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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)VO
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  • I addressed this back in my original comment. At this point you're just embarrassing yourself and wasting my time. I'm not going to bother replying further, you clearly need to get back to school and learn some basic reading comprehension.

  • What was your exit strategy from this reply?

    Because if I said "Yes" then your next step is to quote the part of the tweet that you think backs up your assertion. Only, you already did that. And I already pointed out that it doesn't say what you think it says. So in what possible way did you imagine that this line of argument was going to end up with you looking good?

  • If the existence of the state of Israel requires the extermination or forced relocation of the people of Palestine, then it should not exist.

    If the existence of the state is Isreal does not require the extermination or forced relocation of the people of Palestine, then what Israel is doing is indefensible.

    You know these facts. They are self evident. There is no way to defend Israel's actions without ultimately arguing against Israel's right to exist at all, which is why you're hiding behind this disingenuous mask of "Just asking questions" and constantly talking around your meaning instead of outright saying it.

  • Well, words would be the usual method. Like, you know, spoken, or written, either is good. That's the usual method of conveying your stance on something. Not really sure what other answer you would be expecting there.

  • Yes, I read that part. You clearly didn't. Nothing in there is an immediate commitment to recognize Palestine as a state. At best "work towards a two state solution" means "someday maybe Palestine might get to become a state if we're all feeling really generous."

  • My pupper has currently gone to great effort to start the day by lying in between me and my wife in the bed so that she can be touching us both as she sleeps.

    15/10, she couldn't be doing a better job.

  • Public opinion always matters. Even kings needed their people on their side; why do you think they made up all that divine right bullshit and had the churches preach it so much?

    Every country has the government that a sufficient number of people are willing to tolerate. Tyranny can only tip the scales, it cannot change the game. If a populace doesn't want to be ruled, it cannot be ruled. That's why fascism relies so heavily on the imposition of a hierarchy; because the people who aren't at the bottom will support the system that gives them someone else to tread on, while the rich and the powerful live it up at the top. But you always need to keep a significant sector of the population on your side. There always has to be an in group who benefit enough from the government to want to keep it.

    Governments end when enough people want them to end. Democracy is just a way of doing it politely.

  • Hmm... I'm not actually seeing anything here that indicates an immediate plan to recognize Palestine as a state. Canada has been a supporter of a two state solution for a long time, but that's only a commitment to working towards Palestine becoming a state, it doesn't immediately imply that they'll follow in France's steps and immediately recognize Palestine as a state. The article offers no further evidence for the claim.

  • The members of Collective Shout are in exactly the same position. So why did the payment processors listen to them?

    The fact that this whole issue even occurred is proof that public pressure, when applied smartly, does in fact work.

  • This happened in the first place because Collective Shout turned up and said "A bunch of people are pissed off about this, do something about it." They're not a government or a major corporation, they're just a group that represents people, no different than Change.org. If a petition caused this, why can't a petition stop it?

  • The point is that clouds aren't inherently bad, and actually come with a lot of important upsides; they've become bad because capital owns and exploits everything in our society, poisoning what should be a good idea. The author is arguing that while there's nothing fundamentally wrong with self-hosting, it's not really a solution, just a patch around the problem. Rather than seeking a kind of digital homesteading where our lives are reduced to isolated islands of whatever we personally can scratch from the land, we should be seeking a digital collectivism where communities, not exploitative corporations, own the digital landscape. Sieze the means of file-sharing, in effect.

  • I can't comment on Into The Odd, but I would consider either The Sprawl or Runners In The Shadows. The former is a general purpose cyberpunk system built on Apocalypse World and the latter is a Shadowrun hack of Blades in the Dark.

    And I guess I'd be remiss if I didn't also mention that I've built my own system for my Shadowrun campaigns, called Straylight. I'm in private playtesting right now, and I plan to have the first public playtest draft up very shortly (weeks or days, depending on how things go).

  • I have to support a remote client that uses Starlink. It's a nightmare. We can deal with slow connections, we can deal with bad ping, but with Starlink what we get is the entire connection dropping every minute or so, and coming back up a short while later. It's unbelievably bad.

  • Pardoning Maxwell would be an insanely bad idea. The MAGA world love two things more than anything else; conspiracy theories, and imagining themselves in an endless war against a cabal of powerful pedophiles.

    Maxwell directly aided and abetted one of those powerful pedophiles. To MAGA, there is no possible justification for pardoning her. It would be tantamount to a full admission from Trump, and it would send their conspiracy addled minds into overdrive. At best (for him), they'd wonder what kind of leverage she has over Trump in order to buy herself a pardon. If not evidence of pedophilia, then surely something else, right?

    Is Maxwell angling for a pardon? Almost certainly. But giving her one would be a suicidal move for the administration right now.

  • Not gonna lie, if someone actually arranged that, it would be the raddest thing that had happened in the history of the universe, and I would immediately question their sanity for picking my book to indelibly ink on a bunch of human bodies, instead of many far better options.

  • I see ebooks and paper in much the same way I see streaming music and vinyl.

    I love my vinyl collection. I love the feeling of putting on a record, the old school analogue nature of it. There's a kind of ritual in dropping the needle.

    But I can't bring vinyl in the car or on a plane.

    I love paper books, but they're not always the most practical thing. So ebooks are often a better solution. Which is better is really situational.

    Personally, as someone who has published, a couldn't care less what medium someone uses to enjoy my novel. Ebook, paper, audiobook; the words are the same, and the words are what matter. How those words are delivered is not important.

  • It's very strange to see people repeatedly make this assertion that, having yelled "Fire" one single time with no response, the moral and practical choice is now to sit down and quietly burn to death with everyone else.

    This is, in fact, exactly the reaction fascists want. One of the most effective strategies of fascism is exhaustion. They want people to give up and choose silence over repeating the assertion that "This is wrong" for the hundredth time, and thus "Wrong" becomes "the new normal." We must never let them redefine what is acceptable. The first time or the thousandth time, we need people to continue to shout that this not acceptable.