At a certain point, a useful idiot still becomes an enemy combatant.
Perhaps, but since this is a war of manipulation, you always have to consider: are you fighting those responsible for turning us against each other, or are you fighting who they want you to fight?
I’m not saying to let the cops off the hook. That depends on the answer to the question. I’m speaking more generally here.
there’s a point where who’s responsible and who’s a victim doesn’t really matter to most people and survival against aggressors becomes more important than considering the philosophical/psychological implications
navigating through the complexity of the mind to determine who really “deserves” it is mostly just a lost cause, you get wacky results like concluding that the people in power are actually just victims of their own greed and human psychology, that the universe and therefore life is deterministic and no one is truly at fault for their actions, etc. etc. which could all be easily justified standpoints but are mostly irrelevant to our actual situations
Yeah, you’re right. We are all victims, the people in power too. And most of us involved in politics are aggressors, and are to blame for it. I try my best not to be, because I’m a disciple of love, and my real enemy is hatred, of which political hatred seems to be the most prevalent these days. I still push back against other forms of hatred when I run into them, to be clear.
It’s not a game of survival against aggressors, or at least not nearly as much as it seems to be. The propaganda tells you conservatives want to kill minorities, but most of them (discounting the leaders and the crazies) wouldn’t dream of it. A lot of them are conservatives mostly because the propaganda tells them that liberals want to kill babies.
The actual minority-haters do fall into the conservative bucket, yes, but that’s because it’s the closest bucket to their position. The leaders take advantage of it to boost their numbers, but I don’t think it’s exactly fair to blame the rest of them for it when there are only two buckets.
Most conservatives are people with souls and morals if you’ll get to know them. You don’t have to cave to their position, I’m just asking you to put aside your differences and try to understand them. If you try to understand one and learn that they’re a disciple of hatred trying to slowly drag the world back to the 1700s so they can own slaves, that’s a yike, but don’t paint the rest of them with that same brush until you’ve taken a fair sampling.
My local force recently bought a used armoured personnel carrier (APC) for $100,000 which didn’t go over well with the community. They posted a message explaining they were coming up on fiscal year end and had excess budget they wanted to use up so their budget wouldn’t be reduced next year. That didn’t really help.
It’s mostly used to park next to public events. Arts in the Park? Don’t worry! We got an APC here to protect you! Weekly farmers market? Don’t worry! The APC is here! Sometimes the emergency response team (our version of swat) will also put out a table with all their rifles and gear so they can look cool in front of any teenagers in attendance. It’s weird.
There are way better things to spend your money on so that your budget doesn’t shrink next year. Arguments of whether they need they money or not aside, that’s a real problem for them. Ideas off the top of my head that probably wouldn’t signal to the town that they’re under occupation:
• Ammo and range time • Conflict management training • Public relations block party • Solar panels on the roof • Diet, exercise, and lifestyle training • Law review classes
“we have to irresponsibly spend the remainder of our budget so it doesn’t get reduced next year” followed one month later by “we need more money because we maxed out the budget last year”
Fuck this atrocious cycle. It’s everywhere. Military, police, any other government branch, corporate politics, 501c orgs pretending to be charities… The greatest crime is stockpiling unsent capital, apparently.
Your town likely doesn’t need a tank, but the major metro area within range of that tank is gonna need to call upon it next time the cops decide to kneel on someone’s neck.
If you want to see what the world would look like without the GPL, just look at how the BSDs are getting shanked by Apple (and many other companies too, but they’re the biggest).
If it weren’t for him, I have no idea what Linux would be today. No doubt in my mind, RMS is #1 on my list of most important software developers to have ever lived.
He didn’t give up his fortune directly, because today he is a rich man. He just enriched with a different approach like opting to not lock the source code of his work like another guy we know well…
No, but they were very adamantly against the sharing of ms basic which was their big product (before dos), at a time when software sharing was fairly common.
For a guy like that, it was never about money. He knew that would come in comfortable enough amounts. For him, it was about being the smartest person in the room. And 90% of the time, he is. And he lets you know.
Perhaps I’m confused. I’ve never seen or heard Torvalds act in the manner you describe. In interviews, and talks, at least, I’ve seen him be quite self-deprecating, quite deferential, and quite humble. He just doesn’t put up with bullshit in the space he knows extremely well, and he’s very direct with little regard to being empathetic, or at least that’s how he’s acted in the past on the Linux mailing lists. Being matter-of-fact can often be misconstrued as acting superior, but I’ve found it’s usually a time-saving personality quirk.
Edit>> Clearly this guy is unable to understand what being matter of fact is and resorts to ad hominem when someone doesn’t share his opinion. Sad, really, but pretty normal for the internet, I suppose. Oh well.
Right, this happens with me all the time (though I suppose I don’t require the use of swear words, but I do use them quite a bit, just not when speaking professionally). People take my matter-of-fact personality as being arrogant. I’m really not, or I actually try not to be, but I can understand how things can come across when not mincing words. I suspect Torvalds doesn’t like making useless small talk, either, which is a trait of this kind of personality. I can wholly relate to that and how people might perceive him. But I do not feel, as the person I replied to had written, Torvalds “lets you know” that he’s “the smartest person in the room” in any instance I’ve ever seen him speak.
I get involved later on and say: ‘Christ this is horribly ugly code, how could you ever accept this?’
That's a direct example of him acting like the smartest man in the room, and letting you know, straight from the link that was provided. He's most likely right, but there are ways of stating that diplomatically. That's not matter-of-fact, that's just being arrogant. If you can't see that, and you also find that people consider you arrogant, maybe you should consider talking to a professional about that.
My case in point. That wasn't an ad hominem, that was genuine advice. You admitted yourself that people find you arrogant. If this is affecting your life, you should consider talking to someone about it. Especially since you just accused me of something, and then immediately did the exact thing you accused me of doing. This isn't a competition, this is genuine advice. Please consider it.
Not everything is an attack. You can interpret things however you want, but you're the only one that has to deal with the consequences. I wish you good luck...
He would’ve definitely made more even as a senior employee in early Microsoft, IBM or any of the big Corps. Linux exists solely because he made it a collaborative endeavour from the start.
Linux exists solely because he made it a collaborative endeavour from the start.
That is the important part. If Linux had tried to compete with Microsoft as a closed-source operating system, no one would have used it – who would use a tiny, buggy (back then), incomplete, closed-source operating system made by a few guys in their spare time against a very popular, feature-complete, close-source operating system with billions of dollars funding its engineering effort?
What makes Linux popular is that it is collectively owned, that is as much a feature of the operating system as any technology or algorithm written into the source code itself. That feature is what set it apart from Windows or Mac OS.
I don't think he ever expected fortunes, going off his famous usenet post. He just wanted a Unix-like OS that wasn't Minix and didn't cost exactly one space shuttle. One that he could fuck around and do anything he wanted with without regard for someone else's license and restrictions.
Everyone else wanting one too was a happy accident.
Exactly, the neoliberal capitalist religion causes collective brain damage. Especially at that time, since there was a frenzy of propaganda around Bill Gates and how he became the worlds richest man by selling software, in particular operating systems. So from that non-logic it follows that if you have a popular operating system you should become the worlds richest man, but if you just give it all away for free, then you gave away a fortune. It makes total sense in the completely warped, schizophrenic world view of the US neoliberal mainstream media.
To any three-letter agencies who might be reading this post, I was uploading Linux ISOs and scientific research papers. I would never dream of uploading copyrighted material…
I'm Detective John Madden with the NFL, you're under investigation.
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