Which generally comes with “I am more important than those forigners and hence should be treated better than them” which is just another form of “what’s in it for me”.

Certainly my experience from living in Brexit Britain is that the kind of people who couldn’t accept criticism of Britain were also the kind who though they were superior to foreigners because of being Britons and expected to be better treated than foreigners for it, and that wasn’t just in their own country but also for example when on vacations abroad.

As far as I know, in the countries were Portugal set colonies up, mixed race kids were just Portuguese on account of having a Portuguese parent.

When the Revolution in Portugal happened in 1974, Fascism was brought down and most of the “colonized” countries became free (Brasil had been independent for over a century by then, so it was only nations in Africa) and any Portuguese national who wanted it was repatriated, quite independently of skin color, and many were mixed race hence why I think a large proportion of the mixed race offspring just got Portuguese nationality on account of having a Portuguese parent and was in a normal Portuguese family.

That said, I vaguelly remember that during the Fascist Dictatorship the authorities didn’t want mixed race people in Portugal, but after the Revolution nobody really cared.

I guess that during Fascism the Portuguese authorities were fine with people having mixed race kids as long as the whole thing happened in the “colonies” and stayed there.

Certainly the stories I’ve heard from that time don’t really include in the “colonies” the level of segregation I’ve heard about with for example the English in places like India, though in the “Homeland” it was different.

Not to say Portugal was or is some kind of Racism-free paradise. It’s probably culturally just a bit less elitist and relaxed about “enforcing rules” on people than many other European nations who had their own “colonization” projects.

And then of course there is the example of Brasil were there are all skin tones possible, so clearly for many generations a large percentage of people haven’t really cared about keeping races segregated since originally there were only white Portuguese, black African slaves and the natives, with the latter actually being the smaller fraction of the population. I see it as an indication that the dominant original culture (the Portuguese one of the XVI and XVII century), didn’t care much about stopping people from having sex across races.

I’m Portuguese and I get the impression that the way the Portuguese were different from most European colonialist powers is that the Portuguese would fuck (in a literal sense) just about anybody, which is a huge contrast with for example the English that tended to not mix with the natives.

Brasil, the only place outside Africa which was a Portuguese “colony”, is a wonderful example of racial mixing (though it has its issues).

Not saying that Portuguese colonialism was good (it was not even close to positive), just that it serms to have had this unusual higher tendency for people to mix across races, not because it was done with good intentions but it just happened to there being something in Portuguese culture (damned if I know what) that led to that.

Patriotism: “What can I to for my country?”

Nationalism: “What can my country do for me?”

In my experience living in a couple of countries in Europe, generally the bigger the country the more the nationalism (though Germany is maybe exceptional on this) - small countries have very little tendency for people and business to display the flag and have flag-themed products and objects whilst larger countries have more of that.

That said, the far-right everywhere are flag-shaggers and during periods with large international sports events (for example, the World Cup) many normal people will display a national flag, though even then it’s more so I large countries than small ones plus in some countries other flags are used (for example, in Britain they use the flags of the nations rather than the UK flag and in The Netherlands they use the “Oranje” flag rather than the Dutch flag).

I think the only country in Europe with nationalism close to America is the UK and I don’t believe it’s anywhere the same level (for example, they have nothing like the Pledge Of Alliegance).

The more services you have depending on a 3rd party which can do whatever the fuck they want, either directly or by changing the rules when the feel like it (i.e. not bound by rules they cannot change, such as root DNS providers are) and then doing it, the less your system is actually self-hosted, IMHO.

For me the whole point of self-hosting is exactly being as independent as possible of 3rd parties that can just fuck you up, be it on purpose (generally for $$$) or because they go bankrupt and close their services.

This is why I’ve actually chosen to run Kodi on my home server that doubles down as TV Box even though I can’t easilly use it from anywhere else (it’s possible but it involves using a standalone database that is then shared, which can only be safelly done through customly setup ssh pipes) rather than something like Plex.

It’s kinda funny to see people into self-hosting still doing the kind of mistake I did almost 3 decades ago (fortunatelly in a professional environment) of trusting a 3rd party to the point of becoming dependent on them and later getting burned when they abused that trust, and which led me to avoid such situations like the plague ever since.

Mind you, I can understand if people for whom self-hosting is not driven by a desire to reduce vulnerability to the whims of 3rd parties (which includes reducing the risk of enshittification) and is instead driven by “waste not” (for example, bringing new life to old hardware rather than throwing it out) or by it being a fun challenge, don’t really care to be as independent as possible from such 3rd parties.

Something as simple as using Shell Scripting to automate tasks (say, rename all files in a directory according to a certain pattern) is programming in Linux and most of these you can even do directly in the shell (i.e. just type a few lines of code on the command line directly, no need to have a file with the program or do any kind of compilation).

Also it’s stupidly simple to program in certain languages like Perl and Python in Linux mainly because you’re just working in the command line interface and most of what those languages do is that kind of thing (rather than graphical UI stuff), those languages come almost invariably pre-installed in Linux distros, and you can use the same trick as with shell scripting of just starting the interpreter and type the code directly to run it.

Beyond that, if you’re actually doing stuff like server-side software development, Linux is overwhelmingly dominant in that space and it’s way simpler to, when targetting Linux servers, to just work on your own Linux as developer (user) machine because all the tools for remote access to Unix machines are there nativelly and work seamlessly, plus you can can have the developer machine double as a development environment for server side development (as Linux can still act as a server machine even when you’re running it as a user machine).

If it’s in your systems in an open format it’s yours, if it’s outside your systems or wrapped in some kind of locked format that forces you to go through somebody else’s software it’s de facto theirs.

Due to my own experience in software development with 3rd party solutions from way back, I never adhered to Streaming solutions (even though I was tempted) and always stuck to getting my entertainment in a media format I controlled (legitimately for a long as I could, not so much once even physical media started having DRM) because I was aware that it’s risky to outsource so much control over one aspect of what you do (in this case entertainment) to an entity which, frankly, sees you as nothing else that microscopic fraction of their bottomline.

(The funny bit is that if Netflix would sell me their Series in an open file format that I could download and at a reasonable price, I would have sent lots of money their way, same as I spent lots of money on DVDs and even VHS tapes back in the day. In fact all throughout that period I was doing something like that for games: as soon as I discovered GOG with their DRM-free downloadable installers, I started acquiring all my games by buying them from GOG)

In the fullness of time, my caution seems to have been proven right.

That’s pretty much the self-made home media system I’ve upgraded to some months ago, only mine has an N100 CPU (which is nicer from a power consumption point of view for an always on system since its TDP is 15W).

It’s wired to my TV, running Kodi on the foreground, runs qBittrorrent on the background over an always on VPN and serves as my home NAS.

From Aliexpress I got a wireless remote that let’s me control Kodi as if it was a TV box, so from my sofa I handle it as a TV box whilst from my PC I can ssh to it and to any computer kind of management.

Probably one of my best purchases ever.

It happened to me for during a couple of days last week that I could hear my own heartbeat whenever it was quiet.

No idea why and it’s gone now.

One should be have been assuming since Windows 7 and automated online updates that the Microsoft key used to sign OS updates is in the hands of at least the NSA (and hence probably the Israeli equivalent) and they can push whatever they want to your computer as an OS update, bypassing all protections.

In fact the same applies to Linux updates of certain distros - if they’re maintained by a company based in the US they can be forced by FISA courts to provide the signing keys to the US Government.

More in general, just go read about FISA courts and their secret court orders - companies based in the US or hosting things in the US can be secretly forced to just “give the keys of the Realm” to parts of the US Government.

Since things like the Patriot act one should be treating companies based in the US as just as untrustworthy as companies based in China.

(By the way, some other supposed Democratic countries have similar or worse systems - for example the equivalent of FISA courts in the UK have things like secret court sessions were the side which is not the State is not authorized to have a legal representation, see most of the evidence or even know the decision of the court).

Have people already forgot most of what came out in the Snowden Revelations?!

I think people are mainly driver by the tabu against eating human meat rather than any kind of proper thinking about it, but the tabu itself probably came to be because people kept getting sick when they ate human meat but not when they ate other meats.

You see a lot of that kind of thing in other tabus, for example the ones against incest (inbreeding tends to produce offspring with health problems) or handling feces (because the bacteria in feces tend to cause disease much more than the bacteria in things like dirt).

I read it as meaning:

• “Just because two sides are fighting doesn’t mean you have to pick one”.

Every single disease that might be present in human meat is 100% capable of infecting humans, which is not at all the case for non-human meat.

Even if you properly cook the meat, things like prions can still remain.

I suspect that’s probably one of the reasons why the tabu against cannibalism is so widespread: from a health point of view human meat is a lot more likely to make you sick than non-human meat.

I think at the root of it all is a far broader phenomenon than that which is far from gender specific.

In simple terms: quiet confidence doesn’t stand-out in “loud” environments were people’s attention is being sought by countless other people, especially for people who aren’t sophisticated and lived enough to recognize and value it, and the vast majority young people are such people as are (or so it seems to me at times) a large minority or even a majority of supposedly adults.

Putting it in another way, both quiet confident people are nowhere as invested into shaping the opinions of others as to spend most of their time “shouting” (and by “shouting” I mean all the ways people try and project and impression onto others, not just speaking loudly, so for example how some people always dress to impress rather than dress for themselves) and unsophisticated people are drawn to “loudness” rather than more subtle elements of how others talk, dress, make choices and act.

This stuff is behind phenomenons like Influencers, Celebrity Culture, Populist Politicians and so on, which has been pushed very hard in Western Culture for decades now.

So loud toxic masculinity posers with lots of exposure in the News Media (with the well known “Halo Effect” that people who are talked about a lot are perceived by others as important even when most of the talking about them is saying negative things) will get the attention of and influence emotional, social and/or intellectual simpletons.

Palantir is pretty core to the Surveillance Society in several supposedly Democratic countries. More in general just about all companies in that space such as the NSO Group makers of the Pegasus software for remote hacking of smartphones are invariably unethical

Similarly the whole business of Investment Banking is pretty unethical, and that definitely includes most Hedge Funds, the latter never being household names.