t3rmit3 @ t3rmit3 @beehaw.org

He / They

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I don't think that most progressive groups doing actual organizing are doing these kind of purity tests, I think that's mostly online spaces or non-political-organizing spaces that are setting out their own boundaries for acceptable behavior.

I've never once been asked to make a statement of e.g. trans support before being allowed to attend a protest or DSA meeting. It's mostly assumed/ trusted that you're showing up because you support the work.

If, however, someone seeing a Pride flag in a coffee shop window or at a protest is enough to make them leave, then you don't want them there, not because of the morality of their beliefs, but because they are creating an ultimatum that you must abandon or hide your beliefs in order to gain their support, and that's not solidarity on their part.

Solidarity is a two-way street.

Bernie Sanders or AOC don't mention support for e.g. LGBT+ people in every speech, but they will if you ask them. They won't feign or adopt indifference to the issue to gain a false solidarity.

We can help any grouping and gather support from any grouping, without needing to say we need to put the brakes on and help some other more virtuous-to-advocate-for grouping instead.

I'm interested in what examples you are thinking of, for this.

Nah, they aren't even right about organizing; in fact, they're literally making contradictory claims.

Were Leftists too lazy to be capable of organized political protest ("lol, organize"), or were they

"march[ing] on every major american city, and [taking] control of university commons across the country"

Because that sounds like organizing to me?

They will just present anyone who isn't pro-Israel as ineffectual, when the reality is that the DNC not being responsive to their base at any point along the route (and don't cite Biden dropping out as that: Biden dropped out because DNC insiders were screaming, not because of the actual electorate) cost them the election.

But they probably think that all the polls showing that the majority of Americans (even Republicans) wanted a ceasefire (which is what the protesters were demanding) were wrong, and the average American is actually secretly pro-Israel's war on Gaza.

Stewart has always had way too much faith in our institutions being inherently positive, and I fear it's made him feckless at this critical moment. An institution captured by Nazis is a Nazi institution, and must be treated accordingly.

Man pages, help files, and commented configuration files galore

Technical documentation != Tutorials. Not even remotely.

Linux support forums might be hostile to entitled noobs looking for a handout and a quick fix

"Oh so you use Linux? Name every distro (to prove you 'put in the effort' to my standards)"

Sarcasm aside, Lime Buzz is completely correct; FOSS as an ecosystem has cultivated an air of ahem techno-elitism, and that severely undermines its actual usefulness as a tool of individual freedom or certainly resistance. If a tool requires a bunch of X (time, money, base knowledge, etc) in order to utilize, it's not going to be useful to people who do not have that resource to spend on it. Which is going to be the majority of any given group. And that has really made it as an ecosystem much less important than many other concerns. Individual projects can still be important, but Linux is certainly not going to save us from Authoritarianism.

Corporations pay for support services. The code is free (as in speech). No one ever claimed that the support was also (or even should be) free.

Corporations may unfortunately be people, but people are certainly not corporations, and shouldn't be expected to pay for everything corporations do.

If you believe that Linux actually helps people- that it materially improves their lives over being trapped in a predatory tech world built by for-profit entities who are happy to sell their customers out to a fascist government- then you are conceptualizing the relationship between Linux evangelists and new users incorrectly. We're not providing sales and tech support in that case, we're providing them aid. And aid workers don't ask people to show how much they've tried to help themselves before offering them help.

And if you don't think Linux actually aids peoples' lives, then you just agree with Lime Buzz that

There are far more important things to worry about and to do.

Especially Xi Jinping, who's the one best situated to exploit the power vacuum that Trump will create. I'm all for imperialism dying, but that's not on the table right now, just US imperialism being supplanted with Chinese imperialism. Whoop-dee-doo.

I've always been a critic of accelerationism, because I never believed a regime powerful and stable enough to obtain power through civic processes could actually be so incompetent as to implode themselves beyond repair. Fascist states tend to actually have pretty stable civic institutions, they're just deployed in evil ways and for evil reasons. Trump is beginning to make me think that we could actually see the complete peak-to-trough crash of a superpower in 4 years or less.

Relative to people in their country, sure. But China can't and isn't interested in flying over to the US to arrest you if you talk to their AI models about Taiwan being its own country, whereas no one should have any doubt that OpenAI or any other US AI company is happy to tell Trump's administration who's been asking it about LGBT+ issues or other topics the US government is now against.

It's not whataboutism anymore, it's literally that both are evil authoritarian governments, but one (US) has physical access to US users, and the other doesn't.

What's a Jellyfin?

Yep. Conscientious objectors won't save us this time, disruption is going to have to happen in the streets.

As of current count, 75,017,613 did in fact bother to vote Democrat, and 75 million people resisting is more than would be needed to grind most federal government operation to a halt.

You actually have 19mm of space for writing. Or you could upsize to something with 51mm or even 54R (mm).

Another point in the long list of proof that ICE enforcement is entirely appearance-based and discriminatory. I expect no one who dislikes ICE is surprised, and no one who either likes them or who is ambivalent to them, cares.

we were wondering what happened to those that were racist by defending the cultural appropriation

I don't want to dive into the specifics of which words were or were not problematic, but automatically labeling disagreement over an etymological issue of appropriation as racism is, to me, difficult to reason out. Disagreeing with a black person because they're black would obviously be racism. Assuming you understand black culture just as well as a black person because you have some surface-level exposure to it would be racism, sure. Even asserting that black people cannot or do not have any culturally-derived and culturally-important language would be racism.

But I don't think that merely disagreeing about what that language is, especially in cases where there is not a clear origination of a word, is intrinsically racist unto itself. AAE has many words which it itself has adopted from other languages (even non-colonizer ones).

When a clear pattern of use of AAE is at play (which it certainly sounds like is the case for the FOSS creator person, especially with the use of "we be", which as a structure is entirely originating in AAE), disagreement certainly might stem from racism (see: people defending Elvis or Ariana Grande), but that is by no means a sure thing. Many words have muddled histories, or have passed between different dialects of English. This isn't even beginning to get into loan words vs appropriation.

tl; dr - Discussion and disagreement of what constitutes cultural appropriation is not inherently racist.

I mean, it is in fact extremely apparent that they are Nazi salutes.

As many have said, the fake GOP Christians would have derided Christ as a hippie or deported him if he showed up today.

Knowing more about AI makes people less open to having it in their lives

Is it just me? Doesn't this feel like the more natural way to frame this? There's something about the title that feels like people are being encouraged to know less about it.

I'd be interested if anyone has insight into the mental/ linguistic mechanics of this.

Go away Europol. We already have enough problems to deal with around Big Tech right now without also having to worry about European police states demanding them to do away with any semblance of user privacy.

“When we have a search warrant and we are in front of a house and the door is locked, and you know that the criminal is inside of the house, the population will not accept that you cannot enter.”

If you already know they're a criminal (i.e. they're already convicted), why do you need their messages? Or are you referring to suspects as criminals? Also, likening digital communications to actual, physical, living individuals is some "You Wouldn't Download a Car"-level fear-mongering.

So what are you referring to, then? Inflation-adjusted wage growth?

Purchasing power, which was not shit in the 90s compared to today. That's what really matters; what can you get with the money you have.

You’re ascribing way too much rationality to the average voter here.

I think you're ascribing too little. The average voter is not a political philosopher, but they're also not comatose. They understand simple economic principles like tax cuts being given to others and not to them, or subsidies for certain industries and not others, or the lack of government action to curb rising prices, etc. They may not have all the proper labels to describe what they're seeing vs what they want to see (and indeed, the US has spent so long demonizing Socialism and propagandizing Capitalism that most can't describe either properly), but polling proves that most Americans (hilariously, even most Republicans) don't want cutthroat neoliberal everyone-for-themselves economic policies.

Bold of you to assume there’s more to come, in light of recent events.

I think that Trump would love to install himself as a dictator, and maybe he will, but even dictators keep controlled elections going for the appearance of legitimacy. He's already 78, and no other Republicans have managed to replicate his popularity among GOP voters. One way or another (unless the US government literally dissolves, which is my preference tbh) we'll be dealing with a post-Trump US government sooner or later.

We'll see how long it takes for the government to put a stop to US companies actively data-mining, profiling, and discriminating against our citizenry. I'd say we need a Chinese company to come in and do it, but clearly they'd just ban that one company instead of the actual problematic actions, and allow US companies to continue exploiting us.

bull market

The stock market is not the economy. The economy on the ground has not been bullish. The US stock market doing well benefits the wealth-holders, not workers.

people primarily care about their own life, and just aren’t motivated by big abstract concepts

I agree, which is why the DNC's attempt to allow a leftward shift only in its social policies has fallen largely flat with connecting with voters. It's a sort of Rainbow-Politics, if you will. Voters see that they're not actually moving Leftwards on economic policies that would help their own lives.

Sadly, it seems the DNC is taking this as a message that the Leftward shift on social issues was the problem, rather than the lack of economic change. Sanders has been talking about exactly this ever since election day, but the DNC leadership is already signaling they don't believe that or care. I am worried we're in for several Presidential election losses before they all die out or get the message.