Star Wars, DC, Marvel, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Jurassic whatever, Ghostbusters, Indiana Jones, Godzilla, Halo, Gears of War, Batman: Arkham and every other nostalgia-driven cinematic/televised/videogame franchise relies on shitgobblers. Shitgobblers just keep gobbling.

The top comment on this thread contains a conversation (argument) about Chomsky’s view on the term “genocide,” as well as his verbiage discussing Serbian-run concentration camps.

I listened to Understanding Power fairly recently and it definitely changed my outlook and broke me out of the lull of neoliberal self-satisfaction, and helped introduce me to other leftist writers. So I’m a fan of Chomsky’s, but it doesn’t sound like he had that good of a take on the Bosnian genocide. He seems to only reserve the word genocide for the Holocaust so as to keep its significance, and despite supporting a UN fact-finding commission that did find Serbia was running concentration camps, he refers to said camps as “refugee camps,” instead, and seems to infer people had the freedom to stay or leave as they please (even if this was technically true, I doubt it was practically true).

So, not a good look for him, even though he had other viewpoints that I’ve been strongly influenced by.

Have you happened to read the book? He has a chapter dedicated to his decision to call it technofeudalism rather than capitalism, hypercapitalism, technocapitalism, etc. Basically he’s saying profits have been decoupled from a company’s value, and that it’s no longer about creating a product to exchange for profit (which, in his words, are beholden to market competition) but instead about extracting rent (which is not beholden to competition – his example is while a landowner’s neighbors increase the values of their properties, the landowner’s property value also increases).

Anyways he describes Amazon, Apple store, Google Play, cloud service providers, as fiefdoms that collect rent from actual producers of products (physical goods, but also applications), and don’t actually produce anything, themselves, besides access to customers, while also extracting value from users of their technologies through personal information. They’re effectively leasing consumer attention in the same way landowners leased their lands to workers.

It sounds pretty accurate to me, but I haven’t had much time to chew on it. What’s your take on that idea?

Actually, you’re not being clear, at all. The article you linked, yourself, notes that the 37 murdered political candidates were local government candidates murdered between September and May, not national candidates. Far cry from your insinuation that 37 of Claudia Sheinbaum’s political opponents were murdered so she could win by the hands of the cartels.

Sorry, buy-it-for-life

I kinda like the idea of a phone that is usually small, but I can make big by unfolding it if I want to. But I do agree that the fewer moving parts, the sturdier and more BIFL. It’s just that BIFL is not really attainable anyways in the current state of the phone market due to software support obsoletion.

I’d like to see a small eink phone or the tiny matchbook from Her.

“You are shredding the UN charter…with your own hands.”

As he shreds the UN charter…with his own hands.

I didn’t think about it as a dog whistle, but I’m sure it is. That is me being ignorant. I’m not trying to use it in that fashion. It’s not right he owned slaves. Once again, my main point is that he was not completely okay with slavery, as the original person I responded to was asserting.

You’re getting into his role in drafting laws, which I havent commented on because I simply don’t know, off the top of my head, what is attributed to him besides much of the original Constitution. I can only guess in regards to that, and I would guess that, being a white man, he considered and heavily favored the interests of other white men in the drafting of laws, and is responsible for much of the inequity we still see today.

By the way, Nike has been accused of utilizing forced labor in the past.

I mean, I never said it was okay he had slaves. It’s obviously monstrous. And yes, it was cowardly not to be public with his private opinions on the matter. My whole point is Jefferson was not completely okay with slavery, although evidently he was okay enough to own slaves (depending on your viewpoint, that make your opinion of him either better or worse), and that he didn’t fuck a bunch of his slaves.

Edit: And i suppose that contradicts my Nike comparison (hence why I emphasized “softly” there). Still, I’d say Jefferson was a product of his time and place, for the worse.

Edit2: actually no, it doesn’t really. My point was that a person can be uncomfortable with a thing (Nike’s labor practices) and still perpetuate it because of the just vast vast acceptance during the time

I didn’t say you stated them. The person above did – the person I originally responded to. When I say “If you’re going to invoke history…” I mean, “If a person is going to invoke history.” Maybe I should have been clearer there.

I personally don’t believe Boles sanitized Jefferson’s biography. Again, I think he did a good job of outlining his life without letting him off the hook. It’s cool you’ve been to Monticello, and that you know about Jefferson. But if a person is looking for a fair depiction of Jefferson, is that really the place to go? I mean, certainly slaves were the ones who built up that place. I’ve never been, so I can’t say for sure that they (the curators) don’t condemn Jefferson in the way that you’d like, so doesn’t that point kind of undermine your argument? Hey, I’ve never been, so I don’t know. I’d guess Monticello is just as likely or more to have sanitized Jefferson’s life than Boles’ book.

And sure, there were people that opposed slavery centuries before Jefferson. But I’d wager to guess they were in the minority (ie, not the prevailing notion) considering there was an entire industry revolving around the slave trade during Jefferson’s time, consisting of more than just two individuals.

Edit: Sorry, this doesnt really cover your entire comment because of your edits, but yeah I think the general jist is that we disagree about the level of Jefferson’s “alrightness” with slavery. I mean, yeah he’s totally a hypocrite, and you could argue it makes him worse that he acknowledge slavery was wrong, but still perpetuated it. I’m hesitant to do that, because of the time and place that he lived.

I’d very very VERY softly compare it to the fact that today, we know Nike has bad labor practices. Am I going to condemn everyone I know who wears a Nike product? Probably not.

I mean, it’s not defendable on any level, except that the prevailing notion of the time was that black people were inferior to whites. Obviously that doesn’t make it right, and by today’s standards Thomas Jefferson is a monster.

I’m not trying to defend Jefferson as being a good person, but expound upon the (what I consider) false assertion that Jefferson had no issue with slavery whatsoever (from his private letters, he held views against slavery) and that he fucked a bunch of his slaves. I agree with the point of the individual above that the US was built by white men for white men. But, as I said earlier, if you’re going to invoke history in your argument, it’s best to do it with some level of accuracy.

Since I recently read that John B Bole’s biography on Jefferson, I figured I’d chime in. The biography tries hard to put Jefferson in his time and place, establishes him as somewhat of a renaissance man (which, again, shouldn’t be praised much due to his privilege and use of slave labor on his projects), and also highlights out his hypocrisy and disappointing refusal to support anti-slavery movement publicly.

That is all true

I’m not really doing any mental gymnastics, nor am I sucking him off. I’m just pointing out that you weren’t historically accurate in your comment, despite the sentiment being correct. I also happen to think that history is interesting (despite most of it being about rich white men – lots of credit to People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn) and that its important not to always paint over it with a wide brush soaked with our own modern sense of ethics and politics.

Edit: Also, I’m literally a socialist. You could be less reductive.

Not that I don’t agree with the general sentiment, or want to condone slave-owning in any way, but Thomas Jefferson only had children with one of his slaves, and from the historical record it appears to have been a consensual romantic relationship, insofar as one can have one with such a vast power difference (you cannot, really). He did oppose slavery privately, however he owned slaves, himself. Although, again from the record, it appears that they were more a part of his household, and treated (relatively) well, rather than how we typically imagine slaves in the South. Again, still not right, but compared to his contemporaries, you would call Jefferson a good owner. Still fucked up to say. A further disappointing fact is that, despite the fact that he deemed slavery reprehensible, he also deemed it to be political suicide to try to change the status quo. He brought the issue up a few times during his very long political career, but quickly abandoned the efforts. Additionally troubling is that, like many other in opposition to slavery at the time, he thought the solution was to ship black people to an island in the Caribbean so that they could form their own nation. This was not an uncommon opinion during that era – I believe even Lincoln bought into this “solution,” at one point. Also fucked up, but somehow better than the at-the-time alternative of continuing slavery.

Anyways, I don’t mean to undermine your point that many of the individuals who established this country did so with the idea that black and brown people, women, and the lower-class, were less-than, and established it in such a way that made it difficult or impossible for them to participate. However, I think your specific examples aren’t super accurate, and since I just read a pretty fair biography of Jefferson recently called Jefferson: Architect of American Liberty by John B Boles, I figured I would chime in. Really interesting and very much puts a great (in terms of historical stature) and flawed (in terms of our modern sense of morals) man in the context of his time and place.

Ideologically Ubuntu makes me cringe, but I also use Google and a host of other technologies that fuck my privacy, so I guess I have accepted the world we live in.

In the same way that I think it’s noble when people try to live waste free, I think it’s noble to use things like GrapheneOS, or selfhost all your services, or de-Google your tech. But it’s unrealistic for all of the world to live waste-free or customize their tech so as to be private. In the end, the government needs to step in and force these giant-ass companies to behave better, because they are the primary forces pushing forward the destruction of the environment and personal privacy.

I dont really fuck around with the GUI stuff tbh…I’ve always just done ubuntu-drivers autoinstall

I guess my issues with the installer have mostly stemmed around the software raid and manual partitioning. Simply installing on a single drive isnt bad.

Hate saying it, but Ubuntu just works for me. I’d rather focus my computer configuration and maintenance efforts on clients rather than my own laptop. If I have to reinstall for whatever reason, its pretty easy because I’m already very familiar with the (shitty) installer, and I don’t do much customizing because I’d rather not have to go through that every time I reinstall.

Granted I’ve never even bothered to run Arch, or any really other desktop distro for that matter. Ubuntu + Gnome looks nice, seems to just work, all I need to do is apt install nvidia drivers and firefox post-install and I’m up and running. I don’t want to do work on my laptop, I want my laptop to enable me to do work.

But the person above said

While technically true for some but not all places, in reality it’s just not a practical thing anymore as it has been displaced by motorized transportation and social media being where 99% of the people are, respectively.

You’re allowed to try to make people notice a website with no social media presence in the same way as you’re allowed to run for congress as an independent with a budget of the necessary registration fees plus $5.

Aren’t they pretty much saying the exact thing that you’re claiming nobody is saying? That in practice it’s still easy to create your own website, but nobody will use it because 99% of people are on social media platforms, instead

I dunno maybe I’m missing something.

I agree with you and the original guy – the web is still just a collection of interconnected computers, and it’s still open and mostly inexpensive anyone to host a website on. The trouble for the individual is the maintenance cost, especially if their site sees high traffic. But that brings us back to the idea that you’ll pretty much never see the same userbase as the large social media platforms.

This isn’t to say that the power held by Google, Meta, Snapchat, or TikTok to direct information any which way they would like doesn’t need to be dismantled. It’s just that the web is still free, in the sense that it is just a road to another computer, and you can still prop up a house with an address on that road for relatively cheap.

US colleges after 10,000 Palestinian children are killed: “We need to stop antisemitism on campuses at all costs!”