agreed. if they stopped and realized that lesser evil is still evil, they would stop trying to defend it.

… Their backup tool is so good that as my old laptop started to die I was easily able to transfer my entire setup to a totally different computer and pick up exactly where I’d left off

you must have read my mind because this is exactly why i’m on the market for a new distro. lol

i put fedora on my laptop w the intention that it’ll be temporary so that i’ll have something i can trust right now and knowing full well that fedora iterates quickly. their migration tool has never worked for me and now i have to update again. i’m looking for something that has a longer term iteration like debian has, but shorter than debian.

the labels usually don’t matter much in the technology centric communities; what matters here is this part:

For me, data privacy is just about being practical and ethical. I hate it when big corps like Google use my data for things I can’t control, like military projects. It makes me angry, when they turn a tiny mosquito into a weapon. I see that happening with AI too. I’m against that.

i’ll be genuinely surprised if any of us here feel any differently – i definitely don’t – so you’re in good company here.

you’re conflating “refusing to play” with “choosing not to pull the lever.” choosing not to pull the lever still accepts the framing. it still says “these are the only tracks, this is the only lever, so my only choice is yes or no.”

actual refusal means rejecting the premise entirely. it means organizing outside the trolley and/or building a world where the trolley doesn’t run in the first place.

you say there’s no magical third choice. that’s exactly what people said to the abolitionists and the suffragettes and to everyone else who ever refused a rigged game, but built a new one anyway.

so no, refusing to play isn’t playing along. it’s the first real move anyone makes when they stop believing the lever is the only tool in existence.

now whose being deceitful? you completely skipped the 38 million figure. not a word. that’s not an accident or an oversight. that’s how this system wants you to see it. that’s the body count of your “pragmatism” – people killed by us sanctions, not genocides or ethnic cleansing like everyone else is talking about here. just policy, managed death and you call it “mitigating damage.”

you say refusing to vote does nothing. but what has voting done? the system you’re defending has killed atleast 38 million people outside american borders while saving dramatically fewer inside. that’s not a trade-off. that’s a slaughter you’ve learned to call realism.

you say “managing genocide is better than nothing.” but managing genocide IS genocide. slower, cleaner, easier to ignore like the democrats prefer it. you’re not pulling a lever to save people. you’re pulling a lever to feel like you tried while simultaneously legitmizing more tracks getting laid.

and here’s the biggest dodge: you say “when you have a strategy to actually make a difference, i’m all ears.” i don’t have a plan, but marxists have a plan and it’s been around for almost 2 centuries now. it’s called refusing to legitimize the system, building dual power, organizing outside the two-party death cult, and ultimately abolishing the conditions that make genocide a natural outcome. it’s fine to disagree with it, but don’t pretend the only choices are lever a or lever b.

you’ve already decided that anything outside voting for the lesser evil isn’t a strategy. that’s not pragmatism; it’s learned helplessness with a moral license.

also refusal to cooperate isn’t plugging your ears. refusal is the only leverage people have when the game is this rigged. you don’t delegitimize a system by playing along; you delegitimize it by withdrawing cooperation. that’s not childish; it’s literally how every actual movement for abolition in history started – by refusing to play.

so no, i don’t have a plan to stop the train tomorrow with a single vote. neither do you. the difference is i’m not pretending my lever-pulling is saving anyone while atleast 38 million lie dead at the feet of your “realism.” and at least leftists are actually building something instead of just managing the bleeding.

very much so; it gives us something practical and immediately implementable.

what do you like about it?

i ask because i need to switch distros and i’m looking for ideas besides the usual recommendations.

you’re proving my point here without realizing it.

the two tracks are an american framing. pull the lever or don’t. vote for the lesser evil or don’t. those are the only choices your system lets you consider.

but here’s what you’re missing: both tracks were laid by the same people fostering the genocide. the lever is a prop. “pulling it” doesn’t stop the train; it just makes you feel like you did something.

and here’s the part many won’t touch: the same system you’re defending as “pragmatic” has a body count outside your borders that dwarfs anything it saves inside them. a conservative estimate puts the number of people killed by us sanctions alone at 38 million over 50 years (and that’s ignoring the genocides and ethnic cleansings). that’s not a rounding error. that’s more people than the population of canada. that’s the cost of your “realism.”

furthermore, consider the numbers most americans care about: how many americans has the system saved by being “pragmatic” inside the voting booth? because 38 million dead outside vs. dramatically less inside – that’s not a trade-off; that’s a slaughter masked as strategy.

western teleologists have self groomed themselves into thinking pragmatism means picking between two options handed down by the ruling class. anything outside that frame gets called “virtue signaling” or “immature” because it threatens the real game: managing genocide, not ending it.

deontology isn’t about clean hands. it’s about refusal to legitimize a system where genocide is a natural outcome. and that refusal isn’t inaction – it’s the foundation of any actual alternative. you can’t build a track that doesn’t lead to a better destination if you keep praising people for getting good at pulling the lever.

also the person who refuse isn’t plugging their ears; they’re saying the whole track-switching game is rigged so they’re not going to cooperate. that’s not self-centered. that’s the only sane response to a system that made you believe the two tracks is the only world that exists.

in the interest of reciprocity from someone who was once “terminally online”: educate yourself on the tribalism of the lemmyverse:

lemmy was created by leftists who had a strong interest on gnu/foss technologies; but the recent reddit user purges has swelled the number of lemmy users. the new users are almost entirely liberal and the trolls among them have turned this instance into a hotbed of political tribalism enough that many leftists have chosen to re-home their memberships to hexbear.net or lemmygrad.ml instances. likewise, the most ardent liberals have created piefed to avoid exposure to leftist political theory.

the people of this and most of the gnu/foss communities on this instance seem to do their best to stay politically neutral, as the lemmy developers try to do as well.

i’m somehow disappointed that i didn’t make the list. lol

Dwayne Johnson is good at playing Dwayne Johnson™.

his comedic chops seems really good in the movie named “the rundown”

i’m convinced that it’s because people considered it in theory only; disconnected from the real human preventable tragedy that it is.

now social media is making it difficult to ignore the impact of this human tragedy and it’s forcing people to add their humanity to that theoretical consideration.

i’m also convinced that the age/id verification systems that all western gov’ts are currently implementing are geared towards returning us to a state of giving greater emphasis on theory rather than humanity.

it really gives me hope for the future every time i see people make this kind of effort!

The opinion makes sense to deontologists, but to the teleologists of the world it rightfully seems insane.

from a deontologist’s view, refusing to play along with a system that enables genocide is the only moral move. you don’t need it to be effective. you need to not be complicit. that’s the intention and goal that you seem to be miss understanding.

teleologists call that insane because they only care about outcomes. but that’s exactly the problem – their framework treats genocide as just another variable to optimize around instead of the human & ethical tragedy it is in irl and it’s not a bug; it’s the system working as designed.

so when people choose not to operate inside the american system’s confines – where genocide is a natural outcome – they aren’t being naive. they’re rejecting that system entirely. they’re acting like deontologists in a world that only rewards teleologists. that’s not a misunderstanding. that’s a refusal.

it’s a refusal and the only sane response to a system that has genocide and ethnic-cleansing baked into its logic.

i use cigarettes and mate to give me a buzz based energy boost when desired, but for you they do the opposite; the human body can be so strange sometimes. lol

biases manifest in really strange and unexpected ways and you’ll fail even when you try to intentionally account for them; that’s why things like facial recognition success rate correlates to the darkness of your skin or why successful ai recognition of text/speech is related how different your language is to english or mandarin.

the only way to successfully gaurd against bias in software development is to have developer teams comprised of people can naturally keep each other’s biases in check.

i’ve started getting into mate by accident recently because they were out of cold brewed coffee; something about it is dramatically more effective at making me productive and the thought of coupling it with a cigarette nicotine buzz feels like overkill to me.

but now that i know that’s a thing, i’ll probably end up doing it. lol

nvidia support has definately gotten better and the first part of my comment was snark; it’s ignorable… like most of what i say. lol

tiktok is especially interesting when you use it on a laptop compared to a phone; a lot of the features like reposting videos and following people don’t always work so i have to implement work arounds to do both and it sometimes feels like going back to 1995 since my workarounds involve text messages. lol

we joke here; but that’s literally what the hasbara narrative seems to be on reddit like platforms.

comments deriding liberals for not voting for kamala harris are followed up by snarky comments denigrating people for showing concerns about the genocide and ethnic cleansing.