Ziro

I want to talk about trains.

Why am I not having any issues blocking ads in YouTube? I use uBlock Origin and Firefox.

Stop all the hate for nuclear. It’s just a way for the fossil fuel industry to cause infighting among those of us who care about the climate. If we can make energy free or close to it, we should. The closer everything comes to being free the better.

I love AwesomeWM as a window manager. It’s pretty easy, even for a complete beginner. I highly recommend.

interesting. I wonder whether that’s specific to the mobile hardware. I have a 3080 running just fine on Mint.

Your mom would do just fine on Mint, and you know it.

I was only trying to point out that there is no political left in America. I wasn’t trying to hurt your feelings.

I just want to point out that the Democratic party is also full of fascists. The two-party political system is just a smoke and mirrors act. The rich still get richer and the poor still get poorer, even when Democrats are in charge. (Take the present, for instance.)

And, sure, I know it’s popular to say that the Democrats aren’t as bad. That doesn’t mean they’re good or that they should be lauded for simply not being Republicans.

Or, please, trains.

Atlantis

There is an essentially immeasurable difference between support for anarchy and support for coercive power structures. Marxist-Leninists hope to exchange one coercive power structure for another. It is little different from the imperialism it would hope to supplant. Piracy belongs to anarchy, not Marxism.

I suppose, more specifically, self identity as defined by one’s belonging to any number of a given set of social groups (e.g., fandom. nation, gender, race, religion, socioeconomic class, etc.)

I more or less believe that the concept of the self or of one’s identity is arbitrary: that there really is no self to identify.

I take your point, but that doesn’t mean that I find the left to be much more appealing than the right, at least in terms of its ability to make worthwhile systemic change. The end result is the same. The American “right” and “left” are obsessed with their own flavor of identity politics, and that is what defines them over their approaches to government and economics. America’s “left” is still seemingly anti-socialist.

I don’t think that people should go out of their way to offend others, and the left’s propensity for tolerance is somewhat better than that of the right’s, but the postmodern social construct that is “identity,” at least in American culture, inspires tribalism and disunity. The right, being so opposed to postmodernism, itself, has unwittingly adopted the construct of identity, regardless.

And I don’t wish to invalidate others’ experiences as members of identity tribes, especially those who have been (or still are) wrongfully subjugated by coercive powers in our society that may even force an identity construct upon them, but generally, feuding between opposing identity tribes seems to me to be a distraction from making a systemic shift toward a better society. Identities don’t care about social welfare, though they may claim to; they care about ensuring they remain or grow stronger as modes of personal validation or actualization. They struggle against each other, as if they are, themselves, organisms fighting for survival.

People aren’t defined by the subscription list of their identities (including “left” and “right”). We are not the final distillation of social performance. We just are—a cross section of experience, carried from one moment to the next.

I am a socialist, though I do not subscribe to all of the American left’s social or moral takes. I just want everyone to have a strong government-provided safety net, good social services, and a satisfying life that isn’t defined by the type of work one does or one’s profession.

edit: Having said that, it doesn’t seem like either the “left” or the “right,” at least in America, truly cares about effecting these sorts of changes. They just want to be loud.

I will tell you why atheism, regardless of the horse on which it rides, is a step toward progress: it is because belief in fantasy is an opiate that numbs us and stymies progress toward improving the welfare of all.

I think that the left-right dichotomy is inherently flawed. A lot of what I believe might be considered “right-leaning” or “left-leaning,” but I cannot say that I prescribe to either sort of ideology fully or with any fidelity.

I will always be opposed to any view with a pervasive “moral” authority, and both the so-called left and right are obsessed with their own versions of this. The problem we run into is the false supposition that beliefs can be categorized on a spectrum spanning right to left (or, even more liberally, a spectrum spread across two dimensions). It has been a ridiculous notion from its inception, whenever that might have been.

Building one’s identity (another silly notion, in general—identity itself being a frivolous construct that functions only as a fulcrum for the extortion of social power) upon a supposed spectrum is likewise ridiculous. You can be conservative or liberal, or anything, really. But those beliefs do not exist in a linear or planar dimension. They are so far removed from each other that one cannot fathom sliding incrementally from one to the next.

And to each respective party, “left” and “right,” the other can be demonized as evil, even without full comprehension of the other. It’s all just so damned tribalistic and silly.

Right. So, I don’t get why it should matter where, exactly, the bar of soap goes.

It’s all about feel. Mechanical keyboards just feel so very good.

edit: Actually, I’m wrong. It’s also about sound. There are silent mechanical keyboards. They just aren’t of the Lethani.

Isn’t the soap that touches the body ablated by friction with the skin?

I like Flatpak for what it is. It’s great. But I wish that the application IDs weren’t so long.