Try Lutris - it integrates with the GOG store so will fetch and install the games from there, with proper scripts to configure Wine so that the game just works with no extra configuration (i.e. with works like the Steam launcher does for the Steam store).
I believe Heroic Launcher does the same, but I’ve just settled down to use Lutris and Steam so never go around to test Heroic.
Yeah, my bad.
In light of the complete total bullshit that both Carney’s “suspention” or arms sales to Israel in Canada and Starmer’s “restriction” of arms sales to Israel in Britain turned out to be, I incorrectly presumed that like me others would see Merz’s announcement with distrusts and skepticism (given that until now Germany has “unwaveringly supported” the Genocide even harder than the other two countries) and did not actually wrote it in my post leaving it open to a different interpretation.
The NAZI element in this racism is the supporting of a Genocide (Fixed it for you).
It was never about Germans being NAZIs or having NAZIs amongst them (which should be clear when that quote is seen in context rather than decontextualized as you used it) which is why on all my posts I very carefully only ever mentioned “NAZI-mindset” (and really meant it as “NAZI-like mindset” since it’s not about people thinking like the NAZIs in everything)
My point is about how a certain moral framework specifically defining how other people should be treated depending on their race, which is very much the same moral framework that served as foundation for NAZI thinking on Race, is still alive and well amongst the German elites and treated as a natural way of thinking by many if not most of the rest (i.e. it has been normalized amongst the German Society).
And, yeah Britain and America too display said “NAZI-mindset” in their support of this Genocide, and the rationale is the exact same one as I used when talking about Germany - its not about about having a National Socialist Party Of The German Worker there, it’s about following an extreme form of racial discrimination which sees mass murdering of children as morally acceptable if the aggressor ethnicity is a “favored” ethnicity and the children are from a “disfavored” one.
Further, having such a mindset amongst at least part of the population there makes all sense in light of both countries’ history: the British elites were very attracted to NAZIsm right up until Hitler invaded Poland (there’s even a picture of young Princess Elizabeth being taught the NAZI salute by her uncle, the King) AND have their own collection of Genocides they commited during the Empire times including one done in India by none other than Churchill himself, whilst America only exists as it is thanks to the Genocide of multiple Native Indian tribes there, plus widelly practiced Chatel Slavery for a large part of its History.
The real shocker in all this is that it turns out that either the “Humanism” of many supposedly Democratic nations in the last couple of decades was 100% performative and totally hypocrite or they’ve actually been regressing back to 19th century values (such as white colonialism and the myth of the “uncivilized savage” that justified treating them as subhuman - something which curiously, is a common supporting pillar in Israeli propaganda about Palestinians) that ended up materialized in the early 20th century in things like the Holocaust.
So no, the Nazi-mindset in the sense I used it (meaning Nazi-levels of Racism and disregard for human life) is not a Germany Exclusive. The only thing in this that is a Germany Exclusive is that Germany supposedly attoned for having acted on such mindset and expunged said mindset, but in practice it didn’t attone in a fair way (for example, the victims of the Holocaust from the Roma People never received the same treatment as even members of the Jewish People who themselves were never victims or family of the victims) and the mindset was never expunged and is alive and well amongst the power elites and even accepted as normal by many common Germans as painfully displayed in the “unwavering support of the Jewish Nation” whilst they commit Genocide.
It’s funny that you think merely being a Racist or not is the only consideration, rather than what you do or allow to happen because of your Racism.
That reductive “logic” only makes sense if for you, Morally, supporting the mass murder of children because of their ethnicity is exatly the same as unfairly suspecting somebody of being a “shady character” because of their ethnicity: in other words, murdering tens of thousands of children with intent because of their race, is for you morally the same as unfairly suspecting somebody of bad deeds because of their race.
You’re making my my point about Nazi-mindset.
It’s not the being a Racist, it’s the how far you act on it.
The NAZI element is the supporting a Genocide which is turning into a new Holocaust (this one were the mass murdering is done via Starvation rather than Zyklon B, which is especially daming because Starvation is considered the most painful death there is on account of the body eating itself up) because the aggressors belong to and claim to represent a specific race than the victims: that is far, far beyond common racism - even the Ku-Klux-Klan did not murder as many children of the targetted ethnicity in a century as the Zionists did just in the first couple of months of this attack on Gaza.
That’s what really qualifies that kind of mindset at a level beyond “mere”, common Racism, and into the same domain as Nazism and other ethno-Fascist ideologies.
For me personally and adding to that, comes the profound dissapointment that a nation which I believed had, following the horror caused by a certain kind of thinking in their own past, interiorized the Humanist principle of an unconditional “Never again!”, turned out to instead had just interiorized the idea that a racial classification error had made with one specific ethnicity (and only one, so for example the Roma people whom Hitler himself made equally targetted for extermination, are not included in this) which was before deemed untermenschen when they should’ve been classified as ubermenschen, and just moved them from one classification to the other in their treatment of them - a mere admission and correction of a “labelling error” rather than acceptance of the error of and tearing down of the entire way of thinking that labelled people by ethnicity like that, used such labels to determine their “inherent worth” as human beings and translated that into actions that would even result in the death of millions of people deemed of a “lesser” race if the killers were of a “greater” race.
“Never again!” was only ever about specific races, not about what human beings should not do to other human beings.
The “unwavering support for the Jewish Nation”, very openly stated by amongst others Merz, could only be measured as “normal” Racism (it’s very openly about the ethnicity of the people in that nation, hence the Racial Discrimination is not in doubt) until the Genocide started, but its continuation even as it became clearer the extent and, maybe more damning, the sheer inhumanity (the targetting of children is pretty telling) of it, has showed that the mindset behind it was not merelly that of the common Racist: it takes a very special, very extreme kind of Racist to be ok wth the mass murdering of children.
Wherever the fuck the moral red line is for the German elites (it’s unclear if they even have one), it’s far beyond most Racists out there, even the likes of the most racist Afrikaners in Apartheid South Africa or the Ku-Klux-Klan in America.
The NAZI mindset that even the lives of children don’t matter if they’re from an ethnicity which the fascists of a self-proclaimed mater-race (“god’s chosen people”) have deemed subhuman (“human animals”, “vermin”), is alive and well in Germany.
The symbols were torn down and the goosestepping stopped to appease the Allies, but the mental framework of seeing others as “ethnics”, with those of some ethnicities being thought of as untermenschen whose lives have no value, still lives in the German power structures.
Might biggest disappointment in all this was the revelation that even in the face of Genocide Germany still puts support for Races above Human Lives, just like in the old days.
My point is that Engineers with good people skills and the patience to provide support to regular people aren’t common, not that there aren’t any (the business of IT Consultancy, for example, relies on those).
Also they’re a lot more expensive than the typical first line support workers.
Grabbing a bunch of random engineers and having them do first line support on a mass market service is thus both idiotic and seriously desperate.
Well, I’ve worked directly with end-users often enough, both on the side of getting requirements from them for new features and supporting them for the existing application features (these were expert users) and think it’s important for engineers to get that kind of exposure.
However working with a limited number of users who are experts in their domain and have high skills in computing is something very different from manning phone lines to provide first line support for a mass marketed product or service whose users are just average people who don’t work on any organized thinking area (so their thinking and ability to express themselves clearly is all over the place) and whose computing abilities are usually pretty low, especially compared to an engineer - the mismatch is so broad that it tends to be an exercise in frustration from which the average engineer will learn very little even if they are open minded and understanding.
In the companies I worked it, engineers were at most at 3rd level support (mainly in places where the users were business experts and advanced computer users) or even the people 3rd level support calls when they can’t sort the problem out.
Either way, the vast majority of support calls are filtered by lower support levels out before it gets to them.
Putting engineers as first line support sounds like a spectacularly bad idea, at multiple levels: they’re far too expensive to waste doing that job, they generally tend to use expert terms rather than common terms so the users don’t get them, what they see as “baseline computing know-how” that they expect users have is still well beyond the computing expertise of most people so all in all they tend to detest doing it.
Yeah, the engineers with people skills are probably looking for another job or at least leveraging this to get a raise.
engineers
people skills.
Not really two positively correlated things, probably negatively correlated.
Putin’s a complete total psychopath for whom human life has no value.
And yet he’s fucking Mother Theresa of Calcuta by comparison with mass baby murderer Netanyahu whose troops actively target children.
You will notice that Merz has “forgotten” about Netanyahu is this “most serious war criminal of our time” scale.
This is all smoke & mirrors: German mainstream politicians loved Putin and they especially loved the money they got paid when they retired from politics for “consuting work” or even board memberships in companies like Gazprom, and it took months and a lot of pressure from everybody else in the West to get Germany to start disconnecting from Russia and reduce the money they sent Putin’s regime for things like gas which was used by the likes of BASF as cheap raw material in their processes to get a competitive advantage over other chemical companies. Also getting them to actually start supporting Ukraine militarily was like trying to pull teeth out - I remember how everybody and their dog had to send tanks to Ukraine before Germany finally got around to sending their old tanks there.
I very much doubt that these statements from Merz are any more than pure image management, especially because his “unwavering support of the Jewish State” (his own words) has showned that for him too, just like for Putin, human life has no value when a person is not from the “right” ethnicity.
Surely the feeling of being shamelessly ripped off is a “real experience”!???
Macron and Netanyahu doing some cooperative performative bullshit to hold off the pressure from French public opinion for something effective to actually be done to stop Israel, rather than starting by not sending weapons to Israel anymore and applying sanctions on them.
The real aim of this performance is to distract and confuse the public and give the Zionists time to finish their “final solution”.
It’s an old neoliberal trick to keep on supporting Fascists: when things are so bad that public opinion has turned against the Fascists, announce a totally ineffective action as if it’s some great pushback against the Fascists, have the Fascists loudly bitch and moan about it (with a wink and a nod) all the while de facto buying time for the Fascists to keep on murdering and get more gains for themselves and, of course, afterwards there will be no actual reversion of the gains of the Fascists, much less punishing them, afterwards.
The next stage will be some kind of “It’s too late now” talk coming from Macron.
It’s not quite “jumping from the frying pan into the fire”, but it certainly is “jumping from one frying pan into another frying pan”.
Steal the cake from the public.
Slice it up and sell the slices to the fatcats at discounted prices.
Throw a few crumbs towards members of the public and claim that “now everybody can own it”.
It’s been the neoliberal strategy for privatizing public assets since the very start.
It’s mainly to do with longer and seldom cut hair being a lot harder to keep healthy than shorter and often cut hair is.
Being a man or woman doesn’t directly dictate the quality of one’s hair, rather in the current cultural environment it influences how long one’s hair is likely to be allowed to get before it’s cut (and how much it gets cut) which in turn influences how healthy one’s hair naturally is.
Then there’s also the whole concern with one’s external appearence which again in present day culture is also different in average for men and women, with the latter under more social pressure to look well groomed.
Plenty of guys out there with long hair have to go to a lot of trouble to make it look healthy when they actually try to.
Kinda reminds me this Game one plays in Theatre which is to Play The Status (you’re given a number between 1 and 10, with 1 having the lowest social status and 10 the highest, and you try and act as such a person).
Alongside the whole chin-down to chin-up thing, people tend to do more fast and confident moving the higher the status, but the reality is that whilst indeed up the scale in professional environment the higher the status the more busy and rushed they seem, the trully highest status people (the 10s) don’t at all rush: as I put it back then (this was the UK) “the Queen doesn’t rush because for everybody the right time for the Queen to be somewhere is when she’s there, even it it’s not actually so, hence she doesn’t need to rush”.
There was also some cartoon making the rounds many years ago about how people on a company looked depending on their social status, were you started with the unkept shabbily dressed homeless person that lived outside the vuilding, and as you went up the professional scale people got progressively more well dressed and into suits and such, and then all of a sudden a big switch, as the company owner at the top dressed as shabbily as the homeless person.
You don’t control your peons, you mainly define zones were certain things should happen and the peons go and do it.
Zones can be for very low level explicit things (such as “cut all trees in this area” or “mine these iron nodes”) or broader activities (for example defining an area for cultivation of a specific plant, were the peons will automatically seed and sow, and you don’t even have to assigned specific peons to it).
There are a few single-action commands (say, toggle this machine ON/OFF) but again they’re not peon-specific (you just signal that the machine needs to be toggled ON or OFF and somebody will get around to do it),
You can force a specific peon to do a specific action just once, but it’s seldom used or useful.
You do normally control your peons directly for warfare, though.
In practice, you vaguely control who does which kind of things and with which priority via a control board where you define priorities per type of activity and per-peon, so basically a high-level management tool.
My impression is that there is a little bit of micromanagement but very little.
People doing things with their time and expertise without a profit motivation is Communism!
/s