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.

I definitely would not feel comfortable taking that gamble. I don’t want to be alarmist, but I truly don’t think that risk is worth taking right now.

Who to Follow on Social Media

Proceeds to link to Instagram.

“Here’s how to make it easy for the current administration to add you to a list.”

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.

I don’t know if she’s nice, but I do know she’s rich.

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

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.

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.

Passion isn’t felt towards everything equally, it’s specific, and Democrats can’t figure out how to make people passionate about their candidates without compromising on their leaders’ neoliberal economic policies and their so-called “rules based order” of American hegemony, so they keep losing. Obama ran as a populist candidate, and he blew away previous numbers even though he turned out to be a staunch neoliberal. Biden barely managed to eke out a win in 2020 (“Despite his relatively comfortable 74 vote margin in the Electoral College, Biden only won the decisive states of Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona by a combined 43,000 votes.”), and it was only because he was coming straight out of Trump’s term. Harris had 2 months to try to turn around Biden’s dumpster fire of a campaign, and she made too many missteps.

Ultimately, candidates have to earn votes, and the DNC’s anti-populism and pro-neoliberalism clearly aren’t doing it for people. Maybe in the '90s when people’s salaries were booming, Clinton was able to win on it, but we’re not in that economy, and most Millennials and younger have only seen recessions and stagnation. Even after Trump, we’re in for more losses if Democrats only allow for Progressive social policies, and not economic or political ones.

I hate to link to Reddit (and I’m too old to know how to get to the original video), but this also seems pretty relevant: https://www.reddit.com/r/TikTokCringe/comments/1i302rf/if_tiktok_being_banned_doesnt_radicalize_you_as/

In the beginning, sure. But all the TikTok users actively choosing Chinese alternatives would seem to disagree with that, now.

You’re argument is basically that you should have the right to to ruin yourself.

Look, I agree with you that TikTok is bad, but… YES, freedom means the ability to choose, good or bad.

If you want someone to blame for this, blame the US government for allowing US tech companies to become so predatory and gross that young people literally prefer a foreign product that may be profiling them. It’s not like data collection and censorship isn’t rife on Xitter or FB, and the reality for most Americans is that the US government has more ability to use their data to directly harm them than the CCP does. No one is worried that the Chinese government is going to show up in Alabama with CPS in tow because a teen revealed they’re trans online.