obinice

As an American? Surely you mean as a proud member of the new American Protectorate of the Russian Federation, comrade?

APRF, got a ring to it!

Anyway better start being proud or it's off to Gulaganamo Bay...

You were the chosen one! 😭

Yeah but they're gonna rewrite the constitution, it's gonna be the best constitution the founding fathers will be jealous they didn't come up with this thing it's gonna be airtight and on the blockchain

I agree, I don't want my browser provider to collect any data on me at all, but if they absolutely must gather the absolute minimum system analytics stats or such they should NEVER pass it to a third party for ANY reason.

You make a desktop browser application, that's your job, to provide a portal to the world wide web, nothing more. Stay within your bounds and we'll never have any problem.

Yeah, it's such a depressing thing.

For a long time growing up I didn't even know what racism was. It existed and was there if you looked for it, but as a child it wasn't really taught to us, and if you don't experience something directly - and importantly don't have a brain that can easily understand the concept of hating other people based on silly random things like skin colour or where they're born - it can be easily overlooked entirely.

This works both ways though, when we were young we heard racist jokes and just thought of them as jokes. We thought the joke was for example making a little fun of the differences between people from different places, like their accents, in a light-hearted way that works both ways (like other people would make fun of our accents too, and its all done in a generally good natured way), but as we grew older and got a bit wiser we saw the differences between those "jokes" and the actual good natured sort of stuff.

When you can't conceive of that sort of hatred, you often can't see it even when it's presented in front of you wrapped up to look like something acceptable, I suppose.

Thinking further, on the one hand I'd say we weren't really taught very effectively at school what racism was until well into our teens, even though we were taught from the youngest ages to have a basic kindness and respect for everybody, etc etc. We were taught to be anti-racist basically, but weren't actually told that racists exist and what racism actually was.

I wonder if the lessons would have carried a little more understanding if we were shown the larger picture earlier.

Anyway, yeah. It sucks that people can't just ignore all the race/gender/etc stuff and just treat people the same.

We'd still find loads of reasons to hate each other :-P But it would based on our beliefs, actions and character, not stupid things like the colour of our skin or where we're from!

Ignoring whatever happened in the majority of your comment

I feel like this is some sort of sly insult 😅

Like, imagine having a polite conversation with someone and they respond with "ignoring whatever happened when you just opened your mouth,..."

Does this mean we can't be friends? But you're so well spoken and cool ):

Ignoring whatever happened at the start of your comment, that's fascinating! I assumed it was a biological test, silly me. I suppose I agree with the general concept there, I don't really want people who support genocide to be involved with anything I'm involved with, where possible.

Giving it some thought though, life isn't so cut and dry, someone who likes genocide might also live in my neighbourhood and share some of my beliefs about needing the bin men to come round more often, and thus we'd find ourselves allied at a local Council meeting or such, where preferably I'd not want them to be involved in anything I'm involved in, but in this case it'd harm my own cause to try to exclude them.

So, do you lock them out of things for that one belief - potentially weakening your own cause, or do you let them participate - thus diluting your opposition of the thing they support that you are against (e.g. genocide)?

I suppose it's a difficult question that we all must look inwards to our moral compasses and answer for ourselves.

P.S I looked up what gop means for those out of the loop, it means "Grand Old Party", which is another name for the current ruling political party in over the pond in the USA (officially called Republican Party).

Are Smelloscopes ok?

I wonder if it's English, or American English 😅

(Thank you for the tip by the way I had no idea!)

Fascinating and bizarre, has he published any print books on this subject that I could pick up?

What are we testing the purity of? The leaded water they're drinking?

( I don't actually know what a purity test is in this context, I can't imagine any scientific test that would establish how "pure" aka free from presumably negative contaminants a person is, nor how this could justify genocide at any scale even if it does exist? )

I mean... I guess if there's a test that confirms there's a 100% chance that a person and all of their offspring will become an existential threat to the rest of humanity (for example their bodies somehow produce a cocktail of deadly to normal humans and incurable highly adaptable and highly infectious pandemic level viruses which they breathe out continually)... Then I can see the argument for at minimum ensuring that horrifically dangerous mutant doesn't procreate.

But, like, you basically have to go into X-MEN mutant territory of biologically dangerous to human existence before I'll consider sterilising a person/group of people, or if necessary ending their lives.

In the real world there's never any reason or excuse for genocide. So, yeah, whatever these "purity tests" are, sounds like Scientology level crap to me.

Yes you're right, the government should absolutely make child rape jokes, if people get angry about it you should just ignore them. Of course. That's just wise government policy, it shows how highly respectable those in the government are.

I don't use Skype for business, I use it for the video calls and for the ability to have international VOIP numbers that I can ring from/to, and send texts and stuff.

Not sure what service I'll migrate to once this is gone, I guess I'll lose my numbers too :-(