Nonviolence is a lofty, and unattainable ideal. Unless you can create something that prevents violence in an absolute, physical sense or can successfully breed out the sadistic elements of humanity it will forever be subject to the whims of charismatic violent people. World history, at least from the perspective of governing authority, is nothing but physical and psychological violence.

The Buddhists would tell you that life is duhkah (suffering). Trying to force any order onto only increases suffering. The french existentialists would tell them that the only thing you can do about it is to laugh in the face of the absurdity of existence. Then they’d go to a bar and the buddhists would watch the existentialists drink themselves to oblivion respectfully and with a detached interest.

Anarchism, nonviolence, and philosophy in general, rarely align with your subjective lived experience. The best way to deal with Nazis is not to punch them, but to live your life the best you can and try to have as much fun with other humans as is possible. If you engage with them on their terms, those of violence and hate, they’ve already won. Hug a nazi, especially if you’re part of a demographic they hate. Treat them like you would a slow child. Education, empathy, and kindness beat the nazi next door. Unfortunately though once they establish their fourth Reich like it seems they are close to, you have to wield collective hard power (tanks, predator drones, and boots on the ground).

You, the human reading this, will accomplish nothing by punching a nazi, hug them or ignore them until it’s time to fight them collectively.

I streamed it while I was working on other things but I thought it was pretty hilarious. Kamala seemed to be intentionally pushing Trumps buttons to derail him and he just could not accept that he is not universally loved.

Honestly though, given how Trump lies and Kamala was putting on a show the whole thing seemed so cynical and pointless. I’ve watched every presidential and vice presidential debate since Bush Jr.‘s second term even in the "good ol’ days" when it wasn’t just a sound bite circus very rarely was a president even able to achieve the lofty goals they pitched the American people on.

The whole thing is farcical in 2024. The lack of shared reality the Trump era has ushered in makes it next to impossible to trust anything a politician says. Kamala had spunk and moxy and was very down to earth and likeable, but policy wise she made a lot of statements the presidency doesn’t have the power to deliver on. Even with the insane power the supreme court gave the executive branch a few months ago.

Trump was Trump. It’s pretty clear how much his brain has rotted when you compare this debate with the one he had with Clinton. But otherwise you can’t trust a single word he says. His position on any matter is irrelevant because he’ll retcon it later if it’s inconvenient. Meanwhile Kamala vowed to continue helping our frenemies do some ethnic cleansing and spent most of the debate posturing for the idiots to stupid to already have an opinion.

News headlines won’t change national culture or policy. The pro-policing subset of America is large and has a lot of dark money supporting. Private prisons and the handful of companies that support them, weapons companies who have seen record profits because we militarized our police after 9/11, and fascist sympathizers and supports all want things like that to happen.

Unless you, me, and everyone else who cares about the issue called our representatives daily to demand action, nothing will change. Even if every single person who wanted police reform in the US called their federal and local representatives demanding change, there is still a good chance the pro-police-brutality club would still have more influence.

What would you have us do? Paxton isn’t going anywhere anytime soon and Texans do not have the power to recall officials. We can’t protest because in 2023 they passed a law making basically all protests illegal.

Even if Texas goes blue Abbott and Paxton are still in office because they’re not up for reelection this year. Plus the state is so gerrymandered, even if it did go blue nationally, locally the dems probably couldn’t retake the state government.

Hate to say it but even if Kamala wins any women or queer person in Texas who can leave, should.

I grew up in East Texas (and moved back two years ago). I promise you, most rural Texans will tell you the side Texas was on.

So the system successfully identified the kid as a threat, but was not able to prevent the shooting because the father bought the guy on behalf of the shooter.

How would you even prevent that? No way the 2a nuts would go for a temporary ban on firearm ownership (or at least new purchases) by family members. Besides something like that could be used maliciously very easily. You can’t take all the kids who post edgy shit online into custody, we just don’t have the budget and it’s probably not the right move anyway.

You could mandate therapy or some other mental health intervention, like a biweekly visit with the school’s counselor. But those nerds don’t need any qualifications so they might not be able to identify a credible threat or help talk a shooter out of their (likely unknown to the counsellor) plans.

There are a gajillion things we could try, if not for the blind ignorance of the 2a nuts.

Those of us ignorant enough to vote for Trump also vote for the Greg Abbott’s and Ron DeSantis’ of the country. It’s not a popular position these days but we, the little people, includes the poo-brained asshats voting for Trump and the fascist takeover of the American South. But they’re too stupid (or more accurately, willfully ignorant) to understand the scope of what voting for maga and maga-adjacent Republicans really means.

I guess through a kinder lens our maga neighbors don’t have the perspective required to understand the truth of the world they live in. Some might be wholly incapable, but most just don’t care enough to try. But the societal bubble the average maga voter lives it makes the ethos look pretty appealing. The rhetorical techniques used by maga media and personalities are like psyops level effective.

It would be irresponsible and incorrect to lay it all at the feet of voters or politicians of any political party. Every American is responsible for what’s going on in the country right now.

Software, 1,000%. I love linux and daily drive it. But when I have videos to edit, photos to rework, or collateral to design I have a windows laptop with professional grade tools to do the job.

I’m sorry, gimp is hot garbage. There isn’t a pro-grade, open source video editing tool or anything close. Inkscape is useable in a pinch. Scribus is useless.

Not everyone is a multimedia creative professional, but most software on linux never quite have the features you need, are no longer maintained, or will be useful in ten years.

That said, I’d still rather break out the laptop when doing client work than daily drive MacOS or Windows 11. Either way the barrier for most users is that linux almost works.

The theoretical benefits of Gentoo or Arch are completely negated by the fussy nature of those systems. You have more control, but to get it you have to do a lot more work. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, just that’s the main difference between arch, gentoo, and a more streamlined distro.

Really it depends on what you want out of your distro. If total control is what you’re after, then gentoo is only the beginning of a deep k hole that ends in LFS and a ricing habit. Personally I like using my computer as a tool to do other stuff so anything more hands on than debian stable just gets on my nerves or turns me into a ricing addict. But I had to install gentoo to figure that out.

Gentoo is a filter. You either love it and continue diving or learn you want something else from your OS.

Legible notes, especially those intended to be personal. I absolutely love buying used books and finding notes in them (either between the pages or written on them). Crumpled notes, shopping lists, discarded notebooks.

If I wasn’t poor, I would prefer those to the banality of money.

Trump made the remarks Thursday during a campaign stop at the New York Economic Club. “At the suggestion of Elon Musk, who has given me his complete and total endorsement…I will create a government efficiency commission tasked with conducting a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government,” Trump said. “Elon has agreed to head the task force,” Trump added while noting that the task force would be responsible for “making recommendations for drastic reforms” to the government.

Not sure I love the sound of “drastic reforms to the government”. But if we’re stupid enough to give gim the keys to 1600 Pennsylvania again, it’s what we deserve.

I wanted to be a filmmaker but was forced to choose a different path when my grandfather (who had set up a small college fund for me) refused to pay for school unless I chose something more practical. I caved and majored in journalism (my mom was a photojournalist before I was born) but was so heartbroken I dropped out in my first year. I tried a second time to go to school but I couldn’t stay engaged after learning the thing I had been working towards since middle school was no longer an option.

I ended up going to work in tech instead. In my late 20’s I thought I would figure out making short films on my own wrote a script, bought some gear, but when I looked at how bad I was at social media and how much I wanted someone to see my work, I thought the odds were against it.

A few years ago some unrelated mental health issues made it impossible for me to work and I am writing a script for an audio drama which is hopefully cheaper to produce and a zine about Utopia while I recover.

Bailing on my dream wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Most of my problems and regrets are related to the undiagnosed and untreated mental illness that destroyed my already struggling career a few years ago. Not making the elder millennial version of Point Break sucks, but maybe if the audio drama works I can parley that success into a streaming series (Archive 81 style).

I mean if you have monies you could get into spec miata racing. You’re in it for like $10k with car and track fees and stuff, but you don’t have to be a professional to compete and driving a gutted miata around a track is a lot of fun. Or go karts, though if you wanted to compete, the miata is cheaper.

Personally I’d recommend focusing your time and energy on the things you can control. As an individual, there is nothing you can do alone about it. If you feel strongly enough about it you could join or start an advocacy organization about the part of the problem you find most galling. But the truth is unless enough people both want change and are motivated to take action to get it the world will continue its decline unchecked.

Volunteer if you can, but try not to let it get to you. The impersonal brutality of our world sucks butts. Some horny french guy would tell you that life is absurd. If everyone agreed we shouldn’t burn fossil fuels, we wouldn’t. But we can’t ever all agree about anything. Most landlords aren’t malicious, they just don’t understand how their greed affects others and don’t care enough to try. The horny french guy’s drinking buddy and metamore would say you can only laugh at the absurdity of existing at all. If you look hard enough the entire universe seems in on how fucked we all. Do what you can, but find something else that makes it bother you less (like a hobby, not a meth habit). I like writing weird stuff and being the model maliciously compliant tenant.

You totally have a move with the landlord. Follow the rules of your lease chapter and verse. I bet there is a specific clause in there about you being responsible for any unreported maintenance issues. And there is also a clause saying something about the landlord’s responsibility to perform maintenance. There is usually some wiggle room, but there is probably like a two week window in which the landlord is required to fix any issues with their building.

Report everything. Get on a first name basis with the maintenance folks and whoever answers the phone for your landlord. I had a roach problem because my next door neighbor was a hoarder and left my landlord voicemails every night updating them on all the new locations I have found roaches and my efforts to eradicate them myself. Once the roaches were dealt with my landlord was very willing to overlook those maintenance fees because it’s cheaper than court.

Edit: and was probably grateful not to deal with that tenant.

On a technical level, no. You’re right. It would not be possible to capture the protocol entirely. But meta has serious cash to spend on marketing Threads. If they can capture enough of the ActivityPub market and were to collab with Bluesky and use their protocol (I forget the name), or make their own, it’s only a matter of time before the drop activitypub and force users either to join threads or lose access to their users.

Threads and Bluesky are kind of an existential threat to ActivityPub given Meta and Twitter’s track record with Open Graph, bootstrap, and public api’s.

Embrace, extend, extinguish.

100% yeah. I guess I mean that OP is already frustrated by noise in their news sources, rss doesn’t solve curation, which is what it sounds like people think rss does. But if every story you’re shown needs to be relevant to your interests rss isn’t going to fix that.

Even the perfect news outlet that OP describes is going to have tons of boring stuff. Social media tried solving it with algorithms and will probably move on to AI driven feeds in 18 months, but their profit motive spoils the effort.

Then again I’ve thought about curation vs. aggregation maybe a bit too much.

There are millions of blogs and news sources to browse off the beaten path. It really depends on how the site is built. A Wordpress enterprise solution has a default rss feed, but it can be turned off should the site choose. A medium or ghost based site has the same toggle. For a more bespoke solution it is extra dev time not all sites opt for anymore because so few people use rss these days.

Back in 2010 at the height of Google Reader’s popularity rss only accounted for 10% of traffic and depending on how the feed was configured it might consume 30% of the non-money-making bandwidth. There was a push to try to monetize rss, but it kinda backfired and the technology faded into (relative) obscurity for the average person.

There are tens of thousands of absolutely amazing blogs and news sources online today with no support for rss.

It’s all part of the extant stuff.

Megan is Missing (2011) is one of the most horrifying films I’ve ever seen. Fair warning though, the last ten minutes are excruciatingly painful to watch. It is not for the faint of heart.

In the gore porn genre Cannibal Holocaust (1980) and Hostel (2005) are vile, but so pointlessly gorey the actual horror (the brutality of men) is almost entirely lost.

Funny Games (1997), or the 2007 American remake for those who don’t love subtitles, is another unnerving portrayal of ultra violence. It’s not gore porn, but is graphic. The original version’s pacing will make you squirm in your seat.

Hush (2016) and Creep (2014) are two of my movie-night-with-friends films. Still very much about the human monster, but not overly graphic and prefers to build by making the viewer a partial participant. You have to be a certain level of broken to enjoy some of the others on my list, but these two are disney movies compared to Cannibal Holocaust.