comfy @ comfy @lemmy.ml

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3 yr. ago

I know you said you were on a phone, although if you can, spoiler formatting on this would be great. It's perfect for long sections that can be opened and retracted (and also for content that not everyone really wants to see)

Look for leftist organizations near you, join them and honestly engage with them.

Personally, I found Palestine protests and similar ones to be a great way to find multiple parties, ask them basic questions, and separate the junk ones (e.g. idealistic ultra-left sects) from the ones with a viable strategy. I first went to the unionists there and asked them if any of the socialist orgs actually worked with them and only two of the four locals were mentioned. Notably, one which was mentioned and one which wasn't were both, on paper, followers of the exact same strain of Trotskyism, in fact one was a split from the other party, but on the ground it's night and day, apples and oranges; one works with&within unions to make sure its members are on board with picket actions before they happen, the other has fresh college students recite an evangelical recruitment script at protests and end up asking Palestinians at a Palestine protest with family still in Palestine if they're aware of the ongoing conflict.

In a word, if you have choice, check them all, and you don't have to pick one just for their theoretical tendency. Being correct isn't enough.

Every socialist country had a revolution.

[* there are a couple of small exceptions, but their situation doesn't apply to countries like the US and still required a mass movement to be built]

The section about pessimism is relatable. I spent a few months in my teen years in a chatroom with the topic of being outcasts in some way or another, before realizing it was a self-prophecising kind of toxic the same way that incel culture is, but there were some people ranting about how stupid people are and woe is me, I'm Cassandra! And my impression at the time was thinking they're probably an egotistical prick who thinks they're better than everyone else. But on the other hand, it is frustrating to see, less how 'dumb' people are but how ignorant people are. It's hard not to get a bit of ego at times. And this isn't about IQ for the most part, these issues are often caused or compounded by other problems with education, social values, propaganda/indoctrination and the lot. I guess I feel the activist frustrated enough to yell "why don't you care?" when obviously, rationally it's more complex than that.

This is a big issue in tech communities as it becomes more accessible, people are entering who aren't used to the DIY culture, who don't understand unsaid (or said) rules like asking smart questions to not waste everyone's time. The world is at your fingertips! Fucking put that question in a search engine first before you waste my time, my life has value goddammit! When I occasionally whine about reddit culture, that's a part of it. People who are curious (and that's perfect!) but don't realize they're asking questions they can learn the answer to themselves. It's like if we're talking about cooking and someone jumps in to ask "what is a herb?", it's a valid question, an important question, but for fucks sake you can learn that without asking us all! Or at least go to ELI5 & NoStupidQuestions where those questions are appropriate.

Keep in mind, that rant is specific to online questions, where you have the resources you need. It's more acceptable in a conversation, and I certainly don't want anyone to feel uncomfortable learning things.

Honestly, a community learning how to effectively direct people to an FAQ to onboard uninformed newcomers on answers and community expectations is the difference between a welcoming community and burned-out babysitters becoming toxic.

fwiw, Hong Kong protestors were protesting about their own home, rather than these universities protesting in international solidarity against their university's investments and policies. I'd kinda expect the Hong Kong ones to be defended more viciously.

Great work, that release page lists plenty of neat upgrades.

and got Peertube federation working again

Good to hear! I tried to like/upvote a PeerTube video a few weeks ago and couldn't view the channel.

No, that's not my argument. Plenty of those licenses are enforceable and sometimes enforced - even if they're not enforced perfectly.

My argument is that OP's license is mostly targeting situations which, I believe, are unenforceable. I know this following example is ridiculous, but it's a bit like saying "we should ban drunk driving in other countries". Drunk driving laws are useful, they're enforceable even if not perfect, but there's no point in trying to enforce them in other countries who won't respect our laws.

Me. The work I'm using them for doesn't need collaboration or sharing. But it's important to also have collaborative ones up my sleeve.

I'm using formula calculations and visual graphs, so a CLI-managed CSV just won't work for me.

The reason we aren’t enforcing what OP is proposing is because it doesn’t exist, so no enforcement apparatus exists. Why would it?

Our legal systems already recognize and have some mechanisms to enforce contracts and licenses. We don't need to build a whole new one for each license. But our existing copyright system already fails to enforce itself in certain countries and with certain entities (e.g. military) and I just can't see that changing.

Why?

I absolutely agree. Violent direct actions are rarely the preferred route even of notorious groups like antifascists. Even (left) radical groups usually understand and teach that mass movements are safer and more powerful, the best way to win a battle is without firing a shot. And the failure of the late 1800s/early1900s anarchist propaganda of the deed assassinations proves your point that violence alone won't solve problems. My caveat is that when violence becomes tactically appropriate, we shouldn't assume it's inherently wrong.

Do you guys think that this is utopic? Does it really hurt the essence of open source? Do you think in the same way about this, and if yes, how do you cope with that?

I do think it's utopian and I can't see it being effective, but you do raise a good question: "Does it really hurt the essence of open source?"

I see open source through a pragmatic lens, not some untouchable liberalist moral right. I'm not the kind of person who says "We should hand power over to the fascists since they did win the vote this time", or "Nazis have a legal right to be here, stop harassing them!". Helping people in reality is more important than trying to implement abstract ideals consistently. So, when push comes to shove, I don't really care about the essence of open source. One could claim that copyleft (e.g. GPL, CC-SA) violates the liberty of companies to use code freely. Yes, it does violate their liberties, but that's a good thing. That's the whole point, in fact. It's a pragmatic compromise away from some abstract ultimate freedom, making it something that actually empowers us and avoids helping those exploiting us as much. And you've taken a similar theme - while I disagree with some of the entities you've chosen, I agree with your attitude. The essence of open source isn't real, it can't help us.

I don't think it's useful to directly compare the GPL. It's often disrespected, yes, but it's also often enforceable. If you violate the GPL in a for-profit product, you might be someone the courts have jurisdiction over and the license is enforceable. It is sometimes enforceable and therefore useful. In OP's proposal, the only target of it I see as viable is the "radical parties". All those other targets are pretty out-of-reach.

As a side point, GPL, along with MIT, CC0, WTFPL, etc., would still be somewhat useful regardless because they forfeit rights. I can modify and republish the software publicly because I'm confident I can't legally be sued for it.

Good points. In fact, many of the normalized things we take for granted today (like the eight-hour day, liberations of many colonies) were gained through the efforts of radical parties and radical, including violent, actions.

The status quo causes immense suffering. There's a trolley problem at play - to do nothing is to be complicit in suffering. Radical opinions are needed to break with the status quo to reduce suffering, even if it involves direct action against the people running the system.

We have all kinds of other licenses that people disrespect, yet we have them and try to enforce them where we can. I don’t seewhy this would be any different, even if it’s a very difficult challenge.

Laws mean nothing as ideals, like you said, they need enforcement. Unless we engage in vigilante action, we rely on existing law enforcement systems, which do have biases and vested interests and therefore an incentive to ignore many of these criteria. Drunk driving is a case where most governments can look at it and see the obvious benefit to society and its rule, and will bother to at least try to enforce it. And LEA have resources that enable them to enforce that. This kind of license, on the other hand, doesn't have that same motivation nor capability. Who's going to stop a military using it? Their own government? Another government?

It's completely utopian.

For what it's worth, I'm very familiar with that feeling too, despite excelling academically and a high score on IQ tests. Ignorance is not a lack of intelligence, it's more likely a lack of experience. And every culture, job and hobby will have their own terminology and assumed knowledge, so not even the Einsteins could pretend to already know it all.

I listen to music all the time, I've composed amateur music myself, and enjoy occasionally reading wikipedia for trivia of music theory, but if two musicians start talking about basic stuff like major and minor chords I'm already out of my depth. Do I do the smart thing and ask them to explain? Or do I just nod until they talk about something I know, or tell myself I don't actually care about music theory?

Yes.

My only caveat is that I understand some recruits are ignorant (as in, can't point out USA on a world map), exploited by recruiters, and are capable of coming to their senses. One example of what I'm talking about, a former Navy officer who joined to avoid homelessness and unwittingly took part in the horrific blockade of Yemen, eventually understood that they were part of a blockade only once they returned to the US, and later became a socialist anarchist.

In case anyone needs this said plainly: Fuck the empire, and fuck the people who signed up to enforce it. My point is that some of the signups who are committing these atrocities are capable of deradicalizing themselves and educating themselves once they understand what they're doing to other people and why they were doing it. I am not saying this as some silly moral appeal - again, fuck the troops, ignorance is not an excuse, they are legitimate targets - but rather to point out pragmatically that those who leave the force may still be able to fight for a good cause despite their past actions, a fact that is sometimes lost in slogans.

It needs to be accepted as currency to be useful.

My friend uses it to anonymously buy servers. Their country has a history of killing political activists so they take their privacy seriously when it comes to that kind of thing.

I would say Monero was useful to them, at that time. It didn't have to be mainstream to be useful. They weren't investing in it. It allowed them to make an international transaction which is much harder to track than other accepted payment methods.

Those are both great points, thanks for explaining.