To pursue my point, something is definitely happening on the disgust front. A few decades ago, it was normal in the West to eat offal. Now plenty of Westerners are grossed out when they find bits of bone in their chicken broth at an Asian restaurant. For meat to be widely palatable these days, it has be only the best cuts, if possible in a sealed packet with no indication that it comes from an animal. Part of the explanation is surely a subconscious awareness of the horrors of factory farming. But I think something more fundamental’s going on. Something about disconnection from nature, ironically.

Absolutely agree that legislation must bring transparency to factory farming.

telling them that their culture and way of life is “gross”.

Hard to deny that in most cases. But not all, because people’s minds work differently. Personally I rind risible the idea that somebody is attacking my “culture and way of life” when they question my diet. Am I really so rare in my individualism and openness to new ideas?

Because here’s the thing: I personally have stopped eating certain foods simply after thinking about what they are. Cheese is literally the congealed secretions of the mammalian reproductive apparatus. Pretty yucky when you think about it like that, right? No rational arguments or statistics required. That’s a pretty cheap conversion to veganism. Yes, I know that most people will not be open to this kind of novelty thinking. But presumably some will, especially if it can be done with humor.

Also, some of the best plant based food is totally gross. Fermentation is life.

True. I’ve always found mushrooms a bit icky too, but I soldier on and eat them anyway because they’re so healthy.

Of course I don’t, although in my case it is. The deeper point is that if people were to reflect more closely on the origin of their food, this would certainly be a win for veganism. After all, plants are seen as many things but “gross” is not usually one of them.

Disappointed you had to jump straight into censorious mode and tell others literally to shut up.

The main reason for not eating cheese is that it’s gross! Just think for a second what it is. Think harder. Gross. Admittedly pizza is kind of tasty - IF you can stop yourself imagining what it’s made of.

Unlike meat, even the best fake cheese is not very realistic IME. But if someone else enjoys it, all the better.

The point still stands that no one outside of the US cares about their constitution or political system, and to say it does shows an incredible level of ignorance of world politics outside of US borders.

I’m not sure these sweeping statements are really helping your argument. Despite my “incredible level of ignorance” I am in fact not American myself, I have no particular reason to defend the USA for the sake of it, and I stick to my assertion that the stability of the US Constitution and the American social contract is unusual in world affairs - and even that this is not particularly controversial among historians and pol-sci specialists, notwithstanding your dismissiveness. Don’t agree? That’s fine, but maybe consider letting up on the contemptuous tone, it doesn’t really elevate the debate.

Very few countries in the world have had a political history as stable as the USA’s over the last couple of centuries. Take France, which since 1788 has had: an absolute monarchy, three revolutionary regimes, a constitutional monarchy, two imperial regimes, a bout of full-on fascism, and five separate republican constitutions. At most of the junctures between those things, there was suffering and bloodshed. Maybe people “don’t give a fuck about the US constitution” - it certainly looks like Americans don’t, these days - but the stability of American democratic politics is genuinely very unusual and the constitution obviously has something to do with that.

As for your take on populism in the world, I am not as nonchalant as you. Yes, the rot has been stopped in some places, for now (Brazil, Poland, partly India) but in general it is still very much on the march. India, Turkey, Philippines, Hungary (which is right inside the EU - and now Slovakia too), El Salvador, Mexico, Tunisia, etc. The Arab world is less democratic than ever. And of course China is once again going full dictatorship only a few decades after discovering what a bad idea that is with Mao. Personally I doubt that China is much influenced by US politics, but pretty much everyone else in the world is. And most of this happened quite neatly during the period following Trump’s first election. Whether it is mostly cause or correlation, the link is there.

Yes and that’s the sad paradox. America’s interest is now (at least temporarily) at odds with the interests of freedom and democracy. Trump’s abuses cannot be seen to pay.

The worst impact of this debacle will be outside the USA. This will be taken as a green light for strongman politics everywhere. Including here in Europe where that sort of thing has ended very badly in the past.

You Americans really have behaved like spoiled children. Whatever the leftist fringe here thinks, the American constitution is the envy of the world. You’re on the same electoral calendar since the 1780s, without a single interruption. For literally centuries your leaders would follow the rules, shake hands and leave office when their time was up. Over and over again. It’s an incredible achievement, it was the template for a successful democracy.

And then this ogre came along and broke it all, and you decadently voted him back in.

IMO America’s institutions will contain the damage, probably. But other countries will inevitably now follow the example of America’s voters. And for some of them that’s going to turn out less well.

Your point is a bit off-topic but I for one agree with you.

Interesting read, somewhat enlightening.

But IMO, from the point of view of interoperability, it was bad enough having competing corporate social networks. We don’t want to replace that with competing open meta-networks. And yet ActivityPub and ATProto seem to use completely different paradigms, which would make bridging them pretty hard. Frustrating.

Interesting. Possibly useful to some. I have also discovered that the simplest, most privacy-friendly way to update location is just to do it manually when you change location.

I have a simple script that does this by querying OpenStreetMap’s Nominatim server with the city name. It feeds the resulting coordinates thru a Python library that deduces the timezone, and sets the system time to this.

If you really mean “literal Nazis”, that tends to support the hypothesis that you’re not being exposed to much that contradicts your worldview.

Your contradicter is right. You’re basically describing the list system, which is the purest form of PR and pretty common in Europe. You vote for a platform and a list, not for individuals.

Time to rinse off and get out of the shower.

But it doesn’t work like that. Wealth is a status symbol, and status symbols are comparative. Millionaires compare themselves to slightly richer millionaires, and billionaires to slightly richer billionaires. Everyone else is irrelevant to them.

But a very, very credible voice on this subject. Let’s not fall into the easy trap of tribalism.

Good to know.

Useful. I hate shorts and portrait-format video in general.

NB for those who don’t know: a server is not needed to make Youtube RSS feeds, they exist natively: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCxxxxxxxxxx. You just have to find the channel_id buried in the page source, which admittedly is a bit of a PITA. But no native way to exclude shorts, though.

And so what? Why are you so bothered by it? I’m a Linux user of 20 years and I couldn’t give a fig that someone is running a forum called LinuxSucks which, unsurprisingly, contains little “positivity or praise” for Linux.

So: you posted a serious contribution in an unserious community, and got treated unseriously. It’s not very newsworthy.

As for that community’s existence, why is that even up for discussion? As a Linux user I’m happy for people to say what they like about Linux. If the jokes are funny, all the better.

I use Ubuntu btw and it doesn’t suck. Well, not that much.