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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: January 9th, 2024

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  • I strongly hesitated saying anything at all b/c there are so very many different rules governing the behavior of every single kind of symbol. Though one jumping off point is the use of the parenthesis, without slashes prior to them and them meaning alternatives within a grouping context rather than merely “remembering”, for the sake of e.g. replacement or copying, so e.g. in the Unix CLI “grep” command this would not work even with the -e parameter (I am not so sure about perl-style though, or rather, this would work within pure perl, but perl-style regexps from within grep is another matter, plus that option itself is not universal across all forms of Unix).

    In any case, I hoped that the YoMama joke would be universally understood and appreciated regardless, across all of the many & varied language barriers 😜.



  • Fwiw, I agree with most of your message - blaming migrants for a disease is a cop-out, etc. - it is just that it has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with what I wrote!:-P (one potential exception is that they knew about hygiene from whence they came, but transitioning between climates e.g. from a very warm jungle area to one with a bitterly cold winter, could introduce a barrier, plus do not underestimate how many are literal children, whose parents may have done something like literally and physically dropped their children over the fence, then turned around and went back home, or possibly rather simply died of covid or whatever, either way thereby leaving their child to face the new area “alone” i.e. at the mercy of the people in this country to take care of such literal orphans) The rest went downhill from there.

    And fwiw, you basically were telling me the opposite of what you yourself seemed to be doing: I am supposed to think hard about how my messages will be received, and adjust my words accordingly, so as to get a better response - and in particular to avoid even the tiniest spectre of a potential misunderstanding? Okay, true but… pot calling the kettle black there? Also, all those pejoratives sprinkled in there - that I made a “mistake”, that I was putting forth a “cop-out” argument, that my idea is “racist”, that my thoughts are “frivolous”, etc. Except you did not even bother to verify that I even meant any of that in the first place - you basically triggered yourself, then reacted to that phantom in your head, the whole conversation having little to no involvement with my actual words, and then when that fact was revealed, rather than apologize you doubled down further and harder, as if the prior message did not exist, except also extending it further to say that was somehow still my fault that you went off like that.

    Meh, it happens though:-). The important thing is to learn from it, if you want your words to be something worth paying attention to. And yes, btw, I do acknowledge that I could have done better in my initial, one-sentence comment, regardless. It was very off-the-cuff, not deeply thought out about how others might perceive it (as the article we should have more rights presuming should have done, seeing as how it was an actual article). We both would do well to pause for a moment prior to speaking, to let our words mull over in our heads before blurting them out:-). In my case I could added simply something like “not that I blame them or anything, just coming at this from a diagnostic perspective”, or perhaps more along the lines of my later comments where I clarified that if I was to blame someone it would sooner be predatory landlords and the like. Although it is worth mentioning that there is zero possibility of avoiding ALL potential misunderstandings, especially on a topic such as this that generates such strong emotions in the readers of this article. Still, one more sentence (fragment) would definitely have helped.

    Whereas in turn you could do well to listen to your own message about how easily words can be misconstrued. You basically read the article and high on those emotions, used me as a dumping ground, for a topic that I would have agreed with and actively upvoted if you had made it clear that the target was not what I had said, but instead tangentially launching off of that to some other topic entirely, e.g. about the clickbait media’s inaccurate portrayal (except they never mentioned migrants iirc?). i.e. we could have been together on this rather than on opposing sides. It is something to think about, at any rate.

    As for why I brought up the topic at all, it is literally the chief and often sole job of anyone at all who works in any of the STEM fields to first diagnose an issue, prior to fixing it. e.g. if the majority of the new disease victims were children, then the response would take a different form than if they were adults. Similarly for whether they speak English well or not, or like… have access to a phone - e.g. if the “solution” is some kind of hotline that people can call to report rat infestations, then would children who don’t speak English and don’t have easy access to a phone be able to take advantage of that, to avoid the horrible conseuences of this phenomena? But anyway, you chose not to care about the reasons why I said what I said, and skipping the investigation stage entirely just jumped into your diatribe of why what I really meant (except that I didn’t mean that at all!) was bad. So perhaps I should modify what I said earlier: we both would do well to pause before speaking, but you also could add in a step to pause and listen. Well, you will do whatever you want, ofc, and I would not dream of trying to change you (b/c that’s impossible), but since you asked, that is my thought:-).

    Also, you are right to seriously question yourself, particularly if there is any way that you thought what you wrote was in any universe “non-confrontational”? Instead, I see that you have decided to now triple down on how this is all my fault, for failing to consider how you might interpret what I said inside your own head. Do you see…? Well, anyway, it’s something to consider. You know, I actually do get that - heck, I have been that - but also, I moved on, and I am much happier now as a result. You’ll find your way too, if you keep going (but since you asked, no, tripling down even harder even while making mouth-noises that you are apologetic does not come across as genuine, even if you actually were attempting to be thus).

    Also, you are doing it again - e.g. when you say “it is… partly your responsibility to understand how your speech is interpreted by others”, that is an obviously 100% statement, that once again has only the tiniest sliver of relevance to what we were actually discussing. I said ONE SENTENCE, obviously I did not put 20 minutes into composing an entire message about the topic. The context is completely different, b/t my comment about the article, vs. your reply to my too-brief comment.

    If you truly get any of what I am saying, you will not reply again and instead spend DAYS thinking about it - I don’t need to hear the entire back-and-forth of what goes on inside your head, it is not what I came to this article nor to the Fediverse for. It is probably too much for me to hope for, but I did at least offer a fully fleshed-out response to your questions, so my conscience is clear.


  • Yes, it is true - and extremely sad - that people on social media often immediately jump to the exact & opposite conclusion as is warranted from what I said, intentionally choosing to first misunderstand me and second to act upon that misunderstanding. But that is not fully on me, especially when I said one single sentence, that could have easily meant several possible things, and is thus at worst ambiguous and therefore neutral. You yourself did this, when you said that “your idea is not realy plausible” - i.e., not “if I understand you correctly, then I think that…”, but your idea, singular, as in one, single, interpretation, with none other possible. This is, if I am not mistaken, known as the “fallacy of extremes” where if X is true then surely there is no possible way that Y could not also be true, where Y is the absolute most extreme version of X, e.g. I dislike X, therefore X is like unto Hitler.

    And this is why conservatives dominate the internet. With liberals choosing to eat their own, we have to watch out for attacks from both sides, rather than merely the opposition.

    But if you truly were curious what I meant… you could have simply asked? Instead, you told, and despite being wrong, doubled down on it again, shifting the topic ever so slightly so as to maintain a righteous-sounding tone. Well, congrats I suppose, b/c your response did get the same number of upvotes with fewer downvotes (btw I never downvoted you) so… I guess you “won”? But let’s face facts shall we? We both lost here, by allowing the conversation to devolve to this level. I mean that somehow what is - or rather, at least might be - happening to immigrants has been entirely lost from our back-and-forth exchange.

    Kudos for at least caring about their plight though, that much I do applaud. I hope you think about this exchange and how you can improve your end, and I will promise to do the same.


  • I never said anything at all about “blaming” them, even if they did happen to be found at the center of this horrible situation. There are a lot of people who while sitting in the comfort of their mansions are very free to make a lot of choices - e.g. the Texas governor who sent them there under false pretenses - but recent immigrants, especially those fleeing persecution at home, are typically those least free and capable to avoid e.g. scams from a scummy landlord who may receive rent money in return for substandard housing where rats might be found.

    Also the article talked about a change after 2020, and the influx of immigrants who were promised to go one place but then somehow ended up in a city not of their choosing seems to fit that criteria of something different than the two decades prior to that where infection rates were low.






  • B/c he knows that he does not mean it, and his base knows that he does not mean it, but it still manages to communicate something regardless - “they bad”.

    Humanity today is genetically identical to those in ancient Greece, and many of us have spent less time schooling ourselves about how to e.g. avoid frauds than many of them did back then. ergo, “argument by authority” still works for us, as perhaps it did for them back then as well.

    Your presupposition seems to be that humanity should somehow get better over time? At least it seems to relate to a common humanist theme, but if we want to get better, it is going to require effort on our part to make that happen. (apparently, having access to the entire repository of human knowledge at our fingertips is not sufficient, for those who cannot be bothered to learn from it - either by reading or just sitting passively as videos with pwetty graphics do all the work of spelling it all out for us, yet still that is less fun & engaging to people who would rather watch shiny motor vehicles with ads on them drive round & round in circles)