(Not that person)

1 File transfers can be done via apps like localsend, pairdrop/snapdrop (selfhosted, I wouldn’t use the public servers), or simply putting files on a shared server, etc.

2 This is impossible to correctly answer until the new phones are actually out. Reason being we don’t know the restrictions (or hopefully not) that Apple will arbitrarily apply to the port. The iPad, for what it’s worth, can easily mount USB C drives and other accessories, so, hopefully Apple continues in that vein of sanity

3 no

4 my iPhone is my actual phone phone and the pixel is wifi only.

I let people play on my lawn just to bring balance to the universe. Unless they don’t clean up their dog’s shit. Then old man mode erupts.

Normie is incredibly common online in general. It’s not just relegated to weird right wing sites either.

I’m in my mid 30s and even I gotta say… you sound a bit like “old man yells at cloud” with this take. Just chill out a little bit. You’re making the rest of us approaching-middle-agers look bad.

And if you’re somehow younger than me then I gotta say… actually, keep it up. Your apparent lack of being terminally-online (oh no, I used a recently coined term…) is definitely healthier than whatever the fuck the rest of us are doing.

Revanced has sponsorblock though and has for a while

I was using Heimdall and it was having some weird corruption(?) issues. Switched to homarr when I saw it the other day and it’s great. It has small icons (for phones) medium (for like tablets) and large (for desktops/laptops) all can be changed independently so you can optimize for mobile and desktop usage. Très bien

Which is annoying tbh.

Would be nice if the smart whatever (see I forgot their app name already while typing) team would… team up somehow with the revanced team and they agree on one name, one app. Having two apps for what is essentially the same OS with a different skin is… silly. Like an app for Apple TV and a different app that does essentially the same thing for iOS.

I see updates from as recent as last week on github?

On that note, if anyone sees this comment or another and wants to try YouTube revanced (or extended) DO NOT JUST BLINDLY GOOGLE AND CLICK THE WEBSITE THAT COMES UP FIRST

I have no idea if that site is owned by a legit dev or not. What I do know is the legit devs directly say on github, where the source code can be reviewed, to NOT download from any other place than github.

Sorry for the PSA but I just don’t want people downloading possibly malicious code from random sites. It’s easy to fall into the blindly search, blindly install hole.

I think it’s just the ease of GUI for people. This isn’t to shit on anyone, btw. A lot of people don’t like dealing with the keys and IPs involved, few as there may be, with setting up wireguard.

If someone else has a compelling difference or reason to use tailscale then I’d be happy to hear it. I tried it once and it worked fine enough. But wireguard works just as fine and takes the same time to setup if you already know what to do. Like wireguard seriously takes 2 minutes.

There’s absolutely no way they force the usage of apps. How would people without smartphones use their websites? From a laptop, on the website? And if they use a non-standard browser like a fork of some weird shit? I know financial places are run by 70 year old boomers but there’s no way they’d try this as it just goes down a rabbit hole of constant IT work. Certainly not every bank anyway. The entire concept of a place even thinking to do this is hurting my brain because it’s some incompetent. You either hire a million CS people and try to fix problems all day or lose all your customers instantly. A large portion anyway. If this is true for the UK then that little island is gone in more ways than I previously knew. Pure incompetence.

Anyway I wasn’t assuming you were dumb, just maybe hadn’t tried it for some reason. It’s like asking if your computer is plugged in and the switch is on first.

You can just use the websites for any bank or credit card, etc. instead of the app. It’s less convenient and usually a way shittier experience, but, that’s the price of not using Google (or Apple, Microsoft, etc.)

This is essentially, ideologically anyway, the same as Eastern European (Ukrainians specifically I recall several years back way before the current Russia shit) diaspora who love to put those “in remembrance of the brave Ukrainians who died fighting evil ideologies.” And then its very clearly supporting the collaborators with the Nazis against the Soviets.

Also the same as the “daughters of the confederacy” type statues. I think most Americans, liberals mostly, but even some of the less completely brainbroken conservatives/republican types recognize the confederacy just stood for maintaining the institution of chattel slavery in the US and thus was dogshit, inhumane, indefensible ideology for that alone. But yet they’ll often defend those statues of like General Lee and Jefferson Davis, etc. There’s something fucking weird about statues. And this is just my opinion, but whatever, it’s like people just want to mythologize and whatever else this made up past or heavily altered vision of the past. Like thinking David and Lee were “generally respectable southern gentlemen who just happened by historical standards now to do abhorrent things.” And it’s just weird, man. Sometimes people are just bad people. If you owned other humans you were bad. Is that so fucking controversial? If you fought for an army willingly that advocated genocide of people based solely on weird racial and religious grounds, I don’t really care WHY you did it: that was fucking bad! And you do not deserve to be remembered as anything other than a person who died for a bad thing. And not individually remembered, no, just a fucking sack of bones and sludge along with your former pieces of shit. If your grandfather was one of these soldiers, yeah, that’s not your fault. But it IS your fault to embrace that person when no one is fucking making you and choose to hold them up on a pedestal. You’re actively tying yourself to some of the worst shit in history and doing so willingly when you could also reject such people and their ideologies. It’s ok to condemn shitty family members. Nazi grandpa, Nazi brother, I don’t care, you aren’t doing some good thing by honoring them especially when they died way way outside your lifetime. You’re just choosing to do so because you like their ideology. And that makes you also a shitty person.

Got off on a rant there, but fuck it.

Ultimately these monuments don’t mean much on their own. However, there is absolutely an undertone, a bad vibe maybe the zoomers call it. Material conditions are worsening in the first world for many reasons. People are looking for “why” and more importantly seeking a solution. As leftist movements become more pronounced in the third world, such as Africa, it makes sense to see a reactionary turn in the first world to further fascist ideology. The mixture of worsening first conditions and the rise of some leftist, socialist, communist, whatever else, governments and such is exactly the perfect climate to push the underlying fascist tendencies of the first world forward and accelerate them. Fear of the other, fear of retribution (a favorite for white liberals), just… fear. Fear from ignorance. It’s not good. These statues, who cares ultimately. But they symbolize a lot and not in the way they intend to. Symbols of untaught history, willful and forced ignorance, fears of the unknown, fears of different people and cultures. I dunno. I’m not proposing any cheat codes to fix anything. Just saying what I’m observing. It’s hard to see anything going the “good way,” but I guess we’ll see…

The entire idea of continents is stupid anyway, really. I understand the desire to name locations on the map for easy identification and reference, that’s fine, but the execution is arbitrary as fuck as far I can tell.

Most of the issue is Asia, Europe and, to a degree, Africa. At some point we just started using Middle East to describe the area vaguely east of Egypt and west of India. Just draw a giant fucking circle south of Russia and between those countries and call it “Middle East.” Ignore all history, ignore cultural differences. They are all one thing now.

I could definitely rant about a bunch of other shit like “Russia? The fuck is going on there?” or “Africa: Continent or country? Don’t ask Americans!” but I really just find the entire idea of continents to be kind of silly. More silly than the usual “nations are dumb” kind of way. Even more arbitrary and ultimately meaningless.

Also, everyone always says Australia is the only country and continent simultaneously. But isn’t New Zealand part of the Australian continent? Or are the Kiwis just special? (Yes, I’m trying to start shit between the Kiwis and the ‘stralians). What about Antarctica. Google? What the fuck is google? No thanks, I’m just typing and guessing shit now. It’s like advanced Wikipedia perverts. They read made up shit and believe it. I just make shit up and ask easily answered questions.

Edit: apparently I posted this last night in a weird half-sleep state. I apologize for nothing. My brain is weird.

I posted this comment in response to someone asking about debating and stuff. (Yeah, I just linked to my own comment.)

It basically sums up my position on the futility and ultimately the damage, for lack of a better word, you end up causing to yourself by engaging too much with people who are operating in bad faith and/or have absolutely no conscious political ideology. That doesn’t mean they don’t have an ideology of course, but you know who I mean, I think. “I’m tired of everything being political!” Types who actually mean “the world should operate in the way it always has which benefits me and I refuse to acknowledge this because it would force me to have to either advocate for change to the current system(s) or accept I’m a shitty person.”

There’s a contradiction of course between absolutely needing these people to become politically engaged in order to actually get anything accomplished and the simultaneous complete powerlessness we each ultimately hold as individuals.

Now that last part of my previous statement rubs a lot of people, in my experience anyway, in a bad way. I’m speaking realistically and objectively. What each of us chooses to do ultimately has little to no effect on the overall system. People who think otherwise… no, you don’t. The truth is change only happens through the changes of a group of individuals. And I know “so if you don’t change then you are the problem” is the knee jerk logic there. Maybe that’s true in some philosophical sense or whatever the fuck. But in reality if you are the 1/100 or more likely 1/1000, 1/10000 individual who is “doing change” guess what happens? You get fucking smashed. The reality is it doesn’t matter how much that 1/1000 screams and throws a tantrum or is nice and logical, none of it matters until a bunch of individuals, probably without a consciousness about them, start doing a thing.

That’s all incredibly abstract, and I apologize, but I’m using the abstract to illustrate reality. Maybe I’m fucking up. My only point here overall though… take it easy on yourself. If capitalism as a system is a giant dam and our goal is smash the dam until it breaks its important to remember a few things. You are just one person, working either alone or within a rather insignificant group. You pecking at the Hoover Dam of capitalism definitely is doing something, but expecting onlookers who love this hypothetical dam to just let you do it would be silly. And even if left alone, the progress you make will be tiny, essentially zero in the grand scheme. It’s probably also useful to remember that capitalism, like a dam, must be, and is, maintained by those who benefit from it otherwise nature or something else will destroy before long. What I’m saying is, capitalism is a doomed system in a long enough timeline. You are simply a possible accelerant of its destruction. (This all sounds negative with dam blowing up but whatever, make it positive somehow. Like that dam being freed in LoTR around wizard guy’s tower.)

I don’t know. This is just how I approach this stuff after a long time languishing in my own mind. There’s really little I can do as an individual, but what little I can do is still worth it in the long run. Just don’t expect to ever see results of the work you do. Do it because it gives you purpose and because you know that you are on the right side of things and you are moving pieces of sand that will lead to a better world someday.

A fresh reading of Capital (book plug time?) helped me too. I feel like I, we, build so many resentments for individuals and even towards ourselves that might be justifiable in a lot of ways but also don’t serve positive change. Kind of removing myself from the situation, like the soul of a person floating above his old body and just examining things, allowed me to see things in a way that made things more tolerable. Actually this sounds like I’m advocating for dissociation lol. Maybe I am? But controlled levels of it. You still gotta live in the world.

No shit.

Anyone who objectively looks at the Nazis and the US back to its founding until today will see many similarities… mostly because the Nazis just ripped off the US. The US had already completed (by the early 1900s) its expansion westward and genocide of the indigenous inhabitants along the way. Germany saw that and liked what it saw and copy pasted to the German eastern front. Their idea of “Lebensraum” was essentially the same as the (white) American dream of the open frontier. It required violent expansion supported by the government and the extermination of all the non-whites along the way. And obviously as far as Nazi laws go they just straight ripped Jim Crow laws written to discriminate against black Americans to the Nuremberg laws to discriminate against Jewish Germans.

You seem to think minds are being changed in twitter comment sections or even on here. I think we should all know by now that’s not the case.

Besides that, anecdotally of course but whatever, before I started taking Marxism seriously and reading more I got yelled at by I can’t even estimate how many people who were a mixture of MLs, anarkiddies, whatever else. Some clown being mean to me, justified or not, had exactly zero impact on my willingness to learn more when the time came. If I’m being honest, my upbringing in the heart of capitalism had already put blinders on to Marxist ideas. They were simply wrong and anyone who believed in them was crazy/evil/stupid, take your pick. It’s not like some guy calling me a lib could lower the bar of consideration below zero, if that makes sense.

Anyway, the only way people are reliably going to come to embrace Marxist critiques of capitalism is if they find it when in a state of mind where they’re already receptive to it. If their material conditions are shit or becoming shit they’re going to be desperately seeking out the reason… I mean I wish I could say we all could help guide these desperate people to the light, but I just do not think that’s true. Sure, post an explanation when something happens that kind of boggles liberals’ brains. Maybe even post when the hogs are especially riled up over something. But overall it’s not going to penetrate deep enough.

Which of course goes to my last point which ties to your first thing. There isn’t just poor discussion from those of us who consider ourselves to be MLs and live in the imperial core… there is NO discussion because there is no real significant amount of us. I don’t think I’d even say 1% of the US have read and understand Capital. Or any other writings for that matter. It’s probably an insanely small amount. Which IS a problem because if you don’t have people who understand the ideology to teach those who won’t go learn on their own (not online, but in settings such as union meetings which is one of the reasons I do advocate for unionization even in the imperial core) then how the hell will you ever have a revolution much less one favorable to principles we’d like to see? You don’t, basically.

On the hand, and this gets a bit doomer/pessimistic so brace yourself, there will no socialist revolution within the imperial core. Not likely in our lifetimes. The way things are, and the way ideologies work, even if material conditions continue to plummet, and who the hell would expect otherwise?, people will become more and more radicalized… towards fascism. I wish it weren’t true, but the US state has all but assured it will happen either on purpose or by completely moronic and evil policies. Thry wiped out any even slightly leftist movements in the country repeatedly and barely or never touched the right wing. Add to that that fascism has no like real driving ideology or core principles. It can be molded to fit the individual racism and hatred of any given person or group. Socialism, done correctly, does require a base level of acceptance of certain principles. A politically uneducated mass of people with falling material conditions… what else is there to expect?

I know this probably comes off as inconsistent or schizophrenic. It does in my mind too. We’re simultaneously faced with the reality that we probably can’t really affect anything, but we must do something. So what do you do? Post nice essays on Twitter? I dunno, maybe. I’d say just about the only really consequential thing to be done is what I said earlier. Try to form or join a union for a profession you work in and find those workers who seem to share your mindset and see where they are in their political educational journey. Maybe you journey together further, I dunno. You could probably do this in other ways too just in the real life local community. The key though to this entire thing is the people you seek to educate in order to “convert” them have to trust you and not just like some sociopath shit where you manipulate them into it. But real, actual trust that you build through genuinely discussing things, helping people, whatever. Sounds like a lot of work. I know. It is. Way more than posting nicely online, for sure. But if you want to be doing something, short of going off and John Browning some shit or offing yourself (can’t recommend either of these), I don’t really know what else there is to be done. We’re just in a weird wait and see period of history right now it appears. The decline of the US and the western EU could take another century, who knows. I dunno. I’d just spend less time worrying about random libbed up, probably a Nazi dude on reddit being butthurt and more time worrying about focusing your power and energy where it can affect change and accepting that your power to do anything is damn near zero. Some people call that being a doomer. I’d call it being realistic.

Of course this is only one man’s opinion…

I’d say you probably shouldn’t try to counter them. Not often anyway. It’s mentally taxing and ultimately produces basically zero fruit. People grow up their entire lives, their nice comfy lives btw, being told “China bad! US good!” and although you obviously can’t just swap that moronic narrative and make it true… it’s much closer to the truth. They already believe insane bullshit, basically. Can you argue a fairly devout religious person down from their religion of choice? Of course not.

Leaving aside the religious stuff, they have to find a reason to change their minds within themselves. Everyone in “the west” who was born and raised within its culture by the average normie-brained neoliberals that have been dominant for the last 40ish years and ended up on this website is way outside of the norm. People like to say “I watched/read/heard X and it changed me!” No, it didn’t. You changed because things around you didn’t add up. You looked into it. You probably found a bunch of shit that you thought was insane conspiracy (not theories, but actual conspiracies). Maybe some is/was but a lot of the shit if we’re talking about reading into the history of western nations especially the US is true. The worst shit did happen. And it’s hard to come to grips, properly, with the reality that you are not living in the good nation. That China isn’t full of misguided fools, that the USSR often held a much higher moral ground on basically every discussion of everything… that much of what we were told about them is just straight up lies or exaggerated for propagandistic effect.

I think accepting China isn’t the absolute demonic evil of the world is probably damn near the last thing for westerners to break out of. Well, besides the monkey-brain shit which might be impossible to break for many people cough anarchists cough (reactionary tendencies towards individualism comes to mind).

If you throw out facts of how the US is objectively, absolutely no debate, insanely worse for the world including many of its own citizens you’re just gonna get CNN talking points, state dept lies, links to horribly written, poorly sourced bullshit about the billions of Muslims that China apparently liquidated last month. Only slight exaggeration. They don’t want to learn or hear the truth. They literally don’t care. It will take either time and circumstances unique to them to change their minds (after an academic journey of some sort, as all of us had to do) or… force. No one can do the first method and we obviously lack the power to do the second (for now…).

So, sure, post some links, point out the easiest most obvious hypocrisy (like people shitting over “China spying” meanwhile the NSA has exabytes of fucking data on the exact dimensions of your cock and asshole) but I wouldn’t engage too much. I try to limit myself to about once a day, and I don’t read the hog replies because what’s the point of the mental stress this would cause me?*

*I edited the last sentence from ending with “mental disease” to the above ending to clarify I did not mean that the senders of said annoying messages, liberals basically, are suffering from “liberal brain disease” but rather they are giving me brain disease by which I meant stress, annoyance, etc. It was a self-attack of sorts (I can’t handle too much uneducated/bad faith pushback), but I recognize the wording was poor. Hopefully this is better. Also as an excuse: I wrote this, and all of my comments basically, either on the shitter or in this case sitting on my bench press bench procrastinating from lifting.

I appreciate the recommendation, but I’ll probably keep slogging on the downvotes as badges of honor. After so many years of pissing off swarms of redditors, well, time to do some more I guess. So far I have enjoyed the times I’ve seen people handwringing over the .ml domain (when they learn it can mean more than the country it’s meant for lol) and how they’re like “well yeah spez sucks, BUT ARE WE GONNA GO TO A TANKIE SITE!?” I love it.

Mostly just annoying. Kinda wish the site didn’t have downvotes or maybe even upvotes. Specifically downvotes though are never used to indicate “This info is factually wrong” or “This is a racist comment.” I mean, they might also be, but the primary usage despite any intention years ago is a cathartic “fuck you!” to the person you’re downvoting. It’s used so much for that purpose that I basically mentally swap downvotes for upvotes when it’s a topic that will anger libs. Their disapproval just shows me I probably said something correct (but also further shows the worthlessness of the downvote button). Probably the “like” button is about the only useful such device to indicate engagement but limit butthurt kneejerk downvotes.

And before anyone thinks I’m making this like my life priority: I’m really not. I don’t care that much. It’s just one of those things which seems outdated and should go away but probably never will because the anticipated asshurt is so high. I absolutely know reddit soys, chud or libs, would lose their minds crying over it if it happened (see the time YouTube removed their dislike button- people fucking still try to code it back in lol).

Welp, back to downvoting all the liberal comments :)

This has 9 downvotes from those pieces of shit LMAO

Is there a way to stay federated so they have to read our posts sometimes but they can’t downvote? They can comment, then we can mock them, but silently, anonymously downvoting is too cowardly to abide.

Someone rate this drama on a “worth learning about” scale from 1-10. 1 being mentally filter all further references and 10 being read a 3 volume analysis on the history and full critique of this goat-person person… goat…?