dihydrogen monoxide is also dangerous, we must ban it as well

nix/guix can be used on any distro and it provides a way to organize .config files so that if the .config directory gets deleted or accidentally modified for some reason, restoring it would be very easy. By putting the configuration in a git repo, it also makes it easy to restore previous configurations. I accidentally deleted a bunch of stuff in my .config directory once and that’s one of the reason I use this tooling now, so I thought OP would find it helpful also

When people want “Linux” on their phones they’re talking more about the ecosystem than the OS

Use nix home-manager or guix home and put your configs in a git repo (this is my guix home config for reference)

People were condemning the Pro-Palestine protests on my campus because “they could have followed the rules” and apparently sending a bunch of state troopers with weapons and snipers and a tank and arresting 20 protestors was a justified punishments for having a few tents and a tarp.

In Dallas the light rail normally doesn’t check but they’re doing it more frequently now mainly to get homeless people off the trains, and they will make you get off if you don’t have a ticket. The busses always check though.

You’d rather side with a Trump supporter than someone who refuses to vote for genocide? That says a lot.

Then clarify your statement. What even are you trying to convince me? You keep telling me that everyone thinks they are right and people should follow the law - but the law is made by the same people who think they’re right so what makes the law so special? Why should I as a person with strong opinions on many topics ditch my own moral compass in favor of the law? I can’t tell what point you’re trying to make with this.

So what are you saying? That objectivity doesn’t exist? That there is no way to run a society that objectively does a better job at making people as a whole feel comfortable? That it’s ideal for people with opposing ideologies to exist (I used to think that when I was a libertarian but over time realized that having an ideology coexist with another ideology that wants the first ideology gone simply doesn’t work well at all, so we need to find the ideology that works better and progress from the other one).

I would argue that there is no objective right or wrong, but also that people in general have certain shared interests and usually some sort of a common moral ground. Like basically nobody wants to be in a concentration camp. People don’t like being endangered by others, so basic laws are agreed upon to minimize this, like don’t murder or rape people. And people want to be free to do things they want to do, so if they don’t cause significant problems to another person they should be allowed. There might not be an objective “right” but there is an objective “this is what this person wants” for every person which means that there is a way to balance these interests to come up with a set of principles that objectively makes a society that is comfortable for as many people as possible. So since I naturally want to be comfortable and I know other people naturally want to be comfortable and societies tend to be more efficient and comfortable when people cooperate, working toward these principles is how we successfully do that, and this is what I will use as my basis for right and wrong.

However, when one person’s freedom infringes on the freedoms of another person, this is where major problems arise and compromises need to be made. With the goal being to have a society that is comfortable for as many people as possible, this means that there is an objectively best compromise that meets this goal, and what people need to do is figure out what that “objectively best” compromise is, which happens by understanding the context of every party involved in this conflict. So whether an action is “right” in terms of making a society that is comfortable for as many people as possible is dependent entirely on the context, not the action itself. Which means that while actions such as killing another person are normally “wrong” as it infringes on the freedom of another person, if killing that person helps society reach the goal of being as comfortable for as many people as possible (i.e. the person is actively oppressing people based on characteristics they cannot change and killing them would help stop that), then killing that person is “right” in terms of that moral context.

This is the basic idea that separates “fascism” from “antifascism” (and other similar ideas such as “racism” vs “antiracism”), in that they may use similar tactics but when you look at what those actions are objectively doing to people, one is promoting discrimination based on characteristics people cannot change leading to a more unequal society that deviates from this ideal, and the other is countering that, leading to a less overall unequal society and progressing toward that ideal.

The challenge is that this objectivity in terms of what actions are “right” and “wrong” is still being discovered and debated on, and putting those disagreements in light so they can be resolved is important for making social progress. But in the end, whether a person or a society is “fascist” is an objective measure and in my view there is nothing wrong with combating this through any means possible.

Hitler firmly believed he was making “society better for basically everyone”. The Christian Nationalists and White Supremacists firmly believe their getting into power via a Trump administration will make “society better for basically everyone”.

Well for Hitler and White Supremacists they clearly weren’t making “society better for basically everyone” and all it takes to understand this is basic logic that they support one superior race and commit genocides against other races. We can argue that our thinking may be flawed and biased all we want, but that doesn’t change the objective reality that Hitler’s genocide is very well documented and that it clearly caused massive amounts of harm and suffering.

Christian Nationalism is more nuanced having been a Christian myself previously, and deconversion fucking sucks. But if they want to make a convincing argument that Christian Nationalism is a good thing, they need to prove that God actually exists and there’s enough things in the belief system that contradict scientific observation that they have no real argument supporting this. The various other pieces of bullshit they brainwashed me for 18 years with does not help their argument either (like my science teacher who was trying to convince us that dragons and dinosaurs exist right now but very few people have discovered them). Science has more ground in objective reality than religion does, and the amount of innovations science has helped us with that religion hasn’t shows us that one clearly works better than the other when it comes to progressing.

The wrinkle that you overlook is that there are many wildly varying viewpoints about what is “good”. Being “inclusive of everyone” for example, is something that most Christo-fascists would abhor, their bible notwithstanding.

So because other people’s definition of “good” is targeting people for how they were born, nobody should do anything to protect them? Why do you think these ideologies are worth defending? They’re a danger to myself and my friends. If you want to convince me that genocides are good for humanity, you’re going to need to be a lot more convincing than that.

if one group ignores the rule of law because they are “right” then the other group feels fully justified in doing the same. And because we have a democracy and that democracy doesn’t enshrine progressive ideas into law, we can’t ensure groups with ideas we find abhorrent don’t use our precedent to impose those ideas on us.

Guess what? While good people are arguing about whether it is right to do things that aren’t normal or expected to progress their agenda, horrible people are going to take the initiative and do them and then it’s too late. Life isn’t a democracy, it’s a battle between rulers that are engaging in genocides and doing other extreme human rights abuses versus everyone else. There’s a reason why aggressive people consistently end up at the top. If we want any sort of chance whatsoever of dethroning the genociders and abusers, being aggressive is the only way that even has a chance at happening. Same reason leftists and even liberals now are buying up guns. The law has a history of being weaponized to keep people marginalized, we cannot rely on law to save humanity when that law comes from the same people that are humanity’s biggest threat.

And on top of that the very reason the Democrats lost to Trump is because Trump is an actually interesting candidate promising to make radical changes, aligning with the interests and identities of many Americans, and building a shared vision and hope for the future. While meanwhile the Democrats fuck around doing basically nothing, they flip-flop on their stances whenever its convenient for them, they make vague statements that do nothing to give people any sort of inspiration, and they act like they’re out of touch with the population. If we want to stop Trump while the Democrats continue to not due shit, our best bet is a sort-of left-wing “Trump” that has the same sort of enthusiasm, energy, and vision that can inspire people to unify and fight for the social good.

Have you ever tried to negotiate or educate someone when you are angry? Like say your neighbor keeps playing loud music and you really want them to stop. If you come out yelling at them and are visibly angry you -might- get them to stop, but you have made an enemy. If you approach them in an open-minded way that acknowledges their rights and autonomy you have a much better chance of a constructive dialog that gets you what you want.

Approaching capitalists in an open-minded way rarely works. They operate on a system of optimizing to what benefits them the most economically, and if it benefits them economically for you to not have rights no conversation is going to change that. It’s more likely to work for people who are socially conservative or lower-class economic conservative, but capitalists are generally a lost cause.

Maybe it helps to be reminded that we still have a lot of power, especially at the local level…

Well funny enough in my very local area the protestors who bent laws and got arrested for it have had a bigger impact on political discussion than any single other event that has happened here. And other cities within my state have made it illegal to feed homeless people, yet activists did it anyways and even sued the government and ended up on national news for it. It seems like the most interesting people here have no problem with ignoring the rule of law, and I respect them for that.

I’m using a 6 pro and it works fine

What makes a society good is being inclusive of everyone regardless of how they were born and working through cooperation to achieve goals and look out for each other. A society where people are intentionally neglected for another group’s economic gain is not a desirable society unless you’re a fascist. However, ideologies are not people and ideologies that promote an unequal society do not need to be tolerated, and people who pose a danger due to their actions to the people around them in a society that would otherwise be more fair do not need to be tolerated either.

Neither authoritarianism nor ignoring the rule of law are inherently bad. In reality, law isn’t words written on a piece of paper - it’s people with political motives that hold authority over law enforcement and the criminal justice system. The words themselves hold no authority, and they depend on the people to actually follow them, so the people can collectively choose to ignore them or change their meaning and now suddenly the law is different even though the words didn’t change one bit. The political motives the people who decide the law have generally favor a society that supports corruption and inequality, so there is nothing inherently wrong with breaking the law, especially if it makes everyone’s lives better.

Fascism is a specific type of authoritarianism that basically does the opposite to a society of what it should look like. Utilizing authority to make society better for basically everyone is not fascism. Utilizing authority to dehumanize a subset of people for the economic gain of a “superior race” is fascism.

The Democrats need to drop out and let an actually serious party take over

as a uni student, all work and no life. kindof depressing, there’s a good chance I have adhd as well

I’ve used R studio on Arch Linux ARM before, so it should work

For Uni I use Typst for most documents nowadays and sometimes LibreOffice. If I need to open a .docx I use LibreOffice for that as well. It does fuck up the formatting sometimes though so if you have an annoying professor that requires .docx files perfectly formatted you might need to use Word in a VM or a lab computer if they’re available.

Teams works on Firefox so I just use it there (there’s also an extension that lets you install PWAs using Firefox so you can do that to Teams as well).

For Excel, I don’t use it so I’m not sure what features you need and whether LibreOffice has all of them.

R works fine on Linux.

The packages get updates fairly quickly for a non-rolling release distro, and the distro is more batteries-included and tends to adopt newer technologies like BTRFS faster than other distros. It also has the immutable Silverblue variant which looks neat although I’ve never used it myself.

I’m not really sure. One of the most common complaints among the less extreme portions of the right is that the left is too intolerant and strict and not fun to be around. And being more welcoming of the person themselves, even while acknowledging to yourself that their beliefs are severely flawed (possibly due to factors such as propaganda, peer pressure, religious beliefs), might be a way to help capture that crowd and work to win them over.

At the same time, there needs to be a line drawn somewhere where the person is clearly being malicious and possibly dangerous and is a lost cause. Stuff like “your body my choice”, using slurs, praising suicides of marginalized people, etc isn’t worth tolerating. Also when it comes to group activities, allowing these sort of people and ideas makes minorities uncomfortable, so when they leave to someplace more comfortable now your group is just full of Nazis. I seen no problem with cutting these sort of people out.

My family is conservative and I’m still dependant on them for healthcare, so calling them out usually isn’t worth it although sometimes I still do.

There are also people I know (many of whom are relatives) who seem like normal people but then support Trump and all of his policies. I want to think they’re not horrible people and that they’re just brainwashed, but recently I’ve been seeing some of my friends jump on the alt-right bandwagon and posting extremely racist stuff to be “edgy”, even after leaving the far-right culture bubble they lived in. This is the sort of stuff that even when I was still a conservative I would never have thought it would be okay to promote, and I grew up in the same environment they did so it seems like they know perfectly well what they’re doing. After all of this I’m starting to think that maybe many of them are genuinely terrible people.