FBXL Social

sj_zero | @sj_zero@social.fbxl.net

Author of The Graysonian Ethic (Available on Amazon, pick up a dead tree copy today)

Admin of the FBXL Network including FBXL Search, FBXL Video, FBXL Social, FBXL Lotide, FBXL Translate, and FBXL Maps.

Advocate for freedom and tolerance even if you say things I do not like

Adversary of Fediblock

Accept that I'll probably say something you don't like and I'll give you the same benefit, and maybe we can find some truth about the world.

Ah... Is the Alliteration clever or stupid? Don't answer that, I sort of know the answer already...

Honestly, soapbox (the software running poast) is so good as a mobile website I just use it.

It's like.... "Use a rubber dummy!"

Well this is the Boomer ideology, that the worst thing you can possibly do to someone or something is to judge it. Even at this very moment, cannibal gangs? Well that might be bad but would be even worse is if you judge them for it. How dare you?!

Seems to me like a massive improvement over chicago most days.

A perfect example of "you aren't stuck in traffic, you are traffic"

They successfully cut a clip of Donald Trump saying "there were good people on many sides, and I don't mean white supremacists and neo-nazis, they should be condemned completely" into a clip saying that he supports white supremacists and neo-nazis.

And a lot of people just sat there and took it, so yes they think we are that stupid and for the most part they are right.

You know what's hard to hack?

Piece of paper and a little pencil counted by a little old lady

C'mon man, I checked the Jobs report, and it says no change since 2011!

And you guys kept saying all these policies were killing Jobs!

Because it's fbxl social which is an extension of fbxl, and fbxl.net itself has used the a sort of 1970s futurism/psychedelic rainbow stripes on black motif for nearly 20 years now. (And realizing that fbxl.net has been up for nearly 20 years I need to go into the corner and cry)

It's something that was common iconography in the 1970s, itself an evolution of early psychedelic art of the 1960s. It's an aesthetically pleasing, colorful, and optimistic design.

It's a symptom of the broken parts of our society that all love must be sex, and all sex must be love, and every rainbow must be a symbol of sex because there's nothing else it could be, nothing else it could mean.

It wasn't until I started talking to my newborn son that I started to realize how much we're trained to find double entendres in everything, and I honestly had to turn off that part of my brain because it's not healthy to pass everything you say or do through a series of filters to extract meaningless potential hidden meanings. It actually prevents you from just saying what you mean with plain language since you're playing 5d chess with yourself in every statement you make.

FBXL started off as QBXL, or QuickBasic Accelerator, an irreverent magazine about programming in a language that was already considered long dead when the magazine started. Later on when the free and open source FreeBASIC programming language was developed (and I lost the domain name because I forgot to renew in time) the magazine changed into FBXL.

Solzhenitsyn wrote in the Gulag Archipelago about people who knew they were going to die in the gulags and how they'd develop a gallows humor, a coping mechanism to help deal with the reality that they had no future. In the same way, FBXL has always had a sort of gallows humor about it, everyone knew there was no future in QB, but why be sad when we can laugh and have fun anyway? Even with the development of FreeBASIC, it isn't like we can expect major players to start making their projects in BASIC, it's always going to be a tiny niche.

FBXL itself has always been about freedom of expression, humor, and a willingness to push boundaries, even at the risk of offending some.

FBXL prioritizes authenticity and staying true to its vision, even if it means alienating certain audiences or challenging societal norms, and maintaining editorial independence.

That has been true long before the current moment in time. It's just that unlike the early 2000s when most of the issues were written, now it's a home for all sorts of ideas because the whole Internet is starting to look a lot like that gulag, with freedom's days being numbered. Let's enjoy ourselves -- why be sad when we can have fun and laugh while we can?

"What piece of information would you need to receive to change your mind?" is almost like "How would you feel if you didn't eat breakfast yesterday?" for intellectuals.

Definitely a truth that the end of pax americana will mean a lot of wars, and that's what's starting to happen. That's the reason why there's wars breaking out in Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America -- longstanding tensions turning into violence now that everyone is seeing America as weak.

I'm lowkey shocked -- you'd think that there'd be other routes set up by now -- Hell, I'd expect Internet to be restored using starlink if nothing else?

HEIL DER FUHRER TRUDEAU! (so please don't seize my bank accounts)

IMO the first amendment doesn't apply to the government itself. The government's speech *should* be limited.

It's somewhat ironic, everything everyone complains about the English doing, they did it to the Irish first.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRVOOwFNp5U

Still my favorite rap song of all time. Should be at the top of most lists.

that's reasonable as a sort of first order heuristic for who is your friend since most people who are nice to you are most likely to be your friend, but then you need to think one step beyond that and ask why.

It's not just important for this purpose, but because as you rise in the world people will be nice to you not because they're your friends, but because they want something from you -- be it money, access to your power, or whatever else.

Judas betrayed Jesus not with a dagger, but with a kiss. This is directly contrasting Julius Caesar who had a number of daggers forced into him at point blank range. Rather than being betrayed by overt hostility, he is in the end of a trade by a symbol of affection, intimacy, and warmth.

I think that that has very strong parallels to today. There are movements which either intentionally or unintentionally are going to break civilization. They advocate for things that are simply not in the best interest of the human race and over the long term, such as degeneracy, embracing hedonism, generally ignoring reality, rejecting deferring gratification, rejecting grit, rejecting the whole concept of virtue. But they do this with a veneer of affection, intimacy, and warmth.

It's a difficult tactic to deal with, because someone you love must sometimes be pushed back against if you love them. People will do things that hurt themselves or hurt others, and if you care about them, you do have to judge them and you do have to let them know that what they're doing is wrong, while someone who doesn't care can just keep supporting you right into the grave. Meanwhile, the person who loves another looks like the bad guy for pushing back, and the person who doesn't care about another looks like the good guy for supporting someone.

Another archetype is cassandra, someone who was spurned by the gods and given the curse to speak true prophecy but we considered insane anytime she did. And I think that we see this out there as well. I have to admit I've been as guilty as anyone of seeing Cassandras speak, and just assuming that the prophecy is insane ramblings, but here we are. The world is a mess and a large part of that seems to be the predictable and predicted outcomes of things people warned us about.

I think part of the issue there is that the people who would be the most conducive to the message are also the ones who in the moment aren't nearly as much the people that the message would apply to. In my case, I listened to all the messages that everyone warned us about, but for the most part it ended up finding a balance where I can take the good parts of that ideas. And integrate them, and the bad parts of good ideas and try not to integrate them, and so the outcome really isn't that bad because it becomes a synthesis of the best parts of many different ideas, whereas for a lot of people that's a lot of work and so they're just going to take things to face value. Some of the things that we're seeing as a result of that are absolutely abhorrent.

But for someone who's going to intuitively take the good parts of bad ideas and disregard the bad parts of good ideas, it seems intuitive that the bad ideas aren't necessarily going to lead to ruin, and so the prophecy seems absurd. But it isn't. Prophecy didn't speak of the sort of people who can build their own ideology, and spoke of followers and the consequences of people who just follow following something terrible.

I remember in the debates in 2020, Joe Biden was bragging that more people involved with the Bush administration liked him than Donald Trump.

Of course they would, Donald Trump is a direct answer to all the epic failures of the Bush administration. The Bush administration is closer to the Bible administration then the Trump administration, because the Democrats haven't had their road to Damascus moment, they haven't yet realized that the status quo they're trying to maintain isn't going to continue to work for them.

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