Walt J. Rimmer

Most people don’t actually know what logic is. I would ask him to define logic to see where he’s coming from. Because most people either don’t have a definition or if they do it’s different than the one the person they’re talking to has. But to do that, you’ll also want a definition you could explain to someone else going into asking the question.

You know… I was the last man to sleep with her.

• A frog, probably.

Twenty tracks? You whippershnappers don’t know how good you got it! When I was growing up, we only had eight!

USAers or United Statesians

Dontrio was the first that came to my mind.

Most things are probably fine, though Windows updates might do something funky or just put it back from where you threw out that trash.

But Edge is a different story. Microsoft in their infinite wisdom decided to make Edge, their web browser, essential for Windows Explorer, their file manager and desktop among other things, to function properly.

So if you get rid of Edge, things can get kinda fucky. I haven’t looked into if someone has made a workaround, I know that there are modified “debloated” Windows installs that do some heavy duty mucking about in there, but I don’t know if anyone’s figure out how to give Edge the ax without making your desktop freak out.

Started out as co-workers in a university work-study job, had a short relationship.

I mean, a union is simply a way for workers to organize independently from management. While it’s useful for countering bad management and things like that, that’s not its only purpose. And anyone saying that it is either doesn’t know as much about unions as they think or is anti-union while trying not to say as much directly.

That was one part of a whole that a never got anywhere near finding out the entire story. With that and her stories of being damn near abandoned as a child, it really worried me as to what might have happened to her that she never felt free enough to tell me.

I tried to explain, “Like, no, that’s normal.” And she was just insistent that it was not. I didn’t know about the believing herself to be half-succubus until later, but when I found that out, it kind of clicked into place that something happened to her and she just cannot believe that a normal person should enjoy sex the way she does. And that is… Really troubling.

I never knew my Set Theory professor was so against workers’ rights!

Sadly, with recent events, all I can think about with this is how Linus Sebastion would go on the WAN Show and say things like, “You don’t need a union unless you have bad management, and I never want my employees to need a union.”

His NAME is ALEX!

I don’t remember exactly how old she was, but we were in our last years of university (I failed out, she graduated) so she was definitely in her early twenties, 22-24, somewhere in there.

And, yeah, no, my amateur and as such meaningless guess of a diagnosis was also that part of the delusion was a need to feel special. She talked about how most other people didn’t know the truth, they couldn’t know the truth, because she had magic power that let her know things about the world that normal humans couldn’t. You get that sort of language in conspiracy theorists and other types of people who want to feel special, they want to be in on some secret that everyone else can’t be. So I’d say that’s definitely part of it. But I also think, especially with her believing in a third parent when she was initially abandoned by her father and effectively abandoned by her mother until her father got custody of her again, I think most of it stems from her trauma as a child. Even that need to feel special, with no real parental figure for many of her formative years (I don’t remember how old she said she was when her father regained custody of her), probably stemmed from that lack of anyone encouraging her.

But, ultimately, I don’t know. She didn’t tell me half of this stuff until we were breaking up. And I’m not a psychologist, and she very much needed one.

If you think horoscopes don’t make any sense, you’re really going to be boggled by its sister, numerology.

It really was. While there were bits and pieces of this that came up during the relationship, the bulk of this came out as we were breaking up. She had been abused as a kid, though I’m not sure the extent of that abuse. At the very least, she was abused by being effectively abandoned. She said she fended for herself, mostly eating canned food she got for herself through grade school, things like that.

I was upset for a while, she’s not someone I want anything to do with, but mostly I just feel bad for her. She was traumatized as a kid, she receded into a delusion to try and escape that, and her delusion came to define her to the point where she got incredibly defensive if you tried to challenge its reality. She had said that she tried therapy before but that it didn’t work because she knew better than the therapists how to deal with her problems, and I’m certain what that actually means is that they tried to talk her out of her delusion and she wasn’t having any of it.

I really hope she got the help she needs, but I sadly doubt it.

She didn’t just think she was a witch, which I was mostly OK with because religions are weird and stuff, so I thought as long as it doesn’t reach the realm of life-affecting problems, it’s a non-issue.

She also believed she had friends who were werewolves, she could do magic, the date of your birth determined your personality, because a planet was in retrograde good things were about to happen, vampires started the Red Cross so they could always have access to blood, and, oh yeah, along with her two mortal parents she also had an incubus second father and that she was half-demon and that’s why she liked sex when she wasn’t supposed to.

That… That girl needed some serious help, but claimed that she was well-adjusted and fit to help other people instead. Because, of course, she was also an empath…

Edit: I want to make something clear that it suddenly struck me I haven’t; with all this craziness that she believed, that young woman had her life a hell of a lot more together than I did or do. She graduated university while I flunked out, she found a job while I’m being rejected every time that I apply, she found a low-rent apartment to live in while I’m still living with my folks. Don’t get me wrong, girl had some trauma and had some problems. But she was contributing to society while I’m fucking around on the internet because I can’t seem to make anything of myself.

He didn’t call us idiots. He called us unempathetic. And I’d say that’s been a fair assessment of a lot of the internet. I know that when I was on Reddit, I’d read a lot of comments that were filled with entitlement, people feeling they were owed something especially if that something was free, and very little empathy. For how much Redditors (and now that many of us have fled to Lemmy to build a new social media life, Lemmings) like to criticize the, “They’re just lazy, I’m really struggling,” mindset, they sure do like to ask for free things but complain if people treat them the same way.

I mean, it is a thing. I’m not saying that you’ll agree that it’s a right thing or that it’s justifiable. I understand arguments against it. But it’s more along the lines of Peter Sunde’s stuff. Piracy which fights for freedom of information, against things like corporate secrets and abuses, things like that. One of the examples of ethical piracy has been using piracy to share news and media with blackout countries, nations that are banned from getting any media that isn’t state approved. I would call that kind of piracy ethical piracy.

Protest piracy is where you pirate something in protest of the people who would otherwise be making a profit off of it. There’s a reason why that’s not under the same umbrella. People can call pirating Adobe products what they want, but it’s not at the same level of trying to effect social change as ethical piracy reaches for.

I mean… Yes?

For most websites to be functional, they need to be moderated. If you let anarchy reign, it’s not some utopia like I’ve seen a shocking number of people online claim that it would be. It ends up with a lot of racism, hate speech, doxxing, threatening violence, illegal content being posted, users being harassed, and other terrible things. Most people won’t want to be part of a site like that because it isn’t accepting or welcoming, it’s a dumpster fire.

No one should have come into Lemmy.World and thought, “Huh, this is going to be true freedom! I’m going to start advertising selling cocaine!” Maybe they’d want to, but the site isn’t just anything goes. They’re trying to run it on the open web and draw in a stable community. To be clear, I’m understanding but unhappy about the decision to ban communities about piracy. But criticizing a website by saying, “I thought you said anyone could come in, so why do you have rules, HUH?” That’s bullshit!

Look at what happened to Gary Bowser. Dude basically ran PR on a website, but because he was the guy who they were actually able to find and get a hold of easily, he’s now on the hook for millions of dollars of damages that he didn’t cause to Nintendo.

I am disappointed in this because I think that there is such a thing as ethical piracy and protest piracy and that they’re important. But I also know that those things aren’t going to be stopped or even significantly hindered by one instance deciding not to host their content. And I understand the fear that comes with stories about how rights holders have gone after whoever the fuck they can when they’ve got a burr up their ass about something.

Should the admins of Lemmy.World be held liable for a community simply discussing piracy and not actively practicing it on the site? No. Would they be? We don’t know. It’s possible. And that’s what makes it scary. People who commit digital crimes often get hit with disproportionately harsh punishments. They’re sometimes treated like terrorists. It’s insane. And yes, it’s frightening.