deleted by creator

Didn’t even know there was one. Is it an exiled community, or just happens to be popular here just like everywhere else?

[This user claims to have blocked the instance I registered on, so I assume they won’t read this]

Lemmy is what it is because of the beliefs and values of instances like lemmy.ml. There have been many other attempts at creating reddit alternatives, decades of them, from voat to raddle. The lead developers have clear values which guided Lemmy into being a better platform than reddit and the other reddit-like forums - free-and-open source, anti-commercial, decentralized, and counter to the pro-US media hegemony. These are not incidental, values aren’t a syncretic pick-and-choose buffet! They are a result of the socialist ideologies of the admins of each of those instances, and how they have been applied to material reality.

And keep in mind that these instances aren’t some outsider aberration, they were the three largest Lemmy instances until 2023, they remain large and popular, and host popular active communities frequented by users of many other instances.

And while Zedestrian perceives lemmy.ml, Lemmygrad and Hexbear as problematic (and I have my criticisms of each of them), from my perspective, many of the big liberalist instances are far more problematic, tolerating right-wing bigots, allowing obvious pro-US think-tank propaganda accounts, and banning users from advocating for action (including, where necessary, violence) against the ruling class destroying us and our planet. That’s a big reason why many left, for were banned from, reddit. Should lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works therefore be removed, for being problematically close to the harmful behaviors of reddit.com that many of us are trying to escape? That’s a serious reputational liability too, it can drive users away if they can’t find the places they want to join.

' or 1+1;

he is still completely new to this so I want things to work out perfectly for his first experience.

If you’re able to be there for the install, then great. I’ve had a couple of times where, due to certain hardware, it needs a different sound server or some other workaround. In an extreme case, you might need to fallback to a second choice of distro.

but I have been hearing a lot about Bazzite lately and see that it offers a very nice gaming experience

Is there anything specific you’ve heard that applies to your friend’s needs? (Honest question, I haven’t looked deep into it.)

If it’s just small things like ‘Steam and [etc] is installed already’, then you can just do that easily anyway.

no typical package management like apt or pacman as I browse their docs, instead it relies heavily on Flatpaks [snip]

Keep in mind that Mint uses apt and (optionally, but IMO inevitably for a gamer/dev) Flatpaks integrated in their package manager, which has gotten much smoother but still is two different systems which can cause confusion. I don’t know how Bazzite handles this.

I remember Happy Tree Friends made some YouTube Copyright School videos, but I’ve thought they’d have a real opportunity making public safety warnings.

RSS feeds. It’s digital so probably not what you’re asking for, but I would often drain time checking tabs or bookmarks for updates each day. Now I just have a specific list of updates from feeds I’ve subscribed to: no ads, no recommendations, no scrolling, no manual refreshing every hour. Just what you ask to see.

Website doesn’t supply one? Luckily some RSS tools let you create one from most websites.

Also, relevant youtube video from Technology Connections about feeds in general.

And, on the topic of digital simplification, learn how to mute specific conversations on your chat apps. Many even have temporary muting (mute for 1 hour). You don’t need constant pings distracting you from life.

All black t-shirts, same pants, same sweaters, same socks, share socks with my wife.

I’ve similarly simplified my wardrobe. It’s been great.

Most of my clothes are made from the same (or at least non-delicate) materials and all my daily wear aren’t light clothes, so they all go in the same wash.

Did this next one with a few things, so for example, socks: Bought one type of daily-wear sock, made sure I liked it and then bulk bought them, so apart from a few special pairs (sports, decorative pattern, other colors), I don’t need to care about pairing socks because they’re all the same. Growing up with 3-pair packs of socks all in different paired-colors, and then socks with the same brand and same colors but different length, was a waste of time.

Yep, I’ve also gotten responses pretty reliably from professional artists, including those I’d assumed would be far too busy to answer (including the directors and writers of famous tv shows).

Are you looking for the Animal Smoothness Scale?

I would like to join the single-day general strike that is being called for the US this Friday, January 30th

What backing is there for this strike? For example, are there any labor unions, community organizations, and cultural leaders involved like in the recent Jan 23rd Minnesota strike? [Edit: the answer is a pleasant yes! https://nationalshutdown.org/home#endorsers ]

Take a sick day regardless, unless you’re going to use them all in the future, but if it’s just a few social media posts saying “general strike now!”, of which there have been hundreds of attempts over the past few years, without any institutional backing, then temper your expectations. Worker unions exist for us to organize us! So if it’s a real strike you want, unionize, and push the union to act.

It’s worth acknowledging that superior firepower hasn’t directly resulted in success for the US military. Guerilla armies like in Vietnam and in many countries in the Middle East such as Afghanistan have repelled US invasion, and wargame simulations (including US on US wargames!) have repeatedly shown this.

Add into the mix that there was a serious degree of military revolt (complemented by homeland revolt) in the Vietnam War (and other later wars too). While this was largely boosted by it being a conscription army at the time, I still believe an internal US war would make the military similarly vulnerable to internal conflict, and even external sabotage by citizens.

We saw ICE disarm and shoot a citizen who had a gun. A lesson from this is that a weapon is only threatening if we create an environment where it’s a credible threat, like outnumbering them with armed citizens.

Masks? I could go either way on this. Masks can be protective, and can also be seen as alienating from the community. That alienation is not some unchangeable truth, it’s just a result of how they’re perceived in our cultures (often associated with crime). For a counterexample, look at the Zapatistas who regularly wore masks to protect them from cartel and state violence:

On the topic, I’ve been seeing plenty of war-hawk think-tank accounts who only post propaganda, like:

• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected] (and all their alt-accounts, including [email protected] and [email protected] )

They are clearly not involved in our communities.

veterans, such as myself a former Navy Nuke Instructor

A bit off-topic, have you heard either of the Wake-ups episodes[1][2] from the Eyes Left podcast? And if so, do they resonate with your experiences in the force?

Stop throwing trash […] because it ends up in the dirt thus the food.

This reminds me that most of the anti-littering ads I’ve seen are more about shaming or about dying wildlife than about direct impact to all of us. This is an issue that could be simple to illustrate with a video PSA, following how littered trash contaminants find their way into our food chain and to our mouths. Makes it more personal and hopefully icky enough.

The police structure is not strictly local, that’s an assumption I wouldn’t make. Here’s a reddit thread (I’m assuming mostly USA responses) with many verified officers saying they live half an hour, an hour or more away from their jurisdiction: https://reddit.com/r/ProtectAndServe/comments/1c59je6/how_far_away_do_you_live_from_your_department/ - “Seems most LEOs I’ve met don’t live in the same area they work”

Someone in another thread says to an OP: “I am assuming you are in the US, but elsewhere it is somewhat unusual for a police officer to live within the jurisdiction they police. Often you will find particular towns where officers might cluster, but living in the same part of a city, or in the same small town, is undesirable due to familiarity and reprisals. Obviously there are exceptions.”

A local militia of citizens will tend to be more familiar and accountable to the community they work within than some strangers working for the state, who are alienated to the subjects of their law enforcement. Plenty of systemic issues with police are a result of this alienation from the society they police.

In this example of Cherán, IIRC the corrupt police they evicted were municipal police, not local. By being members of the community, the local militia that replaced them could resolve more issues socially rather than by violence (inc. threat of violence) and were not accountable to the national government, but instead to a local government directly elected by citizens. So what this means is, unlike most police forces, these law enforcement agents are accountable to the community they govern. This reduces the tendency for corruption and abuse, and makes the job less enticing to those would seek to abuse it.

Daggers in a select few hearts may be enough to shift things.

If you’re proposing what I think you are, it’s sounds like something we tried in the late 1800s/early 1900s. Our lesson was that this tactic won’t solve a systemic problem, at least in isolation. Action without a surrounding social movement is lost. Just ask Luigi - despite the widespread bipartisan approval of their action, there weren’t many copycats nor long-term changes in our conditions. And, if you saw much of other Lemmy instances at the time of that event, you may have seen various people denouncing it as ‘adventurism’, despite how cathartic it was.

So, many of the socialist organizations aim to develop the surrounding movement needed to cause systemic change.

So abolish police forces and replace them with militia? What’s the difference?

Cherán did this in 2011. The difference is massive. Crime dropped massively, and the community trust their militia. “Right now there is no crime. These days, it doesn’t get worse that a brawl. A bar fight, a street fight.” Their homicide rate is (last I remember) the lowest in their state and among the lowest in the country.

It certainly helps that they didn’t just drive out police, but also political parties, implementing their own direct democracy.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=SrPBdLiqMb0

Here is a real example of a place (Cherán, pop. 16,000) which kicked out their police, party-politicans and other organized criminals in 2011, replacing it with a local militia of citizens and direct democracy. Crime dropped massively, “Right now there is no crime. These days, it doesn’t get worse that a brawl. A bar fight, a street fight.” Their homicide rate is (last I remember) the lowest in their state and among the lowest in the country.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=SrPBdLiqMb0