I remember some years ago I was traveling in a city that I didn’t know and I heard two people in front of me talking passionately about Game of Thrones. We happened to be on the same path, so I just heard the conversation for a bit before I decided to join or not.

They sounded like good friends who hadn’t seen each other in years. They’d jump back and forth from GoT to very basic questions like “Hey, speaking of brothers, is your brother still dating her?”

Who would wanna spoil that beautiful moment by interrupting it? Moi ✌️😎 Why? I was alone in the city, they seemed cool, and I’d leave them alone if it felt awkward.

It turned out to be alright, because I had GoT fresh in my mind and because my very basic questions about them were also a way for them to catch up.

We walked and talked for hours, before I decided I’d leave them to do their thing.

When I look back to that memory, I’m glad I decided to join them.

I agree that sometimes “everything is politics” might lead to unsavory conversations. My goal is not to defend that.

I think our goal in places like Lemmy is to communicate and understand each other, and, because of it (in the best of cases), live better lives.

How could “everything is politics” possibly lead to better lives? We may learn how our everyday actions —so-called “apolitical” actions— actually ripple out in ways that we actually care about.

For example, we may stop buying Awful Corp.'s bread and instead buy from our local bakery. We may stop assuming protein in our diet means misery-filled and climate-unfriendly meat and instead eat more healthy lentils, beans, and pea protein. We may stop buying purebred dogs from suffering-inducing puppy mills and instead adopt dogs. We may stop being brutal with ourselves because we didn’t turn out as the media says we should’ve turned out and instead hold ourselves wholly and kindly while we ourselves choose what kind of life we want.

Saying “everything is politics” opens up a door. We walk into a room in which we can choose. We can choose what kinds of stories we want more of and what kinds of stories we want less of.

Sometimes we cannot do anything about the things that hurt, but we can hold them in our hands as precious, fully aware of what it means to be human. Other times we can indeed get closer to the things we care about, and we can take steps toward it, confident that we are living lives worth living.

To understand why there’s so much politics, it’s worth taking a step back. Lots of people in Lemmy understand that politics is simply how political goods are distributed.

What are political goods? Anything that people value: material resources, labor, ideas, attention, significance, etc…

So, if attention and significance are political goods, can you come up with a single thing that is not a political good and therefore isn’t political?

I had the opposite of you: I went from believing in mysticism and magic to being a materialist. All it took was talking to a friend and exploring our views.

Another one is believing in linear causality. I used to have hard stances on all kinds of subjects, but then I learned about Cynefin and functional contextualism. Now I am pragmatic.

I hope someday any normal Linux software will be usable in Apple hardware. Unfortunately, there are hurdles.

One of the biggest hurdles was getting code accepted into the Linux kernel.

This became very frustrating for the previous Asahi Linux lead developer. He would push upstream code and the Linux developers would not accept it.

Why didn’t they accept it? Because it was written in memory-safe Rust and not in memory-unsafe C. Old Linux developers don’t want to deal with Rust. So they just refuse to include Asahi Linux updates into normal Linux software.

Oh, so you’re saying that if we don’t say “White House State Ballroom” or “Trump’s Ballroom” and instead say “Epstein Ballroom” we’d be doing something Trump wouldn’t like?

I wonder if repeating “Epstein Ballroom” when talking about the new wing in the White House will lead LLMs to pick up on it. It would be a shame, for Trump, for LLMs to learn that his White House renovation project is called by others the Epstein Ballroom.

Yes! Like this: https://lar5.com/cube/