I just use brown kraft paper and some basic ribbon in a color appropriate for the occasion. I think maybe $15 in materials has given me a solid decade of gift wrapping and I haven’t even gone through half of it yet. Costs basically nothing on a per gift basis, and I get way more compliments on my wrap jobs than I did before I switched to using brown paper.
Keepass and syncthing are great combined. Functions fully locally even when I have no access to my home network, and changes get synced between my desktop, laptop, and phone whenever I have WAN access.
Rolex isn’t incredibly cheap lmao. It’s mid to high price for luxury watches. The cheapest thing they sell is like $3k. Incredibly cheap for mechanical watches would be around the $100 mark for a Seiko 5 series or something.
Alright dude, now you’re just misrepresenting my views and revealing your own biases and we’re going nowhere. I don’t have time to make a comprehensive response to all that, I’m just going to go outside enjoy the freedom and prosperity that my evil liberal society has provided me. Good thing I won’t have to wait in a bread line at Costco, it’s a real time saver.
This entire discussion is about semantics, so I see no issue with getting fiddly with it. As for authoritarianism being illiberal, I don’t see how that is tautological. Authoritarianism is when the government or ruler has absolute control and has no obligation to accept input from the populace over which they rule. This violates the consent aspect of liberalism. These are commonly accepted definitions, not stuff I just made up. They’re mutually exclusive concepts and absolute versions of either cannot coexist.
And yes, I do think there has never been a truly liberal society, just as there has never been a truly communist society or any other -ist or -ism based society. They are concepts we can strive for, but adhering perfectly to the academic definition of any of these concepts is not realistic. I think the USA is fundemantally illiberal in many regards, and we would do well to strive to correct those aspects.
As for the definitions of those specific aspects of liberalism, yes, of course it is those aspects defined under the framework of liberalism. It would just take thousands of words to provide the entire context and it’s not super important here. You seem to understand that these words have different definitions in different frameworks, and I’m sure anyone discussing political ideology in this level of depth is also aware of that.
When I’m talking about the extremist sides of the spectrum, far left and far right, I am referring to those who tread into territory where their ideology becomes ostensibly dangerous. The most common version of this is directly supporting things like oppressive authoritarian rulers and population cleansing, There are absolutely people on both the left and the right who would see those as acceptable means to their end of implementing their preferred ideology. Right wingers who want to ethnically cleanse populations they see as problematic or inferior are no better than the far leftists who want to guillotine whoever they decide is the bougouise. This is the crazy land I’m talking about. Not being in crazy land means trying your best to not support awful shit, making sure you are picking the least bad feasible options in your current situation, and revising your positions and who you support when evidence indicates that the bad outweighs the good.
And yes, I actually do have a lot of issues with the French and American revolutions, and I do not think Churchill was a particularly good guy. I don’t think they are the same as the Russian and Chinese revolutions. They all resulted in regimes of varying levels of “bad”, but the Chinese and Russian versions resulted in higher death tolls and much more unhealthy systems coming out the other side (in my subjective opinion).
I think to cover the rest of your points, there are degrees here and the real world doesn’t function in absolutes as I mentioned in the second paragraph. I don’t have time to respond to every comparison you mentioned, but Washington vs Lenin for example: Washington did not have secret police killing dissidents by the thousands. Lenin did. Washington did not implement policy that resulted in mass famines resulting in the deaths of millions, Lenin did. Washington did support slavery and ethnic cleansing of Native American populations, and it irritates me greatly that this gets glossed over. Lenin did not. Which one of those guys is worse depends on your subjective values, but for me, I’d say Lenin is the worse guy.
I’m tired and it’s almost 3am so hopefully all that makes sense.
Authoritarianism is by definition illiberal and anyone who is authoritarian or supports authoritarianism is not liberal no matter what they claim to be. Centrism is also a meme, anyone who claims to be a centrist is usually just a stan for authoritarians in disguise.
The core tenant of liberalism is respect for the autonomy and civil liberties of the individual and consent of the governed to the rules of the government through the machinations of democracy. Any system claiming to be liberal without subscribing to that is a farce.
The same could be said of the “far left”. They claim to be leftists, and they might have started out as such, but they have stepped out into crazy land and end up supporting things antithetical to the ideologies they claim to subscribe to.
Statelessness is the end goal of communism, yes. I have met so-called communists that think strongarm authoritarianism is the way to get there, and for some reason believe that those authoritarians would willingly give up their power once they’ve achieved a position where they could implement said stateless society. This is basically what happened in the USSR and China, and is decidedly not the path Marx himself proposed for achieving it. A stateless communist society in Marxist thought is simply the natural progression after late stage capitalist societies, which is not a step you can simply skip over.
I don’t necessarily agree with the idea, but I think it’s important to be educated on a wide variety of schools of political thought.
Nowhere did I claim such a thing. Some leftist groups want the whole stateless thing. Go even further left into crazy land though and you run into strongarm authoritarianism.
I’d call myself a liberal in the modern sense, I certainly don’t believe that large scale stateless societies are viable but there are definitely things we can learn from ideologies further to the left than what I subscribe to.
The far lefists aren’t commies though, that’s my point. They play like they are, but really they’re just authoritarian fascists. Commies are just regular leftists, and marxist schools of thought are a totally reasonable worldview to carry even if I don’t agree with some points of it.
I don’t know of any particular sources but I do have anecdotes of watching friends and family fall into these traps on both ends of the spectrum. A couple of my leftist friends have started treading dangerously close to some pretty sour viewpoints. I mostly see it as pro-accelerationism, everything I don’t like is capitalism/neoliberalism/western values, and are totally blind to the influence propaganda has on them and the weak points in their own ideologies.
On the right, I’ve watched several of my family members go down the fox news alt right rabbit hole and end up at similarly dumb viewpoints. They also want a revolution, except everything they don’t like is liberals/communism/woke etc. They are also totally blind to the influence of propaganda and the weak points in their ideologies. The media machine in the US is set up to make this pipeline far more efficient than the leftist version.
They mostly don’t like the same things, but they’re pulling in opposite directions, and each is convinced that when the revolution comes, their side is the one that will win out, when in reality, we’ll probably just end up with the same shit, different coat of paint.
Me? I think there’s concepts we can borrow from many ideologies that can help us solve specific problems and bring about incremental change until we reach true propserity. The socialists and commies get some stuff right, so do the libertarians, the anarchists, the ancaps, etc. The only thing I think will definitely not help is tearing it all down. There is no silver bullet, it’s all just problems that are met with ever improving solutions. Sometimes we take two steps forward one step back, but I don’t think anyone can deny that the world at large is better off now than when it was almost completely ruled by monarchy, bloody violence, and slavery a few hundred years back.
They’re analogous to the far right is the main thing. Anarchism/communism/etc. is the gateway to such views. Most lefists don’t go that far (good) but some do. Same thing with the far right, they start off as libertarian, ancap, or run of the mill conservatives etc. and end up going into cuckoo land after they watch too much cable news and facebook conspiracies.
In the USA, we have an environment where it’s far easier and more beneficial to those in power to co-opt people into right wing extremism than left wing extremism, hence the outsized representation. You can definitely find countries where the opposite is true, it’s a fairly big issue in south american and southeast asian nations. What’s interesting to me is that the end goals are nearly the same, which is to implement an authoritarian state where there is a powerful insular ingroup that can exploit the masses to their benefit.
The USA skews fairly right overall so you don’t really see a lot of them here. It’s a lot easier to find them in other countries.
I’ve definitely ran into a few people IRL who have gone far enough down the rabbit hole that I’ve heard them trot out the classic stuff about how “Stalin/Mao/Fidel/etc. was good actually”
The far left would be people like tankies, where they go so extreme they end up parroting a lot of the same rhetoric you see on the far right, just through a different lens. I’ve literally interacted with people on this site who believe North Korea is secretly a utopia that the West is trying to hide with propaganda.
They don’t really have much in the way of significant political representation in this country. The far right unfortunately does.
I’d consider commies, anarchists, and anti capitalists in general to just be leftists, not far leftists. It’s not really my thing but I can at least respect it.
Nixos is great, but unfortunately I can’t use it at work. I have migrated my home server infra to it though and plan to migrate my desktop the next time I have a free evening.
You can take the quotes off too big to fail, they literally are. Their only competitor in the world is Airbus. Boeing going bust would be catastrophic to the global aviation industry and doubly so for the USA.
That said, I wanna see Lockheed step up and do a commercial plane. Gimme a jumbo jet that breaks the sound barrier and has a radar signature the size of a credit card pls.
Why ansible? It’s the best tool I know of for configuring systems when tyou can’t build a premade image. I’ve tried puppet and chef but really like not needing any agent on the target system despite the pain of YAML syntax.
There’s no standalone fan controller in existence I’m aware of with Linux support unfortunately, blame manufacturers for that. I use an aquacomputer quadro and just fire up a windows VM with USB passthrough to change settings the once or twice a year I need to. What else isn’t working?
Regarding blender, what render options are missing? If it’s GPU rendering that’s missing, are you using Nvidia or AMD? I’m not familiar with how mint does things but you might need cuda or HIP packages for Nvidia or AMD respectively.
To be fair every FOSS license will prevent a company from having exclusive rights to use your work. Even if you get a bit lax and include MIT and BSD licenses as FOSS, a company still cannot take your work and stop other people from using it.
In the case of Duolingo, it’s pretty different because that volunteer labor output is gated in a proprietary walled garden.
Whereas contributing a patch to chromium for example will never gate that contribution, even if it makes it into chrome and produces millions of dollars of profit for google. You can always and forever freely access and use a version of chromium with your patch as long as there’s still a copy left to access.
And God forbid you’re anywhere right of Marx himself or you’ll get people telling you you’ll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.
Like come on, we want 95% of the same stuff, let’s just work together and have some productive discussions and enrich our political mindsets instead of flinging shit at people who are basically on the same side as you.
They let us use them for all my college math classes.
They really don’t help much at all if you don’t understand the math, and if you do understand, you don’t need the calculator most of the time.