I’m still hanging in there. New treatment soon so fingers crossed. It will be a few months until I’m on the other side of it. Will update when there’s something to update on.

Sorry if I’ve missed any messages or pings.

“Would you say that Brexit was a scam?”

“Yes.”

“And would you agree that it was sold to the British public through propaganda and outright lies?”

“Very much so.”

“Do you take glee at the news at the victims of this mass-scale scam have faced hardship and financial ruin, if not openly wishing death upon them?”

“Of course I do.”

“And would you agree that you are morally superior than these people and that you have their best interests at heart?”

“Undoubtedly.”

It’s shit like this attitude that I just cannot square the circle of. It’s much easier for someone to detect the open scorn and contempt that another person has for them than it is to detect the lies that someone like Nigel Farage feeds them.

That’s not to say that Farage isn’t transparent with his bullshit but when someone genuinely hates you and wishes ill upon you, it’s virtually impossible not to take notice of it. I’m not saying that reactionary and bigoted beliefs aren’t contemptible or that they should go unchallenged but, generally speaking, treating people with contempt is one great big own-goal imo because you aren’t gonna get far educating and agitating amongst people who you consider to be human garbage.

[Sung to a thrumming new wave baseline]

🎵When a problem comes along, you must Beanis!
When there’s something goin’ wrong, you must Beanis!

I say Beanis
Beanis good🎵

When it comes to content warnings I try to be specific about the content and to give a estimation of how in depth the content is because I think it’s helpful for people to make an informed decision. I also try to remember to bold my content warnings and to put them on a separate line, often I will put them halfway into a comment right before the CW content appears as that way a person can still read part of a response while choosing to skip over a detailed example that may be triggering.

I’m going to give some examples of what I think are better and worse content warnings to illustrate my point in quoted comments:

CW: violence
I disagree with your point because sometimes violence is necessary to defend yourself from harm. For example, take a child who fights back against their abuser…

So in this one the CW isn’t as visually distinct so it’s easier to skip over if you’re skimming and it also excludes a person from reading a response before the potentially triggering content. Also “violence” isn’t really descriptive - is it shouting? Is it a gunshot? Is it something really gruelling like you’d expect from a gory horror movie? This makes informed consent much trickier and it unintentionally excludes people.

Another example:

I don’t agree with the absolute pacifist position like you’ve described. I think that justice is something that needs to be defended, with violence if necessary [note here that just mentioning violence in the abstract isn’t a problem imo because what are you going to do - say CW: violence before you mention the concept of violence?]. As MLK put it, the absence of the absence of tension vs. a positive peace, which requires the presence of justice, is an important distinction to make.

[CW: Brief discussion of child abuse and neglect in the abstract]

For example, only the most rabidly dogmatic pacifist would denounce a victim of child abuse for resorting to an act of violence to defend themselves unless it was wildly incommensurate with the threat or perceived threat that they were defending themselves against. Maybe they would take a different position for a child that is being subjected to serious neglect like a child who is being denied meals but I’m uncertain tbh.

In this example, if a person decides to skip the comment because of the content warning they can still participate in the discussion to a large extent, even if they opt out of the last part so it’s less exclusionary by its structure.

The content warning is also visually distinct and it’s descriptive - it provides a good example of what to expect in the next part and who the language will be addressing. If it wasn’t an abstract discussion I might say something like “Detailed personal experience of psychological abuse as a child who went through it” or “Description of fictional animal abuse in a film” because these can be very different experiences for someone to read about and they can have very different impacts.

When it comes to really intense stuff often I’ll just put a CW at the top saying something like “Really in-depth discussions of transphobia, SH, suicide - if this stuff can be too much for you just skip the comment because you won’t get anything out positive of reading this comment.” such as in a case where maybe I’m really getting into the weeds and educating someone on a topic and encouraging them to shift their opinions. Or I might say “Blanket CW for very detail discussion of most/all forms of child abuse” rather than attempting to make a laundry list of each type of abuse. That sort of thing.

Anyway I’m not saying that this is how everyone must do their CWs but I feel like this is a good way to go about doing better, more helpful CWs.

I don’t think it’s a libbed up take but I can give you the boilerplate lib-brained “rational self-interest” ethics response, which is just a variation on their answer to “Why would you support free education if you don’t have any kids yourself?” with that answer being that we all benefit from a society where people have access to this, even if it doesn’t benefit us or our loved ones directly; those people getting an education are your colleagues and neighbours and friends and everyone else in society so an educated population (or a healthy one) benefits us as individuals, if only indirectly. I don’t need to point to the ongoing pandemic or previous ones to help you extend this analogy just slightly further for a real-world example of why this also applies to health. I don’t think this is the ideal basis for justifying universal healthcare but if that’s what it takes to shake people out of their edgy Ayn Rand phase then so be it - it’s hard to argue against this point.

If you want to take a restorative justice approach then even the worst people to exist need good healthcare so they can repair some measure of the harm they have inflicted upon the world for as long as is possible.

If you want to take the most punitive approach to justice then even the worst people to exist need good healthcare so that their lives can be as long as possible in order to exact the most retribution from them because a swift death would be far too merciful for these people.

And if you’re going to provide good healthcare to the very worst people in the world then you’re kinda obligated to provide good healthcare to everyone else, at least if you’re going to be morally consistent about it.

Sure, but there’s a massive disinfo machine which has sprouted its own backyard propaganda industry that works 24/7 to mislead people. In a perfect world, this wouldn’t exist. In a perfect world, people would be highly educated and politically developed where only if you are knowledgeable about the person you are voting for would you vote.

But based on my own anecdotal experience the average person who supports Trump isn’t as intelligent and they definitely aren’t as educated as the average person who supported Harris. I think it’s safe to say that Trump’s campaign exploited this demographic to get him into power again. Sure, if someone in his voterbase isn’t grossly misguided then they have vicious political beliefs but the idea of celebrating a person’s impending death because they are being stripped of healthcare for having the wrong political beliefs is really fucking vile.

The democrat supporters love touting the fact that studies show they have a higher level of intelligence and education and, often, that they demonstrate higher levels of empathy too. Yet they get a thrill out of shit like this or the carpet bombing of Gaza and, like the trees in the forest voting for the axe (like they always love accusing conservatives of being) not only do they vote for the (other) party that represents the interests of capital at their own expense but in doing so they vote for the (other) neoliberal party which continues to strip funding from welfare, education, healthcare, and housing that ensures that the next generation will have poorer educational outcomes and thus who will be in the prime demographic for conservative voters when they come of age but they are also actively ensuring that the development of the coming generations will have lower “IQ” because they are negatively impacting on nutrition during developmental years and doing shit like exposing kids to hazardous levels of lead in the water supply.

The only people who I have much more than a baseline level of sympathy for are the extreme progressives who haven’t quite managed to figure it all out yet but I’m more inclined to be sympathetic to the person who is, allegedly, too stupid to know better than the person who is implicitly arguing that they themselves are more intelligent and that they do know better and yet still support a near-identical party. (Edit: I could have worded this part better. Fascists get no sympathy from me. Radicals get all my love. For all the liberal cohort, though, what I said in this paragraph applies.)

Yeah, that’s a good point.

I’d say that it would have to be more of an indicator than a measurement; it’s not like there’s some magic number of CEOs being assassinated that we would need to reach and then, spontaneously, the masses would reach a point where they are ready for revolution but if that number of CEOs were getting merced then for every assassin you could assume that there’s at least 10,000 people who are deeply sympathetic. With those sort of numbers you’re easily looking at millions of sympathisers and at that point a single spark really can start a prairie fire, in this case.

I think that there’s a direct parallel that can be drawn between Luigi Mangione and Willem Van Spronsen and, in part, it is that both failed to grasp the urgent necessity of building a movement and the ultimate inadequacy of adventurism and propaganda of the deed.

Both are heroes in my mind and both showed a degree of courage that is rare and should be inspiring however there’s a reason why basically everyone knows the name of Vladimir Lenin while Aleksandr Ulyanov is a footnote in history, why Willem Van Spronsen himself has become barely a footnote in history and why we can expect Luigi Mangione to join their ranks in a very short period of time. After all, the American memory is short and it is only getting shorter.

He knew What Is To Be Done

It’s not possible for me to disagree with this position any more than I already do. This is not what Lenin wrote about, this is not what Lenin nor the Bolshevik party did. This is not what needs to be done Brian Thompson has already been replaced. A thousand Brian Thompsons could be killed and the merest of dents would be made in the system at best. I respect the actions of Luigi Mangione but he will never achieve the change he sought because of a fundamental failure inherent to his muddled political beliefs.

We need more than that, the world needs more than that.

I’ve never used Solidworks or AutoCAD so I can’t speak to whether they work in WINE or if it would be suitable for 3D printing - honestly I’d be concerned about stability in WINE for 3D printing because of the risk of prints failing but this is so far outside of my wheelhouse that I really have no idea.

But it sounds like dual-booting would probably be the best solution for you, especially with the odd game that isn’t compatible.

Sounds like you don’t have much to lose. In your case, unless there is some specific programs you need to use on your laptop for work/study then you should be fine diving headlong into a Linux install tbh. Windows can be a pain to have running on a dual-boot on the same drive though. You will need to disable secure boot and the way that the different OSes manage the internal time on the device differs so you need to direct one of the two to follow the other OS’ default format, I believe. Aside from that you should be alright - I’ve heard that some people encounter other difficulties but these either emerge when you have a shared partition on your drive and you have that open in on OS, then you suspend that OS rather than shutting down before starting the other OS as I think this will cause the partition to be locked out from the other OS until you shut the first one down. I figure nothing big will likely come of that but I’ve never encountered it personally so just something to be aware of.

As for the other issues that may occur from a dual-boot set up on the same drive, I’m not sure whether that’s an older issue that doesn’t occur anymore because the cause of it has been resolved or if it’s specific to certain OSes or what. I’ve never encountered it personally, although after the initial week the number of times that I’ve booted back into windows has been less than half a dozen times.

Pro-tip: if you are pretty set on making Linux your daily driver then I’d go through the pain of allocating the majority of your drive space to Linux because you will probably want almost all of it there. If you divide it up 50/50 you’re probably going to wish you had a larger partition for Linux once Windows becomes your backup “if I really have to” OS, especially if you plan to have an extensive library of games on Linux.

Speaking as someone who recently made the jump, Linux Mint is good. Not perfect but an easy enough on-ramp, aside from a couple of hiccups. You can run lots of (most?) Windows programs in Wine which is not an emulator.

If you have the opportunity I’d recommend dual-booting with windows to ease out the transition. Make Linux your default, have windows as a backup which you can resort to in moments of absolute frustration (and also to get a taste of how bad it really is on the Microsoft side of the fence), and gradually over time you’ll find yourself probably relying more and more on Linux.

Dual boot works better on two separate drives for unnecessarily complicated reasons (thanks, Microsoft), so if that’s at all an option then do that.

Linux gaming has come a long way in a short time, especially thanks to the Steam Deck and now Bazzite really driving Linux gaming to get up to speed. I’m not really much of a gamer so I can’t tell you what it’s like on Linux and I haven’t had the capacity to sort out emulation as of yet but at a guess I think you’ll find yourself pleasantly surprised for the most part.

Pro-tip: if you are trying out a Linux distro, consider buying a reasonably sized SD card, presuming that you’ve got a SD slot in your laptop. Just get a microsd card and use an adapter for the broader applicability, if possible. Load up your distro on the card and run it off of that for a little bit to get a feel for Linux in your own time. Then, as long as your SD slot is low profile that it doesn’t protrude, once you switch to a more permanent dual-boot set up you can use the SD card as a makeshift shared drive (because Microsoft makes a shared Window/Linux drive kinda painful, naturally).

There are other good distros out there but Mint has been my daily for months now and I’m quite happy with it. It’s not perfect but I have a strong preference for it over Windows, which is the destination I wanted to arrive at.

Either of those outcomes would have been wonderful radicalising moments for a ton of supporters though

The thing that gets me is that he could make himself last on the list if he reduced the operations of his orphan-crushing machine by like 90%. Not even 100%, just 90%.

He could hold onto more wealth than he could spend in a lifetime. He could still live in a ridiculous mansion and shit. But if he gave away 7 of that $7.5bn on actually good causes that he wasn’t profiteering from which directly benefitted the world then he would almost certainly be considered one of the rare “good ones” and his chances of getting cleaned up in a wave of uprisings would be very, very low.

But no. He’s going to have panic attacks due to a latent guilty conscience but he isn’t going to actually do anything about it. This headline has the same energy as an oil executive who publicly complains about a heatwave imo.

Sounds like Devin has never heard the phrase “Devaround and Devout” before 😏

Every true crime show coverage Rommel-ises figures like Ted Bundy to the point that they erase how incompetent the pigs were. They paint them as being suave, super-genius criminal masterminds rather than creeps and opportunists who take advantage of the many opportunities that the Chief Wiggum-esque cops hand to them on a platter.

I don’t remember the details exactly but I think Bundy was apprehended and maybe cuffed and left in the second floor of a library unattended. Bruh. So he jumps out the window and runs away since the windows weren’t secure and neither was the building. Couldn’t have seen that coming!

From memory Bundy made it through at least one traffic stop and it was basically a matter of “His car fit the description and he matched the profile of who we were looking for but he seemed like a nice, modern gentleman who was polite and friendly so I waved him on. Alas, he got away without even an attempt at a disguise because he was just so incredibly smart that he somehow outwitted us all!”

I think it was him who was also put in some county jail cell or similar. The cell had those floating roof tiles like an in office building. So he pushed them up and tried to escape that way too. I don’t know if he did or not but that’s not some criminal mastermind at work, that’s just incompetence handing the guy a free throw.

Likewise they need to tell us that John Wayne Gacy is some genius criminal mastermind because otherwise they might have to talk about his connections to the Delta Project and North Fox Island.

I think it’s useful for people to recognise the cops as being incompetent but that’s only the first step and it’s only a half measure. Those fuckers are extremely good at covering up for Epstein and they are perfectly competent when it comes to assassinating Fred Hampton and stuff like the MOVE bombing; it’s not about whether they are incompetent or not, it’s about where they are competent and where they choose strategic incompetence that reveals their true nature, in the same way that capitalism is both ruthlessly efficient and hopelessly ineffective depending on what it’s doing and it’s only by looking at this holistically that it reveals the reality of how capitalism truly functions.

Arrack/arak, although technically they refer to different types of alcohol and they aren’t in common usage.

I’d like to request this song in memoriam of Brian UnitedHealth

rakija

Huh. We have a word which shares the same etymology in English. I never knew that, that’s kinda neat!

I was not aware of Willem Van Spronsen before this post

Yeah, that’s to be expected honestly. For me it was a sort of Lenin’s brother moment.