There are gamers and there are gamers.
Some gamers prefer not to have the level of noise of a jet engine taking off right next to them to get a couple percent more frames per second on a game.
I would say there are at least two quite different markets amongst PC gamers who have different preferred balances between performance and the downsides of it (noise, heat, power costs), a bit like not all people who enjoy driving want muscle cars.
Lying and misportraying themselves in social media is nothing for a country were most people are fine with murdering tens of thousands of children because of their ethnicity.
This is nothing given the depths of their depravity.
Ah, the good old fallacy of justifying one thing with something completely unrelated.
One can just as easily use the same argumentative structure to claim that a delayed train on the subway is the tip of the iceberg which is the Worldwide Illuminati Conspiracy or that the wood in one’s wardrobe having a darker spot indicates it used to be a gateway to Narnia.
IHMO, if you just look at it like any other form of Tribalism (i.e. Political, National and even Sports) it absolutelly makes sense that people whose identity is a Religion (or a Political Party, Nation or even Sports club) cannot emotionally accept that those of “their tribe” are bad since one of the core foundations of Tribalism is exactly that “we” are good and it’s the “others” that are bad.
The massive and for them extremelly important mental and emotional construct of self-validation and self-aggrandizing such people have based on their identity as member of a tribe (all those “we members-of-tribe are something-good” beliefs) - often at the cost of personal achievement recognition or as compensation for lack of personal achievement - would collapse if they accepted that the basic axiom of “membership of the tribe makes/proves people good/superior” is not true, so at the most basic psychological level they’re driven to not question that axiom and to deny anything that might disprove it.
There’s Progress in Technology and Science, but Socially and Psychologically Humans have barelly changed in millenia.
I think people often people confuse Scientific and Technological Progress with general progress, when for Human Society in general it’s really more of a case of Same Monkeys, Better Tools.
(All of this IMHO)
I would say that mansplaining is an actual real phenomenon, sometimes directly so (guys that do believe they know better than women) and other times indirectly, in cultures were men behave in a more assertive and aggressive way than women in conversations in groups and take over the conversation, in practice creating situations were they’ve taken over explaining something which a woman in the same group is vastly more qualified to explain.
However the word “mansplaining” has been so massivelly abused by mysandrists cosplaying as Feminists (to the point that in the last couple of years the most loud and frequent use of that word was by said mysandrists making prejudiced statements), that now there’s a natural “bullshit!” reaction to anybody using it.
If you’re a mindless tribalist, the “tribe” it’s based on is the thing that maters the most, and for some of those their tribe or at least and important part of its identity is a specific religion (often it’s even a specific sect within a major religion).
If you actually use your brain for thinking (instead of just as a cranium filling mass that keep it from collapsing into a vacuum) then it is indeed irrelevant the religion The Handmaid’s Tale is based on.
Both of those things are the same: Liberal Politicians are just pro-Oligarchy (i.e. anti-Democracy) types cosplaying as pro-Equality using a highly hypocrite construct (not really Equality, which is equal in all dimensions, but rather one that only defends “equality” for some people or things and not for others, especially not for anything involving Wealth) and hence morally bankrupt.
PS: I wrote “Liberal Politicians” because a lot of normal people who see themselves as Liberals haven’t actually deep dived into analysing the ideology whose superficial slogans they parrot to discover its fundamental contradictions - starting by how it classifies people by characteristics they were born with (hence not of their choise and not reflecting them as people) and then treating them based on the prejudices one holds for or against the one of such classifications those people are deemed to belong to, as well as the whole "NEVER, EVER, EVER talk about Wealth Inequality and the inequality of treatment based on Wealth) - so genuinelly think they are defending a moral and ethical position whilst in fact being the useful idiots of the Neoliberals who just to divide the Left into a neoliberal-style competition were people, driven by Greed, fight against each other but claiming to do it for the “group” rather than for themselves.
Zeleneskyy voiced support to Israel right after 7 October and has been completely silent about the whole thing since.
Sounds a lot like how a lot of Jewish people (and not only Jewish people) reacted to it and subsequent events afterwards - they first saw Israel as a victim and supported it but over time changed their minds seeing what Israel was doing using that attack as an excuse and possibly as additional information about Oct 7 that was not straight out of the Israeli Authprities emerged.
It certainly doesn’t sound at all like a Zionist (for example Biden or most political leaders in Germany) have reacted: those have very vocally continued their “unwavering support” for Israel.
If Zeleneskyy morally supported the actions of Israel even once it became clear they had gone from self-defense to committing a Genocide, he would have kept voicing unwavering support for Israel, yet he has stopped talking about it altogether, and since Ukraine requires the support of the US and Germany, both countries were all main parties support the Israeli Neue Nazis and their Neue Holocaust, saying nothing at all is the smart balance he found between Morally being against the actions of Israel and doing what is best for Ukraine.
Good old German power elites: there has never been a Holocaust they didn’t support…
I lived in the UK back during Brexit and the only people who said that “the BBC is Leftwing” were the English Far-Right - in fact that kind of stuff started (or at least became “mainstream” enough to be noticeable) at around that time and then was picked up by the Far-Right populist side of the Tory Party during the Leave Referendum.
They’re a posh kind of Rightwing, so far more subtle than loudmouths like Farage, Boris Johnson and Trump, but it didn’t take me long after coming to live in the UK (a decade before Brexit) to notice how much to the Right they were (not even Center-Right) from their fawning coverage of the Monarchy, almost invariably positive spin on the “upper” classes and the ultra-wealthy and heavy nationalist take on all foreign affairs (they almost invariably spinned it as “other countries are listening to Britain” when the same news in foreign media barely if at all mentioned Britain).
Certainly the core message from the BBC was always that “the System is good as it is, be proud of it” and “don’t make waves”, in a country which is highly unequal and has pretty low Social Mobility when compared to the rest of Europe.
Also remember how, well before they had any meaningful impact, the likes of Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson got way more airtime in the BBC than, say, the leader of the Greenparty.
Brexit didn’t happen by chance: the fields were Far-Right Nationalism flourished had been long plowed by amongst others the BBC.
But, but, but … the propaganda bot here keeps telling us the BBC is Leftwing.
How could they be Leftwing and have a bias in favour of ethno-Fascists, the farthest Far-Right there is?
Surely the BBC employees are wrong!!!
After the Emissions Scandal and an estimated 10 thousand excess deaths a year in Europe because of diesel emissions: Fuck the European Auto Industry.
Their dragging of feet on moving to EV technology is also disgraceful.
And don’t get me started on the over-reliance on cars in most of Europe.
All in all, they’re a negative for Europe, not a positive, and if they can’t compete with the bloody Chinese, well, let the Free Market they so love for everything else do a little Constructive Destruction on them,
People generally do it because they’re in a political party, plus you get paid for it though I think it takes many months for it to come in (never really worried enough about it to keep an eye out for that money coming into my bank account) and it doesn’t add up to much per hour for what’s a really long day (from about 6 AM to around 10 - 12PM depending on how long it takes to count the votes of one’s polling station).
It’s an interesting experience if a bit tiring.
It’s the most boring thing of the technical side of the job especially at the more senior levels because it’s so mindnumbingly simple, uses a significant proportion of development time and is usually what ends up having to be redone if there are small changes in things like input or output interfaces (i.e. adding, removing or changing data fields) which is why it’s probably one of the main elements in making maintaining and updating code already in Production a far less pleasant side of job than the actual creation of the application/system is.
Yeah, ok, I agree with that.
On first sight (because clearly the word “Palestine” has triggered him and he’s only assaulting people who are chuggers for the UN aid agency) seems to be a violent Zionist nutter (and the violence too is consistent with being an ethno-Fascist), but what we see in that video is not sufficient for people to be certain of it, only at most to think it’s likely.
Context in this situation would only matter in the size of the sentence in a Court of Law.
His action were straighforward Assault, a Crime.
As I said, it’s the transition from words to violence that make it Assault.
Further, you can see him using violence against a guy who is just standing there and not using violence against him (the head butt) as well as against a guy who is actually trying to escape him who he tries to trip and pursues into the store, all of which are most definitelly Attack not Defense.
And all this is assuming you can’t just read the body language of the guy and the other people around him - you can easilly see the others are cowering and he’s attacking not defending himself.
Last but not least the thing that triggered him was clearly the word “Palestine” as shown by him threathening other people with death if they say that word.
You’re doing Narnia-levels of fantasising to excuse a guy who is acting in a pretty straightforward violent bully style and who is triggered into violence by the word “Palestine”, which is not normal unless that person’s a Neue-Nazi.
That doesn’t apply to the people at the shop.
It’s in the best interest of the shop to stop this kind of thing ASAP so they’re far more likely to call the cops if there’s an altercation at their door that’s even going into the shop.
Further, it also depends on the kind of country.
I lived in the UK: it’s far more violent as societies go and far more prone to “I don’t want to get involved” behaviours than other countries in Europe. I’ve seen the way people respond to the same situation in for example England and The Netherlands and it’s very different.
Don’t assume that what you see in Manchester is representative of what you would see in Paris, and definitelly not of what you would seen in Northern Europe.
It’s not a question of “instigation”, it’s a question of transitioning from offensive words to violence, plus the actual issuing of death threats.
Unless you think the UNICEF people (all of whom are smaller in stature) started the violence, this guy is the one who started the violence which in a normal society is the kind of things that criminals do. Him chosing death threats (literally “I’ll kill you!”) rather than non-deadly threats is also highly abnormal (well, maybe not in his society) in that is far more extreme than even a common violent drunk would do (at least here in Europe).
In your group effort to excuse the actions of this guys, you just come out as desperatelly trying to hammer a square peg into a round hole.
Same here and for me too it was gaming holding me back, though I mostly buy my games via GoG hence use Lutris and it’ve had a pretty low rate of games that won’t work at all (and, curiously, one of them which won’t work in Steam works fine if I use a pirated version with Lutris), though maybe 1/3 require some tweaking to work properly.
It’s also interesting that by gaming in Linux with Lutris I can make it safer and protect my privacy because Lutris let’s me do things like run the game inside a firejail sandbox which I have set up as default for all games including disabling network access for the game.
Still have the Windows partition around just in case, though the only time I booted it in the last several months was to clean up some of the stuff to free one of the disks to make it a dedicated Linux disk.