If you’re interested learning opsec, step 0 is learning to threat model. Figure out what situations you’re trying to prevent, what actors or forces may cause those situations to happen, and what your options are for stopping them, and what the costs of each of those options are. Then you can make an informed decision. Privacy is a gradual adaptation, not a switch you can flip overnight or ever be perfect at. It involves a lot of tradeoffs.

A human with no ability to feel unpleasant feelings would die of malnutrition or exposure. A community where everyone has the exact same needs and therefore could only act in ways that were beneficial to everyone would inevitably die out when those needs couldn’t be met.

I think viewing any of these situations or feelings as good or bad ignores the inherent chaos of our existence. And I mean chaos in the sense that slight changes to initial conditions can wildly change a system’s outcome.

I also think viewing “bad” characteristics as inevitable is often used as a way to dismiss change which is clearly a massive net positive. And looking at society’s problems as simply the aggregate of individual people being greedy or angry ignores the nature of systemic problems and suggests individualistic solutions that are doomed to fail

I do too, sometimes. It’s not a healthy habit. I hope you can find a balance that works better for you.

So you’re subjecting yourself to authority that you believe is acclimating you to do things against your will?

Getting people acclimated to obeying authority by starting with menial commands is a real thing. For it to work, the person doing it needs to have some authority and the commands actually have to be things that the other person won’t object to. Do these people have authority over you? Does changing how you talk about Unix desktops seems like a reasonable command to start that process?

Now, I have no problem with viewing random strangers as authority figures if that’s what you’re into, but it seems a lot more likely that you’ve used this idea of compelled-language-as-social-control as a thought-terminating cliche to justify not thinking about why someone might care about randos online using the word “ricing”. And to be fair, it seems like a weird use a mental energy if the point is to assert dominance, but at the same time, you’re the one engaging with it, so what does that say about you?

Japanese cars, yeah?

Sounds like you’re a duct-taper. That’s also indicative of a procedural issue with the company you work for. Shit sucks. Hyper competent duct taper usually ends up being a pretty thankless job as well. Never getting to actually fix underlying problems. Always putting out fires. And everyone just learns to expect it from you, from above and below. And it sounds like you’ve learned to expect it as well. I know all workplaces have their dysfunction, but I hope you can either come to find this one more tolerable or find a better environment soon.

Signing off on this comment as Cool and Good. Hexbear seal of approval or something like that.

No

That’s the historical root of the term, but “barbaric” and “barbarian” also have long histories as diminutive due to colonialism.

I’ve heard Jacobin writers refer to themselves as “the Jacobin milieu”. That should have been my first sign.

Yeah, I back the blue

The uncanny valley exists to enforce social norms at a glance. I’ve tipped people off about me being autistic faster than most chatbots can coherently remain convincing nowadays.

pls buy raybans

I’m not a chatbot. You can tell because my account isn’t marked as a bot account.

Not to put too fine of a point on it, but if the thing you’re whitewashing if itself fascist, then yes, the whitewashing is fascist.

That’s the one!

Reminds me of the places that make you take a “can you recognize basic employee norms and sufficiently lie about your personal life to your manager?” tests

A lot of that is about the bread wall. You can buy the full miches, among other things, off the bread wall behind the counters. I guess they’ve found that having all that fresh bread out front increases sales (kind of like how groceries stores out fresh flowers out front and then having the produce section be right near the front door), but a lot of the big ones sell really inconsistently. Not many people are doing grocery shopping at Panera, you know? Some days the bread wall empties. Other days, it’s half full at the end of the day with bread that’s only a couple days away from being moldy or so hard it’s not edible. So they mark up the bread that’s most likely to remain on the shelf anyway and it becomes tax deductible when they donate it to a local charity. They get their pretty bread wall that sells out two days a week and they get to write off their losses.

But if they don’t donate the bread, it’s not deductible. And if you let employees take enough extra bread, they stop buying as much on their lunch breaks and you start getting empty bags arriving at local soup kitchens, which is a bad look and can jeopardize the arrangement.

Panera overnight baker. I got hired as a warm body to stop them from having to fly someone in and put them up in a hotel. I did not have any relevant qualifications. My training was rushed and done by someone who wasn’t qualified to train me. Then when I was doing the job too slowly, they decided it was cheaper to bring someone in than to keep paying me overtime. I almost cried. I’d never made more than $10 an hour prior to that job, so I thought I was making good money. I wasn’t. Panera and their overpriced shit can eat my whole ass.