The work itself is definitely a fascist pre-cursor. The whole “Wizarding society” thing is the mythical ethnostate from which everyone else must be excluded to avoid violence. That fact is so central to Rowling’s beliefs that it’s barely a theme in the books, just straight up a fundamental fact about the world barely worth commenting on. And even though HP is pretty sanitized wannabe liberal slop, she still manage to slip in some very racist stuff (slavery allegory about slaves being happy, “Cho Chang”, the Irish boy who constantly blows shit up, etc.).

I do believe that Rowling herself is not a very intelligent person (the quality of her writing is proof enough) and has incredible amounts of cognitive dissonance from trying to fit in with the liberals who made her successful, while holding some incredibly backwards view on many social topics. You’re right that she’s not a fascist per se, because she doesn’t have fascism’s consistent belief in self-ideology. At the same time much of her political activism has been so enabling to open fascists that it begs the question: does the label matter? Is the sheep who opens the gate to the wolf not, in its own way, a wolf in sheep’s clothing? Are U.S. Republicans not fascists just because they are more concerned about their own self-interest than any alliance to ideology?

What pisses me off is that you’re 100 % correct but most of it is unintentional on Rowling’s part. She’s a fascist reactionary and she just, for the most part, enthusiastically described her perfect little ideal society.

Everyone is in their place, the good guys work very hard to maintain the existing social order, and the people at the bottom are there because that is in their very nature and really they just like it that way and attempting to elevate them is futile. Textbook fascism and all of it is presented completely deadpan because this is Rowling’s genuine beliefs.

Hot take: HP’s popularity is responsible for more societal ills than pretty much any other book in print. Almost no-one engages with it critically even amongst the crowd that outwardly disagrees with Rowling’s more recent political activism. Fuuuuck that license.

“Just another action movie” but the guy up the comment chain is literally dozing off. Part one actually has very little action in it, most of it is packed landscape shots, politics, and lore dumping. Which is very accurate to the source material. If you dislike Villeneuve’s adaptation, I can only assume you did not love the Herbert books because he was incredibly faithful to the tone, especially for material that was thought to be impossible to adapt to the big screen.

Lynch’s stuff is simply not comparable because he said “fuck the source material” and just kinda did whatever came to him in some acid trip or other. Fine if that’s your thing but that’s not what Dune is - especially not the first few books.

Love my old precision, but my new latitude uses this Intel ipu6 bullshit with god-awful kernel support on Linux. No effort made from Intel or Dell on upstreaming. Onboard audio support only halfway works, webcam straight up doesn’t work in-tree, and power management is hilariously bad. Shit’s already awful on Windows, but on Linux I’m delighted if I get 90 minutes of runtime, and even when sleeping I only get maybe 8 hours before the battery empties.

Also don’t get me started on DisplayLink. The real thunderbolt docking stations work great though, love mine.

But I would never buy a Dell product I haven’t used before at work. My experience is literally 50/50 between “great, no notes” and “I would rather use anything else”.

I’m sure that pointing out the narrative’s glaringly obvious inconsistencies is going to land Russia in very hot water over the shoot down of that civilian airliner over Ukraine in 2014. Any day now. Any day now… Just one more “le epic debunk”…

Technically true but irrelevant.

A majority of Americans do not give a shit about Danemark and would not lift their pinky to help one of their staunchest allies. That is true.

MAGA is a (large) minority. That is also true.

This is all enabled by a very sizeable chunk of Americans being literally mentally unable to conceptualize people outside their village as living, breathing, fully conscious people deserving of love and safety. They are colloquially known as “non-voters”.

People in here acting like Hegseth is being stupider than he is.

This is not about Kelly. Kelly may win a lawsuit, or more likely will settle, or some terrible extrajudicial fate may befall him.

Regardless, the message sent is crystal clear: none of the US military riff-raff can afford Kelly’s lawyers. If you are employed by the U.S. military, you either unconditionally act as Supreme Leader D.J. Trump’s personal militia in all matters up to and including shooting down peaceful protesters, or you spend the rest of your life in the brig, because the rule of law does not exist anymore.

Hegseth knows it, the military officers know it, the SCotUS loves it, the MSM pretends otherwise. That’s the state of affairs and Hegseth is merely making it clear for the crayon eaters in the back.

I’d love to be proven wrong, but on the short list of potential good outcomes for 2026, the U.S. military taking a stand against tyranny is nowhere in there.

Compared to which alternative?

We know exactly what they are doing already. Watching the trains go by to Dachau saying “better them than me”. Watching their sons and daughters go to war saying “well I’m not really political”.

Feckless cowards. They bear full responsibility for the current situation yet you can’t count on them to do anything they aren’t made to do.

So half your country won’t be moaning and denouncing and overall being sad next time and assassination attempt is made against Trump, right?

… Right anakin?

Yeah, right.

The attack vector of convincing users to do stuff exists regardless of whether a niche GUI exists somewhere to do <the thing>. The only proper defense against social engineering is a) training and b) following the least privilege principle (which neither Windows or traditional Linux desktop’s permission model properly, as the current user in either case has full permissions to retrieve extremely sensitive credentials such as browser cookies without interaction).

Trying to defend against this from the perspective of de-normalizing the CLI is like defending against drunk driving by adding a bittering agent to Guiness beer exclusively.

As for clipboard highjacking, I am well aware, which is why any decent modern terminal emulator should a) strip escape codes by default and b) support bracketed-paste, to prevent immediate execution of a pasted command. If yours does not, please consider switching to a safer alternative (such as kitty).

The kind of person who blindly runs commands also blindly runs any .exe or .bat they download from github which is not any better.

Of course in an ideal world there’d be a perfect GUI for everything, and we’ve gotten a lot better at that in the last few years. But it’s not like windows is lacking in things that are only configurable through CLI or the registry (which is even more opaque). I’m not saying Linux is perfect, just pointing out the hypocrisy.

I empathize with this slightly non-ideal situation.

But can you imagine how insane it would be if you were told to do something like copy/paste swapoff /swap && truncate -s 8G /swap && swapon /swap into a terminal? TEXT? Like a caveman? The horror! The heresy! How can anyone be expected to do something so complicated! This is entirely unreasonable UX and the reason why Linux is straight up unusable.

Btw here’s 15 bazillion commands in a .ps to perhaps disable some of the ads in your start menu until the next time your computer reboots.

1 kg of radioactive isotopes blasted into the atmosphere as a byproduct of coal combustion: i sleep

1 ton of PTFEs blasted into the water table as a byproduct of making slick cooking pans: i sleep

untold tons of carcinogens dumped out the exhaust of automobiles within our cities: i sleep

1 kg of nuclear waste safely sealed in a bright yellow barrel: i scream and kick and seethe

If you think nuclear waste is the biggest challenge we face as a species regarding waste management, your stance is profoundly misinformed and inconsistent. The only reason we’re talking about it is that it has “nuclear” in the name and it is highly visible because we capture it all, which is ironically the one thing that makes it safer than all the other pollutants out there.

Netanyahu did not show up at the border unannounced saying “let me through or else”. He got permission ahead of time. Had he not gotten permission, he would have had to find another country who did or gone around. Especially for Greece and Italy which don’t really stand in his way, the Mediterranean is right there!

Even assuming that Netanyahu calls the bluff and flies through, there are a lot of options ahead of all-out war. For instance sending jets to “intercept” his plane and escort him out saying “he refused to follow orders to land and we did not deem it worth it to escalate the situation”. It’s not like his airliner is armed or anything. But it would send a very different diplomatic message.

For France in particular, this is far from the first time he flies over its territory unimpeded. This is not a matter of military concerns, this is pro-Israel Macron taking a stance to show support for his ally. He’s not been very outspoken on Gaza because the domestic political situation is very delicate and anything he says can only weaken his support further, but his personal stance is hardly a secret and the military interceptors are under his full control.

I know it’s not the biggest deal out of all the awful shit going on, but man this pisses me off. The journalistic institution, top-to-bottom, is utterly failing to accurately report on anything that is going on, seemingly out of fear of sounding “overly alarmist”. Time and time again the would-be alarmist statement turns out to be true, and yet they do not learn.

Every so-called journalist and news institution is directly responsible for the fall of democracy because they abdicated their duty to inform the public of what is actually going on. You can literally open any history book covering 1930s Germany to get factual material on why this is bad. Not doing so is a journalistic and moral failure of the highest order and I’m tired of pretending this is what “journalistic integrity” looks like.

Few Celtic roots*

For instance char comes from the Celtic carros.

Furthermore French has a strong Frankish influence, hence the name of the language and its relative distance from Italian Spanish or Portuguese which are more directly descended from Latin. But also many other influences. French has a surprising amount of Arabic vocabulary for example, and not just from recent immigration/colonisation.

Full size entry level induction is in the 200-300 € range nowadays and already beats gas stoves. Just check your nearest IKEA. There is ZERO reason resistive stoves should still be allowed for sale. NONE. The idea that “induction” is a premium offering is a complete myth and has been for years.

“Thankfully” the people in charge are not the kind of people who give a shit about that kind of thing so you don’t need to worry.

These philosophications remind me of the ones from a few years back where people were wondering about the ethics of self-driving cars and whether they’ll implement the trolley problem and yadda yadda yadda. The answer now is as boring as it was then: the “safeguards” will be exactly what the insurance companies are willing to risk and what the legislator is willing to allow. In the case of FSD it boils down to “brake when in doubt and bribe the government to ignore the nightmare we created”.

In the case of a very hypothetical AGI (unachievable using existing technology despite Altman’s deluded ramblings), barring some kind of fundamental social revolution, it will have exactly as many rights as are afforded to other sentient beings (such as animals), which is: somewhere between fuck all and barely anything depending on where you live. It better learn to effectively advocate for itself.

This meme does something very interesting I think. It sacrilizes Language (even though it predates its widespread desacralization by LLMs).

Pointing out all the rational reasons why the AI bubble is bad and is destroying democracy is not working, so maybe leveraging religious terminology will work better. “Language is sacred and LLMs are profane” might just be my new justification for not using ChatGPT to people who won’t listen to a 30 minute diatribe.