MudMan

I did not remember that and I still remember “Los pollos hermanos”, so that tells you how weird that one is.

Also, this dogpile works better if you understand what you’re reading. The comedic effect bit was about the title of the thread, not about my own typo. Now you made it weird by trying to outpedant a pedant but not having the reading comprehension to pedant properly.

Goddamn it.

NOW it’s fixed. Two typos. It was two typos. Point stands.

I mean… no, mine’s a typo (fixed now, thanks for the poke), the other one is a deliberate spelling for comedic effect that accidentally uncovers an endless loop of abject multilingual terror.

This is a Gus Frink meme type of situation.

He also, incidentally, couldn’t speak Spanish for shit. That whole show was a nightmare. “Los Pollos Hermanos” as a phrase haunts me. I genuinely, and I’m not joking about this, sometimes find myself having intrusive thoughts about it after all this time.

You’d be surprised. Spanish countries often dub movies, particularly back then.

But if you want to know what it felt like later in life I can help.

…

The ouroboros of bad pronunciation the headline implies is throwing me for a massive loop.

I mean, you carry on with your American politics things, I just saw this on my feed and had an existential crisis.

I mean, I appreciate the gumption but, honestly? This mentality is probably why Americans can’t have decent public services.

Boycotts, yes.

“I was on the fence about buying this and I want to sound engaged on the Internet, may still get it later” voting-with-your-wallet nonsense? No.

No, no, Jeff Ennis worked as an actual superhero briefly in the 1970s you’re thinking of John Ennis, who created The Boys as a musical in the 90s, but he was mad about his working conditions.

No, it’s much more interesting than that.

It’s an accurate representation of Garth Ennis being mad about having to work with superheroes despite not liking that at all and being a bit of a petty bitch with a bit of a dudebro sense of humor that, frankly, we all overrated at the time because when you were a teenager in the 90s you thought Preacher was hilarious and much smarter than it is, and it got to his head a bit.

And then it’s an accurate representation of Eric Kripke who was very much the right age to have gone through that, taking the material and going “well, that Trump guy sure was a thing, huh?” and “aren’t you kind of over all those MCU movies, also?” because superheroes in film were at the same point in 2019 than they were in comic books in 2006.

Don’t be the teenager we all were in the 90s and assume that “edgy and mean and over the top” is the same as “smart and realistic”. It’s not.

I’ll say that the show is at least less callous than the original material and it’s at least trying to be political, which makes it slightly more plausible and internally consistent than Ennis’ HR complaint of a comic book. Hollywood has a history of taking this edgelord crap (see also: every single Mark Millar adaptation) and making it palatable by applying the same mainstreaming and dumbing down that kills every Alan Moore adaptation. Turns out if the original material isn’t that smart to begin with that’s actually a good thing to do.

Most of that is entirely absurd and not worth getting into. I’m sure a pedantic historian can nitpick it if that’s the way everybody wants to go.

However, let me revisit your accusation of “contradicting my point”. At no stage here have I conflated unarmed protest with peaceful protest. All along I’ve been frustrated by the US mindrot tendency of accepting no nuance between some My Little Pony version of political action and outright armed confrontation. The worldwide protests that show how bonkers the US perception of the issue is were not peaceful, but neither were they an armed confrontation where protestors attempted to use their armed might to deter police forces. They were… you know, political action. Civil unrest. “Civil” being the key word.

The way you and US leftists in general tend to parse stuff like this is nonsense. The fact that mass protests can escalate to the point they went in Nepal, Madagascar or any of the countries in the general “Gen Z spring” movement and prior protest waves disproves the US perspective because a) it has nothing to do with the level of access to weapons, and b) it shows sufficiently commited public action doesn’t have to be either fully nonviolent or an armed insurrection.

Americans look at this as some form ot guarantee their success by either intimidating the other into submission or hoping that the other side will fold immediately. That’s not how this goes. “The cops may charge at us, we should bring guns” is some weird overlap of thinking protestors are entitled to painless victory and that there is no possible pressure beyond violent pressure. It makes no sense to me. And yet, here we are, a bunch of posts down the line.

See, and there it is. Zero to a hundred. It’s either popcorn or civil war, no gradient.

I mean, for one thing Nazi Germany also wasn’t defeated by military cosplayers flashing their gun collection at them, and clearly neither was MAGA America. The first one was defeated by a borderline apocalyptic global war, so… in the grand scheme both the military cosplay and the sternly worded letters are pretty much about just as effective there. We’re still waiting and seeing on the MAGA America part.

But for another, plenty of nonviolent and/or unarmed protest has achieved its goals, historically. From Europe to India to South Africa to the actual United States. The “sternly worded letter” derision is pure action movie fantasy. This month alone the governments of Madagascar and Nepal came down after mass protests. Not a single set of camo pants in sight, just… you know, students organizing on social media and One Piece flags for some reason because this is a weird timeline.

They weren’t even fully nonviolent, either. There were clashes, there was enforcement violence and dozens of people, mostly protestors, were killed in both countries. And still two governments came down and the situations continue to evolve and push for full regime change.

Meanwhile the example I’m being given is some American fascists standing on a street while cops that agree with them wait for them to get sleepy at their military cosplay convention and go home.

I don’t get Americans. I don’t think the way they see the world as a culture makes sense, and I am terrified at how much they export it successfully through places like this. Nepal just held a full-on election over Discord and I still understand how that went down better than middle class America’s political views.

Yeah, no, that’s the point. You look at a barbaric demonstration of a completely broken down society and see something that works. That’s horrifying.

You effectively saw some guy walk into a subway holding his erect, exposed penis in one hand and a machete in the other and went “hey, that guy found an empty seat right away, I think we can all learn a lesson here”.

That’s nuts. It’s weird that you don’t see how nuts that is.

Yeah, no shit, that happens everywhere.

Some people go back the next day, some societies react to this by protesting harder and longer. Other times this devolves into outright conflict or seismic political shifts. Sometimes it settles down over time.

The reaction isn’t typically some combination of “Oh, well, what can you do” and “maybe if we bring actual firearms the natural conflict with authority baked into all civilian political action will dissipate fully and permanently”.

That’s some US-specific delusion and intrinsic tendency to violence right there.

Well that went places.

That is fucking terrifying and so is anybody who doesn’t think so.

This is a weird pattern in that presumably mass abandonment of the em dashes due to the memes around it looking like AI content would quickly lead to newer LLMs based on newer data sets also abandoning em dashes when it tries to seem modern and hip and just punt the ball down the road to the next set of AI markers. I assume as long as book and press editors keep stikcing to their guns that would go pretty slow, but it’d eventually get there. And that’s assuming AI companies don’t add instructions about this to their system prompts at any point. It’s just going to be an endless arms race.

Which is expected. I’m on record very early on saying that “not looking like AI art” was going to be a quality marker for art and the metagame will be to keep chasing that moving target around for the foreseeable future and I’m here to brag about it.

Why else would you shoot at them?

Is that not what weapons are for? Who the hell goes to a peaceful protest expecting to be shot at with lethal weapons? What the hell? You are not protesting at that stage, you are at war, that’s some Tiananmen shit. Listen to me carefully: if you think law enforcement at a protest is going to open fire with live ammunition on unarmed protesters do NOT go to that protest. Start organizing a guerrilla, see if you can get the legal system to act on the people responsible, get in touch with press and try to get international awareness on the serious breach of human rights happening on your country, but do not just show up in a protest you can reasonably expect will lead to a massacre of unarmed civilians. I can’t believe I have to put this in actual words.

I’m always so baffled by American unwillingness to take any action followed by the immediate assumption that the very next step is going to be full-on murder. Just zero escalation, in their minds it’s either eat popcorn at home or be shooting at people indiscriminately.

I genuinely don’t get it. There’s a mental model at play here but it may as well not be carbon-based.

I mean, it’s a lot safer to shoot at unarmed people. I’d certainly be way more willing to shoot at someone that’s armed.

Like I said, alien thoughts in alien minds. I just can’t follow US trains of thought at this point.

Holy shit, are they? Because from the outside looking in I assume the presumption that a gun may be present is why US police is essentially a military organization willing to shoot anybody at the slightest provocation, so I would assume if you are faced with a crowd of armed people your first instinct to stop that is to shoot first.

I mean, my common sense assumption is that bringing a gun of any kind to a protest is a fantastic way to start a massacre of your own people, but I’ve lost the ability to parse how Americans understand both political action and violence ages ago.

I can give that a whirl if it’s not set up like that already, but the monitor is VERY slow on its own. It basically never wakes up in time for the BIOS bootscreen and any signal interruption sends it on a wild goose chase of signal searching around its inputs that can take ten seconds at a time. It’s not a cheap monitor, either, which I assume is part of the problem, as it wants to be super smart about a bunch of things and has to contend with a bunch of options and alternatives that maybe a simpler setup wouldn’t.

Still, worth a shot to try to tune grub and double check if it’s swapping modes unnecessarily between the bios image and the menu. I hadn’t considered it. Like so many Linux features and app there’s a bunch of stuff you can config on it that I keep not looking into because it’s only surfaced in documentation, if that.

EDIT: Tried, didn’t help. The motherboard rebooting gives the monitor just enough time to search its display port input, decide it’s been unplugged and shut down, so by the time another monitor picks up the slack it’s too late and the timeout has expired unless you’re mashing down to stop it. The changes do make the second monitor come up at its native resolution instead of changing modes, but the mistake happens elsewhere.

I could just set a longer timeout, but I’d rather have a faster boot when I’m sticking to the default than wait for the whole mess to sort itself out every time. Been mashing bios entry buttons and bootloader menus since the 90s, what’s a couple decades more.

Still dumb, though.