Are you fucking joking?

If that’s really where you thought I was going with that, you’re the racist.

If you’re trying to troll, good job because now I think you’re either a troll, a racist, or an idiot. I prefer to think you’re a troll.

It’s artificial boosting of the same bigotry that’s been ongoing for generations. The new part switching the target.

See, there’s been a very concerted effort to radicalize the right wing of the American populace by media oligarchs. It’s part of an overall strategy going back to at least the post-nixon era.

Want to crush black people? Find a way to villainize them indirectly. “Inner city” crime. Step up arrests for things that are disproportionately a part of black people’s lives. Spread drugs into the chaos brought about by destabilizing black communities to engender greater violence between gangs. And it worked. Look at how many black people are in jail compared to pretty much any other group.

Go back to Stonewall, when the biggest movements for gay rights got going hard, and remember that trans people were involved from the beginning, but didn’t have a convenient label, they didn’t have a way to be a distinct group. Gay rights efforts worked to some degree. Enough that the far right plans to use gay people as the enemy had to find another target the same way that they had to change targets from black people to Hispanic people in the form of “illegal aliens”.

When your plan rests on fomenting anger, hate, and fear to stir up the lowest common denominator of a populace you have to have a target, ideally more than one since there’s always going to be gaps where your desired audience will fall prey to the manipulation for one hate focus, but not another, like when you run into conservatives that aren’t actually racist, but hate anyone in the LGBTQ+ umbrella because of religion, or sheer stupidity.

So, when gays weren’t a useful target for hate any more because enough people knew gay people, and there were enough gay people of prominence to make it harder, why not switch to the next best thing? Trans people!

See, we had a major shift in awareness of trans issues back in the late nineties and early naughties. That’s was followed by a large shift in trans people now having a serious chance at transitioning as medicine advanced, funding shifted, and there was just enough support that more people could transition and not be alone.

This meant that the assholes pushing their agenda to gain and maintain both wealth and power had a gift given to them. A new label to attack, using the exact same rhetoric they’d been using against gay people. “It’s unnatural”, “but what about the children?”, along with the ability to use lingering misogyny via to attack trans women in specific since they are now women, but used to be men (in the rhetoric), so they must be groomers sneaking into bathrooms.

It’s the exact same bullshit over again.

People have forgotten that the same methodology has been in place every time people in power needed to scare the populace enough to achieve a goal. Remember reefer madness? Before my time, but the entire thing was built in order to continue the oppression of black people, to keep them firmly under the boot.

Go back further, and it was the Irish, the Chinese, the Italians, whatever group was “other” at the time.

But the modern version is so directly a rehash of the anti gay rhetoric that’s not even fifty years in the past that I’m amazed it isn’t glaringly obvious even to the people that have jumped on the bandwagon of both.

I’ve said it before, but people are stupid. They’re easy to manipulate, easy to fool, and that’s the majority. Even the ones that aren’t easy to manipulate can still fall prey to it if they aren’t paying attention. People are also lazy, and have little long term thinking ability, or attention spans. That’s why we got zero lasting changes after George Floyd was murdered. Anyone that’s made it this far, think for a second. How long did it take you to remember that name and what it means? Now, ask yourself how many people didn’t remember at all.

That’s why trans hate is working. People suck. The vast majority are easy to control, and will believe anything fed to them with the right language behind it. It just so happens that while all of the distractions being used to build up the hate also created a smoke screen to hide gerrymandering, which ends up with more and more control over what language is being used everywhere.

So, here we are with a manufactured, strawman enemy being propped up as the target and then painted with the word “trans”. None of the bullshit used to build up the hate is true, it isn’t accurate, and most of the people behind the hate actually know it’s bullshit, but they aren’t allowed to hate the blacks and the gays out loud any more. They can’t just scream the n word or call people faggots at whim the way they used to.

So, now they’ve got trans people to hate. And they want that hate because it means they don’t have to look at themselves, their own lives and choices. They don’t have to stop and think that maybe everything they’ve built their identity around is empty, so they scream about “wokeness” and “transgenderism” as code words.

There’s no serious, legitimate arguments against trans people being allowed to have the full protection of the law, to have full medical access, to have whatever gender they want on their driver’s license. There’s just the bullshit excuses to have someone to hate. There’s not even a good argument about bathrooms, they’re all built on bullshit too, and that’s the one that’s the low hanging fruit because it seems reasonable to people that aren’t buying all the bullshit immediately, but aren’t quite bright enough to think it through all the way on their own. Which, again, that’s the majority, stupid people too drowned in lies and manipulation to bother thinking.

So, Don, if you’ve gotten this far, I know I went wide of what you asked, but it really is all related. It all comes down to the same thing in different faces over time.

For anyone else, I know this got a little ranty in parts. I know it is long enough to look a little crazed. IDGAF. This shit is patently obvious, it’s not even a secret. The people that have been running the right wing of things for my entire lifetime and before have outright and publicly talked about it. One part of it, the “southern strategy” they brag about. It’s infuriating, so I get ranty.

Did they make a choice though? As in a fully informed, conscious choice unaffected by internal and external pressures?

That’s the key to empathizing with addiction.

Most people don’t set out to be addicts. They don’t set out to OD as the goal of using. It’s fair to say that most addicts started out either partying, or self medicating.

The party addicts tend to not realize how damn fast and hard addiction can set in. They know it happens, but it isn’t real, it’s impersonal and distant, because they also know that people really can just use a few times and not do it again. But each time gets harder, and they start needing it to feel good at all. It isn’t done with intent, and they may not even be aware of what they’re actually taking. People are stupid. They’ll trust someone, and when they get handed a pill or a drink and the person they trust doesn’t explain, but they trust them.

And even when it’s someone arrogant that thinks they’re the exception, that’s still a very human thing.

For the ones chasing an escape from ugly reality, a way to feel good, no matter how temporary, sometimes the risk is irrelevant because to them, what they’re trying to escape is worse than any of the stories they’ve heard. Self medicating mental health issues, or physical health issues, or to numb the pain of a life situation they can’t escape otherwise, that’s as human as it gets.

Empathy. It’s also a human thing. We aren’t required to feel it for everyone everyone all the time. If you don’t feel it, you can’t make it magically happen. But we all want it to some degree or another. We all need some degree of human kindness to stay sane in a society that keeps staying ugly over millennia.

So, when we see someone that’s in a bad place, it’s part of that, that we at least try to find empathy for them, if only on a transactional level where we would wish someone make that effort for us.

It is, however, not equally easy for everyone. The human mind and brain is a diverse thing. Some people are born with brains that simply can’t empathize. Others can lose the ability. And there’s also people that have trouble doing it without some kind of “trigger” that gives them a connection to the other person in a way they can understand. Some of us over empathize.

But, at the core of it, the reason we are expected to try is that none of us are immune to the ugly parts of life. Every single one of us is one post surgical dose away from feeling withdrawals. Every single one of us is capable of feeling pain so deep we’ll do anything up escape it.

If you can’t empathize, that’s okay. Though going through the effort of rationalizing how others empathize would help you out a lot when dealing with others. If you make the effort to figure out how the same thing could happen to you, even if you don’t feel sorry for the person, you’ll have fulfilled your part of the social contract as regards the idea of “there but for the grace of the flying spaghetti monster go I”, or “judge not lest ye be judged”, or any other saying that boils down to recognizing that we’re all just flawed beings doing the best we can with what we’ve got.

Lots of poo.

A good bit actually though. I’m disabled, so no job. This means that while I’m on my ass recovering from the necessities of living like cooking and cleaning, I have a shit ton of spare time.

Part of that is spent fucking around on lemmy.

The rest is usually spent on some variety or another of writing fiction. Short stories, a few ongoing novels, that sort of thing. Here and there a poem or song will pop in my head.

Then there’s a bit of panting, occasional drawing, that kind of visual art.

I’ve also been known to run ttrpg sessions here and there, which is its own art form in a way.

Or was it shöen?

C’mon, y’all all were singing it too

If this holds up, then mint users are rocking a thirty year old one cup drip machine that only has one button, and only makes one regular mug at a time.

Yeah, boob owners seem to not fully appreciate the sheer joy of having regular access to boobs for a boob lover. It’s like, “I can see and/or touch those forever? Hell yeah!” But I guess if you aren’t a boob lover, having them might make them become old hat after the first few years.

The good news? My wife is leaving me her boobs in her will.

Nah, she’s got this one old, worn out bastard pf a sasquatch, but she’s a free agent otherwise

Jfc, my wife does this. And it works every fucking time

Dammit, yet another question that I spent too much of my life on.

It comes down to nerves and tissue (cell, not paper) types.

The outside of your nose and the tissues of the anus are not the exact same. There’s a different concentration of “nerve endings”, and different types in different concentrations.

I doubt you want the full Monty of it, but if you look up the term “sensory receptors”, you can do the deep dive very easily.

The short version is that we have specific types of “nerve endings” (that’s what they’re called colloquially, hence the quote marks, but I’ll stop using those at this point). They detect pressure, temperature, pain/injury, etc.

The concentrations of them (as in how many per square inch), and the assortment of them (as in how many of each type in that square inch) varies across the entire body. The easiest way to demonstrate the relative principle is to touch your fingertip to your nose, your lips, your genitals (seriously), and your leg.

You’ll find that your brain interprets the signals in an interesting way. It’ll filter the less intense signals. You touch your finger to your lip, what your brain “says” is that your lips are being touched by something, and the signal from your finger takes the back seat. You touch the same fingertip to your thigh your brain says the finger is the primary sensation, and you feel the thigh via the finger rather than the finger via the thigh the way the lips worked.

Give it a try on whatever parts of your body you want. There’s going to be a shifting perception of whether it’s your finger touching something ( where emphasis is placed on the signals from the finger), or it’ll be the section of the body being touched by the finger (signal from the touched location being emphasized).

The anus and the nose have different jobs. The anus, mostly, needs to detect pressure, injury, and some degree of chemical contact the nose needs less pressure sensitivity, but more motion sensitivity. So you’ll get a different overall sensation with any given substance that’s pushed against either, and when the same substance is moved across either. The difference may end up being minor. But both are sensitive enough that most people can tell a difference between paper tissue products blindfolded.

Back in the day, I wiped asses for pay. The only patients I had that couldn’t tell the difference between brands of TP had medical issues that interfered with nerve signals. Do a test for yourself. Find a buddy to hand you tp or facial tissues and keep a log (heh, he said log while talking about butts). There’s a very good chance that every single one will feel different. You’ll probably be able to tell which brand is which if you’ve used that brand before.

You can probably even tell the difference with your fingers tbh. But you wouldn’t likely be able to if the same products were placed or rubbed on your back

You’d also notice that different objects will feel different when just placed on an area and pressed gently into the skin vs when you wipe the area with it.

Skin is an amazing thing. It’s armor, a sensor array, a biological filter, sunscreen, and a temperature regulator all in one! Plus other functions tbh, but shit like that gets overwhelming to read for a lot of people

You’d be amazed what you can discover with just an hour sitting around and touching things to parts of your body.

Jfc, I thought I was the only one geeky enough to not only do that, but admit it in public

Overall, about the same in my experience. Where you’ll notice a difference is older devices. Lag shows up on Firefox forks then. But usually you can throw klar/focus on and do fine.

Ublock is way better at ad blocking, across the board. Not much gets through cromite, but you will get the oddball one sneaking by now and then. Plus, ublock is easier to tweak.

Now, I will say that cromite looks better on most of my devices. It makes better use of the screen in subtle ways like tabs on a tablet. Just little things I like better visually, which is subjective as fuck, but I’ve used both cromite and fennec in specific recently enough it might be of interest since you’re asking a general question.

Now, I run mull most of the time, but I check out fennec every now and then just for poo and giggles. There’s never any surface level differences between the two.

I think it fair to say that on tablets, bromite is my preference for opening links from other things. It does so faster, and the tabs make switching between things easier for me. But on a phone, they’re essentially equal. Since firefox and its forks are a better choice for the health of the internet, I use it almost exclusively on phones; and it’s maybe 50/50 on tablets.

Look at it like this.

When you got your first smart phone, be it android or iOS, you didn’t know where anything was, so there was a learning curve.

But, in the same way as phones, there are built in “stores”. Those stores are called repositories, and they’re accessible in more than one way. You don’t actually have to use the terminal, it’s just usually faster since you really don’t type much more than you would entering a search in whatever GUI interface comes with your distro. Indeed, you can actually set up the commands in a notepad, change the package name each time, and copy/paste the commands, and you’re only a couple of seconds slower than opening the package manager, searching, scrolling to find what you want, clicking to install… See what I’m getting at?

Windows isn’t really faster than that. You have to go to a site, download, find the exe or msi in your download folder, then click in the various pop-up windows. And you can find .deb files that do the same thing as an exe or msi, just not for every program, because they’re an unnecessary pain in the ass. It’s extra steps.

I promise you, comparing the way Linux works now, and the learning curve it takes to the learning curve on windows back when it was a new experience (and I’m talking windows 95, the previous msdos shells were worse than that), Linux is way easier. And don’t even get me started on how shitty a user experience DOS was. Jfc, I’m dyslexic, and it was a nightmare. Windows 95 wasn’t a big jump better in dyslexia land, but it was at least better than DOS.

If you were used to something like mac only, and had never used windows, the transition would be similarly annoying. And, for me at least, dealing with installs on windows is more of a pain in the ass now that I’m used to package managers.

I did a clean install of Windows 7 on my media PC (and yes, you valiant security friends, it’s air gapped) maybe two years ago. From start to finish, including programs, took me about five hours.

My laptop that I run Linux mint on? An hour, start to finish. The only differences in the programs installed are in specifics, not in types. I plugged in my live drive, hit install, and was ready to start installing programs in maybe twenty minutes. My media pc is an old gaming PC, btw. Tons of ram, ssd, etc. The laptop is an old thinkpad. So it wasn’t like the laptop was better hardware lol.

Which seems tangential, but it’s pointing to the underlying ease of use once you’re used to the system. I’ve being doing windows installs since the nineties (and a little before, but only in classes), so it isn’t like I’m not experienced. I’ve only been doing Linux installs since about 2015.

Hell, my very first Linux install was Ubuntu on my dad’s old computer just to make sure I didn’t screw a box up that was in use. Even that, going from Ubuntu being ready to go, and having the programs set up to use was only maybe two hours, and that was mostly looking up the very process that’s been described by others in this thread and copy/pasting things in for each program.

So don’t get discouraged. If you end up really not liking it once you get past the learning curve, that’s okay, windows will still be there. You can go back to it. But, if you’re like me at all, once that learning curve is past, you won’t enjoy the extra hassles windows puts in the way.

If I was swapping that often, I think I’d set up a single device with my bare minimum, every time stuff, and just keep it bare bones. I actually kinda have that, since I have an old phone that I use as a back door cam, I just don’t use it like that because I don’t switch often enough to matter.

But there’s always a few things that an individual is going to want in every phone, app wise. So it should be simple enough, if you’re going to be using Google services in the first place, to do it. Like, the camera phone has nova launcher, the app for the camera (can’t remember the name, but it’s that one from the Guardian project), my preferred music player, and a note app (I use markor). While I use more than just those on every device, that’s an example of what I’m talking about. If that’s going to be on every device, I could use that backup every time.

Also, it’s nice to see android authority doing a useful article ;)

Eh, for some things, it will work, and I’m amazed you couldn’t find info on a recent movie. But it really has gone to shit. You’ll end up with copy/pasted bot articles a few pages deep on most searches, unless it’s something on those huge sites you mentioned.

The education is a no. Most of it would be boring as hell. Seriously, I’ve got little cousins and nieces and nephews and a kid of my own. The kind of shit they’re doing is so damn dull. It’s remedial once you’ve already done it once, and I can’t think of a worse way to spend a “do-over”

And the experience? Only if I’m allowed access to some serious weaponry. I’m not even joking. I’d fucking kill somebody if I had to deal with the sheer stupidity of most of the adults, and the pure sociopathy of the other kids. Kids are fucking animals with less manners, and more ways to indulge their proclivities. Being forced to deal with the bullshit of elementary school would be bad enough. But being forced to spend half or more of your waking hours with hormone ridden jackasses? Hell no. I wouldn’t subject myself to that now, unless the pay was waaaay better than it is.

If I want to revisit education, I’m not wasting time with the dross and bullshit. I’m going to do it on my own terms. I fucking well earned the time I have now that I’m disabled. Doesn’t matter what degree I could get, I couldn’t do a useful job. And there’s nothing in education below college level worth redoing. Certainly not at the price of having to do it in those schools.

No, it doesn’t.

However, it can.

See, it would be like me linking to my book on Amazon and not telling anyone it was my book. It’s advertising when you’re monetized. And that’s going to mean that the writer may be shilling their product rather than sharing something that is on topic and interesting just because they’re generating income of some degree from it.

It’s a matter of transparency and trust. If you’re transparent about your monetary involvement, then you are letting the reader decide if that’s trustworthy or not, rather than showing that there’s a lack of trustworthiness by not doing so.

Now, I don’t really care, personally. I know substack is a monetization source, and that everything on it is going to be equivalent to an opinion piece until and unless the specific link has verifiable and reliable sources. There is some decent journalism there occasionally.

Seriously, people are fine with sharing one’s own work. You just have to be honest about it from the beginning. Admitting it later isn’t the same thing. And that’s true no matter whether it’s monetized or not, but with something like substack, it’s more important.

Also, as others have pointed out, when that’s all you’re posting, it starts to look like all you’re doing is shilling yourself. That’s pretty much what spam is, by the more loose usage. Unwanted, unsolicited advertisements. Since lemmy in general is hyper vigilant regarding commercial encroachment, it ends up being much easier to be relegated to the spam pile. Lemmy, largely, is meant for conversation between people rather than between people and advertisers. If you want to be a person, and be treated like anyone else, you have to be able and willing to accept the unwritten social rules of the platform.

I’m not trying to shit on you, or your linked article. I haven’t read it (and likely won’t, sorry). This is just to try and explain the wall you’re hitting so that you understand enough to do things differently, or realize that lemmy isn’t the best place to self promote, even indirectly, without full disclosure.

That’s an easy fix. You see someone wearing them, you smash them. If it happens enough, people won’t want them.

What about our stupid?