much water:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_McDonald%27s_restaurants
ChickenOverlord
5mo ago
The low pay and terrible work conditions
Wouldn't less competition for such jobs lead to better pay and work conditions?
ChickenOverlord
5mo ago
I think Westwood, Blizzard, Maxis and id Software held out the longest.
At least for id, I think it's in large part because Carmack is both a workaholic and a genius, so even as he was buying Ferraris and starting space companies he never stopped grinding away. He never really let himself rest on his laurels. Rage is probably the worst game they ever put out (prior to Carmack's departure), and it was half decent.
ChickenOverlord
5mo ago
Battlefield 6 actually looks like it's going to be a smash hit, based on how many people were playing the open beta a month ago. It basically feels like BF3 and BF4 again, instead of whatever crap they've been doing with the series in the last few years.
ChickenOverlord
5mo ago
Thanks! I'll probably wait for the buyout then
ChickenOverlord
5mo ago
Question for investor types here: I bought several shares of EA right before the Battlefield 6 beta, with the expectation that the actual release (coming in a few weeks) would be a massive success and drive the stock up. This news about the company going private has already caused me to make 15-20% total gains. Better to sell now, or is the price EA will pay to buy me out likely even higher?
They almost all either switched prior to mass education and industrialization in their countries, or they half-assed it and ended up with a weird Frankenstein system like the UK, Canada, and Australia
ChickenOverlord
5mo ago
His partner was a man in a dress, though
ChickenOverlord
5mo ago
content creators
fighting words
People really, really, really seem to misunderstand what "fighting words" are. Even if we ignore that the Supreme Court has been backing away from treating fighting words as a real thing for several decades now, even in the cases where they are treated as a real thing they require the person saying the words and the person hearing the words to be in each other's physical presence. They're called "fighting words" because they're words that will likely lead to an actual fight, then and there.
ChickenOverlord
5mo ago
It's been happening on bombs and missiles for more than a century, so...
Try more than 2000 years. The inscription says "Catch!" in Greek.
ChickenOverlord
5mo ago
That's largely because trans subverted and devoured feminism wholesale
ChickenOverlord
5mo ago
Sounds like we're all in agreement then, resisting is the worse option.
ChickenOverlord
5mo ago
You're assuming that the Bishop of Rome is actually Peter's successor is an established fact. Even though Linus and Clement are both mentioned in the Bible, they are never explicitly mentioned as Peter's successors, and no one identifies them as such until ~180 AD, 81 years after Clement's death.
ChickenOverlord
5mo ago
There is a sarcastic line about such people becoming Theologists.
This unironically is basically the primary argument of Al-Ghazali's famous (or infamous, depending on your perspective) Incoherence of the Philosophers. He basically argues that all of the debating and mental masturbation by a lot of philosophers and theologists are thinly veiled covers for their atheism. He was mostly talking about Islam, but many of the same arguments can easily be applied to many Christian thinkers.
Darwin came back before and famously crashed out (and refused to respond to a bunch of questions) over J.K. Rowling: https://www.themotte.org/@guesswho
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