John_Doe_Fletcher

anarcho-heretic, Quokkit guy

0 followers follows 0 users joined 2022 September 06 03:50:34 UTC

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User ID: 806

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Why Bother?

John_Doe_Fletcher anarcho-heretic, Quokkit guy 1d ago

Well, there's a thesis in the culture war thread OP that we've had for actual years:

Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics.

Why bother? Well, you're here, aren'tcha?

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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 2, 2025

John_Doe_Fletcher anarcho-heretic, Quokkit guy 12d ago

And the labor force participation rate is...? Unemployment rate is only part of the picture.

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Friday Fun Thread for May 23, 2025

John_Doe_Fletcher anarcho-heretic, Quokkit guy 16d ago

I always suggest Arch in the spirit of throwing yourself into the deep end - it was my first distro and the learning curve was formative for me. That said I just set up Bazzite for a friend who's primarily interested in gaming, and have been using Debian and Mint for my project machines. I recently migrated my desktop off a Bazzite dual boot to Debian because Bazzite's frankensteinian package management makes it a terrible workstation for me, and then I had to switch to the unstable channel because my 7800 XT doesn't have usable drivers in stable.

WRT aesthetics, I ran Cinnamon on my laptop with a custom theme that replicated the Windows XP look and feel, which was pretty fun for a while. In the last few weeks though I've been moving my machines away from Cinnamon towards XFCE, mostly because Cinnamon's screensaver is kinda broken on multiple monitors of different dimensions and i3 is a little too minimal for me. For funsies I tried NsCDE on my laptop for a few days, but it's a little too alien for my modern ^{^kek} sensibilities, though I like the retro Motif feel.

I was always scared that I'd break things irreparably.

Ahh, youth. What you do is you pick up the cheapest computer (laptop, desktop, pick what suits you best) you can find on clearance and pave over it with Arch. Specifically Arch, because they try to avoid making decisions for you. Follow the installation guide to the point where the install is finished, you've got your account made, all that. Switch to a terminal, sudo rm -rf / --no-preserve-root, and intentionally destroy your setup. Do the installation again from the top - blow out your partitions and make them over again, the whole nine yards. Break out of the mindset of being too scared to break things, practice good data hygiene (like keeping your home directory on a separate partition/drive), and know that even if you literally delete your entire OS, you have done that before and it's not really a big deal when you can just backup your home/data directories and rebuild the whole thing from nothing. Then recognize that most breakages you'll encounter are orders of magnitude less destructive to your system than what you just did.

Then ~~fuck around with the explicit intention of finding out~~ daily drive your new system with the knowledge that if there's something annoying you, you can fix it. My first Arch setup on a laptop, I got distracted by solving issues with the graphics drivers and never got around to doing the whole system blowout. Daily drove that laptop for five years and I learned shitloads from doing so.

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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 26, 2025

John_Doe_Fletcher anarcho-heretic, Quokkit guy 17d ago

and only medicalize the minority who have proper "will claw at their growing breasts with their bare nails if not allowed to get rid of them" dysmorphia.

One turn of the screw later, everyone who's been exposed to the trans meme will claw at their growing breasts with their bare nails if not allowed to get rid of them because they're told that that will get them what they want. The measure becomes the target. Then what?

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Tinker Tuesday for May 20, 2025