misk

I just contributed to this. My gf bought her old work laptop for cheap (an employee perk) for simple survivors-like games. It should have been perfectly capable machine (i5-8350u, 16GB of RAM, fast NVMe drive) and it’s compatible with Windows 11 so I went with that. I’m a Mac guy these days and but use Windows at work so I’m only familiar with LTSC versions. I wasn’t ready for how much of a shitshow it is.

Couple of hours later I had debloated it and disabled Defender yet it was still running dog slow. The laptop had trouble with Thunderbolt 3 docking station, not recognising anything beyond connected displays. Intel graphics drivers were so unstable games kept crashing left and right.

I got tired of fighting it and installed vanilla Ubuntu (didn’t want to disable Secure Boot). I’m not a Linux newbie by any means but these days it’s home server stuff and the like. I stumbled on Bitlocker protection that I’m 100% sure is there to discourage people from switching. Microsoft set it up so that when you look at it funny you have to find unlock keys at your account page. Funny thing about that - when my gf was typing the address for that page in Safari with Google search on her phone the first autocompleting result was a scam page. I’m fairly sure Google does this to spite Microsoft. Fuck big tech but I digress.

After that it took an hour to install including figuring out that I had to add DisplayLink drivers for the dock myself. The process wasn’t great but I guess it’s a real niche case. Either way, this machine is now flying and Steam+Proton handle everything pretty well.

Last time I used Windows on desktop was around W8 and it wasn’t half that bad. Microsoft is doomed if they offer this kind of experience. I was critical of Proton before but I need to acknowledge that some working solution had to be created ASAP to get people off this dumpster fire.

This is not up to Harris or politicians to fix, they are not capable of getting people out of this. They will just let you down in new and innovative ways. You talk about the changes they are doing now but I was talking the changes that they’ll need to get reelected in the future - it will be grim and similar to what’s happening all over Europe. Centrist liberal parties are becoming indistinguishable from parties they lost power to (Labour in UK, Renaissance in France, Civic Platform in Poland). It will discourage even more people from participating in politics.

People need to get out in front before it happens to minimise the damage. This means more respect towards people we don’t agree with and that unfortunately includes less poo slinging at bigots. This also means less involvement in treating symptoms because it depletes our capacity for change („orphan-crushing machine”).

Yeah, that’s what I’m warning you about. This approach has been tried. Whatever happens, it was already decided because you’re not going to course correct at eleventh hour and root cause of general discontent is much deeper than you want to admit.

If you lose you’ll go into democratic resistance, fight every single thing Trump does. By second or third year regular people notice that not much is changing in their lives and then you lose all of your steam. When actual bad stuff happens nobody cares.

Then in a couple of terms people will get tired of the right, vote for the libs and then you realise that those Dems have adopted lots of stuff Republicans did because that was the only way to get back into power. And that it was always about power. I’ll be there to say „told you so”.

I’m trying to explain to Dem voters that their moral high ground and calling everyone a Nazi will lead Republican voters to entrench in views pushed by far right even if they didn’t hold them before. Dem voters are supposed to be the smart ones so they should understand that, right?

In what ways will it be worse / more Nazi than under Nixon? Healthcare? Infrastructure? Minority rights? Black rights? Waging wars and supporting genocide in some third world country? Sorry to break it to you but US was always a borderline fascist state and that includes Democrats.

That feet stomping and refusing to acknowledge reality is a symptom, not the root issue. People don’t feel like they have a real choice so as a response to this overwhelming world they start to treat it like a football match. You support your team no matter what, right?

It’s good that you recognise tribalism as a core issue although you need to acknowledge that you can be victim of that too. You’re trying to start from the top because that looks like it’s have biggest impact but the actual change needs to start at the bottom. This is something we can do but it’ll be much more work than waiting for someone to do that for us. I realise that all of us are so used to slacktivism by now that it sounds like an insurmountable task but there’s no other way. First step is to stop contributing to the problem so here I am trying to explain why current approach won’t work.

So, not much is changing then but you assumed history can only move forward. We’ve reached a point where this belief is pretty much a modern secular religion - nobody guaranteed it would be so. This religion even has prophets like Francis Fukuyama who I blame for popularising it.

It’s likely we will be set back again many times and there’s no guarantee that the end result will be satisfying. The best thing we can do for now is to figure out why those things happen in the first place without attributing blame. The future needs to include everyone, even the bigots. My guess most of the bigots wouldn’t be bigots if they had higher participation in profits that our societies generate. This is because politicians funnel those into the pockets of various oligarchs. Neither Republicans or Dems will fix that unfortunately.

Will US under Trump be more or less of a Nazi state than, for example, under Nixon?

Have you considered being out of touch then?

Most the ones i know that support him are higher class than me.

Statistically this is not a representative group.