Hacker News might be the most insufferable and childishly naive place on the internet.

Well yes, in the sense that sandcastles exist on the beach until the tide comes back in but worry not they are quickly trying to solve the problem of their own existence in as many ways possible as they can whether it be killing themselves with reckless and proud self exposure to Covid, lack of clean water in the places they spend all their money on a big house, mental health, lack of healthcare etc… you just have to give them time to kill themselves off (and make sure your loved ones don’t get mixed up in their collective self destruction if you can).

Change takes time unfortunately :(

Bro I bet if you did allll that work and took all that risk just to make your life maybbeee better that at the end of the day the people living in the place you made it to would be blown away by your incredible bravery and resolve and would welcome you with open arms into their society and economy!

………

Or maybe they would just pay their coast guard to troll around drowning migrant boats with heavily armed speed boats with expensive lights on and an automated voice message that says “go home” and shrug and say “well we tried!!” as families drown right in front of their eyes.

I mean… how big really is the category of software tasks that you can’t properly do on Linux in 2024? I feel like it is getting to the point where you do genuinely have to be specific about what Linux can’t do that is a dealbreaker for you rather than just falling back on “Linux can’t do what people need to do” as a general criticism of it.

Windows can’t do what people need it to do, and it fails to do so while sucking up your private data (which if you work at a business with confidential information IS a dealbreaker). At least when Linux fails it usually isn’t simultaneously violating the IT security structure of your organization….

The funny thing is businesses and government entities can’t even claim with a straight face that they can trust Microsoft to adhere to the meager insufficient data privacy laws that do exist when there is zero evidence Microsoft would behave that way based on the track record even if the financial penalties for failing to do so were actually real to the ruling class and not just theoretical thought experiments that involve a slap on the wrist or more like a light tickling with a feather on the nose.

What I like to imagine that brings a smile to my face is the afterlife for Ronald Reagan involves him being stuck in a small room perfectly healthy and fine, but utterly alone, for the rest of eternity. Nothing is in the room and there are no windows. The room is a single color and silent.

Kissinger I think I would like to not to actually go to hell but be reincarnated as a public trash can in the dirtiest and most desperate part of a Republican/austerity ravaged rust belt city. In this case I would hope Kissinger felt excruciating pain the entire time.

Then again maybe heaven would be wonderful for the rest of us if you took Kissinger and Reagan and cloned them into human bowling pins that you would try to squish into blood splatters with boulders over and over again in a relaxing bowling style game. In this case every single death would be felt by Reagan and Kissinger, their screams and squishing bodies would echo around the bowling alley adding a nice staccato excitement to the background music playing on the speakers!

Do I sound unhinged? Good! Maybe I am describing a bowling alley in hell and not heaven but idk sign me up wherever it is both these men are mass murderers who more than got away with their heinous crimes.

But it will die down. People will just accept it. They always do. They always will.

I understand the frustration and cynicism that comes from wanting something to happen and waiting a good stretch of your life for it to do so but I am sorry, this is not reflective of reality.

Don’t mistake your own fatigue for the behavior of people in general.

Support for software on Linux or Wine is now orders of magnitude more complete and functional than it was 5-10 years ago. There are fundamental changes going on, just because we operated in a paradigm that suffocated the possibility of Linux adoption in the past doesn’t mean that paradigm will continue indefinitely.

There is a difference between being permanently powerless and being powerless under a certain arrangement of forces and actors.

We are entering a period of the status quo being smashed for better or worse in almost every dimension of our lives, what was likely to happen in the past 20 years does not reliably predict what is likely to happen in the next 20 years.

There is actually a true opening for Linux here in a way there never has been.

It is okay to be the person that always recommends Linux, especially if you are a kind person with the patience to explain things to people in approachable terms (and you don’t just scream at people SOMEBODY ALREADY ASKED THIS QUESTION USE SEARCH whenever a newbie walks in the door and asks the obvious questions a newbie would ask).

Now is the time, Linux is pulled up out front waiting to pick us up (with bags packed) and Microsoft is loudly shitting the bed upstairs, NOW is the time to walk straight out the front door, jump in the car with Linux and never look back. We owe it to Microsoft’s long relationship with consumers to leave Microsoft sitting confused on the porcelain throne wondering why they were abandoned and where all the toilet paper is (we are the toilet paper in this metaphor).

Centrists by and large are ideological cowards Why? They just have beliefs that put them in the center of the left/right dichotomy. Is one a coward for not being polarized? This point is almost moot, though — centrism is rather nebulous and ephemeral.

Because it is the mechanism centrists use to arrive at their political beliefs that is cowardly. They don’t tend to start from a perspective that arises from their empathy and curiosity for the world and build their politics based on that, they look at the spread of opinions people have around them and just go right down the middle where they can disappear into the crowd without having to do the hard work of creating an actually ideologically rigorous belief system that adheres to reality and evolves with it.

A rightwing fascist emphatically cheers on the genocide of Palestinians (and Jews for that matter confusingly), a leftist emphatically declares genocide is a wrong and a human rights violation. One of those is a dangerous world view that needs to be resisted with force and the other is a world view of harm reduction and solidarity with all humans. What makes most centrists so cowardly is that they take both of those viewpoints as reasonable starting positions and average them to emphatically supporting “some genocide!” and it is incredibly pathetic.

Liberalism is not dependent on the left-right dichotomy, and it is not nebulous like centralism. It is quite well defined in poli-sci. You can read about the beliefs that it encompasses here.

I mean, academia can define “liberalism” however it wants, that isn’t how I define it and most people in conversation about US politics don’t use liberal that way. The word has evolved from the meaning you prescribe to it.

The good thing is that because centrists by and large don’t actually have beliefs

This is a strange statement. Centrism is by definition a political position, and, by extent, requires beliefs.

I don’t understand the confusion here. My point is that centrism in the US is largely a political position constructed in reverse. If someone (consciously or unconsciously) decides they will peg their beliefs on the center of the Overton Window that is fundamentally a different thing than taking a set of ethics, morals, and policy knowledge and building a political perspective from the ground up.

Call it whatever you want, people that try to disappear in a crowd by just mimicking the behavior and beliefs of people around them are not doing the same thing as people in the crowd who are behaving according to their morals, ethics and understanding of the world and either are blending into the crowd or not because of it.

Centrists by and large are ideological cowards, they are unwilling to imagine right and wrong outside of the comfortable and established narratives that determine right and wrong in their head (and are described within the Overton Window). Centrists will for example happily join progressives in attacking Trump for doing awful things like draconian and cruel immigration control measures, and as soon as Biden takes office and keeps doing the same shit they will flip to yelling at progressives for attacking Biden for doing the same thing.

Centrists are the kind of political position that has substance, it is purely an average of the Overton Window, no matter distorted and fucked up the Overton Window has been made by conservatives and the rich.

Billionaires have no legitimate right to exist.

Period.

It doesn’t matter if some of them “do nice things” maybe.

Billionaires should not exist.

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Any way we talk about this is going to be reductive, the system we are talking about cannot be summed up in easy terms.

I think what you can say however is that one of the hallmark indicators of centrists (speaking from the context of US politics here just because that is what I know) is that they have no true ideological beliefs. The way a centrist determines right and wrong isn’t by thinking about the problem and applying ethics and critical analysis to it like leftist generally does (and conservatives loudly pretend to do), rather a centrist defines wrong as unpopular.

Centrists are always running an average function over the Overton Window and just adopting whatever the algorithm says as what they believe. This isn’t news to leftists in the US dealing with US centrists, but the unfolding genocide of Palestinians in Gaza has written it across the sky in big blazing letters that centrism is a catastrophically dangerous way to reach a consensus in a society undergoing crisis and in need of deep reform.

The good thing is that because centrists by and large don’t actually have beliefs, we just have to shame them into realizing the hateful positions they have (that they don’t perceive as hateful or not hateful, just average!) make them an outcast and they will fold as they always do to whoever controls the narrative.

At this point in US politics I cannot see a difference between centrism and liberalism, there is nothing ideological to locate among the political center of the US, calling them liberal implies something is going on other than being ideological penguins who are afraid to be on the edge of the circle so they waddle into the middle and attempt to disappear into the crowd as they squawk away.

Honestly Star Wars has always had trash writing, it was the people around George Lucas that made Star Wars good and the more success and fame Lucas got the less he listened to others and the worse the movies got.

Specifically Lucas subscribed to Joseph Campbell’s Hero With A Thousand Faces which is a widely discredited work of anthropology and besides Campbell was an outspoken raging sexist (women can’t be the hero they have to help the hero he said many times).

It is a reductive, authoritarian way of telling stories, it only leaves spaces for the chosen heroes. I also find it makes the universe of Star Wars cynical, evil just happens because we are sinful and it is inevitable. It is boring and not very compelling.

Andor of course goes against the grain on all of these things, brilliant series!

So I think the irony is that if standing with Israel means he can win the election, it’s still a better outcome for Palestine than if he loses. If he loses the election, Trump will tell Israel to just go ahead and glass the area.

The irony is how much you have twisted your political beliefs to find a position you feel ok about this from.

The majority of Americans think what Israel is doing is heinous and want it to stop, the idea that Americans are evenly divided on this is not grounded in reality.

I especially can’t stand that people keep treating it as a fact here that US voters are split 50-50 on Israel’s genocide to stop. The polling is clear, US voters with a decisive majority support Palestine and ending this genocide.

People in this thread asserting that most Americans support Israeli’s actions in this genocide rather than support Palestinians as a some kind of indisputable fact as part of their rhetorical arguments is a self fulfilling prophecy of attempting to manufacture consensus where it doesn’t exist.

I can certainly appreciate the point, but realistically what can he actually do? Israel have already shown that they don’t actually give a toss about what the US of A thinks.

Israel is literally existentially dependent on the US along multiple vectors including material military aid and diplomatic cover (especially now that they have made themselves a pariah state globally), this means that Biden has holds ALL of the leverage. Biden just has to actually demonstrate to Netanyahu he isn’t playing around, which Biden has being doing the opposite of.

Terrorism is not an ideological choice, it is a military strategy employed by groups that do not have the means to fight a more traditional conflict.

Hamas uses “terrorism” but the IDF doesn’t need “terrorism” because it has tanks, advanced fighter jets and one of the most advanced and well armed militaries in the world. It can just slaughter innocent tens of thousands of Palestinians and claim it is doing “military operations” and the world media will shake their heads and agree.

I appreciate that for you this may be a chance you are willing to take. I have trouble understanding why anyone would feel that way given the systemic issues of undermining US support for Israel that mean we cannot “stop the genocide” anyway. But thank you for having this dialog.

I understand you feeling that way. I feeling strongly about my position and I will not budge from it because it is founded in my beliefs, I can’t just see this as a tactical decision divorced from the aspect of me as a citizen directly endorsing probably one of the worst genocides in my lifetime (happening with my countries bombs, my countries military training, likely with military advisors from my countries military heavily assisting every level of this genocide).

This is a prototype for a darker future of mass scale violence against groups of people, for example how many US police departments have trained directly with the IDF, the entity that is slaughtering innocent civilians left and right in Gaza? The answer is a lotttt of them. This is a prototype and this is a test and if we do not reject this genocide with an existential disgust and fervor and a willingness to walk away from this voting coalition that benefits us in the near term, the prototype will have been demonstrated to be successful to the ruling class and that future should scare the shit out of you.

Shame on us for being afraid to defend our value because corporate democrats have set up an impossible choice and then argued for progressives to choose them by attacking them rhetorically.

I appreciate that for you this may be a chance you are willing to take

I don’t see this as be willing or not willing to take a chance, I see this as there being no choice in the first place. This is a moment where it’s “ride or die”. Biden can put his chips on the table and prove he treats progressive voters as genuinely part of his core voting bloc. Or he can keep assuming that young progressives will fall in line no matter what and in my opinion that is equally as catastrophic of an outcome if we just fall in line and agree to sweep Biden’s despicable enabling of the mass scale slaughter of 70,000? Palestinian men, women and children (we don’t even know the real numbers because Israel has killed all the journalists it can get its hand on in Gaza).

Now is the time to wield our power, now is the time to shut this shit down. There is no next time, no “we just have to vote for Biden here and then we can do the good work later”. If Biden refuses to budge on this, we have already lost and centrist democrats leveling the blame for that at people like me is lazy and frankly absurd.

I want to vote for Biden and I will, as soon as he calls up Netanyahu and tells him this genocide is over, period. I am not being a troll, if Biden takes serious action and stops this genocide then he immediately gets my vote. Very simple calculation for Biden here.

We can limit the harm by putting pressure on an administration - and, crucially it is working to some degree.

Cool so what me and other people who have had enough genocide and think similarly are going to do is loudly tell Biden (which we are doing) that we want to vote for him, but we can’t unless he stops the genocide of Palestinians. Words are meaningless, small concessions are meaningless, he needs to stop the genocide NOW.

It appears at this point, this is the only way leverage will work because centrists democrats have proven thoroughly how cynically they see progressives and the ideologies they base their politics on. Crucially, I didn’t create these conditions where this is the only place progressives feel they have power in this coalition, centrist democrats like Biden did. I don’t accept the blame for that, I have always made it very clear I hope that genocide is a red line for me as a voter, full stop.

Netanyahu just told Biden to take a hike. Thus, “full stop” disproving what you have said.

Netanyahu will say whatever he wants on tv, the Israeli military industrial complex is utterly dependent upon the US military industrial complex. Netanyahu has no play here and everybody knows it except apparently Biden (or maybe he just doesn’t care I don’t know, it honestly doesn’t matter at the end of the day, action matters).