• 0 Posts
  • 38 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

help-circle



  • That was an interesting read. Thank you. I’ll have to do some thinking on it, and read more carefully when I’m not befogged by a head cold.

    I still want, like, emotionally, the horrible people to face justice (or at least vengeance), but i can see how that can have myriad unwanted consequences.

    Getting people to actually organize is hard. One of the consequences of what Luigi (allegedly) did was people at work started to actually talk about politics, where before it had been a little more gauche (pun intended). Will anything come of it? Probably not.

    At that job, I feel like I was planting seeds of radicalization just by talking to people about US history. Several of them hadn’t grown up here, and had a very glossy marketing understanding. Just telling them about how like Jim Crow is a thing from living memory, not centuries ago, was eye opening.


  • Why is it counter productive? I guess because uninvolved people clutch their pearls and then support the police/capitalists?

    The huge support for Luigi makes me think there may be a change in the air. But also that was precisely targeted, not just randomly murdering. If he had set off a bomb and killed 30 people in midtown New York, even if one was a hated CEO, I don’t think people would support him.



  • i don’t know a lot about the history of the black panther movement (not surprising nothing about it was taught to me in school). Infiltration by the government/antagonists is a real concern. As is being murdered like fred hampton. I don’t really know how to guard against that. The “They pull a knife you pull a gun. They put one of us in the hospital, you put them in the morque” attitude has bravado, but isn’t really safe or sustainable. But on the same time, just being casually murdered isn’t either.


  • To be clear, I support other options like a general strike and unionizing (though I think forming a union is only a bandaid on top of the evils of capitalism, it’s better than nothing).

    I don’t think “just vote for the democrats in 4 years” is a viable strategy on its own.

    But even so, these have to be backed by might. If you do a strike and they send police to do violence to you, you have to be ready to fight back.



  • I think a lot of places that prohibit talking about violence are supporting the horrors. Like, it’d be swell if we could vote ourselves out of this mess but that seems like a long shot, and a lot of damage would be done before that even started to take effect.

    I get most of us don’t actually want to risk our lives. We don’t want to be the one guy who throws a molotov and gets shot by the police.

    But shit is really bad, and at the end of all things might makes right. Principles and philosophy don’t matter if you’re dead.

    I think everyone’s thought about like “what if i went back in time and shot Hitler before things got really bad?” Well, that’s now. You’ve arrived at the time travel destination.

    I don’t really want to live in a world where republicans are shot dead, where the prosecutors putting people in jail for protesting are murdered in their sleep, or where the owners of a factory that pollutes the air we breathe are beaten so badly they’ll never walk again. But I also don’t want to live in the world those forces will create if left unchecked.

    Besides, the right has been using stochastic terrorism for years.






  • I think people over value emotions, but I realize I’m part of people too and it happens to me. Emotions are a fast heuristic but they’re not very inaccurate. They’re good for when speed is important, or when more information isn’t available. Neither is true on an async post about Linux. But yes, I can be dismissive of emotions but it’s something I’m working on.

    I’ve seen too many people make strange, unhelpful, decisions because like “someone told me to do something and now I won’t” or “that guy was rude so I’m not going to listen”. That’s what your post felt like to me. (Note the emotional dimension there, heh)

    Like, imagine a friend who always forgets their plans, is late, and double books themselves. You probably can’t just be like “use a calendar, dude”. You probably have to gently massage them and incept the idea. If you just tell them, they’ll feel bad, reject the idea, and continue having problems. (In real life, some months later the friend did come around to using a calendar, but only after uselessly wrestling with feeling bad)


  • So far this has been the smoothest installation of a Linux OS I have ever done.

    Envy. I tried to install mint last night on a new computer, and it was a shit show.

    • Ethernet and WiFi wouldn’t work.
    • Bluetooth wouldn’t work
    • the HDMI out stopped working at some point

    I did learn you can tether your phone via USB, so I got Internet that way. That was cool.

    But after I got Internet working, with help from discord, elden ring and Baldur’s gate 3 both failed to launch in different ways.

    I gave up. Windows11 is horrible, but at least those things work.





  • I switched to linux because Windows10 is going EoL, and my hardware is ineligible for Windows11. It’s been fine, once I got it set up. There wasn’t any single thing that pushed me over the edge. I just had a free weekend and I knew I had to do it eventually.

    I really wanted the install to be smooth so I could tell everyone how great it was. It was not. Somehow it borked itself, and I couldn’t boot from the usb stick a 2nd time until after I manually edited a file on it. Then installer hung on the last step, and I couldn’t find any answers other than “Use the previous LTS”. At least that worked.