• 2 Posts
  • 127 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 8th, 2023

help-circle








  • Thus using “race” is biologically ambiguous and “ethnic groups” should be preferred, however it is still very well socially defined.

    “Ethnic group” is an anthropological category, not a biological one. The correct biological term is “subspecies”, which Wikipedia defines as “populations that live in different areas and vary in size, shape, or other physical characteristics (morphology), but that can successfully interbreed.”

    Using “race” in a social context makes sense and is far from being racist.

    Given the history of its usage in that context, I have to vehemently disagree. Plus it is so ill defined that it is a useless term anyway. From Wikipedia again: “[…] various definitions exist. Sometimes it is used to denote a level below that of subspecies, while at other times it is used as a synonym for subspecies.”

    Using it invokes all the Social Darwinism and whatnot that the Nazis and others abused it for. So where is the sense in using it exactly?


  • Instead it’s a couple little boys peacocking around bragging about how masculine they are to a captive audience.

    Uhm, well there was a lot of that stuff, but Hegseth spoke for like 45 minutes and inbetween the usual incoherent rambling and machismo, and the book plug [!], there were some actual important announcements thrown in. Internal investigations is to be gutted, records of wrongdoing will be expunged, “DEI” purges will continue, and a whole lot of “you can do whatever the fuck you want now, we will back you” messaging. This was a rallying cry to the fascists in the audience, and I fear there is a subset that will act on it.

    Haven’t made it through the entirety of Trumps speech yet, but most of the first ~20 minutes have been his usual meandering.

    Edit 1: Heh, nice Freudian slip a bit later into Trumps speech:

    That’s why I chose ‘razin’ Caine. He’s fantastic, by the way. I hope you all agree. If anybody disagrees, could I please have your hand? Who disappears that ‘razin’ Caine is no good? Just raise your hand. *inhales* I don’t see any hands raised.



  • […] "And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.

    "But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Informal groups become smaller; attendance drops off in little organizations, and the organizations themselves wither. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to—to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then you are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.

    "But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

    "And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. […]

    Excerpt from the book They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 by Milton Mayer. Longer excerpt available here.




  • Not familiar enough with this particular project to know, but a quick glance at the commit log shows some overlap in commit authors, so I guess there is at least some level of sharing happening, probably just not through merges.

    But being familiar with this kind of project in general, the branches will probably never be fully merged even in the future, just doesn’t make much sense because they are server software targeting very different versions of a game client. There are also two other branches, but they “only” diverged by like one or two thousand commits so far.





  • Well I for one (not GP) am actually quite glad that it is literally illegal to publicly display here in Germany, especially with the current political climate going on here and elsewhere. You want to just out yourself as a Nazi? Okay, off to prison you go. That’s good. AFAIK there are exemptions for temples and such, e.g. for artistic uses like Games, some Wolfenstein games replaced swastikas in the German release because nobody was sure if that’s legal.

    I don’t think it is actually illegal to display in any country that has a lot of people using it religiously, but yeah it’s a sad fact that it still has to be illegal in so many places such a long time later.