barsoap
@barsoap@lemm.ee
- Comment on people trashing the self-service section of the post office 2 days ago:
Austrian and Bavarian gibberish indeed is the same, one tribe, different states. The rest of the sign isn’t in Boarisch though so in Bavaria you’d expect it to be completely in Standard German. Bundesrepublik Standard German, that is, not Austrian Standard German with heuer, Jänner, Paradeiser, and whatnot.
- Comment on people trashing the self-service section of the post office 3 days ago:
The green sign reads “Please don’t leave empty boxes here. Bring them to the bin outside”
No it doesn’t. It has a bad slogan in big font: “If we all unpack here, we can all pack up” (the idiom probably works if you squint hard enough). Then “Please don’t leave waste paper (carton) in the self-service-zone. Carry your empty package to the container. The environment will be just as happy as us”.
It does not say where the container is (despite the definitive article in English, it’s not implied that there even is one at location), nor does it have relevant information in large letters, just lots of fluff. It’s accessively passive-aggressive, trying to give the impression that it’s all polite while simultaneously ordering you around.
Here’s what would work: Big: “Waste paper container is around the corner”. Small: “Please. Thanks”. You don’t have to convince people, you just have to make it convenient and they’ll be happy to carry their stuff five metres instead of playing carton Jenga.
Also they’re using “Packerl” for package that’s probably Austria. Maybe Switzerland it’s not like I’m a specialist in southern gibberish. Also not enough yellow for a Deutsche Post shop.
- Comment on Einstein-Landauer culinary units 3 days ago:
There’s a better way: German flour types. They’re specifying mineral content, e.g. standard “white flour” is Type 405, meaning that when you pyrolyse 100g of flour, 405mg of ashes will be left. As the minerals were all in carbon solution before, and temperatures are low enough to not melt them into slag, you’re essentially left with single atoms. Close enough at least for an assumption. If you disagree I shall hand you a mortar.
Of course, that doesn’t specify everything. I suggest also measuring the released energy, then jot both numbers down on the complex plane. So you have joule-moles of flour.
- Comment on Polar bears 1 week ago:
It’s a category. All lines are arbitrary to a degree and “interbreeds and produces viable offspring” is not terribly arbitrary. You can have arguments around populations which could and would interbreed if they weren’t geographically distinct, you can argue about whether offspring needs to be viable no matter which way around the sexes of the parents are, or how large the percentage of viable offspring needs to be, but in the end, yep it makes sense to have a distinction somewhere around that bunch of criteria.
House cats and European wild cats are considered distinct species not because they’re genetically incompatible, but because they don’t interbreed – too many behavioural differences, and we’re not speaking about culture, here. So even if they could intermingle in theory in practice they don’t, so they stay separate, so they’re different species.
It’s kind of… a behavioural view on the genome? If you have a better idea, field it.
- Comment on GTA 6's delay doesn't mean the games industry's in trouble - it's already dead 1 week ago:
The Steam store is a nightmare for discovery.
It’s brilliant actually. I mean it’s still arguably a shitshow, but Steam is very good at letting shovelware sink to the bottom of their algorithms.
1000xResist was an indie title that was named GOTY 2024 by a few publications, but they only just crossed 100,000 copies sold about a week ago.
Not bad for a story-focussed adventure.
Sifu sold 3m, Baba is You about half a million. The game may be brilliant, the GOTY award may be perfectly deserved, still ain’t going to play it because it’s not my genre. “Story-focussed adventure” is like a quarter of a step above walking simulator when it comes to ludological complexity I’d rather read a book. That’s of course just me, for the general audience… well, it’s niche.
- Comment on Please consider supporting Lemmy development 1 week ago:
As for East Germany, would you mind stating how your thesis about the government taking an active role
If you read what I wrote, then you would know that I actually stated: a) the government didn’t do that and b) it prevented civil society from doing so.
(titles of your links)
West German Government Was Full of Ex-Nazis After World War II
So in the east.
The Purge of Lawyers after the Breakdown of the East German Communist Regime
…lawyers. Gregor Gysi is a lawyer, btw.
All in all you really don’t seem to be particularly knowledgeable about German history. You also don’t seem to be willing to investigate what I gave you, instead falling into a partisan “But SED good therefore they are right” (unironically) and “everything is the fault of the west”. Very predictable, very sad.
- Comment on Please consider supporting Lemmy development 1 week ago:
One proletarian has the strength of two average proletarians.
That’s a relationship to a crate or to barbells, not to capital or the means of production.
- Comment on Please consider supporting Lemmy development 1 week ago:
People claiming simply to have an “understanding of the cultural context” when speaking of the Palestinian Genocide often do so to avoid criticism for not condemning Israel.
Do those people also call out Israel’s annexations and settlements as illegal?
culturaly underdeveloped and are incapable of ruling themselves
Again: Your words.
I quite clearly pointed to the rooting out of Communists in the East and the regular fostering of Anti-Communists in the West leading to current conditions.
And I pointed you to actual literature. Read it if you don’t want to make a fool of yourself.
All this talk of “shutting off higher mammalian and human insticts” is more Idealism than anything else, it fronts the idea of “fear states” as a genuine mechanism when the fear comes with the fascism.
“Psychology is idealism” that’s a new one. The fear is used, imposed, as a control mechanism. Not just the obvious “do what I say or I hit you” but implicit “wouldn’t it be a shame if…” narratives making alternatives unthinkable. A teacher scolding, shaming a student for not answering quickly enough breeds a life-time of preferring ready-made answers over careful consideration – any ready-made answer: The preference is for answering quickly, not for agreeing or disagreeing with the authority figure. The affective layer of the mind is fine either way, all it wants is to not be shamed for saying “I’ll need a moment to consider”.
I’m being quite orthodox here, actually, what I’m talking about is nothing but the socio-psychological aspect of alienation.
Further, Communism isn’t to be grouped in with fascism and Capitalism, it’s diametrically opposed.
Granted. As far as “communism” means the real existing ML experiments it’s still the same fucking river, though.
and the approval of government in current Socialist states is high.
You know where else approval of the government was high? Nazi Germany. Poll numbers are a thought-terminating cliche, you can do better.
- Comment on Please consider supporting Lemmy development 1 week ago:
but retaining the same labor relations to the Means of Production.
So you’re saying that there’s no difference in things like capital access. “Same relations” implying “no difference, nada, zilch”. I don’t find that assessment compatible with the material conditions we live under.
- Comment on Please consider supporting Lemmy development 1 week ago:
Class instead is a social relation to ownership of the Means of Production.
And the managerial class doesn’t have that? Is it easier or harder for an MBA to get a loan to become a millionaire than it is for a worker coop? To furnish golden parachutes for themselves while leaving workers with not even the dole (heard of some nasty practices in the US, there, making people ‘quit without cause’ by bullying etc which would disqualify them from welfare).
- Comment on Please consider supporting Lemmy development 1 week ago:
Though, “understanding the cultural context” is often a dogwhistle, so you may wish to drop that language.
Really. Dogwhistle.
This is about things like inflationary use of the term Nazi, just as an example not even Die Linke calls the AfD Nazis – the agreed-upon term is fascist. That’s because culturally we’re careful about not diluting that term.
So when someone goes over to say feddit.org and posts about how “German police is all Nazis”, that won’t fly. Not because the absolutely left-heavy and German demographics of feddit.org fail to recognise issues with the German police, but because you just trivialised Nazi rule.
That kind of cultural context.
“culturally developed enough”
Your words. You seem to be right-out seeking terms that pass judgement. I suggest finding language that seeks analysis, instead.
Fascism can only be truly beaten by advancing to Socialism.
The psychopolitics of fascism are anxiety: Shutting off higher mammalian and human instincts by induction of fear states. Socialism is an answer to that, yes, but the KGB surely doesn’t help with the anxiety. All that paranoia, all that distrust, and policies which do not alleviate it but only deepen it. Psychologically, capitalism, fascism, and tankiism are different sides of the same socio-psychological maladaptation to human nature.
- Comment on Please consider supporting Lemmy development 1 week ago:
drag quite clearly has stated that “Marx was an Anarchist.” This is wrong.
Absolutely.
The insistence that managers make up a distinct class is more of an Anarchist thing than a Marxist one, as adopting such analysis would be similar to calling plumbers and elictricians their own classes in and of themselves, rather than substratums.
Plumbers are not in a power hierarchy relationship to electricians so that’s a strawman.
- Comment on Please consider supporting Lemmy development 1 week ago:
despite robust democratic control.
You might want to calibrate your democracy-o-meter. At the very least, not conflate a disagreement about degrees of democracy in some specific state with a disagreement on principles.
administrators of public property do not constitute a distinct class,
Ah. So not revisionist enough to acknowledge the professional-manegerial class, I see. I mean it’s not like the concept would break with Marxian analysis, it just re-analyses things with a more complete set of data points. So in this case you can choose between being a revisionist and giving up on materialism, I suggest the former.
- Comment on Please consider supporting Lemmy development 1 week ago:
Did you just call me a fascist Zionist. As far as opposing the genocide is concerned I haven’t been cracked down on – maybe because I understand the cultural context. The government itself, btw, has always considered Israel’s annexations and settlements outside of the 1967 borders to be illegal.
and looks down upon the people of East Germany as “stupid” and “compliant.”
They’re neither. What’s lacking is a cultural habit of self-rule. Complaining “why don’t the people on top do things properly”, that’s not compliant, that’s not stupid, but it’s also quite ineffective when you could run for office and do it better yourself.
The west’s denazification didn’t happen after the war, true – it happened '68, when kids started to ask their parents inconvenient questions. That never happened in the east. It could never happen in the east because the party insisted on its monopoly on politics.
Also it’s plenty well-documented of how the SED just didn’t bother to crack down on Nazi structures. Roughly 25% of SED members had a Nazi past, Plenty of boneheads starting in the 80s, later on they infiltrated the FDJ, in 1990 about 14% of GDR youth agreed with the statement “there were positive things about nationalist-socialist rule”. Have a wikipedia article to kick off your further research into the topic. Why is there only a German version? Because apparently noone outside of Germany actually gives a fuck about these things.
- Comment on Please consider supporting Lemmy development 1 week ago:
Well it certainly is capitalist if it’s not democratic. You can have public ownership and worker control, or you can have public ownership and a dictatorship of people who are not workers. Like, bureaucrats, apparatchik, the nomenclatura, etc. Or the army. Or whoever who’s not workers.
As such drag might operate under the Anarchist definition of state (which I, as an Anarchist, can’t stand, because in <currentyear> it just causes pointless misunderstandings), which more or less bogs down to “hierarchical control”, not “organisational structure of society”. The latter definition is something perfectly neutral, the former is the face of evil itself.
- Comment on Please consider supporting Lemmy development 1 week ago:
Gee that worked well in Germany didn’t it have a look at the polling results for the AfD.
Trouble being that in the east, antifascism was considered state matter, therefore, ordinary people did not get involved. In the west, it was a civil society issue. The SED de-politicised the population, “join the party and read the script or don’t get involved”, and now the east is severely lacking in civil society capacity to oppose fascism. Capacity to engage in politics in the first place, the east is run by West German politicians because East Germans just don’t bother to become politicians, they rather elect West Germans instead. And then they’re complaining that they’re not getting heard.
Nothing about what the Soviets did in the GDR was “taking fascism seriously”, unless with “take seriously” you mean “fertilise the ground”.
- Comment on Please consider supporting Lemmy development 1 week ago:
Nazi collaborators
…like Ukrainian Red Army veterans who fought the Nazis, but didn’t like Moscow calling the shots afterwards. I see you’ve drunken that age-old propaganda wholesale.
- Comment on Please consider supporting Lemmy development 1 week ago:
Marxist-Leninist
but I’m not a “State Capitalist”So you’re a revisionist.
- Comment on Firefox could be doomed without Google search deal, says executive 1 week ago:
I was talking about the foundation itself. And yes ever since the writing was on the wall wrt. google funds they’ve been putting more and more money in investments to make sure they can survive, as opposed to grants. Still keeping with the foundation’s mandate, though, e.g. all their VC investments into AI are the polar opposite of what the likes of OpenAI are doing. Kinda sceptical e.g. huggingface will ever turn a profit, much less a significant one, but it’s important to have them.
- Comment on Firefox could be doomed without Google search deal, says executive 1 week ago:
Firefox is a way for them to make money for their charitable projects. Always has been.
They’ve been opening secondary streams of income – also via Firefox, like pocket and stuff, but it’s unclear whether that would even allow them to keep developing Firefox. It certainly would mean that Mozilla doesn’t have any money left over to give to others which is their main purpose of existing.
- Comment on Firefox could be doomed without Google search deal, says executive 1 week ago:
If you actually had a look at their actual numbers, they’re a charity you know, they’re public, you’d see that the bulk of money is spent on charity. Mozilla has never been a charity to develop Firefox, Firefox has always been the breadwinner for Mozilla’s charity operations.
- Comment on Seriously Jesus, who was doing that for that to be added 😭 1 week ago:
You know what also doesn’t make sense? Not boiling chicken in milk. I can guarantee you that’s not the milk of the chicken’s mother. The “don’t boil a young goat in the milk of its mother” at least has a proper interpretation in the sense of “there were some people who did that and God came and God said ‘yo that’s nasty, stop it’”. Something about not using sacrifice as an opportunity to practice transgression.
In the end I think the Torah is just a tool for Jews to have something to argue about endlessly.
- Comment on Elon Musk's X lost 11 million users in the EU over the past 5 months 2 weeks ago:
The Commission already has an instance and the ECJ also has an instance. I didn’t find one for the parliament, they might not even want to have one but instead leave it to the parties. A parliament instance would amount to the EP president policing parliamentarian’s speech not just inside parliament but also outside of it, kinda iffy.
- Comment on What would this list look like for your generation? 2 weeks ago:
One refers to an indefinite and generic group, and it’s not a “they/them” in the sense that one does not exclude oneself from that group (it’s generic, after all). I guess universal quantification is close in meaning.
It’s a thing specific to English, or I guess Indo-European languages in general. All languages have first, second, and third person anything beyond that is non-standard. E.g. Finnish has a 0th person, “Infer who is meant from context”.
- Comment on What would this list look like for your generation? 2 weeks ago:
because it’s arguably a fourth person pronoun.
Even if you consider it a pronoun, which you’d then also have to do with “class” in “Class, please open the book to page 14”, it’s still second person plural.
Fourth person would be “One does not simply walk into Mordor”. “One does not address the fourth person”. I guess people got it mixed up with the 4th wall that’s why the confusion exists.
- Comment on So true 2 weeks ago:
French fries is the standard German pool food. Like, nowhere else do you see stands selling nothing but fries (with ketchup and/or mayo, of course). And they just don’t taste as good anywhere else, I guess it’s the chlorine in the air making the salt taste extra special without actually tasting more salty.
- Comment on Is water an acid or a base? 2 weeks ago:
The water molecule is amphoteric in aqueous solution
A water molecule in aqueous solution. How can you tell it’s being dissolved, or doing the dissolving?
- Comment on Dolphins Communicate with ‘Fountains of Pee’ 2 weeks ago:
What are the chances they figured out we’re trying to decode their speech and they’re trolling us?
- Comment on Transitioning in STEM 3 weeks ago:
In that specific case it might’ve been an answer to “Do you look at me differently now”, brains like to short-circuit like that, and not everybody is comfortable speaking for the tribe. “Does the tribe like me?” – “Well I do” – “Does the tribe?” – “I’m not the tribe”.
- Comment on Hollywood Is Cranking Out Original Movies. Audiences Aren’t Showing Up. 4 weeks ago:
Cinemas absolutely should be going semi-arthouse at this point in time. You don’t have to cater to a high-brow crowd to not constantly swim with the latest big-studio mainstream, plenty of people who’d totally go to a screening of Reservoir Dogs and you could actually make money off the tickets. Play it again, Sam.
That said I’m totally a fan of shoddily produced local ads. Like a (back in the day) 9mm recording of the interior of a local hair stylist and some cheesy dialogue so bad it could be from porn. Replace 9mm with a phone camera, same thing.
Also, throw in some student project short films. Do list the proper starting time, with a different starting time for the pre-show, “you won’t be bored if you come early and won’t miss anything when not”, avoids everyone rushing to their seats at the same time.
