One time in London (in the Tube, if I remember it correctly) I actually saw somebody telling somebody else off for just passing them on the stairs and not helping.

I’ve lived in several sized cities, from a few thousand people to over 10 million.

In my experience it’s a bit of everything, both ways.

People are more keenly aware of were “your rights stop and mine start”. They’re more ok with smaller personal space and rights (otherwise they wouldn’t be able to live pretty much piled out on top of each other) but will defend their own more strongly, the bigger and more denselly populated the city the more strongly they do it (after having moved to and lived in London for a while I thought I was quite a bit more short fused on those things than most … and then I became friends with a New Yorker …)

Then there’s the whole social pressure thing: the bigger and more diverse the crowds you’re used to the less you care about the opinions of strangers - you’ll almost certainly never see them again, plus there are tons of people doing their own thing so why shouldn’t you do your own thing.

Finally, the “I’ll never see this person again” thing means that people who feel no qualms about taking advantage of others will also not fear reprisals if they do that to strangers, which in turn means that everybody else is far more suspicious of strangers since they’re far more likely to be taken advantage of or know somebody who was taken advantage of than people in smaller places.

But yeah, I agree that most of those dynamics boil down to those in bigger places directly or indirectly not expecting to ever again cross paths with “random person on the street”.

Same here.

No matter what, one can’t just assume the other person wants it or even will be alright with it - it’s not up to me to decide what’s best for others hence I offer my help, not impose anything on anybody.

If they don’t want it (which happens at times), fair enough.

Fascism is very much the natural end state of ultra-nationalism.

A lot of those “victims” in America were fine with the culture of flag shagging leading to this.

(All it takes is to look at American interventions abroad to see that pretty much the entirety of the American political class and broader elites were absolutelly fine with Fascism as long as its effects stayed abroad, and those people were definitelly supported by most Americans, at last as long as there weren’t many coffins with Americans returning home - the other poster is totally correct in being angry at this).

And don’t get me started on how a huge slice of the American middle-class was alright with the total crash of social mobility since the 70s and explosion of inequality as long as they “got theirs” - the bottom of the country was falling but, hey, “I’m alright Jack”.

Mind you, this is the Progressive Politics forum so hopefully there are actually more people here who have long been aware and cared about “the greatest good for the greatest number” than elsewhere (so, leftwingers in the true sense) who are the only ones IMHO that haven’t been part of at least tilling and fertilizing the political field were American Fascism grew, and who are the only real vitims.

The rest were more like colaborators, or at least the kind of people the “First they came” poem talks about.

If it wasn’t Trump, it would be somebody else similar.

Some guy like him accelerating the speed of collapse is pretty standard at this stage of the Rise & Fall cycle of Empire (of which the US is most definitely in the Fall stage and has been since maybe all the way back in the late 70s).

The whole “elite pillaging” stage of the last couple of decades in an extremelly nationalist nation with a massive myth of national greatness was bound to deliver a populist strongman that promised to “restore the greatness of the nation”.

Maybe you’ll be lucky and avoid the whole “overextending itself in a war against multiple enemies / a peer level enemy” kind of thing that also often happens at this stage.

Curry is the greatest dish of English cuisine.

I lived in the UK as an EU immigrant before Brexit and I can tell you that they were already well on their way before that.

Just go have a look at the Stasi-like civil society done in the UK as shown by the Snowden Revelations: it was actually worse than the US and, unlike in the US, none of it was rolled-back in the UK and instead new laws were passed to make the whole thing retroactivelly legal.

This is far from the only way in which Britain hasn’t really been a proper Democratic nation for quite a while (for example, did you know they have a Press Censorship system called “D-Notices” or that there is not right to legal counsel when interrogated at a border crossing?).

Brexit was not the cause of Britain’s increased authoritarianism, it was a consequence of it (though indirectly, due to things like Press ownership concentration, the BBC to quite an extend a Propaganda outlet for the party in government and the pain of the Austerity that was chosen in the aftermath of of the 2008 Crash as a way to pay for the costs of saving the wealth of the rich and the bonuses of bankers).

It’s just that unlike in places like the US or Hungary, the culture of the elites gives a huge importance to “keeping appearences” (hence the “English gentleman” stereotype, which at least nowadays is all about how one presents oneself and not at all about morals, ethics or honor) so you get a posh kind of Fascist rather than the raging strongman populist style of fascist you get in other countries. Also Britain is far more likely to hide the use of force for oppression with “It’s the Law” and “Proper procedure” than the others - again a form of managing appearances.

Like when the coach of a big sports team is interviewed on the half-time break of a game they’re losing, this guy will of course going to say they’re still going to win.

It would only be news if he confessed they were fucked.

In Portuguese from Portugal, one of the words for “queue” is “bicha”,

In Portuguese from Brasil, “bicha” is a slang word for homosexual and has nothing to do with queues.

So the common Portuguese expression to tell somebody one’s going to stand on a queue - “vou para a bicha” (literally “I’m going to the queue”) - has a whole different meaning for Brasilians.

He has blood on his bloody nose.

The obligation to obbey the Copyright of others is only for the riff-raff.

• The Leave Referendum, Brexit negotiations and the actual Brexit.
• Pretty much every single day of the government of Boris Johnson.
• All the shit that came out in the Snowden Revelations about the “worse than the Stasi” level of civil society surveillance UK .
• The causes and handling of the 2008 Crash in Britain.
• The British participation in the second Iraq War which was amongst other things deemed Pillage (a war crime) in the report from the Comission on the Iraq War and the subsequent absence of accountability of British decision makers involved.
• The current government arresting people as “Terrorist supporters” for demonstrating against the Gaza Genocide.
• The pure propaganda BBC coverage on the Gaza War.
• The entire Corby “anti-semitism” slander campaign including the pure propaganda BBC coverage as well as the time they basically called a Jewish Holocaust Survivor an anti-semite to try and slander Corbyn by association.
• The ongoing crackdown on the right to demonstrate since at least 2010.

These are just the biggest ones (not including the long-running shit-show called The Royal Family). Plenty of smaller insane shit can be found in British newspapers quite regularly.

British politicians haven’t been serious and minded for at least 2 decades, probably more.

Great image management and projection of a posh image, whilst totally taking the piss out of just about everybody but a handful of people in their making of policy.

Try Lutris or Heroic Launcher as those two wrap around Wine (and everything else needed to run Windows games in Linux, such as DXVK) and manage the whole process for you, with only a few games which might need tweaking the config to run (and the fraction of games like that is no worse there than it is in Steam).

I use both Steam and Lutris and in my experience Steam is not at all a good launcher for anything other than games from the Steam store, mainly because it is less configurable and because it doesn’t directly expose the tools you need to use to fix those few games that won’t just run and limits the launch options you can tweak, whilst Lutris follows the Unofficial Open Source Credo of pretty much making it possible to configure everything (though Lutris specifically defaults to the best configuration for each game, but it definitelly gives you more than enough rope to hang yourself with)

Steam is very popular because of the Steam Store market dominance so tons of people swear by it (never having used anything else), but it’s not actually the greatest option for anything but steam games and even for those, sometimes it’s worse that getting the same game from GoG and using Lutris or Heroic, mainly because the DRM in the non-GoG version of some games interferes with running them in Linux.

Don’t use Wine directly, just use launcher UIs, such as Steam for Steam store games and Heroic Launcher or Lutris for games not from the Steam store.

You do need Wine installed, but if you use launchers you don’t actually need to figure Wine out or manage it to install and run the vast majority of games unless you’re doing unusual stuff like running pirated games.

Whilst dealing with this kind of asshole in a work environment is a lot more complex, online they’re like dogs barking behind a wall - only doing it because they’re aggressive simpletons and isolated from any problems from doing it - and just as unworthy of consideration or attention as one.

They really only have any impact on you when you give them more importance than they deserve.

Also keep in mind that these people are at the lower end of expertise and professionalism: top experts don’t waste time with talking shit like that, they’ll just either teach you or (most likely) ignore you because they think that stuff is too basic and not worth their time, and professionals are used to being professional and shit-talking ain’t being professional - even in expertise terms these people are unimportant.

In my experience there really is no correlation between being powerless/oppressed and actually being a good person: plenty of such people when given a bit of power turn out to be the same kind of shithole as the ones who oppress them in other situations.

The reason why powerless/oppressed people seldom act as shitholes is not because they’re better persons in average than the rest, it’s because they’re far more likely to suffer negative consequences if they do act in such ways, than the powerfull are.

I think the OP’s experience is the result of this dynamic alongside the one that, when that in an online environment one is far more likely to notice the assholes (because they’re the ones activelly posting shit) than the non-assholes (because they’re more likely to just silently negativelly judge the assholes) - in a street you can see when there’s a ton of other people looking down on the assholes, but you can’t online.

In my experience the solution for this kind of problem in an expert context is to keep in mind that the most expert a person is, the least likely they are to waste time in shit-talking, so almost invariably the people being assholes online in such a context don’t actually have knowledge beyond at most mid-level expertise and are really not deserving of any respect on a professional sense and, of course, as people who would chose shit-talking rather than helping or at worst not bothering and staying silent when confronted with somebody with less knowledge, are not deserving of any respect as persons.

Further and given the whole “generally powerless person who will act as an asshole if they’re isolated from the consequences of it” dynamic, they’re only doing it because they feel isolated from the consequences of pissing of somebody else, but that means the other side is also isolated from them.

Dealing with such people in a work environment is a lot more complex, but online they’re like dogs barking behind a wall and just as unworthy of consideration or attention.

There goes a man who knows who butters his bread and has no problems in getting his nose brown…

Personally, I think this is more appropriate.

Yeah.

Whilst I didn’t explicitly list that category as such, if you think about it, my AI for video surveillance and AI for scientific research examples are both in it.