Lettuce eat lettuce

Always eat your greens!

  • 19 Posts
  • 832 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 12th, 2023

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  • Here’s a super short summary on those points:

    1. Anarchism is about horizontal power structures, mutuality, and community.
    • Horizontal power rejects the idea that a small number of people with very large amounts of power have a right/duty to rule over a much larger group of people. Systems of power, (meaning groups of people and organizations that have influence), should be distributed widely, not concentrated or centralized.
    • Mutuality means that the relationships that societies form with each other, both internally and externally, ought to be roughly equal. There are no relationships that fundamentally privilege one person or group above another. The rules apply equally to everybody.
    • Community means that the primary consideration to any decision or action is how it affects the group first and foremost. For instance, instead of asking whether or not a certain action would generate profit, or make some specific person happier, the community involved as a whole should get to consider how said action would affect all of them.
    1. There are many examples of anarchistic societies both past and present. The Amish, Buddhist monasteries, Anabaptist communities, the Rojava autonomous region in Syria, the Zapatistas in Mexico. While none of these groups 100% adhere to fully anarchist principles, they share many of the same principles and structures. Most people wonder how a society could function with no central leadership or power. While there are many things that would have to change greatly to make that work, there isn’t anything about anarchism that inherently makes it impossible. Modern open source projects like the Fediverse we are on right now, operate in a pseudo-anarchistic way.
    2. There are many ways to argue against Statism and centralized power structures, what you might find compelling will depend largely on your other ethical and moral commitments. But I will say for me, I never heard any arguments that could justify the power of the state. All arguments that seemed to justify state power ultimately could be flipped to argue for other things that obviously are bad, like mob rule. I also found it incredibly interesting that when pressed, most people actually agreed with me that there was no convincing justification for state monopoly on power, but they still rejected anarchism for pragmatic reasons. They didn’t think modern societies could operated like that effectively.

    Some of the other commenters here have linked good resources, For me, understanding two key things caused me to move to my political views:

    • Capitalism is inherently self-defeating and unethical, which moved me to Socialism.
    • The state monopoly on power is unjustifiable, which moved me to Anarchism. The combination of those two conclusions firmly places me in the Anarcho-Socialist camp of political philosophy. The details of how that should look and operate on a practical level are still something I discuss and debate with folks, but we all agree on the general principles.



  • Noob friendly? Linux Mint. It’s not the prettiest, but it looks nice enough, especially if you tweak the themes a little, which is super easy.

    It’s a fantastic all-around distro, and if you use the default Cinnamon desktop environment, it’s rock stable and super easy to navigate.

    It’s what I use on all my personal laptops and also what I set my parents up with when I switched them from Windows to Linux.






  • A health company where they have that poor of security practices? Get the hell out ASAP! When they get ransomware, (and they will,) you do NOT want to be on the hook for trying to recover their systems.

    Trust me, I had to help recover from a ransomware attack at a small company a while back, it hit early in the morning, I got there a little before 8am once I got the call.

    22 hours later, we had only just finished wiping and re-imaging every computer, let alone getting all the software reinstalled, configured, tested, backups re-synced, etc. It took weeks to get everything fully recovered, and that was with a team of half a dozen people.

    In the meantime, CYA hardcore. Document all security issues you can find in email and make sure whoever is in charge is aware and is on the email chain. There literally could be legal charges brought up if it’s involving private health information.



  • I worked for a classic MSP a while back, barely lasted 3 months. Such a toxic environment, tons of pressure to spread yourself thinner and thinner.

    It was one of those places where you were expected to be there an hour early, stay an hour late, and work through your lunch.

    Even though that’s illegal, it was never explicit, just one of those, wink wink type things. But the workload was always so heavy, you couldn’t stay on top of everything unless you were working 50+ hours a week.

    And of course, all salary, no overtime or double time for weekend work.

    I do internal IT now, much better. Trying to get my own one-person shop going to eventually be fully self-employed. Actually, it would be really cool to become a worker-owned co-op, but that’s still a faint dream.