Any others?

I don’t agree that voting prevents things from getting worse…You are literally saying that if we vote for the right people in an informed way that things will not get bad.

But you recognize that’s not what I said, right? I said if you don’t vote, things will get worse. P->Q doesn’t imply ~P->~Q. Classic fallacy of the inverse.

People don’t vote for Democrats because Democrats have terrible policies and terrible behaviors. It’s not that Democrats have terrible policies because people don’t vote. The two party system is just a PR show by the ultra wealthy and that’s why people don’t vote at all. It’s not the case that the two party system is just a PR show by the ultra wealthy because people don’t vote.

But it’s clearly both. It’s a vicious cycle. The data shows that the boomer generation still votes more than any other generation, and as a result, they always get their way. 4 boomer presidents in a row, topped off with Biden from the Silent generation! Yes, the boomers currently hold more wealth than the rest, and yes there is a correlation between being wealthy and being able to cast a vote that matters, but if non-boomers showed up at the same rates as boomers 10-20 years ago, we would be in a much better situation right now. So far, the ones who vote are having their wealth protected.

Now your task is to actually work through your social indoctrination to come to your conclusions based on reality instead of instilled beliefs.

Hey man, don’t sink to that level, please. I’m trying to have a respectful, constructive conversation. Whether intentionally or not, you’ve repeatedly misinterpreted my position.

For ex.

This is the best you can imagine for democracy?

I never said that, you’re arguing against a straw man.

Consider the extent to which you’re upset with reality. The US is not uniquely flawed. Find me a time in human history where none of the crimes against humanity you mention were being committed. But chart crimes over time and I assure you we’re trending better as a species.

And I know you’re capable of seeing that, because in spite of the crimes against humanity committed by the USSR and China, you’re able to see all the good they did too.

They wrote about it explicitly

I’m very interested in any sources you have for this. I would love to have those in my back pocket for future discussions.

not because we voted for the right set of presidents or senators but because we deposed all of those leaders and took control, cratos, back into the hands of the people, the demos

But you see why that argument can always be made to justify throwing out an imperfect system, right? It’s easy to start from scratch, but it’s also the most costly (in terms of lives). It’s much harder to work diligently to make positive, gradual change over time, but historically, we’re doing that. Sure, we can go the overthrow-the-government route, but there’s no guarantee that what replaces it will adequately serve the people. So we’ll overthrow that one too? How many times should that loop happen? As many as it takes? As many lives as it takes?

And what if, when you try to take a stand against the state, the government quashes the attempt using violence, and then punishes anyone who ever so much as mentions the incident going forward? I assume you have examples of that happening in the US. Are you aware of any famous cases of that in China? I wouldn’t presume that this is “the best you can imagine for a democracy”, though.

Again, I’m not here to say the US is any better ethically than China. I’m not going to take the bait on whether china is a democracy, or whether they even claim to be one. But we have to be fair: they’re both guilty of a huge number of crimes against humanity, they’ve both gradually improved the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people, and both of them are underserving their minorities and younger generations right now in favor of late stage capitalism. But I would feel more confident about being able to affect meaningful change both in policy and party in the US than in China today. Though I ernestly hope that one day the Chinese are able to affect similar change there too.

I put my labor into deconstructing white-supremacist patriarchal capitalism in the hearts and minds of my people in my neighborhood and online, and when I do put in physical effort equivalent to door knocking, it’s doing food distribution for the people around me who need food.

That’s great!

But vote. It’s literally the least you can do.

And yet you agree that if everyone does all of the first part, but none of the voting, things get worse, right?

with a simple “vote for the good guys and bad things are because of the bad guys” narrative.

I’m sorry your teachers taught you that, I agree our public education system is in shambles. I was raised to believe democracy is the worst option, except for all the others. And that even if my options are between “Turd Sandwich and Giant Douche”, informed voting is critical to a democracy.

And that’s my point, you can’t both think we don’t live in a democracy AND think that voting is important. You can be cynical about the electoral process, or the direction of the country, but that’s just called living in a democracy. This isn’t even the first time the world has tipped toward fascism, and as dire as it looks, I maintain that until a system breaks apart completely, the only way we make a “more perfect union” on the other side is by voting.

All that other stuff is vital too, particularly when it comes to crossing the critical “when everyone knows what everyone knows” threshold. That’s the “informed” part of the equation.

And how 'bout that Mamdani? Balanced budget! And he’s not the only Democratic Socialist gaining steam. Maybe I’m naive, but it feels like people are finally figuring out which candidates they need to push for if they want to survive late stage capitalism.

I am curious, what is one country you would be willing to call a democracy?

Tell me not to go vote in midterms, then.

Removed by mod

The difference in what we’re saying is semantic.

They fundamentally want the US to continue

If this means a government “of the people, for the people, by the people” that maintains a monopoly on violence to ensure no one is above the law/Constitution, then I disagree.

If this means a puppet state that the “elite” holds oligarchal control over, but maintain whatever facade of democracy they need to, then I agree. But I would not call that the US govt. You could say that because they call it the “US Govt” it’s still the US govt, and you could say that because they call it the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, it’s a democratic republic. But I would disagree on both points.

Yeah obviously they’re not going to personally crown themselves as supreme ruler on a towering citadel constructed where the whitehouse once stood like a caricature of a villain. But if the structure of “government” that we end up with is completely powerless against them, then it’s objectively not the US anymore; it’s just the “elite”, the govt is whatever they say, they are the govt, wealth only flows wherever they say it’s allowed to in order to maintain power.

And that’s always their goal, to become the govt, that’s what I mean.

First off, I’m not a fan of the fuzzy term “elite”, but I’ll assume we both know what that refers to.

People think the rich just like to get richer, that Musk and Bezos are competing to have the biggest number in their bank account. But no, they have no interest in “USD”, they don’t care about being crowned “richest person on the playground”, they want to own the playground. They don’t want to be confined by some government’s laws. After a certain point, the only reason to keep accruing wealth is to one day become the government and write your own laws. To me, that goal IS what makes someone “elite”. Conversely, a wealthy person who welcomes high taxes on the rich because it makes the society around them better is still wealthy, but not “elite”.

The elite are always looking for a route to absolute power, and they all see the Trump administration as an opening and are all jumping at it. The only thing they have in common is they want the US govt to be weakened beyond repair, but where they differ is they all want to be the one to take its place (or retain a position of influence like Little Finger).

I knew the article was going to mention NTSYNC, but is that really it?

I get that we don’t want the argument for compatibility to effectively allow windows to define what the linux kernel has to looks like, but afaik this is one instance. The headline makes it sound like a systemic issue.

You aren’t the only one, this has been the rhetoric from the far right for over a decade now. The “Boogaloo Boys” were named for what they forsaw as “Civil War 2: Electric Boogaloo”. They gained notoriety during Trump’s first term, and later rebranded/forked into the Proud Boys. Now you don’t hear about any of them as much because they’re all hired as ICE agents, military, or working for Hegseth at the Pentagon.

The thing to recognize is, while we’re all flirting with the idea that maybe, if we’re not careful, we might see a civil war in the US’ future, the Trump administration is talking and behaving like we’re already in phase 1: determining allegiances and positioning forces.

The trump administration has a lot of factions involved with a lot of different long-term goals, but right now their common goal is to dismantle the US, and they are currently on track. If at some point one or more states decide the only way to put a stop to unconstitutional federal action is through force, they’ll use the military to “keep the peace”. But that will be the tipping point, and they’ve been preparing for a while…

I agree that it’s the rich that are the root of the problem, but also I don’t understand what the Republican party is (since the great depression) if not a roundabout way to harness fear of downward social mobility to vote in favor of the rich.

And when I say “I don’t understand”, I mean I really don’t understand, because I also recognize that the rich pulled the same shit back in the civil war on the uneducated southern Democrats. The way I see it, today we have “Temporarily Embarrassed Billionaires” fighting for the rich in case they ever get rich, but back in the 1800s they had “Temporarily Embarrassed Slave Owners” who were, again, fighting for the rich in case they ever got rich.

I guess I’m supposed to conclude that the “liberalism” of that time was just misguided because it was attempting to justify abridging others’ individual freedoms as an individual freedom. And then maybe the “republic” of Republicanism was seen as the elite telling the uneducated, “the masses are too dumb to be trusted with a direct democracy, we need to elect an educated intermediary to represent us”. If so, that seems like…not even close to what the Republican party stands for today; Trump was elected on a Populist platform, the opposite of a Republic.

tl;dr I get that despite the corruption in the DNC, liberalism is a valuable philosophy worth refining and progressing toward. But I don’t know what the Republican party still has that’s worth keeping.

Could you maybe elaborate on the feature parity?

1. I travel often. There are a lot of devices in hotels, bnbs, and friend’s houses that have native plex support. Not so much for jellyfin.
2. Casting to cast-compatible devices is very hit-or-miss, but mostly miss. I know the casting ecosystem is already a mess, but as far as user experience goes, Plex has spent more effort ironing it out.
3. The native Plex client works with a controller on my bazzite HTPC when launched from the steam ui, while the native jellyfin client doesn’t.

I keep trying jellyfin out every few months, but so far keep hitting enough friction that I can’t reliably make the switch.

as in separate jellyfin account per each different jellyfin server?

Yes, if me and 5 of my friends have jellyfin servers, we all need accounts on each other’s servers. I then need to juggle accounts to access their content.

Jellyswarrm is a reverse proxy plugin I could run to mask the problem for myself, but it’s not a solution for mom who may have access to my server, and one other friend’s server that I don’t know.

The correct solution is federated accounts, but the devs have already stated that they don’t want to do that.

Why would you host it openly rather than in a VPN like Tailscale or whatever wire guard is?

Then friends and family have to be on my VPN to stream anything.

To me this means they know they don’t have a viable business model. It’s possible they took on a lot of debt years ago, and now they have to enshittify to pay it back. I paid for the lifetime membership years ago, and I would say I’ve more than gotten my money’s worth and I’m mostly still happy with Plex, but I would drop them in a heartbeat if jellyfin was a viable alternative.

People don’t like to admit it, but jellyfin doesn’t have feature parity yet. I think they could solve a lot of the issues if they went the federation route, but until then, it’s just easier for my family and friends to each have 1 plex account instead of N jellyfin accounts. Not to mention the jellyfin vulnerabilities that prevent me from considering hosting it openly.

I remember 20y ago thinking the internet was creating a sort of intellectual “travelator”, where some people would get on and be launched far ahead of the rest. The result would be a huge division in intelligence across society, which would lead to a feeling of disenfranchisement and civil unrest.

So no, if everyone’s intelligence went up by 50% of their own intelligence, you’d just have more of the same problem.

I believe public education is vital, but we didn’t place enough emphasis on the importance of uniform funding across districts and states, rather than having “good schools” and “bad schools”.

I have a TrueNas system locally with periodic cloud sync jobs to backblaze B2.

I was trying to do this recently and learned that, I guess certain bluray drives have been identified as compromised by the powers that be. As a result newer bluray disks ship with a list of those drives, and when your drive’s firmware sees that it is on the list, it will refuse to open the disk. I have an old bd drive from ~2008 that was ~60% effective at ripping my library.

I also tried my best to use fully open source tools in combination with an up-to-date KEYDB.CFG, but never had as much success as just using makemkv.

The most extreme route I found is to refer to makemkv’s list of drives that can have their firmware flashed to prevent it from refusing to read a disk. I haven’t gone that route, but would definitely consider it if I was looking for a drive.

Porque la izquierda libera, la derecha oprime.

(We say “lefty loosey, righty tighty”, but a similar rhyming phrase in Spanish translates to “the left liberates, the right oppresses”)

Or ducks. For clarity.

Either way, just remember to support artists when you can. Bandcamp Friday is one of the best ways I know of to fund artists in exchange for FLACs that you can legally listen to however you want to.

But I was a broke student in the heydays of torrenting, so I’m not judging using any means necessary to listen to music.

Subscriptions for everything. Especially hardware.

I already hate my always-online, have to use their shit app robot vacuum that gets worse after each update. I can’t imagine buying a new, overpriced car these days and having it do all the same shit.