While an aggressive attitude won’t change the mind of bigots, a polite and respectful response to someone who advocates for forcing kids to go through the wrong puberty is going to be especially difficult for people with personal trauma for it, and it’s unreasonable to expect it of them.

I think it’s a reasonable reaction to throw polite discourse out when people use “moderate” as a cover for their bigotry. This is like when “moderate” person said that segregation of black people was reasonable when people were fighting for their civil rights, and that since the moderates weren’t pro-slavery so they were the good guys. No, you’re not the good guys, you’re just not as bad as the super evil guys. Congrats.

Now I won’t tell you to “fuck off and die”, but I will tell you to fuck off. If you were someone I personally knew, I would have put in the effort to be polite and try to educate you or whatever, but since we don’t know each other it’s unlikely to land.

I say it as someone who used to think like you.

That was a nod to Great Moments in Unintended Consequences. (Example)

The Year: 2092

The Problem: Timezones are annoying

The Solution: Space mirrors! A series of mirrors in space would rotate to keep the entire planet under a single time zone. A perfect global time system is born!

Sounds like a great idea! With the best of intentions. What could possibly go wrong?

I like being able to rotate 90° one of my screen because sometimes it’s just the best way to work.

PL setups are the best.

Your phone’s email app is a client, but I digress… I hate using the browser to access emails. I use many different email accounts with multiple email providers to compartmentalize my emails and avoid spam. I used Thunderbird for years before switching to Geary and now back to Thunderbird.

My first time trying to get my mother to switch from Windows to a Linux based OS wasn’t successful because there was too much friction and inconvenience for her, and she wasn’t willing to even entertain the idea of Linux for years after that. My second attempt was successful because Linux is much more user friendly than it used to be 13 years ago, and I changed my approach to make it as frictionless as possible.

Firefox just set to block 3rd party cookies + some basic extensions like adblocking and some easy privacy stuff is a good way to go about it, because it’s better than what she used previously and it doesn’t become inconvenient to her. She doesn’t know what an operating system is, or what cookies are… She just uses the computer to browse the web, emails, and light office work. She even says she prefers the current setup (though that’s because her old computer was chugging with Windows and runs smoothly now with a less bloated OS)

No need for noscript, deleting cookies, fingerprinting, or user agent stuff… Only introduce these to them if they express interest in privacy and are interested in learning more. If you try to thrust it upon them too suddenly they will just think “Linux isn’t a good user experience and is only good for tech enthusiasts and programmers”.

I’m so glad we have GN bringing these stories to light.

I am a staunch opposer to the death penalty, and believe no crime, no matter how severe warrants an execution, but I wouldn’t lift a finger to stop the execution of Nestlé executives because they aren’t worth a single calorie spent on their defence.

Interesting. I’ll try with a few different VPN points.

Sorry for the typo, I meant scraper. A web scraper is a tool to collect data from websites.

Never heard of it, thanks for the tip.

Noticed that. It used to be easy to bypass, because old.reddit.com allowed me to go there with a VPN, but they recently patched it. I found that changing the user agent to make it look like you’re on Chrome and Windows, alongside with US/Canada VPNs tend to get around this, but it isn’t very reliable.

Stealth used to work for a while, but not anymore either.

They are doing it to stop scrappers scrapers and punishing people who use a VPN is just a bonus to them.

What? I was talking about Vietnam, just because they are communist now doesn’t mean they will stay communist. I didn’t mean that Russia is communist now, perhaps I wasn’t clear in phrasing.

USSR collapsed and looks at Russia now. Just because they are communists now doesn’t mean they won’t become fascist in the future.

Can you trust it would stay that way? There is no such thing as immunity from fascism.

But when the death penalty is available, it’s not just the ultra wealthy who suffer. It’s far easier for the ultra wealthy to use their resources to frame someone they don’t like as a murderer or something and get that person executed. It’s even easier for the state to do that if they are corrupt enough. I’d much rather not give the state the right to sentence anyone to death at any point. Make these ultra rich criminals go to prison for the rest of their lives, make it unpardonable too.

Yes, people do escape, but it’s extremely rare. I’m far more worried about the state having the legal power to execute someone than an individual escaping from prison.

Also, giving the prisoner the choice to either be executed or imprisoned for life would give an incentive for the operators of the prisons to treat their prisoners even worse so prisoners would choose to be executed.

Point about escaping/pardon. I acknowledge that society is ever so slightly safer when exceptionally dangerous criminals are executed.

About the risk of being pardoned by a malicious state, it’s true… But the other way could also be true that a malicious state can execute people who don’t deserve to be executed, like Snowden… Perhaps a compromise is to make particularly heinous crimes unpardonable? That would be a decent alternative to the death penalty, and it would be very difficult to repeal such a law.

As for escaping prison, it’s already rare that someone escapes from it. The solution is making better high security prisons for the most violent and dangerous criminals. I think it’s definitely possible to make escaping so difficult and dangerous that it wouldn’t be a problem. Make a prison on an island or an old oil rig, implants to track the prisoner’s location (a fancier version of the anti-theft tags in clothing stores), random X-rays to check they don’t have anything hidden in their bodies. All of these are definitely better than executing someone, though personally I think that maximum security prison breaks are already so rare it wouldn’t be worth it.

If the person goes to prison for the rest of their lives, it will keep society safe from them either way. The death penalty is not making society safer.

Probably “We can ride the AI hype train and make loads of money, sell the start-up to a big tech company and retire”.