Why would they do that? When I started learning VIM more than 20 years ago, one of the main reason was that it (or vi) was already present and installed in every possible Linux system.
> This Orwellian preoccupation with the minutiae of 'historical proof' is
typical of the political sectarian who is always quoting what has been said
and done in the past to prove a point to someone on the other side who is
always quoting something to the opposite effect that has been said and done. As any politician knows, no evidence of any kind is ever required. It is
only necessary to make a statement - any statement - forcefully enough to
have an audience believe it. No one will check the lie against the facts,
and, if they do, they will disbelieve the facts.
Dictators are absolutely terrified of the paper trail. This is the entire reason for existence of the Great Firewall. The CCP invests heavily in sanitizing imported literature and curating the information supply to maintain cognitive capture over the populace.
We are seeing parallel mechanics from the Trump/GOP camp: look at the library purges in conservative states and the push to co-opt moderation on platforms like TikTok. Access to the historical record isn't just a detail; it is the fundamental substrate of free speech.
You sure aggressive propaganda and espionage from the west aren't part of the reason for it? What sort of "cognitive capture" is necessary to maintain control of their population right now? The Chinese are often painted as brainwashed ideological drones in the west, and it says more about us that we tend to believe it than it does about them. You can download RedNote and talk to people in Xinjiang. You can travel there and talk to people in person. Mao is arguably deceased.
Yeah, I guess you're right. I play devil's advocate frequently enough that I forget I'm doing it. I just hate to see a dogpile, because the criticisms tend to go to extremes. People talk about a lot of asian cultures like they're brainwashed bugmen and those narratives serve dangerous interests.
The West is losing its edge on free speech and thought anyway. Criticize Israel in Germany, misgender someone in Canada, say a mean word to someone invading your house in the UK, and see what happens. And it's not going to get better anytime soon.
Exactly. Interesting that both orwell and azimov were wrong in different ways. Also azimov seems unaware of the Fabian link to the title which is surely a factor in the origin.
But Trump and his administration also prove what GP is saying. Few care about the truth.
Trump states obvious lies so blatant ("prices will go down 200%") that anyone who cares could tell they are untruth without needing to look up any paper trail, but it does not matter.
Mike Johnson just quoted St Paul as saying you should respect the authority forgetting that the Romans beheaded him. And it's not like the Bible isn't available widely.
That’s the interesting bit; Winston’s job turns out to be largely redundant. You don’t need to hide the evidence that the chocolate ration used to be higher; if a sufficiently charismatic person with sufficiently stupid hair says that it has increased, a lot of people will believe that.
People is kept away from details by shortening their attention span with the production of continuous pervasive stimuli. Regarding Trump, when he does something apparently stupid (on behalf of the rich people pulling his strings, let's never forget this) he's just forcing the media and people consuming them to start talking about the next event without further exploring more important ones.
put another way, they don't care about history because every economic actor in the economy is trying to keep them distracted -- so that they don't learn the history
the goal is to keep keep em poor, distracted, and angry
Relevant because it's universal human nature, to only have domain over a narrow context in life, and assert what's good/bad based on that limited view with others who occupy a different one. We use justifications which make sense to us that others rightly disagree with. It's not left politics, it's not right politics, it's not just politics, it's everything. Anyone who asserts they are beyond it are full of it.
Orwell and Asimov are talking about something entirely different than drawing flawed conclusions due to inexperience—they’re talking about people with access to the facts and choosing not to believe them.
For instance, Alex Pretti’s murder was recorded from several angles and yet the American right still broadly claims that he attacked the agents, that he pulled his gun on them, etc. You don’t need to be an expert in policing or anything else to watch those videos and see that those narratives are plainly false. That’s of course only one example, but there are many others.
These Minessota videos are classic examples of what Scott Adams used to call "two different movies being played on the same screen", in this case quite literally. From the point of view of a left leaning person, that movie shows a man being assassinated for no reason at all, nothing justify what happened. From the point of view of a right leaning person, Alex Pretti was actively interfering with law enforcement, and he entered a conflict situation while carrying a gun. If a cop is in the act of fighting you, and see a gun, you carry the risk of being shot, it's just reality. The right leaning person, just based on these facts, already reduces the charges from murder to manslaughter, max. Two movies on one screen, and there's NOTHING rational that can be said to change the mind of anyone. Everybody is watching the same damn screen, but the movies are completely different.
These so called right leaning people were, in the recent past, crying themselves hoarse that they have all the right and moral prerogative to carry arms at a protest.
Having the right to do something does not make it safe.
Americans have the right to carry a pistol. But carrying a pistol while heckling police officers and touching a police officer who is performing their duty, sounds deadly to me.
Can we agree that the deceased had a right to carry a pistol? Can we agree that the deceased had been heckling police officers? Can we agree that the deceased had touched a police officer?
Nothing he did warranted death. But he did choose to put himself in an extremely dangerous position, moreso by touching a police officer than by carrying a pistol. But in any case don't carry a pistol when you are out looking for confrontation, especially with police. Even if you're right, you're still dead.
A 'right' in this context by definition means government (agencied) will not persecute you for the activity protected by this right. If that's not the case you don't have the right at all, period.
Note though, I do not agree with this particular right (that of bearing arms, visibly so, at a protest), but the so called right leaning people are very enamored by this one and were very vocal about it just yesterday. Suddenly those same people seem to be equivocating about it now.
The people who were supportive of bringing assault rifles to contentious public rallies are now falling over themselves to blame Alex Pretti.
Touching a 'police officer' had nothing to do with the killing. Had he touched his own behind the same thing could have transpired. What killed him is the political support for ICE to be beyond accountability and the license for violence.
In this atmosphere anyone killed by ICE is automatically a homegrown terrorist, if by nothing else, by presidential fiat.
In this specific case, considering the video evidence, I agree with you 100%. There was no valid no justifiable reason to murder that man.
I still think, in general, when going out looking for confrontation (whether that be against the police or even just a bar fight) that the firearms should be left at home.
> I still think, in general, when going out looking for confrontation (whether that be against the police or even just a bar fight) that the firearms should be left at home.
How do you exercise your 2A rights without your firearms? If you leave them at home, then you aren’t exercising the right, and if you show up in public with a firearm staying out of the way of law enforcement with your hands visible the entire time, then you are exercising those rights i.e. “looking for confrontation”.
In general, I think it’s nonsensical that people can exercise their rights but not in a way that a tyrannical regime might persecute them for—by definition, that’s not exercising rights it’s yielding them to the government.
Yes, this is the entire point: the left is saying "the government shouldn't murder citizens for exercising their legal rights", and the right is saying "if you exercise your legal rights, it's your fault if the government murders you" (or at least "that's the risk you run").
If American patriotism has anything at all to do with valuing freedom from tyranny and oppression, then the right-wing mindset ("you might have the 'legal right' to film an officer, but the state might murder you for it") seems aggressively un-American. Specifically, if you have "the right to do X but the government might murder you for doing X" then you don't really have the right to do X by definition.
For what it's worth, I don't even see this specific incident as government persecution. It looks like plain murder. Murder by a government employee, but murder nonetheless.
We seem to agree that it’s dangerous to assert your rights to a tyrannical regime, and that in this case the regime murdered the person peacefully asserting his rights.
I think we are disagreed about whether someone can safely assert their rights before a tyrannical regime. If you could do it safely, the regime wouldn’t be tyrannical. If you “assert your rights” but only in a way that is safe from reprisal by a tyrannical regime, then you aren’t asserting your rights, you are letting the government infringe on your rights.
You seem to be using the terms "left leaning person" and "right leaning person" when you actually mean "normal people" and "sociopaths." Left and right have nothing to do with it.
List the rational arguments in favor of the so-called "right-leaning" point of view (OP's term, not mine) with respect to the Pretti killing. Spoiler: there are no such arguments, effective or otherwise. To apologists it looks like a Rorschach test; to normal people it looks like a snuff film, brought to us by the same studio that is now distributing child pornography.
Meanwhile, it's possible to favor free enterprise, (genuinely) smaller government, low taxes, free trade, and other so-called "right-leaning" perspectives without joining a slack-jawed personality cult that demands that you deny the evidence of your own eyes.
In my country, lifting a finger against an officer on duty will land you in big trouble. If you got a gun on you and you resist arrest, like happened in this case, you are absolutely getting shot. I can’t really understand you Americans. What do you think an armed person reacting to arrest is going to do with that gun given the chance? If you were a cop would you take chances?? If you did you wouldn’t be here complaining about anything as you would be dead.
1. In the United States, we have Constitutional rights, including the right to carry a gun with proper permits. Like other rights, the state can't murder you for having a gun on your person, but if they have a credible reason to think that you are an immediate threat, they can shoot you. The legal standard for "immediate threat" does not cover this scenario because (1) Pretti wasn't resisting (2) the police stripped him of his gun before they executed him and (3) the agents approached Pretti for no reason at all; Pretti was clearly peacefully recording with his hands clearly visible.
> If you were a cop would you take chances
I wouldn't be a cop if I was afraid that every person with a cell phone might shoot me with a gun, or if I was afraid that every soccer mom in a car might try to run me over. And while American policing is riddled with accountability problems, it's important to emphasize that the crushing majority of American police can manage much riskier circumstances without murdering anyone--it seems to be exclusively the agencies under the Department of Homeland Security that behave like secret police on a regular basis.
Reflexes. When you're attacked without provocation by several people, you put out your hands involuntarily to fend them off. When you are knocked down, you involuntarily try to get back up. On icy ground you are also trying to maintain your balance.
You are demanding that the victim maintain a clear head under stressful conditions, while holding his attackers to no such standard. But you knew that.
If the "different values" are whether or not the state should be allowed to execute someone for peacefully exercising their right to film agents in public, then yeah that constitutes sociopathy in my mind. I'm okay with being intolerant of such sociopaths. You may also find my distaste for Nazism to be "intolerant". Guilty as charged, I guess.
Yes. Karl Popper's 'Paradox of Tolerance' applies. TL,DR: tolerating intolerance turns out to be a bad idea.
Glancing at your user page, this should be an exercise in preaching to the choir. You do understand that the only reason the Republicans in the US support Israel is because embracing fundamentalist Christian eschatology gets them votes they don't have to work for. Right?
No, actually, it seems to me that Americans support Israel because we have the same system of values (democracy, human rights, rule of law), and have the same enemies who wish to destroy both our societies.
How can you say this, out loud, and not immediately hear yourself as the villain? This is such a cartoonishly deluded and paranoid belief, it truly boggles the mind.
Hear myself as a villain? Maybe because I recently had several coworkers and friends murdered, by people who publicly call for the genocide of my people? I can not fathom what you support if you see it any other way.
> Karl Popper's 'Paradox of Tolerance' applies. TL,DR: tolerating intolerance turns out to be a bad idea.
To provide some additional context to an often over-(ab)used quote:
I often see it used as a "thought-terminating cliché". Applying it this way would likely meet his definition of intolerant at least half-way:
Popper defines what he means by 'intolerance'. According to his definition, it requires both (A) the refusal to participate in 'rational discourse', and (B) incitement to and use of violence against people with different views.
You will find 'intolerant people' on all sides of the political spectra. (I don't see how dumbing it down to 'left' and 'right' really serves any rational discourse.)
> "I do not imply, for instance,
that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies ; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force ; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument ; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal." (The Open Society and Its Enemies, 1945)
(It's well worth to read as a whole, given how often it is used and abused out of its surrounding context in the book.)
> "Conscience could be defined as the intuitive capacity of man to find out the meaning of a situation. Since this meaning is something unique, it does not fall under a general law, and an intuitive capacity such as conscience is the only means to seize hold of meaning Gestalts. […] True conscience has nothing to do with what I would term “superegotistic pseudomorality.” Nor can it be dismissed as a conditioning process. Conscience is a definitely human phenomenon. But we must add that it is also “just” a human phenomenon. It is subject to the human condition in that it is stamped by the finiteness of man. For he is not only guided by conscience in his search for meaning, he is sometimes misled by it as well. Unless he is a perfectionist, he also will accept this fallibility of conscience. It is true, man is free and responsible. But his freedom is finite. Human freedom is not omnipotence. Nor is human wisdom omniscience, and this holds for both cognition and conscience. One never knows whether or not it is the true meaning to which he is committed. And he will not know it even on his deathbed. Ignoramus et ignorabimus—we do not, and shall never know—as Emil Du Bois-Reymond once put it, albeit in a wholly different context of the psychophysical problem. But if man is not to contradict his own humanness, he has to obey his conscience unconditionally, even though he is aware of the possibility of error. I would say that the possibility of error does not dispense him from the necessity of trial. As Gordon W. Allport puts it, “we can be at one and the same time half-sure and whole-hearted. *The possibility that my conscience errs implies the possibility that another one’s conscience is right. This entails humility and modesty. If I am to search for meaning, I have to be certain that there is meaning. If, on the other hand, I cannot be certain that I will also find it, I must be tolerant.* This does not imply by any means any sort of indifferentism. Being tolerant does not mean that I share another one’s belief. But it does mean that I acknowledge another one’s right to believe, and obey, his own conscience. […] Suffering is only one aspect of what I call “the tragic triad” of human existence. This triad is made up of pain, guilt, and death. There is no human being who may say that he has not failed, that he does not suffer, and that he will not die." (Viktor Frankl, The Will to Meaning, 1972)
> "For tolerance, rightly understood, has not the slightest thing to do with indifferentism. And if we finally ask ourselves: how can I, being one hundred percent convinced of my own faith, possibly accept another's faith, another's conviction? Do I not, by that very act, become unfaithful to my own faith and my own conviction? We must answer this question in the negative. For I do not respect another's faith because I can share it, but because I must respect the other person himself. Note: Tolerance does not consist in sharing another's view, but only in granting the other the right to be of a different view at all. On the other hand, tolerance is also misunderstood if one goes so far as to grant the other the right to be, for his own part, intolerant." (machine translated from the German original)
(A) the refusal to participate in 'rational discourse', and (B) incitement to and use of violence against people with different views.
The armed and belligerent government agents who killed Alex Pretti and Renee Good certainly meet both criteria, as do the Trump administration personnel who repeatedly and maliciously lied about the events in question. History tells us that societies that tolerate such actions eventually pay a terrible price.
The rest of your wall of text doesn't seem relevant, unless I'm missing something.
Depends on what those values are. Epstein had different values than I do.
I don't think parent commenter is saying that leaning right is sociopathic, but that some people try to pass their sociopathy as a simple act of being right leaning.
> The right leaning person, just based on these facts…
To be clear, those aren’t facts, that’s delusion. Pretti objectively did not interfere at all. He was carrying a gun—that’s a fact—but he didn’t interfere. The federal agents approached him and pushed him back, and he retreated the entire time.
Moreover, a right leaning person wouldn’t delude themselves in this way except that they had previously coded the federal agents as “their side” and Pretti as “the other side”—if Pretti was a J6er and the ICE agent was a Capitol Hill police officer, our hypothetical right-winger would have been outraged at the killing as would everyone else (assuming it was equally as unjustified as the Pretti murder). We don’t even need a hypothetical, because the right was outraged that the J6ers were prosecuted and sentenced, and then jubilant when Trump pardoned them.
I’m also obligated to point out that I’m painting with a broad brush here. A small share of the right have, however reluctantly or timidly, spoken out against the mainstream right-wing claims that Pretti was doing something wrong. For example, Rand Paul gave an interview stating that Pretti was clearly retreating and there was no cause for the killing, and even MTG said that the right would be up in arms (no pun intended) if the roles were reversed. Kudos to those on the right who have the bravery to say obvious truths in times such as these, I guess.
That isn't human nature at all, that is a feature of our economy.
The human nature bit is that we are inclined to follow conviction: belief in an idea. And if someone says something with conviction, whether true or not, our first instinct is to believe them, maybe even trust them.
I just wanted to make a distinction between human nature and the benefits of specialization within an economy. You mentioned being an expert in a single domain, which I interpreted as specialized labor, as in an economy
An economy isn't really related to human nature, directly.
When people loudly assert there's no difference between the left and right in this era, I don't know how to give them the benefit of the doubt. Is it more generous to assume they're being disingenuous and too smart to actually believe what they're saying? Or vice versa?
There is of course a huge difference between left and right, but the democratic party is actually center-right, so...
Previous poster didn't say there's no difference between left and right, they said both parties are bought and paid for by fascists, which is pretty much true, thanks to Citizens United v FEC which passed the last time democrats had control of Congress and the presidency. Congress could have responded, but didn't.
At this time, democrats had 60 (!) seats in the senate, enough to end a filibuster, and they had to negotiate with MODERATE DEMOCRATS to pass the ACA. Moderate democrats are, on the face of things, the reason the ACA doesn't have a public option.
Don't get me wrong, I still vote democrat any chance I get, and would encourage everyone to do the same, but unfortunately I have to do it despite the fact they're bought and paid by the donor class, which are, by and large, fascists.
Democrats should started Jan 7th by screaming for Trump's arrest and not stopping until he was rotting in jail, but all we got was 4 years of nothing, followed by "too bad, so sad, we did everything we could".
This is one of those times where technically correct isn’t the best kind of correct.
Ok yeah fine there are fascists in both parties. Now that we have that out of the way where are we? Oh, right. The same fucking place. Stop wasting everyone’s time with the soft apologetics.
We have a system that moves slowly at a national level by design. One party is hellbent on tearing that down in favor of literal (techno-)fascism. The other wants to maintain the incremental refinement of our democracy. That’s it. One party is literally promising Nazi Germany while the other is offering the potential of the United States of America.
So sure, when someone mentions Alex Preti’s murder or the literal Gestapo or the Epstein Files or unprecedented corruption or the irreparable harm to our international standing or the economic ruin that will take generations to heal or any of the other atrocities just tell them that Anthony Weiner was a creep. You won’t be wrong!
We don’t need incremental refinement now because we are facing an existential threat. The long term promise is a stable democracy. That’s the whole experiment.
We need to hold our noses on the Democrats’ historical performance because the whole party needs to be rebuilt. Instead of fixating on past failures focus on the progressive voices that grow every day.
It's definitely interesting to see what ideas 1984 had that were salient to Asimov writing in 1980 - and also to see which of those ideas still have relevance in 2026, when the world has changed considerably again from when Asimov was writing.
I can see your argument but I'm non american and think you underestimate the impact of USA on global stage.
It was(?) de facto the most powerful democracy with most innovation and broad influence over the world, USAID and so on. Every dictator and tsar had to count with values like freedom of information and tolerance and following laws and trading instead of fighting.
Now it's still maybe powerful but those values and influence coming from it are changing very quickly and that is super recent
Last year I purchased a ticket to a Broadway show in NYC. I refused to use their digital ticketing nonsense, and when I showed up at the box office just before showtime and said my phone wasn't working (for my own definition of "working") they just handed me paper tickets. So I have to believe every one of these companies must have a way of issuing tickets when people's phones "don't work."
It moves the app one notch back from mandatory, but that's still enough to be a real problem. That method is going to have very low capacity and if you lie about your phone being dead or elsewhere that might screw you over.
You have to learn to manage up as much as down. In other words convince your boss that what you're doing is the right thing to do. Might not work in all situations of course but if they respect you and you had time to show your value, they might surprise you by going your way.
> Even if your hardware doesn't support local APIs, there's a good chance someone has made an HA integration to talk to their cloud API.
And if they haven’t, you can pretty trivially write your own and distribute it through HACS (I’ve got three integrations in HACS and one in mainline now)
I love it! But my setup has a lot of sharp edges. It's a combo of things where the "standards compatible" way to connect to HA lacks things like camera control, by dastardly vendors like Chamberlain who basically killed HA support for spite, and finally, by having to use Google or Amazon for voice assistants.
My #1 wish would be for someone to build a HA-native voice assistant speaker. I'd pay $100 each for a smart speaker of the physical quality of the $30 Google Home Mini but which integrated directly with HA and used a modern LLM to decide what the user's intent was, instead of the Google Assistant or Siri nonsense which is like playing a text adventure whose preferred syntax changes hourly. I'd pay that plus a monthly fee to have that exist and just work.
Chamberlain can't change MyQ to get around the fact that HA can operate the switch in your garage with a simple controller attached to it. It is very annoying that they are anti-hacker though.
This M5 Stack ASR unit costs $7.50, and has a vocab of about 40-70 words. That's enough to turn on/off lights and timers. You might need to come up with your own command language, but all of the ASR is extremely local
That is probably a great and fun way to solve the problem for those with even a little free time.
Sadly for family reasons I sadly can't take on projects that require more than a few minutes, so I'm holding out hope for someone to bridge the gap between the "project boards that require writing a bunch of code to interface with Home Assistant and define all of its possible abilities and commands" and "dumb as a post Google thing that you just plug in" with a hardware device that is easy to connect to HA and starts out doing what the Google thing can do, but smart instead of stupid like the legacy voice assistants are.
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