I just mean that I can understand where it comes from when someone is already close to their breaking point, and I think most people are about there. They’re not consciously deciding to bury their heads, because making a decision requires too much inspection to actually ignore it. Often when I was beaten down it’s like my mind selectively blocked out information as a means of protecting me, but I remained in denial about that until I started really getting out of the hole. I’m not sure I’d equate them to Trump supporters in a broader scope, but I do think the lack of inquiry here is not too different from Trump supporters.

I also think that with more animosity towards regular citizens, the more the conversation shifts from the powerful to the powerless. The impact of one citizen changing their mind is wholely insignificant compared to what a politician changing course would do.

I see that there’s no apprehension of “Prevention is better than cure”. You cannot wave away problems because they’re only going to return worse than before.

I’m not smart enough to piece together what you’re saying here. Prevention or cure for what? What does prevention look like? Why should we be apprehensive, it sounds like a reasonable statement?

There’s also demeaning people who see the atrocities for what they are and want to create awareness so they can minimize it. But are shamed for it.

I do feel this point and I’ll admit I’ve had many infuriating interactions. Now I try to just ignore until I cool down, because once I do it’s like this asshole isn’t worth that much thought. I have a limited amount of time to be angry, that’s better spent on the people who actually could make a meaningful difference by taking a stand.

To be clear, -Qm displays installed packages not currently in the repositories. This will include AUR packages, but I avoid the AUR (except for davmail years ago) every once in a while I’ll run it just to check and sometimes it finds packages.

When you install things from the main repos the dependencies get installed too, and if those dependencies are no longer needed they’ll be removed from the repositories. (I also have a bad habit of forgetting --asdeps when installing optional dependencies.) Sometimes they’ll conflict with a new dependency and pacman will ask to remove and replace them, but other times the functionality has become a part of an existing package, so with no conflict to prompt removal they’ll just sit unused on your install. If you haven’t tried -Qm in a long while you’ll probably find a few harmless currently-unused packages that were installed through the normal repos. (-Qdt will cover the other cases where dependencies remain in the repos but are now only needed for packages you don’t have installed.)

Obviously -Qm will also show removed packages that aren’t dependencies, a few years back my preferred pdf viewer was removed from the repositories.

-Qm will also find manually installed packages that aren’t in the AUR if you ever do that.

Gonna disagree with some of the crowd here and say I think those people typically aren’t bloodthirsty/supportive of war. They’ve never believed many examples of inhumanity have been direct consequences of democratic leadership, and some (I have the Gaza genocide in mind here) they’ve never believed existed at all. They’ll see an “expert” voice an opinion that they’re already inclined to believe at present. The “expert” authoritatively cites evidence that they’re not familiar with, so seems legit enough. They’re not going to trust you to have knowledge the “expert” doesn’t, but they’re not interested in holding the discussion with you because they don’t carry the mythical knowledge that would win them the argument. They concede the point ahead of time to avoid conceding after a debate that didn’t convince them. It’s not forgetting, it’s pretending that they agree with your assessment.

A huge factor is how detached we are from atrocities that don’t touch us. I really believe that if one of these people had a friend or family that were affected by this, they would think a lot more deeply on culpability. I lived in Dearborn during the last election and I didn’t get the sense that muslims there were more likely to abstain from voting (or vote third-party) than non-muslims. I know this is partially a function of who I was talking with (mostly academia), but I’m convinced that a big factor was that all of us knew someone in our personal lives that had been emotionally injured by losing family.

There’s a good argument that ignoring atrocities is a moral failure, but I think most of us can relate. There are so many evils in the world today that if I actually spent time to think on even a fraction of them I think I’d be in a mental institution. That recent exposé on the dogs that were trained to rape prisoners, I can acknowledge it’s almost certainly real and that saying otherwise would be an injustice to the victims, but in my heart I don’t actually believe it happened because I don’t feel capable of managing the emotions that would come with accepting it. If you’re already overwhelmed by other aspects of the hellscape you live in, at some point reacting to horrifying headlines by throwing up your hands and booting up a video game becomes a survival strategy.

What does it even mean for one person to be 50% more intelligent than another person?

Yep, and if they drop back below that threshold it will automatically rejoin the list. One instance holding the majority of the userbase defeats the purpose of federation, setting a cap at (IIRC) 30% for this is healthy.

Long ago I used XMPP to chat with a few people, and when google chat came along suddenly I could instant message with a ton of other people in my life. Google later defederated and I was too stubborn to get a google account and it felt like XMPP died overnight. The people I had originally been talking with logged off when that happened.

People go where other people are, and if most people are on one instance and the admins restrict federation, there’s a lot more inertia towards people without access joining the big one than there is towards their existing userbase leaving. Speading out the userbase of a federated network is decentralizing power, which is the entire appeal of federation.

how much are you paid?

I don’t remember exactly, but I remember feeling insulted by the stipend because I spent more on parking in downtown Detroit and had no means of transportation into the city other than driving myself. I had such a hard time finding cheap parking spots within reasonable walking distance of the court.