Right now it looks like a pack of dogs barking around thinking they’re witty and clever for doing so.

Sure, but that’s pretty much any online community. We’re doing it right now. You did the exact same shit in your original comment where you called the GitHub commenters a bunch of children. We are the dogs in the mirror, if you want to change that culture, be the change.

Personally, I don’t think that being a smarmy prick in the comments of some corporation GitHub repo is “bad behavior”. It’s definitely not as bad as profiting from the exploitation of unpaid or underpaid labor, anyways.

When corporations destroy lives, it’s “just business”. But when people refuse to act civilly towards or about corporations, it’s “childish” and “immature”. In that case, I am very proud to be an immature child telling the adults that they’re brainwashed obedient drones complying with the will of then ruling elite.

deleted by creator

You’re acting like releasing the WinAmp source code is like some sort of great gift to open source devs, lol. It’s a community that works based on a set of rules and expectations, if the company doesn’t want to meet those expectations, then an appropriate response is to bully them out of the space (or to bully them into meeting those expectations)

Projects are not entitled to be received gratefully and respectfully if you treat open source devs like a disposable source of free labour.

And the concept of “civility” in the face of corporations telling us what we can and can’t do, can well and truly get fucked.

Phoenician wants a word.

Unless the biter has tavern brawler feat

Thanks for the well-considered and thoughtful response - I appreciate it.

Just to clarify, I’m not trying to make some typical liberal argument that China is evil or anything like that - I’m very far left and I’m not here just criticising China just because that’s what the mainstream media has told me to do. I just think it does leftists like myself no favours to pretend that China is perfect and that we shouldn’t criticise it - and the essay linked above, in my opinion, seems to be a bit of a reflexive defense of China, rather than actually considering the criticism - to me it seems they are choosing arguments to support their position rather than letting the facts and their beliefs lead them to a conclusion.

I don’t think we have to accept that any amount of imbalanced transactions of value necessarily guarantee that billionaires are inevitable - plenty of systems exist where there are “winners and losers” but the system itself reaches an equilibrium state. There are so many solutions which could be implemented to prevent billionaires from existing, and I would say that billionaires can only ever exist when there is a fundamental flaw in the society which produces them. It should be impossible to so thoroughly capture and centralise wealth and power to a point where an individual can have that much.

I’ve re-read this comment and your previous comment multiple times and I’m not really clear on what you mean.

My point is that the essay’s argument is weak because it completely ignores scale and proportionality. It uses the language of marxism to justify capitalism.

I don’t personally agree with it, but I was willing to consider the notion on its own merits rather than in contrast with ideology - but even when I do, I find it a wholly unsatisfactory justification

This is pretty typical self-justifying bullshit. They’re justifying pre-held beliefs (china is good; china has billionaires; therefore billionaires must be good) rather than actually considering the claim based on the merits. (is it actually a good thing that china has billionaires, and what does that say about socialism/marxism as practiced in china)

You can believe that people have different needs and that we don’t all need to be absolutely 1:1 equal in terms of our material possessions etc. and that having some goal to work towards is beneficial to society (ambition) without having billionaires.

This essay is like trying to justify genocide by pointing out that sometimes, for the benefit of society, the death of an individual is preferable to the suffering of many. The issue with billionaires isn’t one of inequality in the micro - it’s the magnitude of that inequality, and the power it brings, which is the issue.

This is how fascism is successful, because liberals will lie for a lie, but they won’t lie for the truth.

The reality is that this idea wouldn’t really fix any of the actual issues in academia. The only thing that would fix the problems with science is the end of capitalism.

Yes, ACAB. Any actions taken by the police are for either protecting the interests of the wealthy and powerful, enforcing traditional/societal norms, or they’re basically a PR stunt. A terrorist attack in New York would potentially harm wealthy people, not to mention Wall Street and the larger economy. so it had to be stopped.

They just eat the other humans remains, duh!

This smacks of accelerationist rhetoric to me. We absolutely can help people to understand that electoralism doesn’t work without them having to experience some sort of revelatory moment. But it needs us to log off and talk to people in real life.

C’mon mate, this is decades old fossil fuel industry propaganda - making people blame themselves for the mess they got us all into. There’s no benefit from beating ourselves up - as individuals we hold no power over the industry. We need to work together and build an organised movement if we want to change things, we can’t change our behaviour individually to change the system.

There is a photograph which accompanies the article of one of the protesters holding a placard which reads, “this is fascism”.

I feel like it’s totally wrong to apply such a broad generalisation (“They don’t want the [genocide] to stop”) to such a group of people. The people of Israel are not a monolith, and I know for a fact that there are those in Israel who have been protesting their genocidal policies the whole time. It seems very plausible to me that a good number of the protesters calling for an end to the current violence will be opposed to the whole settler-colonialist project, in the same way that I wholeheartedly despise the state of the country that I was born in.

Hello, I’m a dedicated Apple user who came across this post on the “all” feed while scrolling. I know that I’m not really the intended audience of this community so if I’m not welcome to discuss here, feel free to tell me to get lost. I don’t want to impose.

I thought it might interest you a bit for me to share my two cents - just for context, I’m very technically competent, much more than the average smartphone user. Feel free to ask me anything. I am not a fanboy of anything in particular except Star Wars, so I’m not particularly inclined to get defensive - I’ll try my best to stay objective and I’m very happy to talk about Apple’s flaws as well.

Anyways, with all that out of the way - my reason for continuing to to use iPhone isn’t because of marketing. I don’t buy it because I think it’s cool/trendy/whatever. I get it because I prefer the experience of iOS over Android. When I tried Android, I found it a lot harder to get things the way that I liked them, it generally felt like it needed a lot more hand-holding from me.

I definitely don’t feel scammed. I’ve been using iPhone since 2011 or so and I’ve been a Mac user since 2016 - most recently I feel like the Apple Silicon MacBooks are genuinely good value, but prior to that I would definitely say that Macs were relatively overpriced compared to Windows PCs. I feel like iPhone is priced maybe (~20% or so?) higher than a comparable Android device, but personally, to me, the price is absolutely worth the improved experience.

You have more choices beyond voting for either Trump or Harris.

Voting for a third party is the opposite of laziness and apathy. You’re intentionally spending the time and effort to place a vote which you know will not succeed, entirely because you believe in doing the right thing, even when it isn’t popular.

The US needs a revolution, the current system is impossible to change without it. All you can do is harm mitigation.

It’s honestly disgusting that this anti-semitic bullshit is upvoted.