The US isn't better or worse than Europe, it's different. Having lived in both the hypocrisy of Europeans when it comes to police brutality to gypsies is astonishing, doubly so since I'm half gypsy but white enough to get a free pass and get told how bad 'they' are.
Usually it's around this time that some European chimes in with some bullshit about how it's not racism when it's against gypsies. Hopefully this time they spare us.
How many gypsies gets killed per year by police in Europe? Compare that to how many people police kills in USA? There is pretty hard data that European police is drastically less violent overall.
It is possible that European police is more racist than US police, yes, but that wasn't what we were talking about. I'm pretty sure that US police is more violent against white people than European police is against gypsies, meaning that even with the racism European police is still much better.
To be able to write what Beethoven did, and the amount of it, I would say he had this ability too. Can't really say that wanting to hear better while he played is a sign that he didn't. What's a scientific understanding of music if you can't hear?
But the thing is that these people are the ones whose main prerogative is to score points. They are largely uneducated and disinterested, the world around them is complex and they feel inadequate. So they read something that tells them all the scientists and educated people in the world are either evil or sheeple and with the blink of an eye they have found superiority to you, when in reality, deep down, they know they don't have a position with regards to the big conversations of the world.
Rather than putting work in to maybe get to a point where they still have to be corrected by those they feel jealous of, those they resent for their cultural capital, they instantaneously put themselves above and beyond all of them.
Reasoning with and understanding them is impossible for two reasons. Everything I've said above and also how infuriating they are. There is only so much going around in circles listening to complete and utter tripe that the most patient of us can deal with. And that is what you'll spend your time doing, because reasoning and explanation is precisely what these people resent about you and it is precisely the driver of their beliefs.
The problem, I believe, is that the ridicule just isn't enough. They have each other as a force field. If they all of a sudden came up with a new piece of half-baked tripe which was ridiculed in their own circles, they would backtrack faster than they've ever adopted any of their views. The ridicule needs to be drilled in.
From a disinterested third-party perspective, this reads like it could be applied exactly in the reverse. Would it be any less correct if they were to say the same about you? Are there differences in intelligence between people? Should less-intelligent people have a voice on issues? Is there anybody more intelligent than you? How do you know that you are smarter than someone else? Do they know that you are smarter than them? How would you know that someone is smarter than you? If you are certain that you are right, is someone that disagrees with you certainly wrong? How would you know if you were wrong? If you were to ridicule someone for a belief that turned out to be correct, what is your proper response? Have authorities always been correct for all of human history? Is there any authority figure that you disagree with today? What is the difference between authority figures that you agree with, and those that you don’t?
Let’s take a perspective from statistical theory. Suppose there is a coin that comes up heads 1% of the time. Person A observes it 10 times and concludes that it always comes up tails. Person B does not observe at all and guesses 50/50. Who is more correct? Let’s see what happens when they start betting with 100. Person A is certain that they will win, so always bets everything. Person B expects no gain, so will not bet anything. After 1000 games, what is the probability that person A will have more money than person B? For a more theoretical treatment of why person B is more correct, see: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kullback–Leibler_divergence
I hope that you can understand that, just like epistemology, statistics, and stock trading, civics is not a domain where self-righteousness leads to good outcomes.
> The problem, I believe, is that the ridicule just isn't enough.
The comment you responded to did not suggest ridicule as a tactic. More than that, I can almost guarantee the commenter would abhor ridiculing as a strategy. The problem isn't that ridicule isn't enough. Ridiculing is part of the problem.
Vim very much parallels a user's story with linux. Experiment just enough that you catch a glimpse of its true power and you become a snob. Your workflow is amazing and anybody who uses Windows/IDEs is a lesser mortal.
I will say that, while vim has a great, great many advantages, I'm often honest with those I'm trying to convert. Like the article said, there is a learning curve and you probably shouldn't try to gain the efficiency offered at peak work times, for e.g. with a deadline looming. Also, you accidentally hit a letter key and you can do something far less obviously wrong than inserting that letter into your text. But these are like getting a runny nose from a medicine that saves your life.
You really get to see who isn't happy with their lives at home. Many for reasons I'm sympathetic to, but a comparable many who really need to reevaluate their shit.
