Maoo [none/use name]

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 17th, 2023

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  • I recommend installing a Linux distribution that requires a hands-in approach like Gentoo or Linux from scratch. If you don’t have an extra computer you can do it on a virtual machine on the computer you do have.

    The process will require you to use the various incantations and rituals of using the terminal. As you do so, learn what they do by googling them or using their man page.

    For more practice, write a shell script or otherwise choose a task you want to do using the terminal like browsing through your files or searching for a file whose name matches a pattern and so on.




  • Congratulations! Reddit is mostly terrible.

    If you want to participate in some niche communities I can understand wanting a new account. Most likely they’re tracing you through these things, with the first ones being more likely:

    • Email address (hopefully you’re using different ones but this is an easy way for them to associate accounts).

    • IP address.

    • Browser or phone fingerprinting.

    For your IP address you can just try to get a new one. Sometimes restarting your modem will do that. Ask Google what your IP address is before and after.

    For browser fingerprinting, I’d just clear the cache and that’s probably enough. Alternatively just use a different browser for Reddit for a while.

    For app fingerprinting that’s a bit harder and I’d say to just not use the official Reddit app if that’s what you were doing before.








  • Gentoo is good for learning. It’s not really a privacy or security-focused distribution per se. It promotes you being comfortable with the command line, configuration files, networking, unix-ie things, and of course compiling programs. If you’re tired of the compiling there is basically no downside to switching to Arch as a “one step up” distribution.





  • Stripping felons of the right to vote was/is a part of Jim Crow, wherein blackness was systematically criminalized, usually through forced poverty and then a criminalization of poverty (e.g. petty theft for survival). Similar to a poll tax, the goal was to prevent black people from having a political voice, including but not limited to electoral. This is why these laws are mostly in former slave states. They were a reaction to liberation. These anti-black policies also applied to anyone else that would be systematically marginalized, serving as a reusable tool for the ruling class. Make poverty itself a deep pit of disenfranchisement and all you need to do is make your targeted group poor enough. Keeping the poor and precarious from organizing politically is also a goal unto itself for the ruling class, though we shouldn’t get overly invested in the idea that voting would ever be enough to actually properly contradict the ruling class itself.

    The criminal “justice” system is not about reform, certainly not in the US. Every aspect of it makes it harder to reintegrate into society afterwards, usually with your record following you well into your life after leaving the prison. Getting a job, finding housing, applying for benefits, all of these will be seriously hampered by being convicted of a crime and serving time. Instead, the criminal system is designed, again, to marginalize. Take the people that are a threat to the perceived interests of business owners and isolate and harm them, also attempting to create the appearance of a deterrent so that others don’t want to threaten private property interests. This impetus poisons the entire system even when it deals with crimes that are not directly crimes of poverty or capitalist alienation (though the societies and pain constructed by the ruling class are certainly their fault).

    Please note, however, that the fact that so many people are disenfranchised already shows us that the ruling class isn’t going to let folks vote them out or otherwise engage in the political policies necessary to address injustice. They won’t let us solve the climate crisis or systemic unemployment or treating housing as an investment. The overt disenfranchisement is a blatant example of how they tip the scales in their favor, but it is far from the only one; most forms of disenfranchisement are so deeply ingrained that few people notice them as such. Poor or biased schooling so that the public will accept propaganda narratives. The maintenance of an economic underclass stripped of rights (such as undocumented immigrants). A requirement to work so many hours that you cannot rapidly gain political consciousness. A media apparatus wholly owned by the oppressor class and obediently taking orders from it on what to focus on, which reporters to hire and fire. The elimination of public squares and meeting places by which to organize. The cooption of academia through a variety of means, ensuring that their work suits the goals of the ruling class or is at least stripped of its capacity to organize against them. The limiting of the concept of political action to voting and going to cop-sanctioned protests. Etc etc.

    The way out of this is to organize directly with one another, to use our organizations to (further) identify the material root causes of injustice, and to work with more than just the tools offered to us by those who already have power.


  • Well Ukraine itself is definitely losing. They will probably lose territory to Poland as well if this keeps up and they have sold their country out to capitalists, mostly Americans. Loans, land, industries, etc all to pay for “their” war effort. The common Ukrainian is who suffers the most under this. They will be more exploited (paid less for the value of their labor), see more social programs dismantled, and go into a serious recession/depression that may not lift for decades.

    Russia is doing okay. The US is pulling Europe more into its orbit (making them pay more for less from the US while losing a lot of their industry), which is a loss for Russia, but that was the remand endgame of the US anyways. What was surprising, at least to some, was the extent to which Russia could survive and even thrive when subjected to the most significant financial weapons the West has. Overall their economy is certainly in a better place now and a chunk of Ukraine will be theirs and the other chunk will be weak. This is a victory for the ruling class of Russia and its overall geopolitical self-interest.

    The US ruling class is making out like bandits as usual, funding its weapons industry, basically a cash injection for the owner class and the only thing the US ever reliably does (threaten its chosen enemies with destruction).


  • Different distros are better for different things. For example, some require give you more control over the OS but are more difficult to learn, or require learning more things at once. Others will be easier to try out but may make choices on your behalf that you don’t like - or distribute software in ways you don’t like.

    Linux from Scratch will have a fairly steep learning curve. Nothing wrong with that, but you’d want to prepare yourself to be cool with things breaking or not making sense for a while.

    Puppy Linux is minimalist, which is something people usually only want after they’ve tried out something else that’s not minimalist. I would recommend trying out something more general-purpose and try out different desktop environments and applications first.