Are you suggesting that rapid offensives - lunging out beyond your logistical network without taking the time to have your auxiliary force fully equipped for the task you expect of them - are a bad idea and will lead to said auxiliary forces putting in but a token effort instead of dying for an ally that clearly doesn't give enough of a shit about their lives?

Linux is free and open source software ecosystem. It's like handing people free brushes, canvases and paints - sure, removing the financial hurdles may enable talents otherwise unable to afford indulging their artistic streak, but you also can't really prevent anyone from painting awful bullshit. Best you can do is not give them attention or a platform to advertise their stuff on.

That's the price of freedom: It also extends to assholes. We can't start walling off Linux, so the best we can do is individually wall them off from our own life and hope enough other people around us do it too.

There's a bunch of staff there too. Wikipedia cites an estimate of 764 people.

I'll plug an interesting blog post on the topic of using chemical weapons. The post concerns itself mostly with lethal weapons, but I feel like some of the points apply here as well.

The essence is that for modern military systems, mobility and the relative cost of manufacturing, storing and employing (lethal) chemical weapons compared to protective equipment render them much less valuable than conventional explosive munitions. They see usage mostly between weaker static armies, which lack the equipment, training or command doctrines for modern warfare.

The banning of chemical weapons was done because they weren't generally very useful for the modern systems of the superpowers at the time. Russia cracking them out again suggests they no longer have all the capabilities of a modern superpower. Which probably isn't super new for most people, but might be worth spelling out anyway.

only by facing that fact can anybody actually fix it

The first step to improvement is to acknowledge flaws. We can still admit "This is outside our current capacity to fix."

pretending "linux is easy now"

This might not always be pretense so much as cognitive bias and a bubble effect: If I look at it from my point of view, it has gotten a lot eas_ier_. I underestimate just how advanced even those things I consider basic are for someone not as versed as I am. I'm nowhere near an expert, but I know enough to have lost sight of the floor.

There are plenty of "fire and forget" distros - If I want to, say, install Ubuntu, I create a bootable flash drive with the base image, reboot, follow the installation prompts, easy.

The layperson will ask "What's Ubuntu? I thought we're talkink about Linux?" "What does bootable mean? How do I do that?"

Most crucially, from my own experience trying to sell a family member on Linux, "What do these prompts all mean?" They're scared of selecting something wrong, because they're not confident that they understand them correctly.

That may be a public image issue: If you're predisposed to think it's complex, the brain may lock itself into not trusting its own understanding of semantics. And the elitists certainly aren't helping with that: If a hundred people reassure you it's fine and one person says it's complex, it's hard to avoid that seed of doubt. Once it is planted, confirmation bias will do the rest.

I don't know what the solution is

One part of the solution might be a "transition" package, consisting of first a tool to try cross-platform alternatives to tools people already use, second a ready-made VM to try Linux without installing it, using a transition distro, styled to look and feel "like Windows" and built-in links to the host filesystem, and finally a fully automated installer that includes backing up files, settings etc. and putting them in the equivalent Linux soot after installation so you have as little transitory friction as possible.

Which leads us back to the topic of leftist politics and the split between moderates and progressives: Of course I don't want to compromise on my principles, but we're not gonna win people over by demanding drastic change with scary words that make it easy to lump in the "Capitalism fucks us over" progressives with the McCarthyist "They want to install a Russian dictatorship!" rhetorics about the radicals and tankies. Radical change is likely to invite radical backlash.

Our best shot at non-violent and lasting change is to make the transition as low-friction as possible, inching people over policy by policy, shifting the Overton Window the way the regressives have been doing for decades, instead of trying to aggressively shunting it over.

Focus less on identity, ideology and terminology, more on individual issues and solutions. Some movements obviously warrant aggressive countering, but we have to pick our battles, or we'll be spread out on too many fronts. Ideology alone doesn't win wars; Strategy does.

We should also project unity of vision and determination instead of public infighting and sabotaging what we all want over the things we disagree on.

Presentation matters.

Too many leftists are so concerned with the substance of the message that they forget how important the presentation is.

I find that to be an issue with many well-meaning people.

For example, I see it occasionally in the FOSS-bubble: It's great if a given software is ideologically "pure", independent from capitalist incentives, open source and freely available. It's great that there are volunteers doing work for the benefit of others.

Occasionally, when someone lists specific tools running on Windows only as reason for not switching to Linux, they get told to use FOSS alternatives instead that just can't match the proprietary in terms of features or usability. When you point that out, there will often be the customary vocal minority of twats chastising you "It's volunteer work, you don't get to demand anything, go implement it yourself" etc.

I hate to admit it, but I'm generally more comfortable around MS Excel than LO Calc. I've used LO Writer and Impress for personal and university stuff, because I rarely need more advanced features (and if I do, I'll probably use TeX anyway), but when it comes to more complex work with spreadsheets, I just find Excel to be smoother in usage. I don't have enough experience in the field of UX to put a finger on why, nor would I likely have the skills or time to contribute fixes to LO Calc. I can settle for less out of ideology, but is that what you expect from people at large?

The same applies with the transition to Linux in general: I'm technically versed enough that I'm confident I can probably fix any error I encounter. But until the public perception and tooling of Linux gets to the point that even non-techies can easily do the switch, it's not going to see widespread adoption.

I love FOSS. I love Linux. I want to see them replace proprietary monopolies as much as possible.

But the presentation matters.

Part of the issue is the push by many left-wing voters to get actually progressive politics on the table after years of alternating between regressives and complacent centrists* that prefer making small concessions to the right over big steps to the left. They don't want another presidency marked by lukewarm promises kept poorly. They're tallying up all the ways in which Harris still isn't as good as she ough to be.

For Trumpers, he is good enough. He is everything they want: A public role model enabling them to be an absolutely shameless asshat.

The complexity arises when people advocate voting for a third party instead. By and large, no third party has the traction to beat the Republicans. You'd need to get the entire Dem voterbase and then some. If that fails, you've split the non-Rep voterbase and the enabling asshat gets the plurality. On the other hand, there's a risk that leaning too far left in the attempt to keep the progressive voters may lose the centrist* voters, which is a gamble whether that will end up a net positive. Harris has a tough job: walking a political tightrope, particularly if it's consistently being tugged at by people.

And there are good reasons to tug on that rope. You'll find some in these comments: Settling for "Good enough" doesn't help getting actual change. For the ultra-rich, on the other hand, progressive policies are a detriment, so they'll want to tug it the other way. The left doesn't want to cede ground and keeps pulling. The centrists* that don't like Trump but also fear dramatic change pull her to the other side again. The "centrists"** pull just to see her fall.

And that's exciting! That's an actual conflict of ideologies! That's her having to work for her voters' approval! You'll see the complaints flying left and right, see her try to keep an ever-shifting balance, see drama and tension! People love drama and tension. Corporate media loves drama and tension because it gets attention, clicks, revenue, all that. "Assholes still support Asshole" just isn't as interesting as " criticises Kamala for , calls her ".

Also, splitting the Dem voterbase serves the corporate executives and shareholders that want the right-wing tax breaks and erosion of worker protections because it makes them even richer. That's probably not a coincidence.

*Centrist as in "I don't want things to radically change", not as in "I think both parties are equally bad, so I'll sow dissent in the Dem voterbase, pretend that I'm not helping Trump with that and get to feel superior to both".

** The latter group of the above footnote. It doesn't really matter whether they're intentional agents of disunity or idealists that care more about voting with their heart than the actual outcome. The result is the same: At best, they've achieved nothing. At worst, they've contributed to Trump's victory.

I mean, go ahead and implement it if you think "That's pretty hard to do, so we opted not to put significant development resources into one feature" is a poor excuse. If the team is working under pressure already, they'll have to prioritise and I assume this got shoved down the lst.

The USA doesn't have a slave caste making up 80% of its population that it ritually declares war on every year. They aren't quite as bad as Sparta.

Yet.

You seem really invested in pointing out those shortcomings. I respect that.

Trebuchet

Oh look, it took me all of a half second to skip over the @s and read the message! What inconvenience!