The name is important because of the parallels between slavery and modern day prisons.
At minimum, the movement is about completely rethinking our approach to dealing with crime. If we “only” reduce the prison population to 5% or 1% of its current count in the process, we won’t have abolished all prisons, but we will have succeeded in abolishing many parts of the current criminal justice system.
If anyone’s operating in bad faith, it’s you. Are you drunk? You’re being an intentionally obtuse pedant and a liar (by your own definition). Try replying once you’ve sobered up, clown. Once you reread and realize how much of a dick you were, I’m sure you’ll apologize - unless I’m right about you being too much of a coward to admit when you’re wrong about something.
You could try reading the rest of my comment first.
Before I reply to your comment, I’d like to share this link. It didn’t change any of my existing understanding because Linus’s comment already made it clear that this was out of their hands, but maybe it’ll help clarify something for you.
I realize now that this comment on that post was made before this one (“What’s free about delisting maintainers based on their country of residence?”) by the same person. It’s disingenuous for someone to act like this is about “country of residence” when they already engaged with a post clarifying that it’s because of sanctions against specific companies.
that you unironically think asset means property
I unironically think that because it does mean that:
- assets plural
a. the property of a deceased person subject by law to the payment of his or her debts and legacies
b. the entire property of a person, association, corporation, or estate applicable or subject to the payment of debts
a. an item of value owned
b. assets plural the items on a balance sheet showing the book value of property owned
When I do a search for “state asset,” the results I get are all related to property, resources, etc., things that belong to and can be exploited by the state - for example https://www.epa.gov/dwcapacity/state-asset-management-initiatives-documents
Searching for “asset” specifically I see a tertiary definition reading “A spy working in his or her own country and controlled by the enemy” as well as the wikipedia definition, but that still means “spy,” not “paid lobbyist.”
just that incredibly obtuse
I’d apologize for not being well versed enough in counter-intelligence lingo to properly interpret the comment, but even with a proper interpretation, the comment I replied to was still incoherent, so I’m not really sure what you expect here.
It feels weird to say that it was incredibly obtuse of me to not spend more time trying to figure out what someone meant when they were, as far as I can tell just mad that Linus and other Linux maintainers didn’t ignore what their attorneys advised, regardless of what impact that might have had on them personally, and spouting a bunch of nonsense as a result.
Maybe I’m wrong, though. If so, would you care to explain how this was a violation of the GPL and/or how all of the 4 freedoms I listed were violated?
Feel free to argue it in court
Sadly, there are plenty of instances of drivers who killed pedestrians doing just that and succeeding. Heck, in two cases the pedestrian was on the sidewalk or inside a building.
I think it happens even more when it comes to cyclists being killed by drivers
Are you thinking of something like Stack Overflow’s reputation system? See https://stackoverflow.com/help/whats-reputation for a basic overview. See https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges for some examples of privileges unlocked by hitting a particular reputation level.
That system is better optimized for reputation than the threaded discussions that we participate in here, but it has its own problems. However, we could at minimum learn from the things that it does right:
If you wanted to have upvoted and downvoted discourse, you could also allow people to comment on a given piece of discourse without their comment itself being part of the discourse. For example, someone might just want to say “I’m lost, can someone explain this to me?” “Nice hat,” “Where did you get that?” or something entirely off topic that they thought about in response to a topic.
You could also limit the total amount of reputation a person can bestow upon another person, and maybe increase that limit as their reputation increases. Alternatively or additionally, you could enable high rep users to grant more reputation with their upvotes (either every time or occasionally) or to transfer a portion of their rep to a user who made a comment they really liked. It makes sense that Joe Schmo endorsing me doesn’t mean much, but King Joe’s endorsement is a much bigger deal.
Reputation also makes sense to be topic specific. I could be an expert on software development but be completely misinformed about hedgehogs, but think that I’m an expert. If I have a high reputation from software development discussions, it would be misleading when I start telling someone about hedgehogs diets.
Yet another thing to consider, especially if you’re federating, is server-specific reputations with overlapping topics. Assuming you allow users to say “Don’t show this / any of my content to <other server> at all,” (e.g., if you know something is against the rules over there or is likely to be downvoted, but in your community it’s generally upvoted) there isn’t much reason to not allow a discussion to appear in two or more servers. Then users could accrue reputation on that topic from users of both servers. The staff, and later, high reputation users of one server could handle moderation of topics differently than the moderators of another, by design. This could solve disagreements about moderation style, voting etiquette, etc., by giving users alternatives to choose from.
Right? It’s weird how so many people upset about the situation in this thread are incapable of explaining why it’s a problem without lying.
Like, I get that it sucks to be removed as a maintainer because of something outside your control. But being, or continuing to be, a maintainer of a project isn’t a right that’s integral to that project being free.
I’d honestly even consider it a good idea for Russia to get the FSF to fight this considering it’s a blatant violation of the GPL.
How is telling someone that you won’t accept their contributions anymore a violation of the GPL?
Literally none of those freedoms were impacted. Everyone is still free to use the program as they wish, fork it, make changes, etc… Linux doesn’t have a new license that says “anyone but Russians” can use it.
he then followed up by gloating about Russian maintainers
How did he gloat? He explained the change. If your complaint is that he was abrasive, I feel like you’re not familiar with Linus.
Ok, lots of Russian trolls out and about.
It's entirely clear why the change was done, it's not getting
reverted, and using multiple random anonymous accounts to try to
"grass root" it by Russian troll factories isn't going to change
anything.
And FYI for the actual innocent bystanders who aren't troll farm
accounts - the "various compliance requirements" are not just a US
thing.
If you haven't heard of Russian sanctions yet, you should try to read
the news some day. And by "news", I don't mean Russian
state-sponsored spam.
As to sending me a revert patch - please use whatever mush you call
brains. I'm Finnish. Did you think I'd be *supporting* Russian
aggression? Apparently it's not just lack of real news, it's lack of
history knowledge too.
Sounds a lot more like he’s frustrated than delighted to me.
Calling your former volunteer contributors bots
He didn’t call the contributors bots.
He called the people submitting reverts and complaining about those maintainers, who weren’t contributors themselves, “troll farm accounts.”
and state assets because of their home country
When did he call anyone a state asset? To be clear, being a troll or a paid actor doesn’t make you someone’s property.
He also explained that this was a legal matter:
> Again -- are you under any sort of NDA not to even refer to a list of
> these countries?
No, but I'm not a lawyer, so I'm not going to go into the details that
I - and other maintainers - were told by lawyers.
I'm also not going to start discussing legal issues with random
internet people who I seriously suspect are paid actors and/or have
been riled up by them.
First, you’re acting like the decision was made by Linus or another member of the team and that they weren’t following the law.
Second, even if that weren’t the case, it’s still completely free. Unless you can name one of the following freedoms that was impacted by those actions:
What “not at all free dogmas” are you referencing, and why is “free” in scare quotes?
I’m not positive of the context for the first clip, but I assume it’s something related to this: https://www.them.us/story/chase-strangio-aclu-gender-affirming-healthcare-prison-jail-detention-trump-debate
Tldr, the law that Kamala was referring to was the Constitutional right of incarcerated people to receive medical care, which includes gender-affirming care for trans prisoners.
We’re in danger of becoming a fascist state? We just had a four year period of having a Democrat as president, with the Democrats also having a two year period at the start of that where they controlled both the Senate and the House. Are you telling me that the Democrats did nothing in that time to counter the threat of the US falling under fascist rule?
If the Democratic elected officials didn’t consider that to be important, why should we?
If their opinion is changing only for the worse because they’re being corrupted by their corporate benefactors, like Kamala, that’s worse than someone who doesn’t change their stance. If their stances started out the same, obviously the person who stubbornly stays the same would be preferable.
This isn’t a way Trump and Kamala differ, though, regardless of his statements on the matter, and Kamala started out with a very left-leaning voting record, so this shouldn’t really impact anyone’s choice of candidate.
So, to be clear, my opinion was about what’s reasonable to do and was informed by our culture and laws. Your objection seems to be related to what should be legal, which is different and is more complicated, as the laws have to balance restricting and potentially damaging businesses with protecting people from discrimination.
From a legal perspective, IMO larger businesses should be held to much tighter standards than small businesses. I think it would be reasonable to legally require Google or Meta to have a reason to ban someone, to have to share that explanation, and to have to allow an appeal to be unbanned to be arbitrated by a third party, without “we can ban anyone for any reason” allowed as a defense.
We also see it being abused with the allowance of a few “good ones” from said protected class to avoid discrimination claims while still discriminating against the rest of said class.
Obviously this isn’t a reasonable thing for them to do.
If a business is discriminating against a protected class and only letting in a few “good ones,” then statistically it should be able to be shown that they ban far more people in that class than outside it.
I believe there should be reasons required to ban someone.
How do you manage that, practically speaking, in a capitalist society? If a business owner thinks someone is acting suspicious and is likely to steal or break something, but they can’t ban them until they have a “valid” reason, if that person then breaks or steals something, that business owner has been damaged by the government’s policy. Is the government going to make them whole? No, of course not.
Does the reason need to be disclosed to the person being banned, or just recorded for future reference? A lot of the time people get defensive and angry when told the truth about what they did that made other people not want to deal with them. If someone’s been leering at customers, smells terrible, is loud and disruptive, or is just plain acting weird, telling them as much when you tell them they have to leave probably isn’t going to help them feel better.
Not just because you own the place and don’t want them in your place as they make you/other customers uncomfortable.
Why do you think it’s okay for a business owner and their employees to be legally forced to deal with someone that makes them uncomfortable?
Do business owners just need to be able to articulate why someone discomforts them? Is someone judging whether a reason is good enough, or do you just need any reason, or is there a list of acceptable reasons? In the last case, what sorts of reasons are acceptable?
If a business can point to measurements they’ve taken showing that when Joe shows up, they lose money - either because their clients leave, don’t come back, or stop spending money - is that a good enough reason to ban Joe? What if this is just because their clients are all racist and Joe is black?
If a business bans Joe because of a particular reason and then Jim does the same thing, is the business forced to ban Jim?
But it’s still relevant as it’s the reason homeless people
The easy solution for this is to make being homeless a protected class. Homeless people need specific protections at a federal level, because they’re discriminated against by local and even state governments. That’s not the only class that needs this, either, to be clear.
That said, all of the times I’ve seen a homeless person banned from an establishment wasn’t because they were homeless, but because of some other reason. The one I remember clearest was a woman who had started talking to me and my girlfriend (at the time) while we were sitting at a table in a coffee shop. She asked us for money or food after just a couple minutes, then went to go and talk to someone else and after a few minutes was noticed by the staff and told to leave. When I asked about it, I gathered that she’d been banned because of multiple complaints from customers about her doing just that.
“Jurisdiction” is a legal concept and the way you’re using it makes no sense unless you’re referring to restraining orders or trespassing warnings being issued by courts/police from different towns or states.
I’m assuming you’re talking about private establishments that have the legal right to refuse service to anyone for almost any reason (exceptions being if doing so is discrimination against a protected class).
If so, then here’s my opinion: If you own or manage a shop, bar, club, gym, etc., it’s reasonable to ban someone because they aren’t the sort of person you want in your establishment. Maybe they make you or your other customers uncomfortable. Maybe they don’t want their place to get a reputation for being where Bad Egg Craig, whose antics sent some folks to the ER, hangs out. Maybe they share ban lists with the owners of other establishments, either because they’re friends or for purely business reasons (if your actions have cost the owner of one establishment money, it’s more likely you’ll do the same elsewhere), the same way insurance companies protect their interests by raising premiums.
What does the Hague Convention have to do with anything? Unless it’s being enforced by the same people it’s completely irrelevant.
We already beat back the fascists, back in 2020 and 2012 and so on. When do you expect we’ll be able to check that one off?
We elected Biden and even had a Democrat majority in both the Senate and House until 2022. Do you mind refreshing me on what they did to implement ranked choice voting?
RCV is being banned by states quicker than it’s being adopted (and many of its opponents are Democrats) even though it wins by huge margins when people are allowed to vote for it. I’m skeptical of any argument against voting for parties with our best interests in minds until it’s implemented. I’ve been hearing the rhetoric that “this election is critical and if you vote third party, you’re throwing your vote away” since Gore vs Bush, and I don’t think it was new then, either. Lately it’s morphed into “a vote for a third party is a vote for Trump,” which isn’t even remotely how it works.
If Democrats aren’t competently opposing the fascists, why should we keep supporting them?
revolution is illegal
Does being illegal make it somehow easier to gain support?
Yes, but also the prison abolition movement is US specific. I’m not affiliated with it, to be clear - not that I oppose it or anything, but I certainly don’t speak for any of its activists.
Have you ever heard the quote “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars?” “Abolition” is a goal, an ideal - and even if it isn’t accomplished fully, working toward that end goal and considering everything necessary to get there along the way is the point.
Along those lines, I posit that if 90% of prisons are torn down or repurposed and the remaining 10% are drastically changed - holding fewer prisoners; not being privately owned and operated; focusing on rehabilitation, like learning new job skills, when possible, and otherwise simply being more humane, then the prison abolition movement would have succeeded.
But if you disagree with the name, what would you call it? “Prison Reform” is already taken and means something drastically different.
And to be clear, for some the goal is to eliminate prisons entirely. The movement isn’t monolithic. Abolishing the “prison institution” as it exists today is a pretty common goal, though, and using “prison” to mean “the prison institution” is a pretty common literary technique called “Synecdoche,” which you likely use every day.
It’s a logical association, though. If the name evokes feelings of slavery, that’s a good thing, as the situation is similar enough to slavery to warrant that.
Slavery in the US is still legal (so long as the person is in prison). Black Americans are 5 times as likely to be in prison as white Americans. A black man born in 2001 has a 20% chance of being in prison at some point in his life.
The systemic oppression of black Americans is obviously because of racism, and the parallels between slavery and the prison institution aren’t accidental. For example, here’s a quote from Slavery and the U.S. Prison System:
Personally, I think the systemic sabotage of black people’s livelihood, communities, and families is vile, but you’re welcome to your opinion.