I miss my city.

Its got hard, dirty edges everywhere, but it is also one of the friendliest, most fun-loving and kindhearted places you will ever have the privilege of visiting.

Just don't be on any roads during rush hour when people are at their crankiest and make sure to keep valuables close to your skin when in places like Times Square and you will only have good experiences.

This is more or less the definition of being Agnostic. You don't subscribe to any of the major organized religions, but you still believe there is more out there than "the mundane."

I'm far more afraid of nutjobs like that bringing a gun to my kid's school because they heard the voice of god or whatever, or justifying the bombing of a school full of little girls because "whoops, wrong god," or deciding an entire planet full of people is done living because your ancient fanfic told you it was a good idea to kill the people you disagree with after you're done beating your slaves properly.

Organized religion has proven to be the single most devastating invention the human race has ever come up with. It genuinely needs to die.

Look up Project Ada, I believe it was. Google/Motorola had a functional mockup of basically a Lego kit for phones. Abandoned for lack of general interest.

If you want it DIY, then DIY. The vast majority of people want something that just works. There's a slice of that who care about the specifics, the nitty gritty, the full capability and functionality. I'm somewhere in that surprisingly broad range of a slice. You are too, it seems, but even then my willingness to tolerate jank with the amount of processing power available to literal children these days is extremely limited. My 8-bit NES ran better with only a few spare kilobytes and you mean to tell me actual gigabytes isn't enough room to do flying cartwheels? Sorry, fuck outta here.

Proof of concept is one thing and I can run with that, but daily driver? I need more.

Yes. Right now there are significant functional differences. In the future, maybe. Human Interface capabilities are always going to be the primary limiting factor, and as of now there are plenty of people who still much prefer actual tactile responses to computing to verify interaction. Physical buttons very clearly respond to inputs - except of course when they don't for [insert IT guy sigh here].

Plus, I can tell you for sure that Linux ARM distros are functional, yes, but don't compare to what an optimized PC distro or a dedicated mobile OS on ARM is like. My RaspberryPi with its fully optimized OS and ARM processor can't handle the same thing my phone can do in the background while I browse several tabs on the internet. Is it the RAM? I dunno, my laptop had the same RAM as the Pi until a couple months ago and still could multitask better. Play a game and watch a video and have multiple tabs open for the game. The Pi struggles on certain websites and that's all I ask of it.

Just because it exists doesn't mean it is ready for primetime.

I'll start with the TL;DR, they're probably bootlickers. To be decidedly less brief:

"Woke" is so stupid in how it is used and meant.

The original colloquialism was about being genuinely aware of what is happening and "awake to reality" with an almost Matrix-like connotation to it. Enlightened, in a sense.

Now it means a tumblrista who has more hair dye than actual sense and is overly concerned with how they feel versus reality. That is, if you are to ask the person in question. And that character assassination doesn't come from nowhere if we're being perfectly honest with ourselves.

Anti-woke at this point is associated with fascism in a distinctly similar misrepresentation of the original term, though perhaps still a bit more appropriate. Gotta be brain-dead or asleep to be okay with fascism after all, so it isn't perhaps as far off the mark.

The person OP describes exists in several instances of the fediverse as well, just wearing a different uniform and flying a few very specific flags. Ultimately they are all secret bootlickers. They secretly worship the strongmen because it allows them to outsource the difficult task of thinking to somebody else who views the world in as simplistic a manner as they do. "That's not a real thing because I don't experience it" type energy, so belittling/dehumanizing/othering/criminalizing/persecuting groups becomes okay in either active ways or "doesn't affect me, why should I care" ways in equal measure.

Again, it is important to note who ultimately comes to the defense of these voices and the commonalities they have with straight up fascists. The person you describe may very well vocally support anti-fascist ideologies at first blush, and yet there's still some authoritarianism in their slant. Like I said, more than happy to relegate their thinking to some form of "greater power" that still views them as the useful idiot. "Well its working just fine for me!"

Yep, keep licking the boot.

Still DIY, only you really would rather not have the handyman come help.

I mean, unless you do. I ain't judging.

I believe so. Nice to have agreement there.

He thought it was water and so drank the entire thing. This consumption killed him.

So look, I'm ambivalent right now.

Blues are incoming. This is better as at least things will stop getting actively, aggressively worse since Reds won't have full free reign. I will take what victories I can right now.

However, your entire point remains entirely undisturbed. I don't believe they will actually do much. What keeps me ambivalent versus bitter is that nothing has had a chance to happen yet. They haven't been sworn in, nothing but words have been thrown around yet. Talk all you want, I'll believe it when I see it.

People didn't believe AOC was gonna be anything. Now I'm not glazing her, but those same people also predicted she would fail immediately. All I said was she has to make it through her first term before we can really take a measure of the girl, and look where we are now. Those folks were wrong and she is a voice that people have no choice but to reckon with one way or another as she has a following and sway within it. Like her or not, those are facts.

There is a glimmer here, and I think what we can expect from the voting public of this generation is the genuine desire for not the same old shit. That's why we got Trump in the first place; he wasn't the same old fart who made empty promises. He came in with passion and common speech rather than boilerplate PC phrases and promised to change the status quo. Monkey's Paw activated on that one for those who voted Trump, but I am seeing that in the current vote as well.

Again, I've got no crystal ball to see how it will turn out, but the hope I once had has somehow limped its way out of the rubble of this administration. Doesn't mean it'll get very far, it just isn't dead yet, y'know?

I don't have to like him to agree with him on this.

I absolutely take your point - Boo Radley comes to mind - but I think the original commenter was speaking as much about the cold look in the eyes as anything else to do with the photo.

Though I admit that could just as easily be projection based on what we know of him. The brain is a very silly bit of meat after all.