millie @ millie @beehaw.org

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2 yr. ago

Single issue voters will go to their graves insisting that Harris would have been just as bad. Potentially graves that they ended up in because they lost their health insurance.

Or because they caught a disease from a $70 uninspected egg.

Honestly I could see portions of New England being pretty willing to join Canada.

Do you think it's realistic to take back any branch of government from like, actual whole ass conservatives by dividing the only coalition we have?

This framing isn't particularly helpful for solidarity.

The left relies on coalitions. Criticizing the stewards of those coalitions because they fail to address the needs of the people they rely on for votes is helpful and constructive. Just reducing all left-wing voters to a pair of stereotypes and trying to push one of those stereotypes away from the other? Not helpful.

We need nuanced dialogue and mutual aid. It's a matter of survival. This isn't that.

Everyone in the military takes an oath to defend the constitution and refuse unlawful orders. Trump may very well be headed toward fucking around and finding out if he pushes it.

Why is this thread full of Nazi propaganda? Yikes. 😬

Don't be so quick to fold. One of the things we've seen over the past few days that it's easy to overlook is that Trump doesn't have the power to do whatever he wants with executive orders. Look at the spending freeze. They reversed the order already because it was clear that they don't actually have the authority to turn off spending without legislative approval.

Trump and his team don't really seem to know what they're doing. One could argue that they're testing the waters, but that doesn't really hold up. It would make sense to slowly chip away at the changes they're trying to make and erode the balance of power. Instead they've basically challenged the supreme court and the legislation to let go of their own relevance. Some Republican representatives seem willing to do this, but so far the supreme court seems less than willing to make themselves powerless.

Frankly, giving full power to the executive branch would be a stupid move for the Republicans. They've spent all this time gaining power in three branches and securing a hold. It makes much more sense to use that power now than to pull their own teeth out just to appease a single administration.

Trump is pushing his luck. Corporate media seems happy to overstate the inevitably of his efforts succeeding, whether they support them or not, but that's just the money-fueled propaganda machine at work. We're already seeing that he can't actually just do whatever he wants, and the more he tries to the more we're going to see the rest of the system's resilience.

Don't give up hope yet.

This should read "America to be hit by 25% tarrifs on Canadian and Mexican goods" because that's how tariffs work.

He's literally just threatening to take more money from American consumers. Yeah, that might change who different companies do business with, but we're eating the ticket cost unless they lower prices by 25%.

Your estimation of what constitutes "objective reality" is in fact the opinion that you're being asked about.

It doesn't actually, and we don't actually need them to admit or even understand that they made a mistake in supporting him. All we need is for them to be embarrassed enough or demotivated enough to give into their laziness and not to turn out at the midterms.

And they were embarrassed in many cases after last time. It's just that the embarrassment that made them fail to turn out for him last time, and even to vote for Biden, was too far in the rear view and largely overshadowed by their annoyance with the administration between his terms.

And again, it does matter because his approval affects how politicians who do want to be reelected will react to him, as well as whether the agencies and departments he passes orders down to will enact them.

His word doesn't just happen. It still requires cooperation. The less support he was, the less cooperation he'll find.

Kinda feels like civilization is winding down.

Nebula is a decent way to be bad at youtube. They don't have too many people on it at the moment, but there are some decent ones. And at least they get a cut.

I definitely agree that there are problems with some FOSS enthusiasts, but I don't think it's constructive to paint FOSS and FOSS enthusiasts as a whole based on their actions. To me, responding to problems involving diminishing the visibility of Linux and FOSS with "but why don't you care about x" isn't particularly constructive, and does little more than drive a wedge between people who think FOSS is a priority (but not their only priority) and people who place FOSS as a lower priority but who are otherwise natural allies.

In particular, the casting of open source devs focusing on what their own creative impulses drive them to make as 'authoritarian' is itself an attempt at authoritarian imposition. To take one's own time out of one's own day to code something is an act of creativity. FOSS is, by nature, less inclined to operate on a top-down model than corporate software development.

What you're asking for isn't a less hierarchical structure, it's a more hierarchical structure. As it stands, open source devs create what they feel is best and you are, as they say, absolutely welcome to fork it. There's nothing authoritarian about that. They've put their time in to create what they see the need for, and you literally are able to either go code additions you want to see yourself, roll back to earlier versions, or even hire someone to make it for you. You are not free to demand that they create what you want to see.

That isn't them holding an authoritarian model over end-users, that's them graciously handing out their hard work, their mental energy, indeed even their spoons, to the rest of us. The only authoritarian part of the conversation between end users making demands of developers and developers focusing on what they choose to spend their time on is the attempted authoritarian demands of end-users.

This is work that they literally give out for free. Not just the end product, but the source. If there's a feature you want, you literally are welcome to add it. That is not the case with closed-source software. In fact, if you attempt to modify closed-source software and redistribute it, there's a significant chance that you'll end up with a lawsuit or at least a DMCA take-down notice on your hands.

Stallman is a creep. 100%. There are other creeps who code. 100%. But there are also all sorts of other people, including members of marginalized groups, who code. For some of them coding is something that helps them feel okay. For others it's something that takes up a lot of the energy that they have. Sometimes it's both. It is completely unfair to demand that they code what you want the way you want when you're unwilling to do that yourself.

I think you're not really looking at the demands that you're making of others and exempting yourself from out of hand in the same breath. If you want to see something in FOSS, you have every right to go add that thing. You do not have a right to others doing it for you.

FOSS is the solution to a lot of the problems we're running into right now. It's no coincidence that Trump's inauguration was packed full of billionaire tech bros who are currently doing everything in their power to further marginalize every marginalized group. FOSS may well be the only reason we continue to have spaces where we can have these sorts of discussions and actually advocate for social progress or any form of leftist solidarity.

He wasn't reelected when his approval rating was low. He was reelected four years later, after Biden's approval rating fell.

That is an incredibly important distinction. People have terrible memories (on both sides of the aisle, as this thread demonstrates), but they do feel the present. This is the present.

This doesn't reflect what we saw during his first administration. At all.

I'm curious how this approach is meant to achieve solidarity. Can you elaborate on your thinking?

It matters because conservatives having buyer's remorse is a good thing. The same thing happened last time he was elected. He saw his support drop and the support for the Republican party drop like a stone. We gained 41 seats in the House at the midterm.

We need his approval rating to be low so that we can flip the house and Senate and have a better chance of taking the presidency in 2028. We might even be able to achieve impeachment in two years if it drops low enough.

Approval rating also corresponds to compliance with executive orders and with Republican cooperation as well as Democratic cooperation at the state level and in the legislative branch. They still want to get reelected, and if the party decides he's a danger to them they will again distance themselves.

Does it mean our problems evaporate overnight? No. But it's a requirement for improvement, so it's good to see.

You know, like, targeting leftist solidarity and looking for anywhere and everywhere to drive wedges. Wedge-like.

Weird that you assume nobody who supports FOSS is helpful to any other leftist causes.

Kinda wedge-like.

I still can't tell if this is sarcasm.