• 3 Posts
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Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: April 7th, 2025

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  • Alternative OSes for phones use the same carriers as everyone else. You can choose to use your phone on wifi only, without a carrier, to avoid using a carrier. You can also choose to use a VPN to make your data inaccessible to the carrier (although they’d be able to tell what cell towers you connect to).

    In order to switch over, check the compatibility information for each of the OSes you’re looking at. If you don’t have a compatible phone, you’ll need to get one. Then you follow the install instructions for the chosen OS. GrapheneOS was very easy to install for me – I switched to it when my old phone broke.



  • Don’t pick a whole distro based on the UI. The distro choice is about stability vs bleeding edge packages, package manager, minimal/maximal installs, security hardening vs convenience, use or avoidance of particular systems (e.g. systemd), and things like that.

    The UI will come from your choice of desktop environment, window manager, compositor, etc. Those can be installed on most distros. You can also look at dotfiles for more theming. Ofc it’s silly to install a different UI on a particular flavor/version/spin of a distro built for a given desktop environment (like Kubuntu), though it’s still possible.

    I’m enjoying Niri rn. It’s a scrolling & tiling window manager. I have it running on opensuse.




  • They’re loud, they kick up dust, and they happen at intermittent times based on when the neighbors do it. they also use fossil fuels. Loud mowers are annoying, too! If you – heaven forbid – want to keep your windows open and feel a breeze, you’re going to get all of that noise and maybe even some of the dust.

    I understand that we have to clear sidewalks and driveways so that accidents don’t happen. People usually don’t have so much sidewalk + driveway that a broom or something wouldn’t do that job quickly. But then we have to blow the leaves off the lawn, too? I know that your HOA will kill you if you don’t, but doesn’t it seem silly to remove the leaves from a lawn, then buy and put down commercial fertilizer, when the leaves would have biodegraded into new topsoil? To spend so much time watering a lawn to keep it alive when the leaves would have shielded it from the sun? Why are we spending so much time, money, water, and effort to maintain sterile grass lawns? We can have beautiful outdoors spaces without being slaves to an HOA enforcing what plants we grow.

    I understand that it’s really the HOAs these days that are a big part of the problem. A good number of people in my HOA-less neighborhood have diverse plants in front of their homes. They look fantastic, they seem to take way less maintenance (I never see them mowing, watering, weeding, fertilizing, etc), and ofc they’re much better for the environment.





  • It’s also the publics job to be informed.

    We’d get an informed public if people had enough time, material security, and agency to get involved in politics.

    Even if it was identical under harris. It was still better under biden. He wasn’t actively cheering the genocide on etc. And at least gave some appearance of trying to support relief and peace.

    This is infuriating. The appearance of trying to support relief and peace? These people’s families are dying. The US is the number one funder and arms dealer to Israel. The few, milquetoast statements Biden/Harris made were only political cover to the overwhelming support for the genocide that the US provided. Look, you don’t have to personally care about this issue beyond appearances if you want, but it is a central issue to voters in a particularly politically-important location.

    That you feel no responsibility or remorse. For helping to Usher fascism in. [etc]

    Don’t make assumptions: I was not an activist in Michigan. I didn’t tell anyone not to vote for Biden/Harris. I voted for them, even in a place where it doesn’t matter. I’m just a stranger on the internet who is tired of Democrats paying more attention to the right than to, well, even the center, let alone the left. They know that there is no alternative vote for us, so they keep tacking right to try and pick off a few so-called “swing” voters. But, doing that demobilizes their base! You need to get people excited to vote, volunteer, donate, and campaign. It’s basic electoral strategy. They refuse to learn that lesson and so they lose to someone who has a smaller, but rabid base.

    Also, why are we focusing on only the Palestinian voters in Michigan as the ones who lost the election when plenty of other voters there and other swing districts also didn’t vote Biden/Harris? Because they’re “supposed to” vote dem? Assumptions like that are part of why the democratic party loses elections to Trump. They made a decision to cater more to pro-Israel voters than voters who wanted to at least halt the genocide, it was an important strategic misstep. Zooming out, why aren’t dems able to contest more districts? There’s plenty of blame to go around.

    Finally, if you think this one thing is what ushered fascism in, you haven’t been paying attention to the last 30 years of politics. Trump’s election is not an aberration, it’s an expression of a large and growing right-wing and fascist movement in the US.






  • The article itself, several paragraphs down, admits you can’t attribute trump’s win to Palestine activists:

    "It’s hard to determine just how much of an impact efforts like Uncommitted or Abandon Harris had in the election results. After all, exit polls showed that voters were motivated more by the economy than by foreign policy. But in battleground states with large Arab-American populations, like Michigan, data suggests that the Israel-Hamas conflict turned people away from Harris. In Dearborn, the country’s largest Arab-majority city, election data showed that Trump won 42 percent of the vote while Harris received 36 percent—significantly less than the 69 percent that Biden earned in 2020.

    But the activists note that it wasn’t just Dearborn and other Muslim-American enclaves that moved toward Republicans in 2024—nearly every district in the country moved to the right as well."






  • I view the two parties as a hammer (republicans) and an anvil (democrats). The hammer actively makes life worse and the anvil is there to support the shape that the US has been hammered into. For one example, look at how the democrats have moved right on immigration and deportation, following the republican lead, over the last several administrations. Don’t vote for the hammer, sure, but the anvil sure as hell isn’t gonna change things back to how they were.