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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • I live in New York City and have no desire to move to the suburbs or countryside. It’s great here.

    • I can walk to most of my needs. Several grocery stores, pharmacies, a big park, bars, restaurants. I don’t need a car.
    • there’s a thriving music scene. I can go see live stuff of many genres every night if I want
    • a deep dating pool. Lots of people. Lots of queer people too, if that’s your jam.
    • I like there being people around. The empty streets of the suburbs feel spooky and hostile to me.
    • more people means it’s easier to get group activities going. Join a soccer team. Brass band. Bird watching group. Knitting community. There’s everything. Usually more than one, in case a particular group isn’t your vibe.
    • stuff is open later.

    Some of the things people imagine about cities aren’t really true

    • it’s not constant noise
    • I typically can’t hear my neighbors
    • people don’t typically interact with you on the street, but if you need help someone will usually step up
    • it’s not shoulder to shoulder constantly. People seem to imagine it’s always times Square on NYE, but it’s just not.

    While you’re not unseen like you might be in the countryside, no one really cares that they do see you.

    Some people want “more space” but I don’t really know what for. A one bedroom apartment is fine for me. What would I do with more rooms?

    If I had kids, I wouldn’t want to put them in the suburban hell cage like I had. Nothing to do. Can’t get anywhere on your own. Don’t like the few dozen kids in your school? Well that’s your whole pool of friendship options. I was always so jealous of the kids I knew that lived in the city. They could just get on the train and go to the beach, or go skating, or go to a punk show, or whatever. I had to beg my parents to drive me anywhere interesting, and usually they didn’t want to.





  • I say this a lot, but all humans are heavily biased towards believing their in-group. For some people that’s basically all that matters. I feel like authoritarians, right wing authoritarians, are especially prone to this. Facts and figures don’t matter. It’s the emotional core of “fit in with the group” and “outsiders BAD” that’s driving it, and all the justifications come afterwards.

    I don’t want to say anything like they’re like animals or subhuman, because this behavior is extremely human. We all do it to some extent. It’s just for some people it’s so dominant, and their in-group is so dangerously stupid, it’s a real problem for all of us.








  • Depends on how it’s set up. If the setting is going into the env it’s a string, so I’d expect some sort of

    if os.getenv("this_variable", "false").lower() == "true":   # or maybe "in true, yes, on, 1" if you want to be weird like yaml
      this_variable = True
    else:
      this_variable = False
    

    Except maybe a little more elegant and not typed on my phone.

    But if the instructions are telling the user to edit the settings directly, like where I wrote this_variable=True, they’d need to case it correctly there.






  • I’m going to guess

    • poor media coverage
    • media is explicitly hostile to protests and pro trump/right-wing-extremism
    • many people are living paycheck to paycheck + we have minimal labor protection
    • years of left-wing organizations being kneecapped (eg: the murder of fred hampton)

    A lot of people are angry but there’s not really much organization. As much as I would love someone to take 50,000 of their closest friends, march down to DC, and shoot every republican in the head, without years of organizing that’s just a fantasy. Unfortunately, the right wing has been doing years of organizing and it’s now bearing fruit for them.




  • I’ve been told violence isn’t the answer and we shouldn’t just shoot nazis and nazi enablers dead.

    The way most people change their mind isn’t based on facts or figures, but emotions. Specifically, in-group belonging. For most people, and this certainly includes me and you some of the time, what our in-group believes is more compelling than an out-groups supposed facts.

    They see that guy as someone in their group so they believe him. They see you as a bad outside bad bad bad liar, so nothing you say is likely to get through. (This comic is worth reading on this topic: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe )

    If you want to change someone’s mind, they have to see you as in-group. Not necessarily the same group as what you’re arguing with. We all belong to many groups. American, new yorker, white guy, middle aged, yankees fan, etc etc there are many such slices. Like how you can’t get a republican to recycle by appealing to environmental concerns (because environmentalists are out-group, so fuck them), but you might be able to get them to recycle via something like “only american ingenuity can turn trash into bridges and tanks!”

    This takes a lot of time and effort, and if you don’t get them to stop hanging out with the other group, you won’t make any lasting changes.

    So I think you’d need a multi prong approach:

    • Get them off bad media. Facebook, fox news, etc. This is reinforcing their bad beliefs. Because they see this stuff as trustworthy in-group, it goes right into the worldview.
    • Get them to stop hanging out with their shitty maga-hat friends. This is the social in-group that’s reinforcing bad beliefs.
    • Get them to trust you.
    • Gently introduce the idea that maybe the extreme right doesn’t have their interests at heart, etc

    All of which takes a lot of time and effort, and your opposite number is basically trying to do the same thing. Except they have fox news, trump, and such in their corner.

    And, again, I’m told we definitely shouldn’t just shoot extreme right wingers and other nazi sympathizers dead. Nor should we burn their houses down. If we’re an emergency responder, we definitely shouldn’t let them die while thinking to ourselves “they would let so many die. without a thought, their passing deserves no mourning” or similar.

    You should definitely nullify if you’re on a jury and someone allegedly did violence to a shitty ceo or red-hat, though, bu that’s getting off topic.