Aceticon @ Aceticon @lemmy.dbzer0.com

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That's the thing: Prejudice is always bad, be it directly (presuming people are somehow worse or lesser than others based on some characteristics they were born with) or indirectly (presuming people are somehow better than others based on some characteristic they were born with, which means the evil types which are found amongst those people just as much as amongst the rest, get away with far more evildoing than otherwise: a great example of this being how Zionists have taken things to the point of committing Genocide because for decades they were leveraging "positive" prejudices about people who are Jewish to get away with doing seriously evil shit).

That's why I really like the Dutch take of "those things are irrelevant for judging the character of a person" when it comes to sexual orientation - it totally avoids prejudice in any form, both the obviously bad prejudices AND the supposedly positive but in practice also negative, just indirectly.

People are people are people - best not presume things about them based on traits that have nothing to do with how good or bad they act, even "nice" presumptions.

The idea of "both-siderism" is anchored on 2D politics: you can't have "both-siderism" where there are more than 2 sides, hence my point about viewing politics as 2D.

You're living inside a box and only seeing what's in that box, hence hyper-aware of the difference between those because they're all that you know, whilst I'm outside the box and pointing out that compared to the rest of the Universe what's inside that box you live in isn't actually very different.

It's like I'm talking about "the landscapes of the World" with an Eskimo - you keep insisting that "this icy landscape is very different from that icy landscape" (which I'm sure they are in the eyes of a person who has only ever known those landscapes and nothing else) even whilst I point out that they're both icy landscapes and thus very similar to each other when compared to other kinds of landscapes that do exist in the rest of the World, such as sandy beaches or tropical forests.

Worse, your persistence in closing your eyes to the point I've made repeatedly that there are more sides than just two, leaves me with the feeling that I'm talking to a particularly provincial and simple minded Eskimo who thinks that those differences they're so hyper-aware off between different kinds of icy landscapes are far more important differences that the vastly larger differences between those and the rest of the landscapes that actually exist outside the place they live in.

In terms of people's own ideology, that's everywhere, really.

The upside of seeing sexual orientation as irrelevant outside sex and romance is that one has no tendency to assume that just because somebody has a specific sexual orientation, that means they think in a specific way (which is just a variant of "they're all the same"), most notably in terms of Politics. This stands in contrast with what you see mainly in Anglo-Saxon nations.

So once one looks at the world like that it's obvious that people whose sexual orientation is one of the less common ones are just as likely to be Nazis as the rest.

The difference in The Netherlands versus other countries is on how free people feel to let society know what their sexual orientation is, rather than the proportion of those who are gay and have Nazi beliefs being higher in The Netherlands than elsewhere - in other words people who have Nazi beliefs there and who happen to be gay are more likely to let others know that they're gay than elsewhere.

As a fraction of the total it's still a small percentage, unless things changed a lot in the 5 years since I moved out of there.

I totally agree that that's a good thing.

More in general it's a good thing that the era of rightwing cohalitions governing the country, which lasted almost 2 decades, seems to be finally over, as the other parties of the governing cohalition have all lost votes.

The Netherlands has actually been quite a neoliberal country for a while now, with steadilly degrading public services (still Scandinavia-style personal taxes but ever more American style public services) and one of the worse realestate bubbles in Europe.

Hopefully this is a change in direction back towards traditional social democrat ideals and away from deregulation, trickle-down delusions and even support for the modern version of the Nazis (the Zionists).

I was thinking that the joke part was about the ciggie rather than the coffee.

Whilst you're kind of joking (I hope!) on the health benefits, I would say that deriving some enjoyment from all manner of small pleasures is a pretty good way to keep one's mental sanity.

In my experience that very much depends on the part of Europe you're in: the "expresso in the morning" thing is mostly common in Southern Europe and France and back in the day when smoking was much more common and was actually allowed indoors in public venues, people having a ciggy and a morning coffee at a cafe was a pretty common sight.

Places in Europe without the whole tradition of coffee places serving expressos never really had this kind of "breakfast".

On the "Europeans" side that's at least 2 decades out of date.

The expresso coffee part is still true in a good part of Europe, but pretty much everywhere in it nowadays only a small fraction of people smoke and even those who do can't actually do it inside a coffee shop because they're not allowed to smoke there anymore, which spoils a great deal of the enjoyment of having a morning coffee.

Exactly.

For the Fascists, the ones they see as lesser are pretty much sub-human and to be treated as vermin, and they have no more empathy for the younger "vermin" than they have for the adult "vermin".

Just look at Nazi Germany and Zionist Israel for very obvious examples of how for these people the children of the "lesser" races aren't really human and get targetted same as all the other members of the ethnicities they literally call "vermin".

If these people were both capable of empathy and unable to block their empathy on a per-ethnicity basis, they wouldn't be Fascists.

Funnilly enough plenty (if not most) games which won't at all run in a more recent Windows like Windows 10 and Windows 11 run just fine in Linux via Wine.

All in all if we consider the full or near full timeframe for "windows games" (say, all the way back to Win95) I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out that a present day Linux distro can run more "windows games" as Windows 11.

One of the more entertaining (though hardly unexpected) discoveries for me when I moved from Windows to Linux on my gaming machine was that several of the games I owned which I could not get to run in Windows, worked fine in Linux.

You own post:

This bothsiderism is pretty thoughtless.

Your post starts with a sloganeering, hyper-reductive take of what I wrote.

As I wrote in response, "This is Politics, it’s not 1D or 2D"!

It is true that both contribute to a surveillance state but to equate both is to just ignore all policy differences, actions and more to pretend to be nuanced while painting everything as the same shade of grey, which is a downgrade to even black and white thinking.

In case you're unware of it, two forests can be the same kind of forest even when the trees in each are different: demanding for others to focus on the details of the trees in each (otherwise they're "painting everything as the same shade of grey") is just a way to try to avoid that people look at the forest as a whole.

That said, you're right. The details are different and I didn't address that in my original post were I only talked about the main policy direction on these domains.

The broad policy direction on this subject is the same and the outcomes have been very similar and over time progressed in the same direction during the time in power of both parties, but things worsened in different domains at different speeds with different parties in power.

This is not even what many Americans call "the ratchet effect", it's actually worse because in this case it's not one pushing in a certain direction and the other refusing to revert it, it's actually both pushing in the same direction, with just some difference in details here and there which didn't add up to much difference in outcomes.

So yeah, my point stands that in this domain both US parties are shit and my second point also stands that you're trying to move the conversation away from criticizing parties for doing this shit by claiming that subtle differences in each party's shit are more important that the overall shitty nature of their actions in this.

The leader of the modern Dutch Far-Right some years ago, when it really took of, was very openly gay.

I suspect that you're from a society where sexuality and sexual orientation are massively affected by Moralism and heavilly politicized - in other words treated as heavy and important subjects aligned with certain political forces - which is totally different from many other countries, most notably The Netherlands were they just treat all sexual orientations as just normal (which is why Dutch Far-Right muppets couldn't care less that their leader was gay).

All this to say that your reading about the sexual orientation of a countries top politicians and what it says for populist politics, doesn't at all apply outside very specific societies with wierd political takes on such subjects.

The Far-Right really took off in the Netherlands under the leadership of Pim Fortuyn who was very openly gay.

Think about it: one of the first leaders of the modern Dutch Far-Right was openly gay and nobody cared to the point that he was politically very successful as a Far-Right leader. In which other country in the World would the Far-Right types be fine with their leader being gay?!

In my own personal experience (I actually lived there for almost a decade), the Dutch have the healthiest take of all when it comes to sexual orientation: it's all normal and in domains outside sex and romance treated as just about as relevant as people's eye color (i.e. pretty much nobody cares).

All this to say that from a Dutch point of view the sexual orientation of the prime minister being homosexual is irrelevant.

Beware of projecting the weird Anglo-Saxon viewpoint on sexuality and sexual orientation onto events taking place in a Dutch context.

Yeah, in a way they're really just saying out loud the quiet part: that their job is to arrest people who "don't look right", quite independently of being an illegal immigrant, legal immigrant or even a citizen.

Having the "app" as an intermediary in the decision process is just a "computer says" way to isolate themselves from the responsabilities of what is in fact their choice (as the app was still configured/trained per their instructions so it's nothing but a computer agent dirctly or indirectly executing their instructions)

This is Politics, it's not 1D or 2D, it's N-Dimensional (with a very, very large N): it's not just possible but pretty much a Mathematical certainty than in a country were there are only 2 parties they will match perfectly on some dimensions, even whilst not at all matching in others.

Trying to dismiss away that aspect of Reality (which is incoveninent for tribalists) with sloganeering like "bothsiderism" is just parroting propaganda meant for simpletons who see reality as having just one dimension where there is nothing more than 2 sides.

It's pretty evident by their actual policies that strengthenning of police powers and the surveillance state are things in which both sides of the power duopoly in the US agree in the most, and it the face of both of those parties being shit on that domain your "yeah, but

<tiny difference>

Now, if you favorite party did start to diverge in that, you would have reason to celebrate, but it ain't hapenning and discourse such as yours makes it even harder that it will ever happen - why would the tribe's leadership change their ways when there's a veritable army of tribalist peons going "yeah, but, bothsiderism" at any criticism of what they do, even those parts which are undeniably shit.

In case you haven't noticed, the system in place now in the US became what it is today under both Republican and Democrat Administrations.

One has to be a tribalist useful idiot to deny that "their side" has done as much to create a Surveillance State as the "other" side - amongst those few things which have bipartisan support in the US are strengthening of police powers and erosion of privacy.

The comparison with most of Europe (with notable exceptions such as Britain and Russia) is very telling: it absolutely is possible to have low crime without reckless invasion of privacy, widespread civil society surveillance, draconian police powers and a pay-to-play Judicial System.

I vaguelly remember reading how SUVs are 70% more deadly in collisions with pedestrians than conventional cars.

(Because their front is flatter and taller, so pedestrians are less likelly to roll over the hood and instead tend to be projected away)

I believe those kinds of cars started taking off back then.

Also the fraction of Israelis who descend from Holocaust survivors is minuscule since the origin of the vast majority of those who immigrated to Israel is Russia.

Unlike the image they try and push with things like their "Western Values" talk, Western Europe and North America are the origin of only a small fraction of Israelis.

You can see the numbers here

In Israel the Holocaust is little more than a tool for nationalistic propaganda.

In my experience AAA games from around 2000s and early 2010s often have problems running in Linux, especially if they have DRM.

In some cases a pirated version will run just fine whilst the official one won't.