You really had me until you claimed workers are in charge of the DPRK. it looks like a hereditary monarchy to me.

For people who are beginners when it comes to computers in general, yeah. But for people who are new to GNU/Linux but experienced with CS/math, it’ll really not be that hard to run archinstall and configure from there. It’s not that different than many other distros, which also have an installer and then post-install configuration to contend with. I’d just argue arch has newer packages and better documentation which some beginners (in the sense they’re coming from macOS/Windows but know how basic software concepts) might appreciate.

I don’t think archinstall is drowning sysadmins/programmers/CS students. What it will do is teach them to swim.

To be clear, I don’t recommend it. But it was once favored over KVM for a variety of applications and it works in a fundamentally different way. I’m just surprised how quickly it’s lost favor among techies.

I looked into it, and you make a good point.

The CFC is commanded by a four-star U.S. Army general, with a four-star ROK Army general as deputy commander. This pattern exists throughout the CFC command structure: if the chief of a staff section is Korean, the deputy is American and vice versa.

I’m not saying the US is a perfect democracy. I’m stating that they’re relatively more democratic. I don’t think the US is a democracy. But I do think that it’s relatively less democratic than the ROK, which appears to be headed vaguely in the direction of democracy, unlike the US or the DPRK. But we’ll have to wait and find out as to whether they actually make it there. Good point about the concentration of economic power. Which obviously means political power as well. But their right-wing aspiring dictator seems more likely to be held accountable for his crimes than the US’s. And maybe that says something about their relative degrees of democracy.

Good point, honestly. But, if worst comes to worse, I expect continental Europe to stand with other continental Europeans and their interests before it stands with the likes of the US and UK.

When did Xi Hinping get rid of term limits? 2018.

Yes, Russia also did this. And it’s possible that the US will do this. And the US does support some monarchies. But that doesn’t mean that we should steal-man one regime and straw-man another. Instead, we should be critical of all authoritarian governments. The enemy of your enemy is not your friend.

When did ethnic cleansing start in Xinjiang, China? 2014.

Does the US support ethnic cleansing in Israel? Yes. Is the ethnic cleansing in Israel worse? Quite arguably, it’s much worse. Is the US doing it externally and China internally? Yeah, but so what? The Biden/Trump can’t say “well other countries have done ethnic cleansing in the past” to normalize theirs. Likewise, Xi can’t say that what’s happening to Muslims in China is justified because the US also has internal racism. That would be whataboutism. We should acknowledge all atrocities without insisting on comparing them and only condemning the worst while excusing all lesser forms of discrimination.

Is China the biggest polluter? Yes.

Yes, the US is a larger polluter per-capita. But China is hardly the world’s role model for sustainability. I think Cuba might be an example of a country with a fairly good lifestyle and state of development relative their per-capita environmental footprint (although they have other problems).

I’m so tired of the oversimplified thinking you people display. Authoritarianism is wrong, red or blue, Black or White, right or “left” (I don’t think authoritarianism in peacetime can be justified by any true leftist).

Oh, and Does China censor LGBT? Sometimes; it depends.

And before you say, “The US does these things, too, but worse,” reach for a glass of nuance. The US does some things better and others worse. We arguably have greater freedom of expression/speech and more turnover in leadership. Not to say we are totally free and democratic. Just that China seems to be farther from freedom and democracy with respect to censorship and elections.

it’s a good beginner distro because getting thrown into deep water is how one learns to swim. archinstall makes it easy enough to install. some configuration may be needed, but that’s the point of Arch as a learning process! still, i’d recommend Fedora, Tumbleweed, or even Debian (it’s out of date but some people prefer UIs that don’t change very often and it still offers 32-bit for your grandpa and his old laptop that’s now too slow for Windows 10/11) over Arch.

Arch is good for beginner sysadmins/programmers/CS students. Fedora and Tumbleweed for enthusiasts who want the latest software but aren’t trying to be that hardcore. Debian for people who have old laptops and only want to learn GNOME/XFCE once and never have to re-learn it with every update.

Gentoo is a good example of a distro that’s absolutely not for beginners. Arch, on the other hand, really isn’t all that bad.

It’s not censorship; it’s content moderation — how hard is it to not make racist jokes on an ostensibly ML forum‽

I be zipping up the directory and uploading my save files to the internet

Surprised no one is saying Xen

The EU should stand united against the US right now. Not because it’s okay for them to own Greenland, but because the people of Greenland are more threatened by the US right now and the EU may be the only effective deterrence from an invasion.

Recognizing the ROK’s past dictatorship doesn’t mean pretending they aren’t more democratic than the US. It isn’t black-and-white.

Edit: this isn’t about the article itself so much as an idea it gave me. Companies are refusing quotes for legal, not political, reasons. But they should be refusing for political reasons, something those of us in the US must start doing ourselves.

I’m obviously not happy it came to this. But, with the US being a genocidal, neofascist oligarchy, it’s entirely necessary. This is real, we are the resistance, and we need to start acting like it before we get disappeared. It is absolutely the duty of every country that values equality, liberty, and solidarity to implement a total blockade on the United States and seek maximum sanctions until the genocide in Gaza ends, until threats of US expansionism end, and until the people reject neofascism, whether in the midterms, in a coup, or in a revolution.

For those living in the US and allied countries, it is our moral imperative to sabotage and destroy all machinery in the US that is being used or soon will be used by fascists. Just be careful who you target and be sure you know why you’re targeting them. (Vandaling small Black businesses accomplished nothing. Targeting ICE will make you a hero.) Make evidence-based vandalism and sabotage your playbook to buy time for immigrants, trans people, Muslims, and Jews in your community by slowing the machinery of ethnic cleansing before it’s too late. (I worry it may already be too late.) See:

Red Flag Alert for Genocide - United States

What the US is doing is based in an ideology of manifest destiny, liebensraum, expansionism, imperialism, and colonialism. See:

P.S. If you do anything, don’t tell me. Anyone can be a fed or a militant neofascist infiltrator.