I don’t think NATO is in any danger. Trump has a very aggressive and bombastic style of negotiation. You saw this with NAFTA. Trump called it the worst agreement in the history of the world. But the USMCA is just NAFTA with a new acronym and now it’s apparently the BEST trade agreement in the history if the world. Its the same with Trump and NATO. The Europeans are the worst freeloaders in the history of the universe…until they up their defense spending by half a percentage point to appease the Donald, and then NATO will be the best alliance ever. Typical bombastic bullshit.

Two things:

1. I have an old refurbished Thinkpad that I originally bought as a backup navigation computer for a month-long sailboat voyage. It had Windows originally and was “fine”, by which I mean slow but acceptable for navigation purposes. When I was forced to update to Windows 10, the performance was no longer tolerable, so I hardly used it for about four years. I also had a Windows gaming PC, so no big deal.
2. About a year ago, I got a shiny new Windows gaming PC. I was trying to decide what to do with my old gaming PC, which had the same problem as my laptop: it could barely crawl under the weight of years of Windows OS “upgrades”. I got it into my head that I should build a media PC with it since Netflix kind of sucks now. That lead me down the self-hosting and Linux rabbit hole.

Before I knew it, I had my old gaming PC running Proxmox and attached to my main television, I bought an old Dell Poweredge server (also running Proxmox), an old Compellant storage shelf with 20 SAS drives, a Tripp-Lite UPS, and a 24-port network switch. I also discovered Docker. So, now I fucking love Linux and I’m a fiend for self-hosting and media streaming. And how do I centrally control all of this infrastructure? That’s right, my old Thinkpad got a new lease on life running Arch and I can run all of my server infrastructure using the terminal, emacs, and web interfaces. Fuck yeah.

And what happened to my beautiful, expensive new Alienware Windows gaming PC? After playing a couple hundred hours of Cyberpunk, it just sits there. Now I’m addicted to Dwarf Fortress on my old Arch Thinkpad and I don’t think about high-spec AAA games much.

I had no idea this would happen when I started this Linux journey. Life is strange.

I still have a Windows 10 or 11 PC that I only use for gaming so I don’t really “use” Windows anymore. I basically use that computer like a really kick-ass game console. Which is why I neither know nor care what version of Windows is on that PC. All my other computers run Linux now.

I had played around with Linux back in the day, but it never stuck. It was the “upgrade” from Windows 7 to 10 that pushed me to commit to Linux permanently. Now my daily driver is EndeavourOS on the laptop and Proxmox on my servers.

What was so bad going from Win7 to Win10? Win10 is painfully slow and shockingly bloated on older hardware, and doesn’t provide any new benefits that I care about. I would have had to replace my laptop for no good reason to stay with Win10. Anyway, once I installed Linux and KDE, I saw how awesome the Linux desktop experience has become and that was that. I will never go back to Windows now, even when I get a new laptop. Windows just isn’t a good operating system anymore while Linux has improved tremendously in terms of user experience.

To be fair, one person’s “politics” is another person’s life. When you say “politics” in the sense and context we have here, what does it really mean? It probably means something like “controversial topics related to gender, race, or sexual preference”. When you think of it that way, it is easy to see that excluding discussion of these topics could be seen as excluding or devaluing people with non-mainstream characteristics. An example of that would be the “Don’t Say Gay” law in Florida, or the US military’s “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy whereby they would allow homosexuals in the military as long as they kept quiet about it.

However, those conversations can be delicate and fraught, so I can see why many people want to keep them to a minimum in certain communities. I have a lot of sympathy for mods that have to moderate such conversations. In general, though, I don’t think it makes sense to remove comments or people unless they are clearly malicious. There are plenty of people for whom topics related to identity are alien or controversial or too painful and personal. Simply calling people “sealions” or “concern trolls” or “transphobic” or whatever and removing them from the conversation is not only wrong, but counter-productive, in my humble opinion. I think the vast majority of people come to conversations with good intentions, but different levels of knowledge, conflict tolerance, and interest in perceived off-topic digressions.

That’s a thought-provoking article you linked. Thanks. Unfortunately, ideological purity testing is a major problem across all sectors and spans the political spectrum. I was particularly struck by the part of the article that discussed whether “marginalized” status should be considered permanent or temporary.

I’ve worked in social services for a long time. Social activism is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, marginalized groups need activists to push their agenda. On the other, activists often adopt that social activism as their primary identity and sometimes even their career. This sets up an incentive structure whereby they don’t actually want to solve the problem of marginalization. Instead, they focus on ideological purity rather than pragmatically solving whatever problems they face.

Sexual orientation, indigenous rights, trans rights, disability rights, race, gender, even recreational drug use, are all marginalization issues that have all received a reasonable degree of social acknowledgement and formal protection.

In all the years I’ve worked in social services, the one issue that never goes away and is never solved or even seriously tackled is the intersection of poverty and mental illness. We are getting better as a society with treatable mental illness like depression and anxiety. However, major mental illness or untreatable/undiagnosed conditions like lack of impulse control that make it hard or impossible to work lead almost inexorably to poverty, addiction, and involvement with the criminal justice system. The activism on that front is itself marginalized because the “fix” isn’t a matter of changing language or mind set, but rather a massive investment of resources. It is easier to sit behind a keyboard and advocate online for nebulous issues like representation than to get out there and make people care about issues that cost real money.

As someone who works with seriously impoverished and mentally ill people, I find the sometimes extreme drama associated with identity politics, representation, pronouns, etc. rather ridiculous. A lot of it is just people trying to externalize their personal issues and force others to acknowledge them, which is unfortunate when it poisons a project or community. It is a form of narcissism, essentially. People who do that should go down to the tent cities, homeless shelters, and jails to get some perspective on just how “marginalized” they actually are and whether publicly exorcising their personal demons is worth destroying the enjoyment of others in a project or community. Their energy could almost certainly be better spent in less narcissistic pursuits.

Yup. I had no problem with snaps or Ubuntu until I saw that underhanded bullshit.

You are incredibly naive. Total war between industrialized nations, as happened in WW2, is won or lost on industrial capacity. States literally need to cripple their enemy’s ability and will to wage war, which means destroying industrial production, food production, access to safe water, and civil infrastructure. And that is why there should never be another great power war.

As for the USA’s use of nuclear weapons in Japan, they weren’t used to “win” the war. As you say, the Japanese were effectively beaten. Nukes were used to force an immediate surrender, saving millions of both American and Japanese lives.

In fact, you are describing what most of the IDF operation has been. The most dramatic video makes the news. But look at the numbers instead of the emotional propaganda.

2.3 million people in Gaza. Almost 5 months of modern war in one of the mostly densely packed places on earth. 32,500 Palestinian deaths, including Hamas militants since the Hamas government doesn’t count civilians and militants separately. That is 1.4% of the population. It is obvious that the IDF isn’t just mowing down civilians or bombing them indiscrimately. All deaths are bad, yes, but 1.4% deaths is hardly a program of indiscrimate civilian annihilation. Should it be fewer? Sure, I’ll give you that. But do you have the expertise to judge whether 1.4% mortality is good or bad, given the mission to root out Hamas? What should it be, realistically? How the hell would a couple of keyboard warriors like us know? Most people are just reacting to the tragedy, not really thinking about the logistics of carrying out the IDF mission. And make no mistake: murderous groups like Hamas, ISIS, Hezbollah, the Taliban, the Houthis, and Iran are a menace to be destroyed. They are the enemy of civilization and have vowed to eradicate Israel and the Jews from the river to the sea. If the militants hide among the population, it will always cost civilian casualties to root them out. There could be fewer with even more restraint from the military, but collateral damage will never be zero as long as militants use human shields.

I guess the civilians could out the militants themselves, no? Then the IDF could take out the militants with fewer civilian casualties.

It’s easy to criticize from your armchair, but what is your solution to the ancient problem of militants who commit heinous acts and then hide among the civilian population? If you don’t have a realistic alternative, then complaining about civilian casualties is just virtue signaling. Lots of people on here have obviously never had to make a hard call to accomplish a mission. The IDF is using conventional military and siege tactics, while Hamas is using human shields and terrorist tactics. Civilians lose either way. That’s war. At the end of the day, however, I would rather see Israel win, not Hamas.

Also, when people say “but what about the children”, it sounds just as disingenuous as when conservatives say it. You should remember that Hamas and their ilk are not your friends, nor are they liberal or progressive or Marxist. They are brainwashed religious zealots who would happily torture and kill you if they could.

You really went there? Ouch. Get help.

Nope. As I said in my other comment, cutting off aid to Gaza in order to starve out the militants hiding in the civilian population is a military operation that is at least plausibly justifiable. And I acknowledge the argument that Israel has taken it too far.

But what is your justification for raping people? What sort of military operation is that, exactly?

My point is that bombing a building that you believe contains soldiers sometimes also causes civilian deaths. We can debate whether sufficient care was taken, but the justification is that the army believes that enemy soldiers were present. Same with cutting off aid shipments. We can debate whether Israel has gone too far in restricting humanitarian aid, but the justification is that Israel doesn’t want supplies diverted for use by Hamas. What exactly is the justification for raping people?

That’s bullshit. There are many news articles literally every single day about the civilians killed in Gaza. Meanwhile, on Lemmy, you have people still denying that Hamas sexually tortured women captured on October 7. Sorry it doesn’t fit your narrative.

In my opinion, there is a huge difference between civilian collateral damage during a military operation and the use of rape as a weapon of war. We xan argue about how much force Israel is using and whether X amount of collateral damage is acceptable. But gratuitously raping people has no legitimate purpose, military or otherwise. It serves to sow terror and incite retaliation, which is why Hamas did it.

No.

alias shortname ‘flatpak run longname’

I’m not the one that made the strange claim and I’m not your history professor. But if I was, I think you’d be struggling on the midterm right now.

WTF? Dude, time to go back to school and take some history courses. You literally made me laugh out loud.

Sorry, I don’t understand what you are trying to say. How are Israel, Canada and America different from Britain and China? And how do the Irish fit into it?

they’re only a nation because that isn’t their land other people lived there first.

That is true of every nation. Literally everyone lives on land that was occupied by some other tribe in the past. The really ironic thing about saying that the Palestinians were there “first” is that the UN used precisely that originalist doctrine to justify creating Israel for the Jews in the first place!

It’s probably true that Netanyahu funded Hamas for cynical reasons. The Israeli right-wing coalition definitely needs to go. But you can’t justify Hamas terrorism againsr civilians because the Palestinian people are angry and oppressed. Hamas has agency. They aren’t some inexorable force of history. They choose to be terrorists. Hamas was already a radical terrorist organization in its own right, and was duly elected by the people of Gaza as such. Fuck those raping terrorists.

All this back-and-forth revenge is, of course, just a vicious cycle and shouldn’t continue. But I am a little tired of this faulty reasoning that Israel is the bad guy just because they are more powerful. Palestinians and Israelis have both done things to provoke violence and both sides have, at various times, rejected peace and compromise. But Hamas is unambiguously a terrorist group that stokes division and whose sole purpose is to eliminate Israel. Hamas is a barrier to peace and will get no sympathy from me.