They always release their “Creation Kit” which is apparently also what the Bethesda employees use to build the quests and NPCs in their games:

• https://store.steampowered.com/app/1946180/Skyrim_Special_Edition_Creation_Kit/
• https://store.steampowered.com/app/1946160/Fallout_4_Creation_Kit/
• https://store.steampowered.com/app/2722710/Starfield_Creation_Kit/

.

The Starfield Creation Kit was only released a week ago (but I think to remember that there was a big delay in its release for Skyrim and Fallout, too - haven’t done any modding since the Skyrim days).

I think this aspect of far right recruitment is the same everywhere: Wealth disparity and a strong, negative news cycle drive people to anything that claims to be against the established order.

And despite all of this being a direct result of 40 years of ring wing policies (Reagan, Thatcher, privatization, deregulation, etc.), they successfully pinned it on liberals the the left at large and declared those to be the establishment.

It is all too easy for someone wanting to rebel against the existing system to fall into the hands of this far right “counter-culture.”

I scrolled across that comment (and it was here on lemmy.world or at least an instance it federates with). The sheer amount of fascist tropes this commenter lines up is surreal.

I would also like to nominate that tankie for second place who argued themselves into a corner in one of those “dOn’t VotE beCaUse gEnoCide” meme posts and stated with utter conviction that he will only be satisfied if the US uses their military to stop Israel. Might end up being the same user, though :)

I liked that about the comic.

Our society has adopted this expectation that once a relationship has turned into love, it must remain that, and if its not eternal soul mates in total devotion, it’s not true love. You’re not allowed to dial it down, take a break from it or return to being friends, or it’s a “failed” relationship.

The message of the comic subverts this, showing that without such baggage, you could just change the relationship to something else and still be happy.

Instead, we assume from the beginning that the relationship is forever, throw our households together, and when the point would be right to return to normal friendship, we force ourselves to stick close until we can’t stand each other anymore.

I’m the weird one in the room. I’ve been using 7z for the last 10-15 years and now .tar.zst, after finding out that ZStandard achieves higher compression than 7-Zip, even with 7-Zip in “best” mode, LZMA version 1, huge dictionary sizes and whatnot.

zstd --ultra -M99000 -22 files.tar -o files.tar.zst

Thanks for bringing this up, it’s really needed.

Your example is just one of many I’ve seen. The entire instance seems to be engaged in an opinion shaping campaign where only this gross mix of Western doomerism with Russia/China-glorifying fascism is allowed to thrive.

I don’t know how to best deal with such indoctrination chambers. Their members become completely divorced from reality and there’s no way to pull them back from the brink because anything you could say to that effect gets moderator-deleted. Yet vice versa, they can freely spread their propaganda and engage in “raids” on other instances.

My pet theory/explanation is that, the more people see things go wrong in society (or, rather, believe them to), the more they tend to become contrarians. They look for views and beliefs that are opposite to what people in authority say. It seems to be built into us, like a tribe of stone age people will question their leaders’ methods and decisions after a row of bad hunts and then desire to hunt in a new place, at a different time, using different techniques.

Modern information warfare appears to use that idea centrally. The far right has been indoctrinated to believe that the “establishment” they rebel against is left wing and that a hard turn towards right wing politics is needed. After Trump won in 2016 and they were officially in power, they splintered a bit until they found a new lore: “actually, we’re still being ruled by the left, they’re the deep state, the cabal, etc.” to rekindle the contrarian / siege mentality and come together again.

I see all that in tankies, too. Society feels like it’s going wrong, so they sponge up any reason they see to hate the “establishment,” which is where the already running information warfare provides them ample facts to blame liberals and hate western powers, etc.

Also, on the hostility… yeah. These echo chambers seem to almost intentionally breed a nastiness that shuts down any useful discussion. Try to defuse anger and you’re “whiteknighting,” try to point out that something decent is good and you’re “virtue signaling.” When these communities erupt into other spaces, they quickly drive out anyone discussing in good faith. Survival of the nastiest.

I don’t know why that comment is collecting downvotes. They are referencing George Orwell’s “Animal Farm.”

Context: “Animal Farm” is a story about how communism can devolve into dictatorship. In the story, the animals on a farm drive out their tyrannical drunkard farmer. They write on the barn wall: “all animals are equal” and live in communist utopia. But some animals, too, hunger for power and status. Rather than overturn the system, they undermine it by adding “…but some animals are more equal than others” to the barn wall, legitimizing a ruling class (themselves) because they are “more equal.”

Disclaimer: I wondered the same, since 2014, and this is what I puzzled together for myself, read it with that in mind!

I believe a lot of it can be traced back to the wealthy and to conservative think tanks / media control by right wing moguls.

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, conservatives were perceived as well-off business people trying to protect their own wealth (I’ve read that people used to say things like “I’m not rich enough to vote Republican” or children shouting “last one in the house is a dirty Republican”). You can even see old movies dunk on conservatives (i.e. take Stanley Kubrick’s “2010: The Year we Make Contact” (1984), at the beginning, with the satellite dish tower, the protagonist noses off about reactionaries being in control of congress, thus leading the country towards war).

This is the rather extreme election result from 1964:

Because liberals mostly were Democratic Party voters, Republicans and their wealthy donors tried to alter public perception of liberals (i.e. make it undesirable for their Republican indoctrinatees to be liberal). This included taking over the media (and Reagan conveniently cancelling the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, which gave political bias in the media some guard rails), then painting liberals as all things undesirable: arrogant, weak, clueless, leeches, etc.

Having a “hate object” worked so well that they kept capitalizing on it. Much of it was/is just slinging sh*t against the wall and looking what sticks, but think tanks are indeed looking at what sticks, so successful patterns get repeated. Some of these successful patterns I can see are: installing a victim complex in conservatives (feeling their back against the wall, they lash out easier, ensuring anyone talking about conservatives is conditioned to use very soft gloves) and the two-year bogeyman, often trying to capture, redefine and vilify some prior existing concept (thus, when the campaign hits, indoctrinatees can find lots of “proof” online of this thing existing).

For example, social justice used to be universally agreed on as a good thing, woke used to mean remaining aware of systemic inequalities, now they make conservatives pop an artery. This has been going for a while (the “hate object” over time has been rock music, hippies, metal music, supposed satan worshippers, pen and paper games, paganism+atheism, video games, social justice activists, cancel culture, black lives matter, critical race theory, wokeness, …)

And I think, yes, your perception is spot on. This is, for example, what I get when I search for “anti-conservative t-shirts” (if it’s too tiny, try it yourself - they’re all anti-liberal):

TL;DR: conservatives are intentionally made and kept angry. It keeps them unified against a bigger enemy (see Genghis Gambit), drives them to go vote and prevents voters from switching sides even if they do not like some things the conservatives are doing. Add to that Russia amplifying this division like there’s no tomorrow. They’re installing this hate for liberals both in tankies and in far-right bigots (and, as far as I can tell, anti-liberal sentiment is pushed into Russian society, too).

elitist, college liberalism ideas

liberals are becoming way more rude, aggressive. Elitist,

young privileged, college liberals who look down on everyone

That smells an awful lot like ring wing indoctrination 101:

1. Restating several times to drive home the claim that liberals are elitist, aloof, rude, “looking down on everyone”
2. Claiming “they” are being aggressive and nasty against super polite people only a little bit to the right
3. Therefore joining the far right is a well-deserved act at getting back at these nasty liberals

.

You wrote two and a half paragraphs that are essentially just liberal bashing. My experience is that liberals are the people who don’t judge you for personal choices, who reach out a hand even if you’re worlds apart.

My observation:

They position themselves similar to classic revolutionaries - they claim to be the counterpoint to the “establishment” or to the “out-of-touch elites.”

That’s pretty tempting for people who don’t like the direction the world is heading in. Most don’t see or don’t want to see that the AfD is chock full of the exact people who rule them from the top down, police their opinions and take away their personal liberties.

What’s tragic is that, historically, a left wing group would normally find itself in the position the AfD is holding now. Yet here we are, after 50 years of slowly shifting rightwards until the social contract began breaking, with a party that offers a harsh jump further right as the revolutionary cure.

They had a serious investigation going, but that was during Boris Johnson’s time as prime minister (BoJo = the Trump-impersonator with the silly hair), so it was pretty handicapped and when the investigation stopped, well:

Johnson’s government refused to release the report to the public before the general election in December 2019.

By June 2020, the report had still not been released, and the Intelligence and Security Committee had not been convened, the longest gap since the committee’s creation in 1994.

(from Wikipedia)

• The Guardian: Russia report reveals UK government failed to investigate Kremlin interference
• Wikipedia: Intelligence and Security Committee Russia report
• The report itself: https://web.archive.org/web/20210114193823/https://docs.google.com/a/independent.gov.uk/viewer?a=v&pid=sites&srcid=aW5kZXBlbmRlbnQuZ292LnVrfGlzY3xneDo1Y2RhMGEyN2Y3NjM0OWFl

Small enough to not get noticed, too little to cover their lifestyle for long, yet too convenient to not take :)

The big paydays usually happen through companies the politician and his ilk are in the board of, which just score very lucrative contracts or orders time after time. Or the politician is hired as a consultant for such companies, collecting fabulous kickbacks. Or the promise of early retirement into “window-looking jobs,” employment where they have a title, high income and zero responsibilities.

Yep. Push and pull.

Saber rattling from the outside, paid-off politicians on the inside. In the short term, pushes policies towards groveling before Russian aggression, in the long term, establishes precedence and shifts the general accepted attitude to dealing with their pressure.

I’m always hopeful, but at this point, I seriously doubt Russia’s sincerity. Past ceasefire agreements, for example, were broken by Russian attacks, usually within hours of the agreement taking effect.

I read his manifesto and substack. He had his own brand of crazy, mixing Russian misinformation and personal delusions half-and-half.

His gist is “climate change and resource scarcity will destroy society, the elites know it and created cryptocurrency to collapse global finance, which will fix things while making them untouchable rulers.”

For a moment I thought a Trump supporter had grown balls. Indoctrinated nutjob balls, but balls.

But after reading that Manifesto, it looks more like it’s a classical conspiracy nutter who must, at any cost, trace all world events and pop culture back to a secret group that is orchestrating everything:

• Secret group controls both major US political parties
• Cryptocurrency intentionally built/pushed by this group to crash the global finance system
• Secret group is mocking everyone by broadcasting their plans through i.e. old Simpsons episodes
• 1970s dystopian movie classics were actually setting us up to accept these dystopias
• Secret group knows about coming resource depletion and climate collapse, will destroy society, then rule the survivors.

TLDR; a wild mix of real issues, attributed to America-centric conspiracy puzzle pieces, many taken from Russian propaganda, combined with far-fetched associations that would make any numerologist proud.

If you were alive (and online) during the 90s, you may remember the banter between Microsoft and General Motors:

From https://crysa.fzu.cz/ondra/documents/cars_like_windows.html (the only online copy I could find)

Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated, “If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving twenty-five-dollar cars that get 1,000 miles to the gallon.”

In response to Bill’s comments, General Motors issued a press release stating: If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:

[…]

7. The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would be replaced by a single “general car error” warning light.

8. New seats would force everyone to have the same size butt.

9. The airbag system would ask “Are You Sure?” before going off.

10. Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key, and grabbed a hold of the radio antenna.

30 years later, some of those jokes are finally becoming reality, thanks to Tesla.

That would (just like Git LFS) store full, separate copies of every single version of the large files I manage. I really, really don’t want to go there, nor do I have even a fraction of the hard drive space for that…

That’s what I meant when I wrote “Git submodules can only point to a whole different repository” - they can’t point to a path inside a repository, only to another repository root. That unfortunately renders them useless for me (I’d have to set up in the order of hundreds of small repositories for the sets of shared data I have).