• Tiny pop-up tent, easier to carry if you can fit inside
• Headlamps
• Sleeping pad or something to separate you from the cold ass ground
• Don’t interact with the cute little bear cubs

A lot of people weren’t fine with that. Pretty much the same people who are alarmed and horrified by the current developments were alarmed and horrified about Guantanamo, the Patriot Act, the war, and all the rest of it. The issue is just that we haven’t really done anything about it.

This kind of weird hyperbole helps no one.

Yes, the US’s prison system is an abomination, including atrocious conditions, corruption, maltreatment and death, not to mention any of the injustices baked into the system of car registration / credit checks / felony convictions / education and all the rest of it that effectively create an invisible apartheid system where about 35% of the country are barred, permanently, from ever being able to live a first-world-existence life.

That’s different than setting up mass detention camps and promising to put innocent people and political opponents into them, setting up a secretive law enforcement agency tasked with doing that, and then getting to work at a massive scale. It just is. The fact that the system has been rigged in general since the 80s doesn’t mean what’s happening right now is not a 10-alarm, 20-alarm, fire.

Nice try Steve Bannon

“I will NEVER co-sign a genocide,” they said, and got really condescending about how pure they were being, by refusing to vote to keep Trump out of power.

Yeah, 100% agree. See also David Hogg, who tried to reform the DNC from within, and how well that turned out.

I saw people at an anti-Trump protest who were getting up and yelling about how it was largely the Democrats’ fault and it was important not to reward them with our votes. That’s the only person I’ve ever seen in person who thinks this way, yes, but I have seen it a nonzero number of times.

It’s almost all an internet thing, just in general. Every single political person I know in person is more or less either pro-Democrat or pro-Trump, or else wholly anti-US in all respects, the sophisticated leftist viewpoint is almost entirely an internet thing for me.

I was talking, obliquely, about the people on Lemmy pre-election who used “Democrats betrayed Bernie” as a reason to make the argument “politics is pointless, let’s not vote.”

If you’re saying those people don’t represent actual progressive activism (which has, I agree, been making more and more inroads every year as things get progressively worse and worse and their momentum builds), I will agree with you completely.

Only works if you have a billion dollars though. If you do it on a big scale, they’re just going to Aaron Swartz you.

Very few revolutions succeed overnight (without then making things worse than before). The way that people gave up after Bernie got cheated, and figured “welp let’s leave things on autopilot then, I am discouraged now that we know the people on top are willing to cheat to hold onto power, that’s unfair and I don’t want to play anymore”, is some lazy soft first world part time activism crap.

(And yes, I am equally part of the problem, not trying to point fingers just agreeing with you more or less. Things build over time. The more you push the more they build.)

Because it is. It’s more or less the only news source in the world that combines solid journalistic integrity, a well-funded operation, and a non-Western perspective. Most of the well funded serious journalism in the world is Western (and by default sort of coming from at least a mildly “gives Israel the benefit of the doubt” perspective for example), and a lot of the non-Western press isn’t as well funded or skilled. Al Jazeera is pretty much the only one that doesn’t suffer from either defect.

Yeah. Nitpicking about how the better replacement isn’t better enough, and so let’s all get derailed into arguments about it, wasn’t what I was trying to do. Just bringing up another also good alternative. RCV seems to be what has the name recognition right now, and generally people like it, so hooray let’s improve.

I used to be a big fan of RCV (and pretty much anything is better than FPTP), but I’ve become convinced that STAR voting is better than RCV.

There’s no “algorithm,” it’s not confusing, it’s mathematically better, it doesn’t suffer from any of the traps that ranking-candidates systems suffer from. Basically you just give a star rating 1-5 to each candidate and whoever gets the most stars wins. Easy peasy.

Yeah, almost to an excessive degree. To me it’s fine, it just means the designer has room to grow in terms of their skill at getting the right balance, but also it’s going to be a little bit of personal taste. This video includes some pretty interesting discussion of the balance between spelling things out, making sure that everyone can notice and enjoy them, versus making things opaque knowing that you’ll leave some people behind but making it that much more special for the people who found them “all by themselves” without any kind of prompting.

TIL.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/unique definition 3 includes examples like “very unique” and “fairly unique.” So it’s incorrect only if you assume that American usage is wrong and British usage is right, I guess. According to the Cambridge Dictionary I think you are right about how it’s used in British English.

Yeah. It’s not a perfect game, it has many issues, but it is fun and exciting and it does something very very different, very successfully. I’m reminded of the Zero Punctuation review of Psychonauts basically saying that its number one good point was that it was something genuinely mad and original, in contrast to the sea of imitation that is modern gaming, and for that alone hooray.

Yeah. That one was on my list to play but I haven’t checked it out yet, I have heard similar things about it.

All I can say is you’re missing out… I can see that it’s a type of game that may not be for everybody, but it is honestly probably the most unusual game I have ever played in my life and I’m enjoying it a lot. I almost did the same as you did, I beat Leshy one time and then continued messing around with it sort of out of curiosity… and then the whole actual fuckin’ game started.

It just made me pick a file from my hard drive, made me a card based on it, and then told me if I let that card die, it’s going to delete that file. This game is nuts man.

You’re allowed to have a type of awe and reverence for the natural world, very much akin to religion, without needing to buy into any bullshit along with it.

It used to be pretty standard, and then the Christians (among others) fucked that up for everyone, and now you can’t be anything other than an aggressive humanist atheist without people starting to make assumptions about you.

If you ever study biochemistry, it leaves you absolutely in awe. The best engineering we can do is pretty amazing, we have computers and airplanes and all this magic stuff, but the stuff in you is a hundred, a thousand times better made. It’s stunning. Comparatively speaking, it is perfect. And that’s only the stuff we understand. The stuff in your brain, we do not.