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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 28th, 2023

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  • Depends what you use it for, there’s some great servers for a lot of things. I don’t really care about platforms and basically use them all. Certain people really hate Discord but the alternatives don’t have many interesting things on them, and the people who use them aren’t a very diverse group. Checking all the right FOSS and feature boxes is nice but it’s not what actually makes a platform good to use.





  • Hitler hated Christianity for its worship of meekness, weakness, a dead man, etc, but used it very well politically. Nazi leadership ranged from full on Christians to pagan weirdos. Jews were associated with Bolshevism, and their hard antibolshevim especially appealed to people who had emigrated to the Weimar Republic during the Russian revolution. Communism and unions were the first targets and how they wedged themselves in to power in the first place. Hitlers first major political victory was the concordat with the Roman Catholic church, promising freedom of religion. In the late 30s Catholic pulpits were ordered to recite a condemnation of Hitler for betraying the concordat. The Nazis implemented a Christian denomination and sent pastors and priests who didn’t comply (many did of course) to the camps. One of these was the famous poet who wrote the “first they came” poem, at first a Hitler supporter who recanted when it was too late, like many of them.

    They had all kinds of weird views about Aryans, a very fluid and subjective category in practice, and the history of Aryans. There were archeologists tasked with digging up the magnificent history of the Aryan race etc. Some people like Japanese were honorary Aryans etc. Down to weird specific traits of people based on the false premise of race being a real thing.


  • Well the one that keeps me needing a Windows machine for on… Ableton Live + VST plug-ins.

    Musicbrains Picard is also the best metadata autotag app I’ve used.

    “Reclaim Windows” type powershell scripts, feel like group policy and powershell are underutilized by average desktop users. A lot of the things people complain about with windows you can control with it. Primarily a debain user myself but I need Windows to run Ableton on custom hardware so it is what it is.



  • It’s nuts to me how there was a recent poll showing Biden taking a hit in swing states, presumably because of the wide and unprecedented public support for Palestinian freedom, and how the reaction among some liberals is turning in to, “Biden’s support for genocide is bad now because Trump could win again.” Criticizing the US supporting the genocide, through the spectacle of partisan politics, turns in to, “this is how you get another Trump victory.” Instead of vocalizing the disapproval, it’s like “don’t say anything because it could help Trump.”





  • I think Dubya hands down if we’re reducing to the presidency. To me Trump represents the absurd spectacle American politics has become, but the worst thing about Trump winning was that the Republicans were able to pass legislation. Trump as an individual wasn’t very successful as a politician once he was in power. Trump, Hillary, and Biden are so widely unpopular in general, and Trump barely losing to someone like Biden after one term really drives the point home how meaningless so much of these politics are right now apart from the spectacle they provide. Trump was the spectacle in a pure form, and when the mainstream liberal media was covering him as a frontrunner in early 2016 and reacting to every tweet, that was my first realization this presidency could potentially happen.

    Bush and the post-9/11 world I view as the sort of last doubling-down towards the political situation we live in today, and Obama represented the best we can hope for within this system. While Obama was insanely likable as a personality and speaker I never really supported the politics he stood for. Adolph Reed Jr. had the best take on Obama in 1996, now an infamous article since it was really validated post-Obama:

    “In Chicago, for instance, we’ve gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices; one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program — the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle-class reform in favoring form over substance. I suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future in U.S. black politics, as in Haiti and wherever else the International Monetary Fund has sway. So far the black activist response hasn’t been up to the challenge. We have to do better.”

    The decrepit political landscape today is a perfect fit for Trump but I don’t think he controls it, he’s just a mirror that reflects back on itself, it’s what goes on in his shadow that’s the real danger. I think progressives being so enraptured by Trump’s terribleness is another serious issue because of this. Just being “not Trump” has allowed the Democrats to be lax on anything that would upset their donor base. Biden was always a darling of the Israel lobby for instance (why Obama picked him as VP) and we’re seeing the effects of this right now. Bernie was a real mobilization and hope for the left and the attacks about him being soft on race etc from liberal progressives was basically an indication of where the Democrat party is. They want the “do-good” version of the same economic system the Republican’s want to hand to the barons, and there’s no political alternative to this system being offered, just the form it takes. Now there’s hope in the increasing labor actions and strikes, an encouraging trend as people are pushed further and further being offered nothing by mainstream politicians.