[-] nednobbins@lemm.ee 10 points 1 week ago

I'm sure that a few, very dedicated, women are doing this.

It's unlikely to be widespread. Sex is one of the most powerful drives humans have. We generally have a terrible track record of trying to convince people to avoid or even delay sex. Even when people believe that their eternal soul is on the line they keep having sex. That's exactly why all the "abstinence only" policies fails so spectacularly.

There are cases where voluntarily giving up something important has led to change. Hunger strikes are the prime example of this. They can have the affect of drawing attention to a matter and raising sympathy.

[-] nednobbins@lemm.ee 10 points 1 month ago

Do you consider yourself these people's friend?
If you're completely disinterested in their milestones, that sounds more like an acquaintance.

But to your question, yes. I actually care about these things for acquaintances and random people too. There are limits to how much I care but it's not zero.

[-] nednobbins@lemm.ee 9 points 1 month ago

I've been thinking about this exact question recently.

My Austrian grandmother and her sister were working class teenagers during the war. They couldn't realistically have done anything to stop the Nazis. They didn't really do much to help but since they were seamstresses they secretly snuck the Jewish family in the building some sewing supplies. It wasn't much and they stopped when they were told that someone had reported them to the Gestapo. Their experience during the war was dodging bombs and trying to find something to eat.

None of that matters. When I was a kid growing up in the US people regularly made Nazi jokes as soon as they found out about my heritage. Nobody was willing to entertain any ideas that maybe those civilians shouldn't have been held accountable.

History judged all of Germany and Austria harshly. It judged the civilians harshly and it judged their descendants harshly.

https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/12/1144717
The world is watching.

[-] nednobbins@lemm.ee 10 points 1 month ago

I'd really like to know more about this. Google shows that there are a bunch of people selling this, or similar things like a rainbow Gadsden flag but it's not clear to me who is actually buying them or what their intended message is.

Is it a joke? Maybe they're just trolling everyone?
Do they not know what one or both symbols mean?
Do they actually support the causes behind both symbols? (I saw one post that suggested it might be a different kind of "Southern Pride")

[-] nednobbins@lemm.ee 9 points 3 months ago

Unfortunately, the experience of being mixed race is a bit more complicated than that.

There are several groups that see me as a potential member but it's usually qualified with an implied "half-member". There's really no group that looks at me and instinctively says, "One of us."

[-] nednobbins@lemm.ee 9 points 4 months ago

There are already some games like that.

Some games like Eve or Factorio have backstories that make it clear the player sucks. Capsuleers are immortal but the rest of the crew isn't. The Factorio engineer lands on a strange planet, pollutes the hell out of it and kills the natives.

Then there are games like KOTOR or Pathfinder:ROTW where the evil path has you make some pretty fscked up dialog decisions.

[-] nednobbins@lemm.ee 10 points 8 months ago

Laughs in Austrian.

The convention for (15-minute) fractional hours is to name the fraction of the time from the previous hour to the next one.

eg:
3:15 -> "viertel vier" = "quarter four"
3:30 -> "halb vier" ("hoiba viere" in dialekt) = "half four"
3:45 -> "dreiviertel vier" = "three quarters four"

[-] nednobbins@lemm.ee 10 points 1 year ago

established limits on the power of their government as a foundational document

I'd argue that's a blessing and a curse.

The framers were coming off a monarchy. They saw government power as dangerous and thought that it had to be limited. But they didn't really consider that other groups might gain greater power than governments.

Unfortunately, we have exactly that problem. Organizations with sufficient money often rival governments for power.

The checks and balances that were designed to protect ordinary citizens from government also protect large multinational corporations and ultra rich families and individuals. The result is often that those powerful non-government actors can often subvert government and ultimately cause the same, or even worse, problems.

[-] nednobbins@lemm.ee 9 points 1 year ago

Didn't the IDF already kill the 1,500 or so terrorists who did this?

What reason do we have to believe that the thousands of people who are currently getting bombed had anything to do with this at all, beyond having the misfortune of living in Gaza?

[-] nednobbins@lemm.ee 9 points 1 year ago

Any mod (packs)?

[-] nednobbins@lemm.ee 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I have to applaud David Nolan on some next level marketing for this one.

He invented the predecessor of that chart as a way to promote libertarianism. It's very clever in how subtly it introduces a loaded question.

The phrasing asks the viewer to consider if they want more or less political freedom and if they want more or less economic freedom. Obviously, most people want more freedom. Therefore Libertarianism is the best form of government. QED!

But that makes two big assumptions that are almost certainly incorrect:

  1. It assumes that choice of government is entirely, or at least predominantly, determined by your views on economic and social regulations. Questions of military, legal process, environmental policy, etc are all either irrelevant or can be entirely described within the economic and social regulation factors. That doesn't even pass the sniff test. If two people agree that they want social and economic freedom, do we really believe that they necessarily have identical political beliefs? No, because we know that in real life they'll define those freedoms differently.
  2. It assumes that complex topics such as economics and social regulation can be entirely described on a single axis of “more vs less". If you look at the disagreements that people actually have, it's almost always about the types of regulations, not on the degree of regulation.

It's a little frustrating that unabashed marketing is so frequently trotted out as though it were an established fact.

[-] nednobbins@lemm.ee 9 points 1 year ago

Didn't know it had a name.
That once stopped me from registering a video game title.

I was feeling silly so I figured I'd go for a nonsensical contrast. "Evil Grape" got rejected. After several failed attempts it eventually dawned on me that some dumb algorithm thought it was a reference to sexual violence.

It kind of annoyed me but I just picked an other fruit. It wasn't until later that I considered that "Evil Banana" was probably more sexually evocative but it was too late by then.

So if you're ever playing a video game and shoot (or get shot by) "Evil Banana", know that, if it weren't for the Scunthorpe Problem, it could have been "Evil Grape," but either way, it wasn't intended as a sexual reference at all.

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nednobbins

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