This post gave me cancer.

XcQ, link stays blue

I see more atheistmemes on All than I do religious stuff.

This is a joke, most likely, given the community and context.

That would be perfect, yes

On one hand, I think it perfectly acceptable and reasonable to oppose the enemy’s employment of some measure on the grounds of them being your enemy and you wanting to defend yourself while simultaneously employing the same measure for your own policy goals. That’s usually how war works, whether cold or hot: weapons are employed if they’re effective, regardless of whether they’re fair for the other side, because you can’t really trust the opponent to also refrain from using an effective weapon.

Mutually Assured Destruction works as a nuclear deterrent because its sheer destructive power risks killing your own people too, and most countries’ grand strategy prioritises their own preservation over the enemies’ destruction. Chemical weapons were “banned” because they were of little value to the major powers’ military system, which has less people hiding in foxholes and trenches, generally making conventional munitions blowing up moving targets more effective than denying an area to your own mobile forces in the hopes of dislodging a dug-in enemy that might have protective equipment anyway.

On the other hand, I resent the damage warfare does to civilians, whether in the form of actual destruction or just sowing division and strife between their factions. Arguably, it might be defensible if you’re simply exposing the truth and hoping to convince a sufficient majority to act on those revelations, but who would be the judge? Who could vouch for that? How could propaganda even account for the nuances and complexities of the issue they’d hypothetically expose without neutering its own effect?

So yes, I’d prefer to see money spent on fixing issues, education in critical thinking, communicating nuances the enemy’s propaganada glosses over or misrepresents. Making your opponent’s situation worse doesn’t help your people. Even if it might “defeat” the enemy in some sense - render them unable or unwilling to oppose you - it creates misery.

The only winners are those that profit from the issues and/or the conflict and don’t care about the individual peasant: Corporate executives, large shareholders, politicians campaigning on them…

(I don’t think I needed to spell that one out, but given the topic, it felt appropriate to be clear)

Trump is trying to get her to mud-wrestle in a pigsty: Even if she wins, she’ll be smeared with shit all over. The only winning move is not to play. Nobody who supported her is gonna think “wait, what if she lied about working at McDs? I’ll better vote for the other guy, who definitely is more working class (and also never provided any documentation for literally anything unless by court order)”

Linux is free and open source software ecosystem. It’s like handing people free brushes, canvases and paints - sure, removing the financial hurdles may enable talents otherwise unable to afford indulging their artistic streak, but you also can’t really prevent anyone from painting awful bullshit. Best you can do is not give them attention or a platform to advertise their stuff on.

That’s the price of freedom: It also extends to assholes. We can’t start walling off Linux, so the best we can do is individually wall them off from our own life and hope enough other people around us do it too.

There’s a bunch of staff there too. Wikipedia cites an estimate of 764 people.

How does suing in a different country work, for instances in Europe? Do they actually have any leverage?

only by facing that fact can anybody actually fix it

The first step to improvement is to acknowledge flaws. We can still admit “This is outside our current capacity to fix.”

pretending “linux is easy now”

This might not always be pretense so much as cognitive bias and a bubble effect: If I look at it from my point of view, it has gotten a lot eas_ier_. I underestimate just how advanced even those things I consider basic are for someone not as versed as I am. I’m nowhere near an expert, but I know enough to have lost sight of the floor.

There are plenty of “fire and forget” distros - If I want to, say, install Ubuntu, I create a bootable flash drive with the base image, reboot, follow the installation prompts, easy.

The layperson will ask “What’s Ubuntu? I thought we’re talkink about Linux?” “What does bootable mean? How do I do that?”

Most crucially, from my own experience trying to sell a family member on Linux, “What do these prompts all mean?” They’re scared of selecting something wrong, because they’re not confident that they understand them correctly.

That may be a public image issue: If you’re predisposed to think it’s complex, the brain may lock itself into not trusting its own understanding of semantics. And the elitists certainly aren’t helping with that: If a hundred people reassure you it’s fine and one person says it’s complex, it’s hard to avoid that seed of doubt. Once it is planted, confirmation bias will do the rest.

I don’t know what the solution is

One part of the solution might be a “transition” package, consisting of first a tool to try cross-platform alternatives to tools people already use, second a ready-made VM to try Linux without installing it, using a transition distro, styled to look and feel “like Windows” and built-in links to the host filesystem, and finally a fully automated installer that includes backing up files, settings etc. and putting them in the equivalent Linux soot after installation so you have as little transitory friction as possible.

Which leads us back to the topic of leftist politics and the split between moderates and progressives: Of course I don’t want to compromise on my principles, but we’re not gonna win people over by demanding drastic change with scary words that make it easy to lump in the “Capitalism fucks us over” progressives with the McCarthyist “They want to install a Russian dictatorship!” rhetorics about the radicals and tankies. Radical change is likely to invite radical backlash.

Our best shot at non-violent and lasting change is to make the transition as low-friction as possible, inching people over policy by policy, shifting the Overton Window the way the regressives have been doing for decades, instead of trying to aggressively shunting it over.

Focus less on identity, ideology and terminology, more on individual issues and solutions. Some movements obviously warrant aggressive countering, but we have to pick our battles, or we’ll be spread out on too many fronts. Ideology alone doesn’t win wars; Strategy does.

We should also project unity of vision and determination instead of public infighting and sabotaging what we all want over the things we disagree on.

Presentation matters.

Too many leftists are so concerned with the substance of the message that they forget how important the presentation is.

I find that to be an issue with many well-meaning people.

For example, I see it occasionally in the FOSS-bubble: It’s great if a given software is ideologically “pure”, independent from capitalist incentives, open source and freely available. It’s great that there are volunteers doing work for the benefit of others.

Occasionally, when someone lists specific tools running on Windows only as reason for not switching to Linux, they get told to use FOSS alternatives instead that just can’t match the proprietary in terms of features or usability. When you point that out, there will often be the customary vocal minority of twats chastising you “It’s volunteer work, you don’t get to demand anything, go implement it yourself” etc.

I hate to admit it, but I’m generally more comfortable around MS Excel than LO Calc. I’ve used LO Writer and Impress for personal and university stuff, because I rarely need more advanced features (and if I do, I’ll probably use TeX anyway), but when it comes to more complex work with spreadsheets, I just find Excel to be smoother in usage. I don’t have enough experience in the field of UX to put a finger on why, nor would I likely have the skills or time to contribute fixes to LO Calc. I can settle for less out of ideology, but is that what you expect from people at large?

The same applies with the transition to Linux in general: I’m technically versed enough that I’m confident I can probably fix any error I encounter. But until the public perception and tooling of Linux gets to the point that even non-techies can easily do the switch, it’s not going to see widespread adoption.

I love FOSS. I love Linux. I want to see them replace proprietary monopolies as much as possible.

But the presentation matters.

Good luck finding “all the domain names”. IDK about suing, but unlike centralised monoliths like Facebook, you’d have to sue every instance violating your rules separately, and that’s assuming you can pin down who and where to sue for each of them.

Part of the issue is the push by many left-wing voters to get actually progressive politics on the table after years of alternating between regressives and complacent centrists* that prefer making small concessions to the right over big steps to the left. They don’t want another presidency marked by lukewarm promises kept poorly. They’re tallying up all the ways in which Harris still isn’t as good as she ough to be.

For Trumpers, he is good enough. He is everything they want: A public role model enabling them to be an absolutely shameless asshat.

The complexity arises when people advocate voting for a third party instead. By and large, no third party has the traction to beat the Republicans. You’d need to get the entire Dem voterbase and then some. If that fails, you’ve split the non-Rep voterbase and the enabling asshat gets the plurality. On the other hand, there’s a risk that leaning too far left in the attempt to keep the progressive voters may lose the centrist* voters, which is a gamble whether that will end up a net positive. Harris has a tough job: walking a political tightrope, particularly if it’s consistently being tugged at by people.

And there are good reasons to tug on that rope. You’ll find some in these comments: Settling for “Good enough” doesn’t help getting actual change. For the ultra-rich, on the other hand, progressive policies are a detriment, so they’ll want to tug it the other way. The left doesn’t want to cede ground and keeps pulling. The centrists* that don’t like Trump but also fear dramatic change pull her to the other side again. The “centrists”** pull just to see her fall.

And that’s exciting! That’s an actual conflict of ideologies! That’s her having to work for her voters’ approval! You’ll see the complaints flying left and right, see her try to keep an ever-shifting balance, see drama and tension! People love drama and tension. Corporate media loves drama and tension because it gets attention, clicks, revenue, all that. “Assholes still support Asshole” just isn’t as interesting as “<prominent person> criticises Kamala for <policy>, calls her <incomplete quote>”.

Also, splitting the Dem voterbase serves the corporate executives and shareholders that want the right-wing tax breaks and erosion of worker protections because it makes them even richer. That’s probably not a coincidence.

*Centrist as in “I don’t want things to radically change”, not as in “I think both parties are equally bad, so I’ll sow dissent in the Dem voterbase, pretend that I’m not helping Trump with that and get to feel superior to both”.

** The latter group of the above footnote. It doesn’t really matter whether they’re intentional agents of disunity or idealists that care more about voting with their heart than the actual outcome. The result is the same: At best, they’ve achieved nothing. At worst, they’ve contributed to Trump’s victory.

You seem really invested in pointing out those shortcomings. I respect that.

I got out-pedanted? Impossibile!

Bene factum

Okay Imma pick a fight here. Your suggestion is the opposite of pedantic. It advocates for a “vulgarisation” of Latin loanwords (in the sense of “making them more like common words”).

I want to go back to pluralising more words in line with their Greek or Latin roots. I want to reverse the perfectly natural and reasonable linguistic shift you’re proposing and instead restore or retain that piece of linguistic anachronism as long as possible.

That’s what I do too - if it’s a meeting I care about, I make the effort to suggest a different time. Otherwise, just decline. My calendar is visible and up to date, use the fucking scheduling assistant to tell you when I have time ffs.

The Vultures?

Could this be normalised against the baseline distribution of languages for the respective platforms / software categories to see if there are any notable deviations?

So in a weird, roundabout way, he’s saving these people from prison by putting them out of work instead?

And probably making it harder for the court to slap fines on his company and make them stick, but I’d give that a pass in this case.