The catarrhine who invented a perpetual motion machine, by dreaming at night and devouring its own dreams through the day.

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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: January 12th, 2024

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  • But there’s enough of a problem you can see even if you just start at Julius, which is what I was concentrating on in my previous comment. The parallels to Trump are terrifyingly on the nose.

    True that.

    Weirdly enough (or perhaps not surprisingly) I see the same here with Bolsonaro supporters; there’s a disproportionally high amount of them among classicists, even if humanities as a whole leans heavily to the left.


  • 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.




  • 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.





  • Upvoted as unpopular. I don’t know if I agree with this or not (on general grounds), it’s extremely complicated.

    In theory it’s completely OK to have a community for a restricted but non-private demographic, and often it’s how you avoid a crowd of “excuuuuse me, I’m going to debate the same stale points over and over, and I expect you to waste your time with me”.

    In practice we know that there’s a high chance that the community evolves into an echo chamber, of the dumbest type - that claps to convenient idiocy, but ridicules inconvenient truth.

    If it’s sensible to have a community like this, as well as the outcome of having it like this, depends mostly on the sanity of whoever is in charge of the comm.

    [Edited for subtle rewording. No change on discourse.]





  • 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.



  • 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.]