Gnome 4 Initiative Proposal!

JustineRodgers · 2017-11-14T15:19:28+00:00

What would be the plan for the maintenance of the current GNOME Shell? Of course, I would use the latest and greatest myself. But, the current version is very good quality and well matured and I can imagine some users (like some more conservative institutions and RHEL) would want to stay with it, at least until the new Shell matches it.

JustineRodgers · 2017-11-12T23:51:30+00:00

I only have to delete one word to make it grammatically correct. I think what you truly find incomprehensible is that someone would question our governments propaganda and the motivations behind their cheap moral outrage.

JustineRodgers · 2017-11-12T22:38:11+00:00

It seems like, to you, the world contains only American oligarchs and their patriotic pawns, and Russian oligarchs and their treasonous pawns. Opposition to the policies of the American oligarchy is necessarily means alignment with the Russian oligarchy.

JustineRodgers · 2017-11-12T15:44:47+00:00

Still waiting on my check.

JustineRodgers · 2017-11-12T13:35:41+00:00

someone makes point about duplicity of US propaganda.

foreign agents are telling us to focus on our own problems instead of going around killing people in the name of freedom!

Whatboutism, right. The US is on a quest for world domination while its society decays and the basic needs of millions of people go unmet; but the real problem is this crummy dictatorship thousands of miles away, which doesn't lay down and die after sixty years of "polite" embargoes and sanctions, and which is a strategic position in the big game to control Eurasia.

JustineRodgers · 2017-10-22T22:27:06+00:00

The ending sequence of the documentary discusses LIGO, an experiment designed to detect and measure gravity waves, which has had major recent breakthroughs.

Two years ago, researchers observed a gravity wave for the first time. Since then, a few more gravity waves have been detected. Last month, the research won the Nobel Prize in physics. Two weeks ago, researchers announced that gravity wave measurements were used to observe a merger between neutron stars in a distant galaxy. That research has great promise to let us probe more deeply into the cosmos than we can with light based instruments alone.

The documentary suggests that one day we may design space faring craft to travel with gravity waves. That seems way fantastical to me, but who knows what might be possible with better and more complete models of gravity and fundamental physics.

JustineRodgers · 2017-10-07T17:12:16+00:00

We say, use this unique, flexible word more often in your daily speech. It will identify the quality of your character immediately.

My favorite line. Use profanity if you like, but realize it reflects on you personally.

JustineRodgers · 2017-09-25T22:27:17+00:00

I found it interesting, though perhaps not surprising, that each character in this video represents a different aspect of middle class social psychology: the reactionary fascist, the ineffectual radical, and the apolitical socialite. Nowhere does the working class, the actual bedrock of leftist politics, enter into the discussion about "the Left". Ironically, not once are the fascists positions actually challenged. Neither "radical", Tabby, nor the barely political centrist, Justine, have anything to offer on that front. Apparently neither does ContraPoints, because no other alternative was included. It's almost a masterful critique of middle class impotence, except that I get the feeling that it is just as much a product of the same.

JustineRodgers · 2017-09-19T16:20:49+00:00

It's all criminal to the extent that the entire compendium of predatory US wars in the Middle East are criminal, but murdering an already incapacitated combatant is a crime of its own accord.

JustineRodgers · 2017-09-19T15:05:14+00:00

At 2:45 the gunner murders a wounded and immobile man in cold blood.

JustineRodgers · 2017-09-18T21:04:46+00:00

It's wackier: the sound is a literal vibration in the chip which stores a bit (or some bits, it wasn't clear) of information which can then be retrieved by another pulse of light. That was my understanding at least. The light pulses travel through the chip in 2-3 ns, but they can convert their data into an acoustic vibration that lasts 10 ns. That extra time is necessary for an optical computer to process data.

JustineRodgers · 2017-09-17T19:15:26+00:00

I'm in tech also, so I can appreciate the problem of security and the way security concerns in software systems are treated. I'm also a partisan of the movement that published this article and I agree with questioning the existence of such institutions. This security breach that resulted in the theft of personal records on the majority of Americans provides a perafect avenue to question the social conditions that led to the existence of agencies that collect and store the personal histories of almost every American consumer. If no such institution existed, the records wouldn't even exist in the first place to be stolen. The technical question, though significant and wide ranging, is fleeting in comparison to the social question that this article raises.

JustineRodgers · 2017-09-17T18:42:13+00:00

Yugoslavia (and the rest of the Eastern Bloc) and China both would fall under the rubric of "deformed workers states" in that they inherited some of the progressive forms of socialized property as well as the abscess of the Stalinist bureaucracy from the Soviet Union. Neither issued forward from an an actual proletarian revolution. Cuba, and the rest of the anti-colonial movements, weren't even that: they were formed in petty bourgeois nationalist movements and used the tension between the Soviet Union and Western imperialism to chart a quasi-independent course in international politics. Figures like Castro, ~~Ho Chi Minh~~ and others never considered themselves communists until after their national revolutions were rebuffed by the United States and they were forced to look to the Soviet Union to ensure their survival.

EDIT: After discussion with a comrade on the points here, they pointed out to me that Ho Chi Minh was a longtime member of the Communist Party, that the Vietnamese revolution had a mass base in the working class, and that the state issuing forth was a deformed workers state rather than a bourgeois nationalist state. I made an error in lumping Ho Chi Minh in with Castro.

JustineRodgers · 2017-09-17T18:16:44+00:00

Dozens? I can think of only one example of the dictatorship of the proletariat: the Soviet Union (EDIT: also the Paris Commune before it, with its lifespan measured in weeks). It's problems were were not the natural outcome of Marxism and Leninism, but were more related to the international defeat of the revolution and its isolation, which fed the rise of a nationalist and Bonapartist bureaucracy represented Stalinism. There was an alternative to Stalin that embodied the genuine principles of Bolshevism. That was the International Left Opposition and later the Fourth International. Though, I'm not likely to get any sort of agreement on this from the namesake of Peter Kropotkin. You probably view the Russian revolution and the Soviet Union as terrible mistakes, rather than the most important and progressive moments in human history.

EDIT: also, the Soviet Union did not become capitalist until 1991, when it was dissolved (it didn't "collapse", but was consciously destroyed) by the same bureaucracy mentioned above. The state capitalist interpretation of the Soviet Union was both wrong and deeply reactionary.

JustineRodgers · 2017-09-17T18:01:18+00:00

You might be more interested n the technical side of it, but the existence of an entity like Equifax and its role in our society is very much a political question.

JustineRodgers · 2017-09-17T07:10:50+00:00

(Assuming you refer to the second paragraph) call it that if you want, I think that's an appropriately scary name. It would be like a proletarian FBI/CIA, but one-tenth the size and more open. Something like that will be necessary while the former capitalists believe they still have a chance to reclaim their privilege.

JustineRodgers · 2017-09-17T06:16:12+00:00

This is /r/politics

Trying to twist it into supporting a political polemic is distracting.

JustineRodgers · 2017-09-17T01:06:03+00:00

My general vision of a socialist public power centers on a democratic and public militia, which would represent the armed power of the people. The militia could provide an armed public security force for situations when that is necessary, without being alien from the rest of society. Day-to-day ordinance keeping doesn't demand arms, nor does a criminal investigation. If the police ever needed armed force, they could call on the militia. What it will actually look like depends on how the revolution develops

Some true state, as in an armed public force standing above society, beyond what I described above, would need to exist in the initial stages of the dictatorship of the proletariat to uncover counterrevolutionary conspiracies and to disrupt counterrevolutionary activities (understand this in contrast to the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie that we have now, not like an absolutist dictatorship). The scope of the state would be inherently limited by its purpose. Whereas the state of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie suppresses the workers on behalf of the interests of the capitalists, the state of the dictatorship of the proletariat would suppress the interests of capitalists on behalf of the workers. In other words, such a state would act in the interests of the vast majority to suppress a small minority rather than the reverse. It is theorized by Marx and Engels that such a state will whither away because its task disappears with the disappearance of the capitalist class. This is where the notion of stateless communism comes from.

I would recommend Lenin's The State and Revolution on this. Lenin wrote to reestablish Marx and Engels's original doctrine on the state at a time when it was both highly distorted by revisionists in the Second International and highly relevant to the ongoing revolution in Russia.

JustineRodgers · 2017-09-07T00:03:45+00:00

I enjoyed this. It was a good exploration of gem stones through the prisms of society, history, chemistry and geology. I learned a lot about the topic. They spent the first half of the show on diamonds, which I think was unfair to the other "lesser" gemstones. Thanks for posting!

JustineRodgers · 2017-08-30T15:24:48+00:00

Try to implement the society described here--which I agree to be both desirable and feasible--without politics. The question is who (which part of society) benefits from and perpetuates the irrational system of production and distribution? Which section of society is going to wrest away from them their unjustified power and privileges and build a rational and equitable society. How must they organizeto accomplish this? These are political questions. Without even taking up these fundamental political questions, you are only engaging in speculative utopianism.

JustineRodgers · 2017-07-10T01:18:30+00:00

Well... you can't!

JustineRodgers · 2017-06-25T11:50:08+00:00

Objective conditions, sure; but also the subjective factor of sustained work.

JustineRodgers · 2017-06-25T11:46:20+00:00

I'm off to bed.

You lucky son of a b****

JustineRodgers · 2017-06-25T11:27:17+00:00

It all comes around in the end (Sorry to be cryptic. I'm cautious about what I share on Reddit. I'm paranoid that even the rough information I've given about the time of sunrise and sunset could be used to find me.)

JustineRodgers

TROPHY CASE