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Yeah, I think I get what you mean.

My own country, Portugal, has issues and around here there is a big tendency to look to Britain for inspiration, yet Britain in many ways is even more broken than my own country (certainly it’s a far less fair society, more stratified, way more violent amongst the lower classes and more fake amongst the upper classes, plus significantly more calcified and less daring in many ways) and which wealth-wise is mainly is just using the pile (of both money and infrastructure) accumulated during their time not that long ago when it was an Empire, rather than in the present day being a more productive country,

People look up to Britain, copy what’s done there under the impression that it works, and then end up with similar problems but none of the good things because the “success” of Britain isn’t the product of what they do now, it’s just accumulated wealth and structures from almost a century ago.

That said, I think the circus that was Brexit has taken the shine out of Britain in most of Europe, including Portugal, maybe more strongly so here because Portugal used to send a lot of emigrants over there and many came back following Brexit and the consequences of Brexit with a far worse opinion of Britain than they went there with, and they certainly shared that opinion with family and friends.

Oh, I don’t at all think that Brits themselves see any of that as ghoulish.

In fact the local culture has a huge thing with a heavilly classist social hierarchy, “knowing your place” in the social hierarchy and looking up to the upper classes and seing them as more capable.

(Their Monarchy is the wealthiest and most powerful in Europe and you’ll find plenty of fawning coverage of them in the local media and a vast majority of Brits love the Monarchy)

In my experience people traditionally tend to see it as the natural order of things and there really was only this period between the post-War times and maybe the 80s when amongst the working class there was this idea that the working class was as much entitled to rule things as the upper classes and a lot of that has been crushed along with Labour Unions, Industry and Mining in Britain and as most of the workers became white collar workers (who see themselves as Middle Class and look down on the Working Class even though de facto they’re Working Class) rather than blue collar.

(Though I supposed some of it was transformed into support for the most extremist far right movements there of the present day, since they get a lot of support from retired working class people who feel themselves rich because the house they own is now worth a lot of money due to the massive house price bubble over there - in a way it’s funny that the most Fascist people of all are actually Working Class pensioners)

Most don’t really recognize that stuff as unusual or strange because that’s all that they’ve known, same as for everybody everywhere all over the World - mostly it’s only people who have actually lived and worked abroad and hence seen things done differently, who can spot the quirks and negative aspects of society they grew up in.

In my experience as an European who went to live there for over a decade, there are a ton of very subtle elements which we can’t really spot from the outside, not knowing the details of how that country works and its culture, especially because they’re culturally extremelly big on image management (which I talk about below), which extends to managing the image that the country projects abroad (both via things like the Media they produce - for example their series and movies about Britain in the Victorian era vastly beautify the reality and almost like clockwork ever couple of years out comes a “Britain won WWII” movie - and their politicians practices both internally and on the international stage of grand symbolic announcements of objectives with in practice either no concrete action ever or even actions which do the very opposite).

Britain is has long been setup to preserve the power of the old wealth and always had Fascist tendencies (for example, there are pictures of the old queen when she was young being taught by her uncle, the then King, to do a Nazi salute) and British elites always sided with Fascists and White Colonialists, such as Pinochet in Chile, the Afrikaaner Apartheid government in South Africa and the Genocidal Zionists in Israel, plus they themselves commited several Genocides in their Empire and historically even relentlessly exploited the local lower classes (with things like Indentured Servitude - which replaced Chatel Slavery but you’ll only ever hear from the British that they were the first to “end” Slavery and nobody mentions Indentured Servitude - and Workhouses).

At the same time this is a country with an extreme cultural tendency to put managing appearances above all else (upside: they have the best Theatre in the World) which is worse the higher the social class one is from, so for example the children of the wealthy are taught to tell people what they want to hear and always show a positive image (not positive cheerful, but rather “flawless” and “impeccable”) and are shunned and emotionally attacked by their peers if they display any kind of weakness (can’t let others see that they’re sad or even sick) and even attend private schools (curiously called “Public schools” over there because supposedly “anybody who can afford the [very high] fees can send their children there” though even that is de facto false for many such schools) which amongst other things teach them discourse techniques (basically how to deceive without outright lying), so most of them as adults have only one mode of relating with other human beings - an unemotional, highly managed posh façade were empathy, in both diretions, is suppressed and they were they manage what others think of them through subtle deceit that avoids direct lying.

To preserve this Power structure whilst avoiding rebelions by the masses their “Democracy” is more Theatre than a system for the masses to control how the country is run, set up from the very start to be “managed” via multiple “backdoors”, such as the Monarchy having real power (the King can bring down Laws, but traditionally does not use that power directly but rather quietly threatens to use it to get concessions), the voting system is First Past The Post to guaranteed that only two parties can ever govern (hence capturing the top politicians in those parties guarantees control of government), the country has an unelected 2nd chamber of Parliament which has seats which are literally inherited and it has no written constitution so it works entirelly on Laws passed in Parliament by a simple majority (and given their FPTP votting system, a mere 30% of the vote is enought to get a simple parliamentary majority) and legal precedent as established by higher courts (and almost 100% of High Court Judges in Britain are people who attended the previously described, expensive “Public” Schools that only the children of the elites attend).

In such a system, control of whatever little Power is left in the hands of the “lower” classes is done in two ways:

• Constant, relentless but subtle Propaganda backed by direct and indirect control of the whole Press by the elites (for example, the board of the supposedly independent BBC is entirelly made up of people who attended “Public” Schools). You can see this in action in how, for example, the BBC will give over 30 times more attention to Israeli deaths than Palestinians deaths or how certain words, such as “brutish” are only ever used for Israeli deaths and various other very negative words are used hundreds of times more often for Israeli deaths than Palestinian deaths - the British Press was Manufacturing Consent long before the American Press started doing it.
• Surveillance to detect and stop any civil society movement that might become an independent Power based on the power of large numbers, together with incredibly ill-defined and of broad interpretation laws, and biased Judges (who as I pointed out, pretty much all hail from the elites as shown by them having attended exclusive expensive schools as children) that are used to, using State Violence, crack down on and stop those movements under the cover of “Justice”. This is how for example Environmentalists who were planning to do a demonstration which would block the main London ring road were given 10 year prision sentences and how the leadership of the Green Party (a small party which is maybe the only left-of-center party over there) has been under surveillance since at least the 80s.

There was a period when the UK wasn’t as bad in this sense following WWII, since in the post-War period millions of the “plebes” had military training and managed to claw a lot of power from the elites to the masses (creating things like the National Health Service and Social Security, and even causing a golden age of the Arts in Britain as working class children such as Michael Cain and David Bowie actually had real opportunities to go into things like Music and Theatre) but that has been progressivelly reversed since Thatcher went into power hence why nowadays elements of the Surveilance state have become so extreme that even the highly managed British Media is starting to discretly question it (though they would never, ever, ever treat it a a structural problem in how Power is approportioned in Britain and will always portray it as a single instance of mismanagement in the Police, which is mainly a middle and working class institution)

Back when the Snowden Revelations came out, the UK turned out to have even more pervasive civil society surveillance than the US, and whist in the US the result of the revelations was some walking back of the surveillance, in the UK they just passed a law to retroactivelly make the whole thing legal, quietly kicked out the editor of the newspaper who brought out the story and the Press never talked about the gigantic surveillance aparatus in the UK ever again.

So I have zero surprise that they’re doing this and this is probably not even the whole tip of the iceberg, but the tip of the tip of the iceberg given the scale of surveillance over there.

Yeah, but at least we knew how to switch consoles.

I bet that most Linux users nowadays don’t event know the CTRL+ALT+Fx shortcuts to switch console.

Can’t say that the old days were really “good” compared to what we had now, but there was definitelly a lot of satisfaction in step by step getting the system to work.

Stories from the “good” old days running Linux on a 386 machine with 4 MB or less of memory aside, in the present day it’s still perfectly normal to run Linux on a much weaker machine as a server - you can just rent a the cheapest VPS you can find (which nowadays will have 128 MB, maybe 256MB, and definitelly only give you a single core) and install it there.

Of course, it won’t be something with X-Windows or Wayland, much less stuff like LibreOffice.

I think the server distribution of Ubunto might fit such a VPS, though there are server-specific Linux distros that will for sure fit and if everything fails TinyCore Linux will fit in a potato.

I current have a server like that using AlmaLinux on a VPS with less than 1GB in memory, which is used only as a Git repository and that machine is overkill for it (it’s the lowest end VPS with enough storage space for a Git repository big enough for the projects I’m working on, so judging by the server management interface and linux meminfo, that machine’s CPU power and memory are in practice far more than needed).

If you’re willing to live with a command line interface, you can run Linux on $50 worth of hardware.

Similar story but I just installed slackware on one of the University PCs (they just had a handful of PCs in the general computer room for the students and nobody actually watched over us) since I did not have a PC yet (only had a ZX Spectrum at the timback then).

Trying to get X-Windows to work in Slackware was interesting, to say the least: back then you had to manually create your own video timings configuration file to get the graphics to work - which means defining the video mode at the very low level, such as configuring the number of video clock cycles between end-of-line-drawing and horizontal-retrace - and fortunatelly I didn’t actually blow up any monitor (which was possible if you did the configuration wrong).

At least we had some access to the Internet (most things were blocked but we had Usenet and e-email and one could use FTPmail gateways to download stuff from remote servers) via Ethernet, so that part was easy.

Anyways, my first reaction looking at the OP’s post was like: yeah, if they’re running X it’s probably a too powerfull machine.

Somebody tried to build a bridge between both groups but they ran into the conundrum that to get to the other side they would first need to get half way to that side, then get half way of the remaining distance, then half way the new remaining distance and so on an infinite number of times, and as the bridge was started from the science communicators side rather than the mathematicians side, they couldn’t figure out a solution and gave up.

I’m shocked you’re missing the rabid anti-Islamism in most of the West - I mean, half of the support in the West for what Israel is doing comes from the whole “Muslims are violent” idea which in turn derives from over a decade of portraying the phenomenon Sunni Islamit Extremism (which is a tiny minority) as a problem of that religion in general (which is hilarious if one is well informed enough to know that for example, Indonesia is the biggest Muslim country in the World).

Not that I’m saying that Islam is any better than the rest, by the way, just pointing out the level of prejudice about it from people who literally know nothing at all about it (learning a bit about it is enough to figure out it’s pretty complex and learning a bit more is enough to figure out it’s as fucked up as most other major religions, just not in the way people think)

Then, of course, there’s the whole looking down on animist religions (most of which are African) as “savagery”, and also a bit so for Hinduism.

In the West maybe only the Eastern ones like Buddism and Shintoism don’t get looked down on, probably because the former was a New Age fad over here and the latter is unknown to most people (and those who do know it, associate it with Japan, which is a country that most people see in a positive light).

The actual religion of Christinanity gets criticized by at most very highly educated agnostic or atheists, whilst for most of the other religions, their practictioners are negativelly viewed by even the most ignorant and ill informed of morons that has no clue whatsoever about the tenets of those religions or the boundary between regional cultural practices and the actual religions.

One wonders just how viable the Ukranian strategy would be to take out LAPD choppers (when landed, of course).

I think you’re confusing Liberals with Leftists.

I can’t remember a single self-proclaimed “Communist” nation that wasn’t anti-Religion.

Tolerance of Religion comes from the Liberal political beliefs side (which many people who are also Leftwingers have) and the modern “Liberals” in places like the US and UK (which are Rightwingers) are the ones who stretch it well beyond tolerance to the point of deeming criticism of some Religions (but not others) as a bad thing, or in other words, activelly supporting certain religions and their values (which as you pointed out, tend to be Corporatist and Fascist).

In summary, Authoritarian Leftwingers tend to be anti-Religion, Liberal Leftwingers tend to tolerate Religion and “Liberal” Rightwingers at the very least defend and sometimes even support certain specific Religions (as far as I can tell, the ones supported by their local money and power elites) but not others.

The only way the sovereign nation of France can ban VPN companies not based in France is to block the IP address of every single entry point of every single VPN company and keep doing so as they add new entry points (I bet the response on the VPN company side would be to start having some kind of dynamic VPN server thing).

And then, as somebody else already pointed out, any technically inclined person can just rent a VPS anywhere in the World and fire up their own VPN server on it.

Reminds me of the running joke I had with a French bloke in a place were I worked in about how Jacquie-Et-Michelle (NSFW) was an unmissable part of French Culture, which none of our other colleagues seem to - or at least admitted to - get.

Nice neoliberal propaganda picture.

The actual Leftwing solution would be to remove the fence.

Also you’re “curiously” bypassing the whole “deeming people victims or oppressors based on the genetics they were born with rather than actually being victimized or victimizing others” part of my argument, which just so happens to be the core of it.

Leftwingers (and Humanists) help people based on their actual need, fight against any unjust treatment (not just for some identities but not others) and force the actual aggressors to compensate the actual victims for what they did to them, not give excuses for the aggressors or ignoring the victims because of their respective identities (unlike what’s so poignantly illustrated by the way the Democrat Party in the US has treated aggressors and victims in the Gaza Genocide).

So even in that propaganda picture of yours were the Ticket-buying Inducing fence stays up, the person on a wheelchair would get help under traditional Leftwing thinking because they have an actual need for it, not because of, say, being old - if they’re old but have no such need (say, a very wealthy person who had a very good life with proper food and living conditions so they did not end up on a wheelchair) they don’t get a wheelchair ramp merely for being old - and similarly a person who is not old (and hence in that metaphor not in an identity deemed in need by Identity Politics) and yet is on a wheelchair also gets a wheelchair ramp under Leftwing thinking because they too have a need, which is all that matters, not whatever identity label has been given to them.

So even in the Capitalist environment where that fence stays up, Leftwingers would help those who need help because they need help, whilst the Identity Politics warriors would be deciding if they would which are identities fro which all members get help and how much help does each Identity deserve all the while ignoring the actual personal need.

Who gains from help not being given based on need and the costs (direct or indirect) being borne by entire identities deemed “aggressors” rather than by the actual oppressors? The wealthy, of course: they get to oppress to their hearts content and the cost for that if the victims are ever compensated is spread over everybody of the “identity” who happens to be the same as them, and if they’re luck and were born with the “right” identity, they’ll even benefit from it even though they have no need at all for that and are actual oppressors rather than victims.

The transformation of Powerfull vs Powerless way of fighting inequality into a miriad of split identitarian fights which claim that people’s victims or aggressor status is wholly defned by the genetics they were born with (rather than, you know, actually being victimized or chosing to victimize others) which naturally ended up with the oppressed fighting amongst themselves as competing “identities” for the crumbs from the Powerful absolutelly is a modern phenomenon.

If you want to see the old style, just look at how traditional Unions still left in positions of relative strenght operate: they don’t fight for different salary and work condition improvements for people with different genders, skin colors or sexual orientation, the fight as all the workers vs the bosses.

Everyone being equal sounds great and all. Show me a left wing country that’s achieved it.

Show me a country were Identity Politics has merelly just reduced Inequality (as defined by the Gini Coeficient) since it became fashionable (so, the last 3 decades).

From what I can see, the countries with the most and loudest Identity Politics are the ones going in the exact opposite direction - higher inequality, collapsing social mobility - like the UK and the US. It’s “curious” that after the powerless fighting as a group against the powerfull were fragmented into different “identities” based on their genetics, each fighting for their “own” group rather than all together, the powerful have managed to capture an ever increasing share of the wealth and the median quality of live has even started going down.

As for your quoting tankies as examples of “left”, well, tankies are fucking authoritarians, so if you’re expecting they’re following the actual principles of being Leftwing rather than mindlessly parroting some Soviet slogans or whatnot and thinking Stalin was a great man, you are seriously deluded or ill informed.

It’s funny that people like you defending Identity Politics have a view of what is Leftwing that is basically the Red Scare. You’re helping prove my point.

Mate, the basic principles of Equality and Fairness of the Leftwing naturally include minorities having the same rights and treatment than everybody else because Equality doesn’t make distinctions on skin color, gender or which kind of people one loves.

The artificial slicing of Equality into “one group at a time ‘Equality’” is exactly the strategy by which the Left was divided, distracted away from the biggest inequality and descrimination of all (that of Wealth) and made to fight each other and be baited by whatever rage-baite du jour served by the far-right populists to their muppets.

Whomever in some Neoliberal Billionaire-Funded Think Tank who came up with that perversion of Equality deserved whatever massive bonus they got for such a brilliant strategy of convincing people that are all being victims of the few, that it’s people like them but of a different ethnicity/gender/sexual-orientation who are their real enemies, not the ones exploiting them at every turn.

You’ve been had and made into a footsoldier in a fabricated war were the working class got divided into “groups” by ethnicity, gender and even sexual-orientation and turned against each other whilst the people doing the most damage and causing the most suffering keep on pillaging to their heart’s contents and, worse, it’s been done via preying on your qualities as a human being who desires a fairer world.

There’s no class war, at least not in a country like the US: for there to be a war the other side would have to be fighting which they’re not, and the billionaires have been into the pillaging stage of their conquest for decades and are just using information control, populism and rage-baiting to make sure the riff-raff remain out of their way.

Things are well beyond the “elites” merely taking an unfairly outsided cut of the growth and well into taking from the rest that which they and their parents accumulated, hence why quality of life for the majority has been going down for a while now and the last two Generations are set to be worse off than their parents.

I’ll give you a hint: billionaires don’t buy newspapers, social media and TV channels with shitty-shit Returns On Investment (if at all profitable) to make money from them - what they’re really buying isn’t the business, it’s an audience for “opinion making”.

Well, I for one did nazi that coming…