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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • Don’t forget an anti-Clinton smear campaign going back over twenty years. She was, despite being objectively qualified, a terrible choice for a candidate. Republicans had decades of opposition research on her and zero compunction about making even more shit up for political theater (see the attacks over a personal email server even though it turned out their own opsec was 100x more lax, several hearings over Benghazi despite previous ones failed to find anything, or hell, even Bill’s impeachment that started as them going over the Clinton’s finances hoping to find a hint of corruption, then latching onto the affair even though Newt Gingrich, the one pushing these dirty tricks, was in the middle of an affair himself while his wife was dying from cancer).

    It was yet another time Democrats ignored political reality to push someone who was at the top of their internal party hierarchy, and Republicans were more than happy to take advantage of their naïveté.



  • He gets tons of flak for his heavy use of drone attacks - which is completely valid - but people usually ignore that:

    • a) The reason we know those numbers is because Obama’s administration put strict reporting policies on drone usage in place that included strikes that weren’t even tracked under previous stats. A lot of those drone strikes were egregious, yes, but also are only public knowledge because he designed a system to be held accountable.
    • b) Trump removed those reporting policies during his first term, then proceeded to order more drone strikes than Obama. Not saying that Obama’s good because Trump is worse, but the reported numbers are back to being fucking lies and those lies make Obama look worse.
    • c) Drone warfare technology started coming into its own around when Obama was elected, and he was stuck with multiple unpopular wars and an openly hostile Republican opposition who would blame any American casualties on him, so of course he used drones more than previous presidents.


  • AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.

    “So we can believe the big ones?”

    YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.

    “They’re not the same at all!”

    YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME…SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.

    “Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what’s the point—”

    MY POINT EXACTLY.

    One of my favorite scenes from Discworld. People make the mistake of treating justice and other such concepts as though they are an inherent part of existence and will spontaneously appear even when nobody chooses to uphold them. Justice is an ideal, one that does not exist in nature and cannot happen on its own. It must be upheld by those in power to exist, but what we have now is a pale shadow of the real thing held captive by the unjust and wielded with bad faith. Even those still acting in our defense are being silenced or overridden by malicious actors higher up the chain.

    At some point we’ll need to act if we want that word to continue meaning anything. To use another Discworld quote, “THERE IS NO JUSTICE. THERE’S JUST US.”







  • It also helps that the Steam Deck has introduced a bunch of people to Linux and shown that it’s not so scary or user-unfriendly these days, plus Valve’s extensive investments into WINE/Proton (software that allows you to run Windows programs and games on Linux) mean that for the first time, running Linux doesn’t mean limiting your library of usable apps.

    At this point Linux actually runs many games better than Windows due to lower overhead, and most things will run without issue so long as they don’t rely on kernel-level rootkits for anti-cheat or DRM (and kernel access is being restricted in future Windows updates after that whole CloudStrike fiasco, so that will likely stop being an issue either way as programs move away from using it).


  • This is the top-voted answer, but it’s missing one key point: Windows 11 mandates a TPM chip, a secure cryptographic processor that (amongst other things, both good and bad) allows an OS to verify that its boot files haven’t been tampered with.

    A lot of old computers don’t have this chip, making this the first Windows edition in many years where the upgrade process isn’t smooth and painless. If you don’t have this chip you straight-up can’t install Windows 11 on that machine without using hacks or workarounds, workarounds that Microsoft have been actively patching out to prevent TPM-less installs.

    Rather than throw away their still perfectly fine computers to buy a new machine they don’t need - for a dubious “upgrade” they don’t even want - a lot of users are choosing to switch to Linux so they can keep their current PCs while still enjoying software and security updates.