Notices by FoolishOwl (foolishowl@social.coop)

My understanding is that the classic definition of a political party is an organized social force attempting to take state power in order to use the state to suppress opposing forces.

My theory for some time has been that in the US, the Republican and Democratic Parties converged into a single party after the US Civil War. I think this is a general pattern in liberal states; what are now called parties show the vestigial features of their historic origins but have fundamentally changed.

Historically, political parties represented social forces, e.g. the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, and later different factions of the bourgeoisie, that were unable to overcome each other in civil war and were instead trying to overcome each other by means short of war.

A party that was completely locked out of state party would either resort to civil war or be destroyed. This is one way to describe the US Civil War.

The fact that the Republican Party was a wreck after the political debacle of the second invasion of Iraq, and the Democratic Party went out of its way to allow it to rebuild, shows how little the modern electoral parties fit the classic model of parties. This is reinforced by the Democratic Party's forbearance following the Trump coup attempt in 2020, and the feeble efforts to constrain the Republicans since they have moved to fascism.

@enby_of_the_apocalypse @hakan_geijer I've thought we need cavalry tactics. But I've not been near the front in quite a long time.

"There’s little use in simply pointing to the law, even the Constitution, to oppose these authoritarians. Republicans are well versed in forging new legal realities through force and violence."
--
If Trump Can Deport Mahmoud Khalil, Freedom of Speech Is Dead
https://theintercept.com/2025/03/10/mahmoud-khalil-palestine-columbia-immigration-deport/

@silverwizard @considermycat With BSG, the overall plot was both incoherent, and arbitrarily overrode the characters' intentions. I kept waiting for revelations of who was behind the arbitrary disasters, and no one was. They just kept throwing in disasters with the implication that someone was behind them, but no one was.

There was also some frustrating things where the showrunners, in interviews, drew equivalences that didn't seem equivalent at all.

@considermycat Yeah, that was really hard to believe.

Overall, I found that series exasperating. They didn't just imply a planned overall narrative arc; the intro directly refers to it. Yet there wasn't one, and the showrunners eventually admitted they were winging it with no direction. They dropped hints about the supposed narrative arc and literally *forgot* until fans asked about them.

Would it be a good idea to initialize a git repository in a directory for config files when deploying a new service?

I'm working on learning more about git, and this struck me as a possible application, but I can't remember anyone suggesting it specifically.

@hellomiakoda The fact that it's a DUNGEON LASER is of course nothing to worry about.

I used the desktop version of Signal for a video chat. It worked quite well.

Someone on here pointed out that adults lament the loss of the creativity of our childhood, but we lost it because we're tired and stressed out all the time.

I could contribute more to the world GMing TTRPGS, or learning to write poetry, or any of a long list of silly projects, rather than sitting at work logging in and out of things and watching progress bars and copying serial numbers into spreadsheets and generally not being able to concentrate on anything for more than a few minutes.

Wait, the armor actually protected one of the soldiers from a glancing blow!

Unprecedented!

#Monsterdon #MastersOfTheUniverse1987

How the fuck does Amazon know my height and weight?

@dalias @redsad @lilithsaintcrow It's been years since I looked at it, but when I rejected it, it wasn't so much tankies, as class reductionist social democrats.

@revoluciana @elexia I've been going back and forth on municipalism, and it strikes me that a lot of what Trump is doing is withdrawing federal support for anything reasonable, and leaving a gap that state and municipal governments could fill. Meanwhile Trump is antagonizing those governments.

The ICE raids, in particular, are causing alarm with municipal governments. That seems to be a place where we could push back: more democratic and independent municipalities.

@hellomiakoda @Em0nM4stodon As I understand, Kiwix is an offline viewer. The download page includes torrent links, and I don't think that can be dynamically updated; we're downloading a snapshot at a specific time.

I'm curious how often there's a new snapshot.

Arguing for eugenics is unforgivable.

@hellomiakoda When I've heard interviews with Trump supporters, the ones who aren't overt fascists, they seem to have expected policies from him that would have the exact opposite effect of what could be expected.

@silverwizard It doesn't seem like the ISP is blocking Tor in general; I think it's the firewall on my router blocking incoming connections. I've tried to switch exit nodes but it doesn't seem to help.

@silverwizard https://forum.torproject.org/t/re-tor-relays-comcast-blocks-all-traffic-with-tor-relays/8008

Turning off "advanced security" allowed me access.