I don’t think anyone with self awareness or love for sound or music would call themselves an audiophile tbf.

This ties into a bigger issue where almost nothing related to sexuality can ever be healthy or normal to many conservatives.

Sex to these conservatives is inherently deviant and filthy. Making conscious life decisions related to sexuality or sexual identity will never be just a life decision. It will be equivalent to actively engaging in sexual acts.

Being trans to them is actively paedophilic because it exposes children to the concept of sexuality and gender. Sex ed will be paedophilic to them because it does the same. Each person’s actions are not the sole thing that defines them, but also their position in society as dictated by “what it has always been”. Men have always led households by marrying women and having kids, therefore men that don’t are a threat.

Conservatism is quite black or white when it comes to things like identity or introspection. It is an ideology that very frequently wages war on self questioning and exploration in exchange for compliance and conformism. It’s why many conservatives hate universities, scientists and partially why they hate immigrants. The entire ideology grows by appealing to people who do not want to be intellectually challenged. It’s especially attractive to those that don’t want to understand other ways of thinking.

Conservatism as an ideology always exploits the greatest potential weakness of the left wing: naivety, and presents itself as the “responsible” or “reasonable” solution to a reckless and harmful left wing. They frame things like empathy and humanitarianism as weaknesses rather than virtues.

It’s why most of the conservative rhetoric revolves around “being taken advantage of” or “being scammed by” this or that group. They love stories about immigrants exploiting the system, cheating or stealing because it proves their worldview that what’s foreign and unknown is out to get them. It is an ideology driven by fear.

And the biggest problem is that, unlike progressivism (which also has its ideological vices and weaknesses), conservatism never seeks to help the weak or empower the vulnerable. Instead it seeks to maintain the hierarchy and keep people in their place. In the US that translates to keeping immigrants weak, keeping black people down, keeping women in the kitchen, keeping white men ahead, keeping the US as an imperial power, and keeping its allies subservient.

But then if poverty is the best predictor for crime, that begs the question why would any country want people who are inherently more prone to crime in the first place?

Wouldn’t it make more sense to precisely discourage that type of immigration if you were trying to bring crime down?

The thing about Japan is complex for several reasons. On the one hand, late payments only affect your PR application if they took place within the last two years. So it’s not like you’ll be perma-banned from the PR if you paid your National Health Insurance slip late once because you forgot.

But if you do pay late consistently, that’s when it affects your PR. And again, you need to be consistent for two years to be eligible again.

Interesting! Thanks for the fact check. I always assumed giving money away would at best just be a temporary bandaid solution since you need a stable income to actually get out of poverty.

Of course, this isn’t a problem with a stable UBI, I imagine.

Nah man, I’m poor as fuck right now, I barely make minimum wage, but I properly file my taxes and you know what? Because the system in my country is good, I don’t have to break the bank to do so either.

Fraud, debt evasion, tax evasion etc are not a consequence of poverty and instead do affect all other people who do things right. You can’t benefit from tax money and from the system if you’re actively cheating it.

The reality though is that most millionaires and really rich families and people aren’t really the main problem with our current system.

Even if your family had tens of millions of dollars available while you were growing up, you’re many orders of magnitude closer to a minimum wage worker than to any billionaire.

The reality is that if most societies redistributed a fraction of the wealth of their top 30 wealthiest individuals, almost no one would be harmed and thousands of people could benefit significantly.

Now, of course, if you just give money away, that’s no good at improving people’s lives, so it makes sense to use the money to fund hospitals and schools, to provide adequate conditions to the disabled, the elderly, single parents, the homeless and our most vulnerable. And oh, would you look at that, that’s just a tax reform.

I’m from a middle upper class family, so, I never lacked any necessities but I also couldn’t afford luxuries every day. But I hold no contempt for people who got to grow up living in wealth and luxury beyond what my family could afford. I hold contempt for people who could dramatically improve their entire communities’ conditions and choose to evade their only tax obligations and only invest their wealth to accumulate more and more.

I think societies should at some point put a cap on wealth. No human being should be as rich as Elon Musk.

Yeah, I think that managed to put my feeling into more concise words. Russian socialism cost many many lives, but at its core the principles it was trying to champion seem correct: it proposes fairness and dignity through the active improvement of people’s education and lives. Whereas fascist movements (Hitler, Mussolini, Trump) are actively destructive. They thrive off of people’s hatred and fear of “the other”.

I guess my main question would be… If the Soviet Union was truly raising thinking, critical workers that would one day not become slaves, then how is it possible that immediately after its collapse, Russia became almost immediately a fascist state that indeed allowed only slaves and never masters to exist beyond its oligarchy?

Something seems amiss in the proposition there. It seems to me like fascism is almost an unavoidable illness that comes to all societies sooner or later, and the only thing we can do is find ways to weaken it before it leads to catastrophic results.

MAGA will be a good example of how fascism comes to its end within societies that cannot be militarily opposed.

What is the reasoning behind that conclusion? I can see how comparing the two simply because they’re totalitarian would be superficial (there are many structural differences between both). And to me, what the Nazis did, the rhetoric they used and their rise to power has always felt much more ominous and foreboding than even Stalin’s.

But I can’t put it into words and I see no real reason why Stalin’s crimes and death camps would in any way be less evil than the Nazis’. To me it feels like Nazis went beyond just political power straight into core beliefs and ideology, whereas Stalin’s crimes were just your typical tyrant authoritarian maneuvering, but I don’t know if that really makes an ethical difference.

Don’t worry, the Colombian right wing has done its absolute best to victim blame the farmers, or to diminish the atrocity or to claim it was a necessary sacrifice.

Meanwhile the Colombian guerrillas did their absolute best to shit on the popular movements that fueled them initially by allying themselves with drug traffickers and committing atrocities themselves against rural civilian populations.

So basically the Colombian civilians of the 20th century were sandwiched between an overzealous fascist right wing and a violent and reckless left wing.

Nowadays both sides are politically mostly rhetorical and the left wing is far less violent while the right wing is more careful about their image after losing elections and Congress seats to the left.

This is exactly how the banana massacre in Colombia took place 100 years ago. Workers were being paid in United Fruit Company bonds, which caused revolts and protests, the US government threatened to invade to protect the company’s interests, so the Colombian government deployed the army to suppress the protests and murdered thousands of farmers.

This still shapes Colombian politics to this day, has appeared in A Hundred Years of Solitude, and has absolutely helped power the leftist movements in the country since. The parliament and president have constantly referenced this instance in recent years too as examples of American neocolonialism.

It’s a tale as old as time.

I mean, surely the answer is yes? There are virtually no supreme leaders who haven’t committed some form of sexual assault or power harassment in history.

Some examples include: European monarchs, Japanese daimyo, Latin American dictators, the United States dictator, several United States presidents, probably a vast number of catholic archbishops and surely some popes, and several Islamic religious imams and ayatollahs.

Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

The situation is eerily similar to that of the Crusader States and the Latin Empire in surprise surprise the “Holy Land”.

Not to mention those wars also came as a general result of prosperity and wealth in Christian kingdoms that fought and pushed back against the Islamic states.

Israel has a lot in common with the Latin Empire really. Fully supported by a foreign, far away power with strategic interests in the region.

Which is why you use it simply as a proofreader and then evaluate the mistakes it brought up. You don’t blindly trust it or worse, use it to write everything from scratch, because then you’re just going to deliver shit code.

I see people hating on AI for things that are far more the fault of how people use it than of the technology itself. AI is extremely over hyped, but if you understand it for what it is, it’s a fairly useful tool.

I think it’s probably fine as long as you wrote that stuff yourself and simply had AI parse through it to check or correct anything you might have missed, which is how I mostly use it.

For code generation, AI is still far too unreliable, and I don’t like the tone it gives to my emails because it doesn’t sound like me. So I just have it correct my weird grammar or spelling sometimes.

The only other option is that they did reach an agreement and said agreement allowed Spain to deny its existence. Trump did this with Iran before bombing actually, where he proposed the Iranian government could save face with public statements while complying with his demands. When they refused, he bombed them.

LLMs like ChatGPT do have their uses and I don’t think we can say they’re absolutely scams. As someone living in another country, they help me proofread my comms and documents so I don’t have any spelling mistakes or weird grammar in them.

Likewise, for coding they can find logical mistakes quickly and are usually good at translating from one programming language to another. So I can see their value as assistants of sorts, but the new hype where all human labour is being replaced by AI makes it very difficult to support these enterprises.

The problem is that I’ve been coding on Windows (and occasionally) Mac for the good part of 8 years and I’ve just become used to the bullshit here. I really hate the idea of having to get used to a completely new brand of bullshit. And I don’t mean corporate bullshit but rather OS jank.

But yeah, thanks for the suggestions. I think I’ll start figuring out some way to migrate all of my stuff. And the C++ legacy libraries and other more complex things.

Ugh. I’ve never wanted to use Linux and can’t afford a Mac, but with this situation, Linux is all I have left. Which I do find annoying but I just can’t keep justifying using Windows.

I mean to be fair I haven’t met the first Venezuelan (I’m literally constantly interacting with all types of Venezuelans day to day) that didn’t want Maduro gone and behind bars, so what happened there is slightly less pure evil and more of a deal with the devil type of situation.

If I had a penny for every Bulgarian ruler that took the skull of a Byzantine emperor and turned it into a drinking cup, I’d have two pennies…