If you think, then you must already exist. I don’t understand how people get confused by that.

I find adults going around trying to shame people for doing completely harmless things fucking gross.

Okay, but I’m definitely certain that the majority of gamers running Windows 11 in secure boot mode with TPM 2.0 are running Zen 3 or 4. How many times can they cut their user-base in half before the people who are left leave because it’s a dead game?

I would guess Zen 1 through Zen 4 is currently the majority of gaming PCs. It’s certainly a massive percentage. I don’t think game companies can realistically just blacklist all of them.

No, you don’t understand, it’s all just part of a 5D chess gambit. If they crash the economy hard enough, then it will be cheap to manufacture things in the US! Plus there won’t be any filthy foreigners coming to take the jobs, since the wages will all be worthless, so that’ll fix immigration as well! As an added bonus, the garbage, worthless wages will also make it so it’s cheaper to run understaffed call centers from the US as well, so you’ll never have to worry about hearing someone with an Indian accent after you’ve been on hold for 6 hours. Isn’t it great?

It is. I mean, it’s also true, but it is pretty cringe.

Oh come on. Seriously? They’re going to lose “freedom”, and democracy, and the economy is going to go to shit, and the world is going to be less stable, and also they’re not the ones who are going to end up homeless and destitute and worrying about the government killing them. It’s not that fucking complicated.

The problem have isn’t that they don’t have all the same goals as me. The problem I have is that they’re idiots who are going to lose everything they care about because they refuse to accept reality and they’ll be mostly fine while the rest of us suffer for their failure.

Look, I don’t know what I’m failing to communicate here, but I absolute understand that. What I’m saying is that even if someone around here wanted to pretend what they were doing was good for people in Africa it would be to say that they’d be better off without our help. That us giving money to dictators that just end up spending it poorly is doing more harm than good, and Africa would be better off without us. That’s the opposite of a white savior complex.

Heck, if we weren’t also supporting dictators in other ways for the purpose of exploiting the people and resources of Africa while maintaining a degree of plausible deniability I might even agree with that.

Mostly though, they don’t talk about Africa, because they don’t think about Africa, because they don’t even pretend to care about Africa.

Unfortunately the strategy is probably just to start so many awful things at once that we just can’t make a fuss about all of them, and then they’ll just follow through on whichever ones don’t get enough attention. Even if we can get everyone complaining about Musk’s garbage and Greenland at once, there’s just something else almost as bad that they’ll do instead.

Fair.

I live in a small town where I have neighbors who fly confederate flags in their front yard despite never having been within 1,500 miles of a confederate state. I don’t need you to tell me what racists are like, thank you very much. Maybe it’s a regional thing or something, but I guarantee that there are a lot of racists in America who do not want to save anyone from anything. They just want to pretend that everyone is just like them, and get very, very mad when they’re reminded that other people exist.

I don’t know what to tell you. I know a lot of people who will happily spout off some of the nastiest things you’ve ever heard about “those people”, but none of them want to save anything. They just want to be left alone in their own little world where they can pretend that if everyone was just like them there wouldn’t be any problems in the world. They just get mad if you make them try to think about what they believe.

Maybe it’s a regional difference, or maybe we just hang out in different racist circles. I dunno. I’ve never actually met a racist that cared about anyone outside of the US enough to have a white savior complex though. Around here they’d much rather sort people out by skin color and ship them to the continent that best matches their stereotypes and be done with ever even thinking about it.

You’d certainly think so if you only saw racism in the form of tweets. I live in a racist shithole. I know real racists. None of them care about any of that. None of them think about any of that. They might at most retweet something like that, and even then it’d only be to complain about taxes. None of them are actually thinking about Africa in their free time.

Racist Americans aren’t tweeting about Africa. They aren’t thinking about Africa at all.

I mean, yeah, okay, technically you’re correct. I should have been more careful with how I phrased things. I know people on the internet are pedantic. I should have seen this coming. Freud didn’t invent studying the mind, he just popularized the idea of, you know, actually using it to help people. The fact that he was bad at doing that doesn’t make it a bad idea.

What would have happened if he hadn’t come along and done that is just a story you made up. It has no basis in reality. Maybe we’d be living in a magical utopia where nothing bad would ever happen anymore. I can’t prove that isn’t true. It’s not really a helpful thing to discuss though.

Being incorrect isn’t the same thing as being a fraud.

Well, he was absolutely a coke-fiend that just made up a bunch of nonsense that was basically all incorrect. It’s easy to call him a fraud now in hindsight, but it’s important to remember that one of the things he made up was the idea that we should treat mental problems like illnesses that could be treated. That’s still an incredibly valuable idea that still isn’t being taken seriously enough. I’m willing to give the guy a break for being wrong when he was making up the entire idea of psychology from nothing. That was still useful, even if we have had to move on from everything he thought about psychology.

Yes and no. A lot of VPN ads are full of lies and misleading garbage, and they’re also often pretty overpriced, but they can be a genuinely useful service for a lot of people as well. Just don’t get the ones in the ads.

Mozilla is kind of a mess, but part of that is it’s actually a whole bunch of different companies all named Mozilla something or other. It’s really easy to go down a rabbit hole of angry videos and articles that make it sound even worse than it actually is, but yeah, there’s some nonsense going on. It’s especially sad how little the main foundation seems to care about Firefox anymore.

MZLA Technologies, the company that runs Thunderbird, has kind of worked around the shenanigans of the main Mozilla Foundation by directly collecting donations from users that are specifically earmarked for work on Thunderbird. They’re doing good work with a fairly safe funding model, so I don’t worry about Thunderbird at all, personally.