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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  • Free speech has never existed in the form told to us in school and on TV. Every liberation fight has faced violent state reaction and required compensatory resistance on the part of the people actively fighting the system. There has never been a turnaround on marginalizing policy that happened due to peaceful, state-protected debate in the marketplace of ideas. It’s all been precipitated by hard fights that inevitably found enemies in the cops and the feds.

    This applies to every Western country, especially those most desperate to cling to their chauvinist myths.

    If you know this, you can protect yourself and others by knowing what response your actions will receive and therefore how to avoid unnecessary risks.



  • 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.





  • The capitalist system has a problem with creating vast income gaps and people doggedly chase higher wages because if they don’t they won’t be secure in housing, food, healthcare, or retirement.

    If speaking French and knowing French literature paid as well as programming, there would be more French speakers.

    Universities can’t fix problems created by the capitalist system. They are just educational and research centers. If a university tried to “fix” this particular issue they would just end up exacerbating it by restricting program sizes even more, making it so that the people with accredited university degrees in CS were even fewer and therefore in higher demand. This would just mean people would go to other universities and start to depend on direct admits into programs when making their decisions. This is already happening and probably why this whiny prof’s department is admitting more and more students into the program every year.

    If we want to fix the actual problem, we would need socialism.








  • Buddy nobody is impressed with your media criticism process of regurgitating Media Bias Fact Check and Wikipedia. It’s actually an announcement that you have no familiarity with any of this and don’t know how to critically consume media yourself. Ironically you’re going to mislead yourself by simply uncritically accepting what is written in those two websites.

    Rather than searching around for someone else to tell you what to think about The Gray Zone, why not critically engage with the content? What do they cite? What topic are they discussing? Do you know anything about it? To what are they responding? Are their criticisms valid?


  • There’s no reason a random dude with a bachelor’s in physiology can’t be good at media criticism. It’s not like the big nerds that go into journalism or join think tanks are beacons of truth. Media criticism is about flexing your skeptical and investigative muscles and being highly informed about the topics in question so that you can do the hardest thing in it: identify what was left out, what was neglected, and what articles were not written instead of what is before you.

    That said, this particular random dude physiology major is not good at media criticism.


  • There is no such thing as neutral. That site is a good example of it: they’re personally highly biased towards “centrist” liberal positions to the point that they conflate it with writing “just the facts”. They have no consistent methodology, they’re just showing you their own inability to detect bullshit when it’s something they agree with.

    For example, as it has often done in its history, The New York Times has been carrying water for fascistic settler colonial narratives, including hiring an obvious racist to write implausible articles about alleged sexual assaults by Hamas on October 7. Articles contested by the people interviewed, the families and friends of those who died. They censored their own attempts to admit fault and their workers creating media about the errors. Only in the last week have they fired the author in question, which will surely be used to imply that this is the only thing wrong with their consistently biased coverage that focuses almost exclusively on interviewing state department officials, Zionist NGOs, and Israeli government officials.

    Did you find any of that on “media bias fact check”? Did it rank the NYT lower than The Gray Zone on its ability to report factually? For having a Zionist bias? Even this one example I’ve provided is far more damning than anything you’ve listed.

    You can’t outsource media criticism, you have to do it yourself and engage with it.


  • 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.