The alt right obsesses over the Roman empire, but ignores the republic, as if Julius Caesar and Octavius were the origin of everything. As such I’m not surprised that they don’t learn about what caused the fall of the republic. (A century or so of oppressed masses and greedy elites did it.)

And, even when it comes to the empire, they’re busier cherry-picking examples that show that the grass was greener, the men were manlier, the women were chaster, and dogs barked quieter.

At least when it comes to languages, the eurocentrism and subjectivity are being addressed for at least a century. Sapir for example proposed that the “classical languages” weren’t just two but five - Arabic, Chinese, Greek, Latin, Sanskrit. And the definition became roughly “varieties with a heavy and outlasting impact outside their native communities”. (Personally I’d also add Sumerian, Quechua and Nahuatl to that list. But that’s just me.)

Additionally plenty linguists see the idea of “classic” not as specific languages, but as a potential stage of a language, assigned retroactively to the period when its prestige and cultural production were specially strong. For example, Classical Ge’ez is defined as the one from centuries XIII~XIV.

I always got this feeling that LMDE will eventually become Mint’s main distro, with the Ubuntu-based version slowly fading away.

I remember. And how much shit the community flung towards them. And their rep is still stained with it, as it should be.

The text says “several”, but it mentions only four components (gdebi, apturl, aptdaemon and mintcommon-aptdaemon) merged into two (captain, aptkit). It doesn’t look like much, and typically the Mint project is responsible to not claim to maintain more than it can maintain¹.

In special, I remember gdebi being broken for quite a while², so this hints that Mint’s goal is to get properly maintained replacements.

1. As shown by Cinnamon. I personally don’t like it, but it is well maintained, even being a huge project.
2. If I recall correctly, the issue was with the associated gdebi-gtk frontend; you’d open a package with it, then click “install”, then the program exits because it’s looking for sudo instead of pkexec. I’m almost certain that it was fixed by now, but it does show general lack of maintainance.

Possible? Yes. Desirable? No; at least, not for most news sources - the extreme sells better than the simply informative, and often this lack of precision is how they manipulate your views towards a certain subject.

True that. And you reminded me a tidbit of human nature, that interferes in this situation:

If you mince words to make something look stronger, weaker, better, worse than it is, plenty people fall for it. Because they care too much about how something is said (the words) and too little about what is being said (the discourse).

He reminds me Marie Antoinette, the last queen-consort of France. It’s said that, upon hearing about bread-less and starving peasants, she would’ve said “let them eat brioche instead”. The historical accuracy of that is dubious…

…but come on, this muppet is literally doing that dammit. Spend a year on the beach if you’re fired? He could’ve literally said “sucks to be you lol” and it would be less abrasive.

And as most people here probably know he’s outright lying when he claims that it was not caused by greed.

It’s the result of the “bombastic” mix of false dichotomy, assumptions, and social media dynamics.

False dichotomy prevents you from noticing nuances, complexities, third sides, or gradations. Under a false dichotomy, there’s no such thing as “Alice and Bob are bad, but Alice is worse than Bob”; no, either they’re equally bad (thus both deserve to die), or one of them is good.

In the meantime, assumptions prevent you from handling uncertainties, as the person “fills the blanks” of the missing info with whatever crap supports their conclusion. For example you don’t know if Bob kills puppies or not, but you do know that he jaywalks, right? So you assume that he kills puppies too, thus deserving death.

I’m from the firm belief that people who consistent and egregiously engage in discourse showing both things are muppets causing harm to society, and deserve to be treated as such. (Note: “consistent and egregiously” are key words here. A brainfart or two is fine, as long as there’s at least the attempt of handling additional bits of info and/or complexity.)

Then there are the social media dynamics. I feel like a lot of users here already addressed them really well, but to keep it short: social media gives undue exposure to idiots doing the above due to anonymity, detachment from the situation, self-reinforcing loops (“circlejerks”), so goes on.

That includes me. Or at least my geospoofed location for the sake of google search (when I need to use it - I’d rather use DDG but… meh), so Google stops trying to sell me local shit.

For further info, here’s Gazeta do Povo’s article, from 14/Jan/2023, that this one refers to… or rather copypastes without linking - the overall discourse and claims are the same.

Okay. Can I be honest here? This is piles of propaganda coming from multiple sides, and anyone claiming to know the truth is probably just assuming. It’s a bloody mess of interests.

And since I do not know the veracity of the claims themselves, I’ll instead focus on who is saying what, and the likely reason why.

The original is from a conservative newspaper from my city, Curitiba. It used to serve our local audience (Paraná state) but, around 2015 or so, the overall focus shifted: instead of being Paraná’s newspaper it became Brazil’s right wing newspaper. The motivation was simply “selling subscriptions for outsiders”.

That article’s claim about Confucius Institute promoting a hidden agenda ultimately backtracks to FBI and CIA (note: this article is linked as source in the other one that I’ve linked.) I’ll leave as an exercise for the readers to guess how trustable the USA government is when it comes to China, and vice versa, given that both countries are fighting a cold war.

Now let’s talk about Diálogo Américas. It’s directly tied with USA’s military - its own words

Diálogo is a “U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) activity comprising a website, a print magazine, and associated social media devoted to building partnership and cooperation among partner nations.”

Given the backstory of relationships between the government of USA and other governments of the Americas, this can be safely rephrased as “we’re military, devoted to enforcement of the Monroe Doctrine.”

Ah, and most likely China is doing its thing too in this regard. How much, we do not know. It might be worth checking what those partnerships with universities are about; there’s a lot of room for propaganda in something like social studies, but if it’s something like semiconductors or the likes the claim is probably bollocks.

Are you noticing what’s happening here?

• USA’s espionage agencies say something.
• A newspaper that backstabbed its own homeland says: “hey, I can use what the above said! It’s from some outside source so people won’t dispute it!”
• USA’s military “activity”: “hey, I can use what that newspaper is saying! It’s from some outside source so people won’t dispute it!”

It’s like a telephone game done for the sake of the context-tomy.

I don’t know for sure. I’ll voice a strong belief in this regard, but take it with a grain of salt.

I think that Hexbear’s views on Russia is a specific case of a general tendency that you see all across social media (not just HB or Lemmy): to dichotomise complex matters into exactly one good side and exactly one bad side, while assuming that everyone belongs to those two bags. It should go like:

1. NATO bad.
2. NATO fights Russia.
3. Criticism against Russia assumed to be NATO support.
4. Since NATO bad, NATO supporter bad.
5. Anyone who would otherwise criticise both NATO and Russia gets screeched at, and eventually shuts up.
6. “Russia good” becomes part of a local consensus.

It gets messier when you add Ukraine into the equation, or consider people conflating governments and populations, but it should give you an idea - it starts with somewhat sane premises but quickly devolves into insane lack of logic.

It explains nicely why they’re supporting Palestine, even with the apparent contradiction: Israel is associated with USA and thus with NATO.

IMO their dichotomy in this topic is idiotic. However it is not just from their part, and blaming specifically Hexbear for this, like some people would do, would be unjust (and a self-demonstrating example). We, people using the internet in the 20s, are collectively doing it.

By the way, you see another example of the general phenomenon in this comment chain. Ctrl+F “elephant shit” and look at the comment I was replying to - “you either treat two types of bad as the same, or you’re defending one.”

[Now I probably drew the ire of all sides at the same time. Frankly? I don’t give a fuck; I’m too old and grumpy to play along.]

I’ll remain sceptic on the claim until the paper is peer reviewed by people who actually know the stuff in it, unlike me.

It was supposed to be 14 hours. It was 28.

I feel like this can’t be emphasised enough: the bus travel will take more time than they claim it to.

Travelling 1600km by bus is… urgh, a bit painful. Even if you get a nice bus, where you can comfortably sleep, with plenty stops, lacking annoying loud people, you’ll probably feel glad once you hop off. Doubly true when returning home.

If you’re still doing it: a book, a fully charged phone and/or laptop (remember earplugs!), comfy clothes makes it more bearable. Don’t assume the person next seat wants to chitchat, or can chitchat about interesting topics.

It’s a good idea to have a water bottle and something to snack on, even if you can stop midway to buy food. My go-to snack was nutrient bars - they take almost no space, they’re discreet¹ and filling enough.

so I assume young people and public facing employees at the bus exchanges to speak some of it…

Don’t assume; look for that info. Preferably on a city level if possible/available, but if you can’t find it at least on country level.

Also take in mind that plenty people don’t feel morally obligated to shift languages based on outsiders’ convenience, even if they do speak it².

1. A big “fuck you” to the muppet on a 600km bus travel that I did, who decided to eat pork rinds while in the bus. That “CRUNCH CRUNCH CRUNCH” was aggravating.
2. I’ve seen this two times. In two different countries. I’ve seen the opposite too, people going the extra length to help you out, so don’t take it as a general rule, just keep it in mind.

I didn’t know that I needed to know about Jevons’ paradox. Such a simple but brilliant reasoning.

You’ll get less pollution and crash deaths if, instead of trying to improve cars, society improved transportation methods that compete with cars: walking, biking, public transport, so goes on. They either don’t show those issues, or show them in a meaningfully lower level.

To be fair I’ve had a few bad experiences with Hexbears, but I think that most of them boil down to “unfunny guy interacting with unserious kids”. But since I’m often lurking there in my political account, I feel like my opinion about them is a bit less ungrounded than this whole “Hexbear bad! EDIT WOW THANKS FOR THE GOLD KIND STRANGER!” echo chamber.

(I also have a few bones to pick with .ml [the people in charge, not the whole instance], but they don’t apply to LG or HB, it’s a matter of transparency.)

I think that this is a red herring.

Even if the first two points apply (do they? I don’t think so, but I’m not going to dispute it*), the problem with T_D was neither, it was users there actively promoting hate against marginalised groups.

And, while you can complain a thousand things about Hexbear, they are not promoting hate against marginalised groups. On the contrary - if they even smell that you might be potentially promoting it, they’ll ban you under a “better safe than sorry” approach.

*reason: I don’t care about USA internal politics.

My experience with LW users is mixed: some great users, some really trashy users. It’s what you expect from a huge instance not geared towards any specific demographic.

As such I don’t think that it’s sensible to generalise LW users like this.

Yeah, because saying “cat shit is not as huge as elephant shit” is the same as saying “cat shit is not shit”. /s