JubilantJaguar

Diet is literally the most frequent choice we all make, i.e. every single day. All your response reveals is your insecurity about your own.

Personally I find the meta-question more interesting than the question here. Your take is pretty much the majority one in any Western society today (albeit particularly thoughtfully expressed here). Personally I share your analysis right down the line. But you're asking to be talked out of it. Is it because you feel that it's not presentable here? Or maybe among your friends? Who perhaps might belong to the small minority (7%) of the US population that pollsters categorize as "progressive activists"? Just a thought.

In any case, steelmanning is a great technique to practice. Well done for having a go.

Go vegan. Or at least vegetarian or flexitarian. Not even joking. Life becomes so much simpler.

Since I'm not a psychologist or even (alas) particularly empathetic, I will leave aside the fact that this post appears to be a veiled cry for help, and answer the actual question.

Prison exists to protect society from dangerous individuals, but also because it's the simplest form of non-corporal punishment. Flogging and flaying and chopping and mutilating and so on are all well and good but at some point in humanity's march to civilization such things will start making the rulers queasy and it becomes more palatable to just lock the problem up for a while.

Personally I have a radically liberal take on this. I think that the purpose of punishment (other than protection, as mentioned) should be not retribution but rather restoration. In my ideal world, prison sentences would mostly be swapped for various forms of community service.

Come to think of it, there are one or two podcasts I stick with partly because I like the sound of the host's voice. So perhaps you're on to something after all.

Big, if true. Not even being snarky. I wish I were so open-minded. There are just some things (indeed, lots of them) that I will never be interested in.

Well said. And I think there's more. In the Anglosphere and the USA in particular, government and state are often conflated, but they really are two different things. The former is the cockpit, the latter is the airplane.

Things are different in European cultures. In Latin languages, for example, the government is understood to be the body of politicians in control right now, whereas the state is a sort of expression of the people's will and therefore has much wider legitimacy. Two very different things. I believe it's similar in German.

I sometimes wonder if this semantic quirk has exacerbated the general skepticism of English-speakers towards collective action.

This is like asking, "What are some good books?" Are people here really so guileless that they're listening to podcasts simply because they have no ads? I don't get it. You could give me 100 ad-free football podcasts and I'm not listening to any of them because I'm not interested in football.

I was waiting for this! Debian is great. I used it for years. But IMO it's not polished enough for normies. The website is fugly and the onboarding funnel assumes too much knowledge. The installer, last time I tried it, was glitchy and unintuitive. I think that techies underestimate how offputting even ostensibly minor issues like this will be to ordinary users. Also, Debian has a ton of unmaintained packages (altho I gather that something is being done about this). Debian is fundamentally amateur in the best and unfortunately worst senses. I think a Linux flagship distro needs to be more pro and systematically thought out. For that, it's always going to help to have a big company or organization behind it.

Exactly. But I would go further. I think Linux needs flagship distros with big solid institutions behind them, and it needs us to support those distros by using them. I know this is not an popular opinion here.

I see those flagship distros precisely as Fedora and Ubuntu.

Funny. I do exactly the opposite for the exact same reason but inverted. I.e., turn the temperature up to unbearably hot for the last 30 seconds. That way, the cold air comes as a relief and you're functionally shielded from discomfort for the time it takes to get dry and covered.

There must be a lot of dumbbells in the world if this is counterintuitive. It's smart.