Well I’m no expert on Christianity, but apparently this theology graduate here agrees with you:

https://www.benjaminlcorey.com/could-american-evangelicals-spot-the-antichrist-heres-the-biblical-predictions/

(not actually everything, but I get your hyperbole)

How is it hyperbole? All artificial neural networks have “hallucinations”, no matter their size. What’s your magic way of knowing when that happens?

I’m involved in the development of an addon for the Classic WoW versions (Questie), and the thing I do there is such a convoluted process that not doing it feels like letting my fellow devs and the users down. But you can do development on the PTRs and beta servers, so I haven’t given money to Blizzard in a long time. Now you could argue that this is even worse in regards to supporting Blizzard than just paying for a game, but I rationalise it to myself with the fact that the newer clients will inevitably be used for private servers just like the old ones were (some already are actually).

Neither. Battle.net is Blizzards game launcher and store. They also own that domain, but the name usually refers to the binary.

The WINE_SIMULATE_WRITECOPY=1 %command% is the Steam launch option you set, with %command% meaning roughly “what Steam would do without any launch options set”.

The whole process was a bit finicky and I did it a few month ago, but from what I remember it went something like this:

• Download battle.net installer
• Add it as non-Steam game to run it
• Locate the newly created prefix in Steam directory
• Add the Battle.net.exe in it as a non-Steam game, then remove the installer (not the other way around or the prefix will be deleted)

Oh so that’s what you meant. Thought you meant don’t use Lutris at first because of how you worded it. That makes much more sense.

AFAIK you can set Lutris up to use GE or Proton builds.

Did that too a while back, but anecdotally it feels lees buggy through Steam, especially regarding updates.

Also clicking the Stop button in Steam doesn’t leave behind zombie processes off Battle.net.exe and Agent.exe, which I had to manually kill when using Lutris. Assume that’s due to Protons(?) pressure-vessel thingy.

there must be a bit more to it than that. AIM, Skype, and several others were viable options with existing userbases.

Once upon a time in a messenger landscape far far away there lived a king called XMPP. It had a lot of powerful children, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Google+, and even Skype amongst them. And they all worked together in a big federation towards the commonwealth of all, freely sharing their metadata. But then some of the children grew greedy, jealously guarding their own gardens behind higher and higher walls, breaking down the federation. And thus the era of the warring messengers began. But prophecy foretells of a prince to unite all the disparate standards in one big Matrix again, completing yet another revolution of the XKCD 972 wheel of time.

For real though it was phone numbers. WhatsApp always worked based off of phone numbers, which is an identity confirmation method that was immediately familiar to most people at the time, even more so than email.

Oh you are right, I misread that. Thanks for pointing it out.

it’s definitely more pro-privacy than Brave or FireFox. I’ve never had to jump through a captcha to use Google in those browsers.

You have this backwards. Google showing you captchas is basically them saying they can’t match your browser to any know (shadow) profile they have already stored. So they aren’t sure you are a human and if so which one specifically. Getting harassed with a captcha is essentially like a badge of honour for your browsers privacy settings.

Firefox has no extensions so no Adblock.

That’s because so far every browser on iOS had to use WebKit as it’s HTML rendering engine, meaning that even if you installed another browser manually you were basically still using Safari under the hood. IIRC the new DMA rules include allowing other browser engines like Gecko, so Mozilla is probably already working on making addons available. I mean they are available on Android, so why wouldn’t they make them available on iOS now that they finally can?

Ok, fuck. Against my better judgement and because I’m sufficiently drunk, here I go again… Drunk text. You were warned.

Let me start off with saying that I empathise with your point. I get what you are saying ultimately, I think. And if you see that on your Lemmy instance, I’m not the one downvoting you. I think your heart is in the right place.

But I really don’t see your point about the sarcasm question. It’s not a question. It’s there. By definition. Why is this the hill you want to die on?

I mean the rest of his speech is just crazy over crazy. The MAGAdonians? I mean come on it’s a goldmine for proving the fuck out of him being a fascist, but you are going for the one trap he lays you, where he is obviously being sarcastic. This is not going to dismantle his larger argument to anyone who might even vaguely relate to it, on the contrary. You need to do better.

But you asked, so here I go again:

He says he doesn’t mean it, in his speech, verbatim.

I’ve watched the CPAC speech three times now. Where does he say this?

He starts out with saying “most dangerous speech to democracy” in a mocking voice, then seriously “not just drain the swamp burn it to the ground”. The whole thing drips of sarcasm from the start. Money quotes right here.

“Shining city on a hill, drain swamp, bla bla”.

Then he lists three sources who he apparently suggests mis-cited him, Jeff Reid, Morning Joe, Mark Hamil. (?) He is mocking their accusations that he would “end democracy”. “We have to end it, that’s what the media told me”. This couldn’t be more clearly sarcastic.

Then he starts to explain his plan to end democracy, which is a list of things Republicans have accused the Democrats of doing that they consider an attack on democracy. The stolen election check-list™ I have documented in another comment. Again clearly mocking the “other side”, hence sarcastic.

He ends this part of the speech with saying:

This is their “democracy” [doing air-quotes]. This is the regime we will overturn. They say democracy but they mean authoritarianism, and we know it.

Again, clearly telling people that he is being sarcastic, outright, into their faces. He does not mean “real democracy™”, he means “fake democracy™”.

It’s there. And I don’t get why you are trying to prove that it’s not, when there is so much bullshit in it that you could go for instead.

Anyway, you will not find any luck in insisting somebody isn’t sarcastic when they most clearly are. This will convince nobody. You need to appeal to their better senses, like “real” Christianity, the American Dream, Human rights, or whatever it takes for them.

I mean even he cleverly does this in his speech, extending an open hand to anybody and everybody, even the Swifties? Like they have a somewhat coherent narrative that people will follow, and you have to admit this guy is not bad at making propaganda for it. And IMHO you are falling for his taunt here. He challenged the public to quote him on this, because he could say it was sarcastic. Because he is.

I’m mean don’t ask me how to stop the fucking fascist in the end. Some relatively influential German politician just proposed what essentially amounts to forced labour for all immigrants for several months to horrendous “wages”, like <1$/h wages. In fucking Germany! The gall! So yeah, I’m not really sure what to do about it either.

You are flipping definitions here. Originally you said by a descriptive definition it’s sarcasm when you do not mean it (which aligns with the dictionary definition by the way, so I’m still confused why you made that point at all). He says he doesn’t mean it, in his speech, verbatim. Your or my interpretation of his other actions and politics doesn’t matter to the question of whether he is being sarcastic. I’m done with this conversation now, good bye.

Rather than using the dictionary as a kind of set of physical laws for what words mean, prescriptive, it’s relevant to consider how people use words, descriptive.

Yes, I am aware of the two basic schools of thought in linguistics, thank you. When people use words as defined in the dictionary then it is still descriptive though.

I think your argument is missing the forest for the trees here, because your argument’s logic seems to be he isn’t using the definition of the word properly therefore it isn’t possible for him to mean that he wants to destroy that thing.

No, I’m saying that is entirely unrelated to the question of him being sarcastic or not.

When people say he’s just being sarcastic, they mean he doesn’t really mean what he says.

He doesn’t mean it, according to his own way of thinking at least. By our way of thinking he wants to destroy democracy, but not by his. That is why I’m saying he is being sarcastic.

So by that definition of sarcastic, the one people are using, he is not being sarcastic.

Apart from my disagreement on this point voiced above, in that case people should change the dictionary. They haven’t. If everybody uses their own definition then language becomes useless.

Edit: typo

See my reply to you up-thread.

He really wants to destroy democracy.

That is irrelevant.

He describes destroying democracy in the second part of his CPAC speech.

Also irrelevant.

There are, by definition, two conditions to be met for his statement to be sarcastic.

1. Does he intend the statement to be ironic satirical? Yes he does, he is throwing a statement made about him back at the Democrats.
2. Does he intend the statement to slight a third party? Yes he does, he is saying the Democrats are the ones actually wanting to destroy democracy.

It is entirely possible for him to want to destroy democracy and still say it in a sarcastic way at the same time. Those two things are not mutually exclusive.

Plus, as we have established down-thread, you seem to agree that he doesn’t believe he wants to destroy democracy, because he has a twisted notion of what democracy means.

I don’t understand why that is so hard to grasp for people in this thread.

Edit: a word.

“Don the Magic Cloak of Plausible Deniability and come with us!”

GP didn’t say these people or this speaker aren’t trying to destroy democracy. GP said they were being sarcastic in this specific video timestamp with the “ending democracy” quote and the context around it.

But nobody in this thread has doubted that the Republicans are anti-democratic in general.

Delivering something in a sarcastic affect doesn’t necessarily make it a joke if the context doesn’t support it.

Well did you actually look at the context in the video? Because if you don’t see that he is being sarcastic there then, no offence, you have no idea what sarcasm is. Or you are hugging your confirmation bias like your life depends on it, which to be fair it actually might. The speech in its entirety is clearly a fascist screed, but that doesn’t mean the beginning of it isn’t sarcastic. And obviously so at that.

Read the wider context.

Yes, context matters. On that we agree. And unless you think he is actually proposing to “flood the nation with millions of invaders [sic] who vote the way we want” then he was being fucking sarcastic there.

Well he clearly is being sarcastic though. Frankly this whole thread is an affront towards the concept of language comprehension.

Fair enough, but none of that means he wasn’t being sarcastic. Merriam-Webster defines that as “a sharp and often satirical or ironic utterance designed to cut or give pain”, which this clearly was. That is of course not a get-out-of-jail-card for being a dumbass, but he doesn’t intend to abolish (his twisted idea of) democracy.

I mean suppose for a second, just for arguments sake, that the Democratic party did indeed steal the 2020 election and you would have to re-evaluate things like January 6th being an insurrection, because violent resistance against somebody undermining a country’s constitution is legitimate. Which is a stance you might have to take yourself sooner rather than later, especially if Trump wins again.

On a side-note, as a German growing up on copious amounts of Nazi history in school and some TV channels running 24/7 documentaries about them it seems rather clear to me where these MAGA people are headed. Already was in 2016. It’s fascism. But it is important to remember that such movements aren’t as monolithic as they might seem from the outside. There are many people in them who are just high on their own supply of bullshit, and you don’t do yourself any favours by misinterpreting them and fielding arguments which are then easily refuted, doubly so if you are fighting against their confirmation bias.

To be fair though, the article in the OP seems to make that very same mistake.