“You plebs should know your place”

In Linux, if you run games with Lutris, you can have them sandboxed with your sandboxing app of choice (personally I use firejail) by changing the “command prefix” option in the configuration for the game (or setting it as the default in the global Lutris configuration).

Also Lutris defaults to a different Wine instance per game, so Windows-specific malware would only ever affect the wine instance of that game.

So if you’re worried about pirated Windows games might contain Linux specific malware meant for when the game is running under Wine (as Wine is just an adaptor, not an emulator or sandboxing layer) you can go as crazy as you want in blocking what that executable can access, all fully under your control.

For starters, the whole “Progressive” thing is an American concept born out of the American environment (with its very deep religious moralistic strain amongst a large fraction of the population) and does not really applicable to Britain because, at least until recently, they didn’t really have regressive tendencies.

Beyond that Labour hasn’t been Leftwing since Tony Blair took over in the 80s and started talking about it being New Labour - they’re Neoliberals and quite strongly so, so pretty rightwing.

What they did was performative Identity Politics like in the US: theatrics in the Moral space to make them seem different from the other mainstream party, rather than actually having genuine Liberal Principles.

Of late they even ditched that and seem to be trying to outfascist the Fascists.

If those “Liberals” were merely “queezy at the idea of direct intervention” they would simply remain neutral rather than arrest people for demonstrating against Genocide.

Their actions disprove their “we’re merelly trying to not take sides” propaganda.

By their very own actions and the kind of policies they defend, American and British “Liberals” are pretty damn close to Fascist, which explains their active support of an ethno-Fascist White Colonialist state mass murdering hundreds of thousands (on its way to millions) of people of another ethnicity to take their land.

Judging by New Labour’s absolute majority on 32% of votes cast with a turnout of 60%, you don’t need half of the electorate to collaborate, just a little less than one fifth.

You need much less than that if the point is merelly to screw up New Labour’s electoral chances.

New Labour are left of outright Fascism, not left of center.

As I see it, that’s both a problem of low self-confidence and passiveness (or maybe underdeveloped values).

For the first, we all have several qualities, but people often don’t recognize or value certain qualities, especially people driven mainly by what they think others value and hence who end up valuing pretty much just the qualities modern Society focuses on - namely Wealth, Beauty and Brains - which is a typical low self-confidence thing.

For the rest, as I see it, having some inherent quality that one was born with isn’t exactly something deserving of much pride because it’s not something one did anything to achieve. If that much one’s parents deserve the recognition for the “achievement”, though they didn’t actually do it on purpose, so maybe not even them. Having pride in being born with a high IQ makes about as much sense as having pride in being born in a rich family: it’s masturbatory ego stroking about one’s luck rather than a celebration of one’s successes.

Well, the point of Neoliberalism is to de facto destroy Democracy by making the powers controlled by voters (the State) be secondary to the power of Money.

I guess the end stage will be something similar to Feudalism, or maybe just Fascism (a number of very Neoliberal nations have of late become a lot more Fascist).

In the transition stage, the politicians are needed keep up the Theatre Of Democracy and distract the masses with ever louder shows of conflict around things which Money doesn’t really care about (hence the Identity Politics Wars).

Whilst I can’t speak in an informed way about Japan, I can about The Netherlands and they have been degrading in terms of quality of public services during the Neoliberal era.

Certainly by the time I left (about 15 years ago) the trend was well establish in that country of having Scandinavian levels of tax (but only for people, not for companies) and ever more American-level of public services. For example, they don’t have a National Health Service (instead they have Health Insurance) even though taxes there for individuals are significantly higher than in countries which do have one such as Britain or Portugal.

They also use to have a high level of public housing but haven’t been building much of it in the last few decades and now have a giant realestate bubble.

The Netherlands is a great example of how even countries which started with a higher level of policies geared towards the good of the many, have a decay of those over time as we get further and further away from the post-War era, especially during the Neoliberal years.

That requires political will to achieve objectives other than wealth maximization, or in other words a political philosophy other than Capitalism which, at least sometimes, is dominant over Capitalism.

The whole point of Neoliberalism from the beginning was eliminate those and make Capitalism the dominant political philosophy rather than just a trade philosophy, so almost 50 years into it the effects are all around us and painful to see.

In Capitalist nations, the further we are from the era of peak Unions and in general civil society movements (which was just after WWII) the slower infrastructure improves from one year to the next, something visible not just in trains but at all levels (even National Health Services for those countries which have them).

The same thing will happen in China now that they’re getting more Capitalist than Socialist.

It was never the Capitalist part doing the kind of improvements that benefit most people, it was the stuff outside Capitalism (that used it as a Trade Philosophy only) constraining it and guiding it for policy ends which were independent of Capitalism.

This slowing of improvements of course itself accelerated with Neoliberalism, since that stuff is mainly about making Capitalism the sole definer of policy, or in other words make Capitalism the entirety of politics, hence unconstrained and unguided by interests other than those of Money, so ever less policy was done for the greater good.

Capitalism is reasonably decent at optimizing Trade in the short and mid-term, but is completelly shit for non-Trade interests such as Quality Of Life, as well as for anything which doesn’t have direct and reasonably immediate action-consequence links such as situations where negative effects are very delayed in time (for example, companies enshittifying their products but keeping on going for years on the inertia of brand name) or emergent in nature (i.e. things that appear due to the accumulation of the actions of many actors, such as Global Warming).

People at the peak Dunning-Kruger point of intelligence - just above average intelligent enough to feel they’re “above” most people but not enough to properly understand the full nature of intelligence and its limits.

It’s my impression that people tend to be more attracted to the unusual, so if you’ve grown up surrounded by big booty latinas, they’re not as appealing as otherwise.

As far as I can tell, most people out there have expectations about high IQ people which are straight out of Hollywood films and wholly unrealistic, so best just leave then with whatever de facto impression of brightness they have about you than mention a number and trigger the “Mental Superman” expectations.

Also going around parading your IQ falls straight into the rule “the more a person brags about some great personal quality, the less strong it is” - if you’re really that bright, brave, strong, beautiful, confident and so on, there is no need to mention it since it’s generally obvious to others.

Maybe he has huge hairy balls?!

I seriously suspect they’re a psyops to help dissipate people’s righteous anger - people are pissed of a something, sign a meaningless petition on something like change.org, get their “I’ve done something” psychological kick and, having satisfied their need to do something, don’t actually go ahead and do anything effective.

Defusing the anger against injustices of the very people who tend to be more aware of what’s going on and more concerned about it, before it turns into action or even causes civil society movements to rise from the bottom up, is a pretty useful mechanism for established powers in those countries which peddle the illusion of freedom to their citizenry.

Look up the psychology of using “but” - in that sentence structure you were justifying the former with the latter, hence why felt the need to emphasized that those two things are separate and one does not justify the other.

As for cyclists being or not reckless lawbreakers, my experience of almost 2 decades in 3 different countries and about 5 cities is that most are not. However there are a few cunts out there spreading a bad impression on the general population about the rest of us by being reckless, so I am totally in favor that those cunts get cracked-down on hard, even if they’re not as dangerous as equally reckless drivers because they’re not riding anywhere near the same weight of metal at anywhere near the same speed - simple Physics dictates that a reckless cyclist is much less likely to kill somebody than a reckless driver.

Besides, cyclists who couldn’t care less about endangering others behave exactly the same behind the wheel of a car and at least in the West most cyclists are also drivers (and we’re all pedestrians too) so in general, that kind of person needs to be convinced to behave differently.

This isn’t the fucking “thin blue line” and frankly any moron supporting those cunts just because “we’re all cyclists” needs to sit down and have a really hard think about what they’re actually achieving with it.

Fair enough.

This article, however, is about New York, were none of that applies.

There is no justification for putting others in danger but then. It has to actually be applied to all otherwise it feels arbitrary.

Fixed it for ya.

There is no justification to put others in danger, period. That applies as much to drivers as to cyclists.

The unjust and an uneven application of the Law is an unrelated affair.

I’ve cycled in places like London, back when few people did it and the cycling infrastructure was basically non-existent and what little there was, were mostly tiny lanes painted blue on the side of the road with no actual safety from the cars and which tended to have cars parked on top.

People still didn’t cycle on the sidewalk there back then, even in places without cycling lanes.

The sidewalk is not a place for cyclists: it’s filled with people who don’t expect cyclists and fragile and highly unpredictable pedestrians like children and dogs.

In my experience cyclists are more likely to run red-lights in pedestrian crossings than in junctions and intersections, so they’re not endangering themselves, they’re endangering pedestrians.