All my machines except for my gaming desktop are linux already. But there are still games with either DRM that doesn’t support linux, or other niche issues, so I’m keeping my Win10 machine alive for the foreseeable future.

The Overton window is anchored by a series of landmarks. The most effective way to lose one of them, like the Constitution, is to start discussing whether it has merit.

In any kind of public, widespread platform/ venue, I agree with you 100%. Discussing whether the US is a moral entity at its root is not something you do on CNN or even Facebook, because it is going to be weaponized by the Right to paint you as anti-US to the politically-disengaged Center, and also to justify their unconstitutional actions as being less harmful via whataboutism.

I don’t think Beehaw- a small, intentionally Leftist space- is equivalent. No one here is going to say, “hmm, maybe Trump ignoring the constitution is the same as people discussing whether a document that first enshrined slavery and then sustained it in a carceral system, is capable of reformation. Makes sense.” Nor is anyone outside this space reading or broadcasting it. And there does have to be space for free political discussion somewhere, or you’ve just abdicated free speech out of fear of politicization.

You wait until the constitutional order is re-established and actors that routinely violate it are punished, and when the Overton window moves back … it’s not really to the left, it’s more towards democracy itself, then you discuss the flaws of the Constitution.

This presupposes that the form of democracy it will move “back” towards will be the same as where it was before all this. There is no reason to think that will be the case, and certainly major political events of the past in the US (Civil War, Civil Rights movement, WW2, 9/11, etc) have often included large constitutional shifts either through amendment or interpretation. This is certainly a major political event.

We could go on a tangent about whether political capital is real, and whether (if it is) we are capable of returning to where we were before even if we wanted, but suffice it to say that many people would likely disagree with the premise that we can ever perfectly revert to pre-2024 Election America. A lot of people (even in the Center) believed that our checks and balances under the Constitution would prevent a dictator. Now that we’re seeing otherwise, I highly doubt most Democrat voters will ever again fully trust the Constitution to protect them, without serious amendment.

So discussing what those amendments might be, how that reform could work, or whether those protections are even possible to regain via the Constitution without e.g. giving congress or the judiciary enforcement abilities (or via some other means entirely), seems like a pretty important discussion for people to be having.

Pretty damn big.

Not being able to name every expert in every field doesn’t make you unintelligent.

“[in]capable of choosing” could either mean “at this time, without full facts”, or it could mean “intrinsically”. The former is fine, but any rhetoric that only our “betters” should be voting, whether that be measured by wealth, intelligence, ethnicity, gender, or anything else, is at best elitist, and at worst bigoted and authoritarian.

I don’t think that most people are capable of choosing who is well suited for a given task.

Just to clarify, do you mean that you just don’t think most people are informed enough as to every person who is an expert in something, or are you meaning that people are not intelligent enough?

You mean Vim?

This already happened in conservative circles back circa 2016ish. Lots of Republicans got tired of being called morons for denying climate change, and pivoted to, “well it’s too late to do anything anyways”. This is just businesses adopting the same rhetoric, for the same reason; if it’s too late, there’s “no point” trying anything, so we should all just keep on polluting and let someone else fix it later.

8th amendment

Oh, don’t worry, they’ll axe that ‘weak shit’ as well. Remember Trump telling cops to not “be too nice” in his first term?

Yes, but the architectures they are dropping are older 32-bit ones. That’s why I said support is “dying”, not “dead”.

The changelog itself notes that this is about 32-bit support:

Debian’s support for 32-bit PC (known as the Debian architecture i386) now no longer covers any i586 processor.

Understandable, but still kind of sad to see support for 32-bit dying. Mostly because it makes me feel old. :P

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.

Esurance

To be fair, it’s entirely possible that they’ve been refused insurance. My relatives near water cannot get insured for anything less than a small fortune. Insurance companies know that climate change is making disasters more likely, and they’re adapting. Hell, I had my auto insurance literally drop me over wild fires here in California (despite me living in an urban area that will never have one), and that’s literally mandatory coverage to drive.

first year over 1.5ºC

This is plain and simple racial oppression. This wouldn’t have happened to anyone else accused of graffiti. It’s entirely about making sure that Palestinians in the US understand that they are in danger, so they’ll quiet down and stop driving awareness of a genocide that makes certain groups uncomfortable.

I’ve never heard of Nobara, thanks for the recommendation!

Haha, yeah I’ve done Gentoo a couple times before, back when I was younger and didn’t mind spending hours tinkering with it. :P

What distro(s) are you using that you recommend? I’ve been running plain Ubuntu for a couple years, but want to dual-boot something else for fun/ change of pace.

I’m not saying those who pushed to throw the election rather than picking the lesser of two evils had the right idea, they clearly didn’t and are part of the reason we are where we are. But you know what would have prevented that? Not simply being the lesser of two evils.

This is the conversation I had with so many people. It doesn’t matter if you think voters are dumb to do something (i.e. stay home in protest over Gaza): if you know they’re going to do that, you actually have to react accordingly.

But at this point I’m convinced the Democratic Party leadership would rather Republicans win than progressives, because Republicans don’t threaten their positions in the party.

I’m also afraid that the message they will take away is, “an important portion of our base doesn’t want a woman as president”, rather than, “there’s a portion of our base that we need to excise because they’re misogynists”.

They wouldn’t lift a finger the past 4 years to actually put procedural guardrails in place to fight the rising tide of authoritarianism in the GOP, but they’re going to in the next month-and-a-half? Please.

This is a good read, and I was very much expecting to disagree with it going in. It basically aligns with where I am:

Whatever China may have aspired to during the Cultural Revolution, it has become another Capitalist, Imperialist, wannabe hegemon. Xi is sitting exactly where Trump wants to, with a lifelong appointment and unlimited control.

I won’t rehash my issues with Leninism and the abject backwardness of creating an all-powerful Single-party State and then believing that it will ever willingly dissolve itself into a Stateless society, but suffice it to say that I think China proves out that Authoritarianism is the default fail-state of centralized governments, no matter their aspirations. That’s not to say they’ll all get there, but it is to say that the self-preserving and authority-maintaining aspects of government inherently bias it towards centralized, authority-based control, not distributed, democratic cooperation and consensus.