Are_Euclidding_Me [e/em/eir]

You’ll find that it’s not possible for the US to completely pull out of supporting them with military aid.

Why not? The US has supported Israel since its formation, no arguments there, but so what? Why couldn’t that change?

Am I reading the article right? My understanding of what I just read is that in 2016 some social media accounts with ties to Russia put out some pro-Stein statements and then a year or two later Stein was photographed sitting at the same table as Putin.

Neither of those two facts suggest to me that she is, as you put it, “another Russian tool”. Especially since the article itself says that there’s no evidence she knew about the Russian social media accounts boosting her and there wasn’t an interpreter sitting at the table with her and Putin.

Can you please tell me what I’ve missed? Is there more evidence that she’s a “Russian tool”? Because the evidence in the article you linked seems extremely weak.

Ok, then try your comment again. What is it that you’re saying here?

This is deeply shitty. If you’re right that >80% of people on Lemmy are men (I’m not sure I buy that), then it’s even worse to assume everyone is a man. What you’re doing is chasing off the already extremely outnumbered non-men. If you want this place to be welcoming to people who aren’t men, then you need to change your behavior.

You did the right thing. It’s a lot of bullshit about “oh, you list your pronouns? You must be fine with corporations selling your data” and then at the end there seems to be a bit of “hexbear showed up late to the fediverse party and is ruining everything”, which is, of course, pretty much directly opposite of the truth.

Pathologic 2! It’s so good! And the next one is coming out next year so it’s a great time to become obsessed with Pathologic!

Sure, that’s extremely fair! Those qt dependencies are no joke! How do you feel about Evince (apparently now called gnome document viewer)? It seems to be the standard gtk pdf viewer, but I’ve never used it, so I actually don’t know what it’s features are like. It’s a heavier application than mupdf (of course), but at least you don’t need to install qt to use it!

When zathura (my beloved) isn’t feature-rich enough for my needs I usually turn to okular. Sure, it’s kde, so if you’re on a pure gnome system you’re going to have to install a bunch of dependencies, but if that’s not a problem for you, okular is quite good in my experience!

Oh shit, is this supposed to be a response to me asking about ranked choice voting? Assuming that’s the case:

That’s cool for Arizona. I hope it passes. But I don’t live in Arizona. Most americans don’t. What should those of us not in Arizona do to bring about ranked choice voting?

support some form of ranked voting in your state next time

Serious question: how do you suggest I do this? The “vote for Biden” people say this a lot, and like, I agree, ranked choice voting would be far preferable to our current electoral system. I’d like this change to happen. So how can we make it happen? What is the plan for after the election to get ranked voting before the next one? So far as I can tell, none of the politicians in my state (or any state, really) have tried to implement ranked choice and there aren’t any ballot initiatives that aim towards it. So what do you see as the way forward here? How do we get ranked choice voting to become a reality before the next time we’re faced with a choice between two absolutely unacceptable presidential candidates?

I can think of a couple of uses. Well, basically just one use. You could hide posts that cause distress for whatever reason. For example, I hate snakes and if someone posted a neat picture of a snake I’d probably hide it, just so I don’t have to keep seeing the same post and jump scaring myself with a picture of a snake while scrolling. Another example might be a thread in which people are arguing and you don’t want to get dragged into the argument. I actually literally did this earlier today with a thread where people were yet again arguing about the upcoming US election and whether voting Biden is a reasonable choice. I’ve read this argument so many times and it’s so tempting to jump in and be an asshole to someone who is wrong and I just don’t want to do that today, so better to hide the post so I don’t keep seeing it while scrolling.

So yeah, you can hide posts you don’t want to keep running across while scrolling for whatever reason. Seems like a pretty useful feature to me, I’m glad we have it now.

Demonstrating absences anything beyond math’s clarity and definiteness can be challenging if not impossible to say the least.

ftfy

Anyway, just a tip for future comments on the internet: I’d suggest not being an asshole in your very first reply to someone you disagree with unless there’s a good reason to be, because it makes you look extremely silly if your shitty comment is actually just wrong. I wouldn’t have commented in this thread at all if you hadn’t been an immediate asshole to frightful_hobgoblin, but here we are.

Yes you absolutely can. Here’s an extremely trivial example: 6 is not prime, which I can prove by simply saying 6 = 2*3. Bam, I’ve proved a negative.

what, on the surface, is a pretty trivial ask

I don’t think having my real life phone number tied to a website or game account is a trivial ask. I’d like my data to be private, especially something as real-life and tangible as a fucking phone number. Sure, there are ways around these things, you can get a fake phone number for cheap (or possibly even free), but that’s rather more effort than I’m willing to put in for most things. If I need to enter a phone number to sign up for an account for something, chances are very extremely good I’ll just decide I don’t need the account that badly. I don’t think I’m alone in this.

For years I used vanilla vim before finally switching to spacemacs like 4 years ago. I’ve never used neovim, because it just didn’t seem stable and mature enough before I switched to spacemacs and at this point I’m happy with spacemacs and will probably stick with it for the foreseeable future.

My issue with vim, and the reason I switched, is that vimscript was an absolute nightmare. I was doing easy stuff, writing LaTeX, but getting vim to compile LaTeX and talk to my pdf reader (as you need if you’re going to be working with LaTeX in any kind of serious way) took way too much configuration and my setup would break fairly often as well. Spacemacs is significantly easier. I was shocked when I went from “I’ve never used spacemacs before” to “I’m comfortably writing LaTeX here” in about half an hour. My setup still breaks occasionally and sometimes it’s a bit difficult to figure out why and how to fix it, but it’s much easier than vim was, that’s for sure.

I also just like the emacs workflow. I like helm, I like being able to change how the editor works on the fly just by writing some elisp anywhere, I like how easy it is to access the documentation on functions, variables, keybindings, whatever else you might need. I like org-mode. I like that emacs has been around for decades and will be around for decades more.

I’d never heard of doomemacs. I’m pretty happy with spacemacs so I probably won’t switch, but I’ll at least read about it some more.

Sometimes the 3 second emacs startup time is annoying so I use vim then.

The way I get around this is by using emacs in daemon mode. So it only has a long startup if I’ve just rebooted my computer or if I needed to change my config and manually restart emacs. You probably already know emacs can run as a daemon, but I thought I’d mention it anyway!

Sounds like you’ve gotten good answers about your formatting question. For the steam proton question, the answer is that yes, steam installs it automatically. You might have to mess with the proton version for specific games, so check https://www.protondb.com/ for your game if it doesn’t work immediately.

Congrats on trying out Linux! I hope you enjoy it! I’ve never used Mint myself (I don’t like ubuntu-type package management), nor the Cinnamon desktop (although I’ve heard good things), but that’s part of the beauty of linux, there’s so much to try! Mint is definitely a good starter distro, but if you find you enjoy messing around with it, you might consider a bit of distro-hopping.

Ok, so, first of all, people vote in China. Like, they do. They have elections there. If you’re defining democracy as “a system in which people vote”, then by that definition China is a democracy. (Full disclosure, I don’t think that’s a great definition and I don’t think China is a “liberal democracy” like the US is, but at this point, we’re getting hugely into the weeds of different political systems and I don’t think now is exactly the time for that.)

Sure, the hexbear posts that make it to the top of the “all” feed aren’t going to be the ones where we’re talking theory, they’re going to be the ones where we’re dunking on people for shitty political opinions. Fair enough. That’s true. It doesn’t mean that theory posts don’t exist, just that they aren’t as contentious as dunking posts. That’s an indictment of the internet and social media, not of hexbear specifically.

Hexbear does talk about liberals a lot, because they are the political group in power in the west. It’s probably worth pointing out here that (american) republicans are, in fact, also liberals. So when we say “libs suck”, we are also talking about the american republican party. Republicans are more open than the democrats about their genocidal tendencies, but fundamentally, republicans and democrats believe the same things and act in the same ways. They all think capitalism is cool and good, they just have slightly different feelings about which tactics to employ to keep capitalism as the dominant economic system. So it’s not that we ignore republicans, it’s just that it can sometimes look that way to people who think “liberal” means “democrat”. It never has historically, but because political education in the US is so fucking garbage, a lot of people think “liberals” and “democrats” are synonyms.

And your last point is just wrong. We know that voting is never going to bring about real change, but that doesn’t mean we only want to complain. The usual advice is to get organized. It’s to find a local group that is on the ground helping people and get involved. Start working to build non-governmental power in your local area. Make connections, talk to people, help people, so that when world events are exploitable, we communists are ready to exploit them. It’s fucking hard, especially in the US where our government has spent years and years trying (and mostly succeeding) to make “communism” a dirty word, but just because something is hard doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing. The idea that voting is something that will affect change is laughably incorrect. We could get into it, but let me just point out that the electoral college exists and that in my lifetime there have been not one, but two presidents who have been elected to office even though they lost the popular vote. Does that sound like a system in which the mass of voting people can bring about real change?

even if there was never any official method of communicating the public will.

What do you mean by this? What kinds of methods do you find acceptable?

There isn’t any discussion on political theory

There is absolutely talk of political theory on hexbear. Right now currently there’s a bell hooks reading group pinned to our front page. I’ve learned a surprising amount from my fellow hexbear nerds. People drop reading recommendations constantly and if you make a thread with questions from something you’re reading, you’ll get engagement and answers. It’s pretty cool.

the focus seems geared on one small part of the political spectrum while ignoring other parts entirely.

Yes, we’re communists. We aren’t going to pretend liberals are worth engaging with politically. That being said, we are a leftist unity instance, so anarchists, MLs, maoists, what have you are all welcome. As long as you’re an actual leftist and not some “just vooooote” liberal, you’ll probably enjoy hexbear.

I agree with your suspicion. Between the op being pretty obvious anticommunist bait and then that asshole arguing in incredibly bad faith about some alleged “10 principles” that supposedly guide all of politics in the dprk, I would guess that the reason this post exists is that people paid to post western propaganda on the internet are here doing exactly that.