For about 3-4 years. I switched after sway added support for per-display VRR which xorg cannot do still (and probably will never be able to do due to core design limitations)

On AMD it’s been better than Xorg for a couple years now in my use case. No more tearing and latency issues, any games that don’t play nice have worked fine with gamescope.

With HDR support finally on the horizon it’ll be able to completely replace windows for me which I already barely use.

The only issue I regularly encounter is programs handling windowing strangely. Some programs like to switch themselves into my active workspace under certain circumstances which is mildly annoying but just requires that I press the hotkey to put them back where they belong a couple times a day.

Alright dude, now you’re just misrepresenting my views and revealing your own biases and we’re going nowhere. I don’t have time to make a comprehensive response to all that, I’m just going to go outside enjoy the freedom and prosperity that my evil liberal society has provided me. Good thing I won’t have to wait in a bread line at Costco, it’s a real time saver.

This entire discussion is about semantics, so I see no issue with getting fiddly with it. As for authoritarianism being illiberal, I don’t see how that is tautological. Authoritarianism is when the government or ruler has absolute control and has no obligation to accept input from the populace over which they rule. This violates the consent aspect of liberalism. These are commonly accepted definitions, not stuff I just made up. They’re mutually exclusive concepts and absolute versions of either cannot coexist.

And yes, I do think there has never been a truly liberal society, just as there has never been a truly communist society or any other -ist or -ism based society. They are concepts we can strive for, but adhering perfectly to the academic definition of any of these concepts is not realistic. I think the USA is fundemantally illiberal in many regards, and we would do well to strive to correct those aspects.

As for the definitions of those specific aspects of liberalism, yes, of course it is those aspects defined under the framework of liberalism. It would just take thousands of words to provide the entire context and it’s not super important here. You seem to understand that these words have different definitions in different frameworks, and I’m sure anyone discussing political ideology in this level of depth is also aware of that.

When I’m talking about the extremist sides of the spectrum, far left and far right, I am referring to those who tread into territory where their ideology becomes ostensibly dangerous. The most common version of this is directly supporting things like oppressive authoritarian rulers and population cleansing, There are absolutely people on both the left and the right who would see those as acceptable means to their end of implementing their preferred ideology. Right wingers who want to ethnically cleanse populations they see as problematic or inferior are no better than the far leftists who want to guillotine whoever they decide is the bougouise. This is the crazy land I’m talking about. Not being in crazy land means trying your best to not support awful shit, making sure you are picking the least bad feasible options in your current situation, and revising your positions and who you support when evidence indicates that the bad outweighs the good.

And yes, I actually do have a lot of issues with the French and American revolutions, and I do not think Churchill was a particularly good guy. I don’t think they are the same as the Russian and Chinese revolutions. They all resulted in regimes of varying levels of “bad”, but the Chinese and Russian versions resulted in higher death tolls and much more unhealthy systems coming out the other side (in my subjective opinion).

I think to cover the rest of your points, there are degrees here and the real world doesn’t function in absolutes as I mentioned in the second paragraph. I don’t have time to respond to every comparison you mentioned, but Washington vs Lenin for example: Washington did not have secret police killing dissidents by the thousands. Lenin did. Washington did not implement policy that resulted in mass famines resulting in the deaths of millions, Lenin did. Washington did support slavery and ethnic cleansing of Native American populations, and it irritates me greatly that this gets glossed over. Lenin did not. Which one of those guys is worse depends on your subjective values, but for me, I’d say Lenin is the worse guy.

I’m tired and it’s almost 3am so hopefully all that makes sense.

Authoritarianism is by definition illiberal and anyone who is authoritarian or supports authoritarianism is not liberal no matter what they claim to be. Centrism is also a meme, anyone who claims to be a centrist is usually just a stan for authoritarians in disguise.

The core tenant of liberalism is respect for the autonomy and civil liberties of the individual and consent of the governed to the rules of the government through the machinations of democracy. Any system claiming to be liberal without subscribing to that is a farce.

The same could be said of the “far left”. They claim to be leftists, and they might have started out as such, but they have stepped out into crazy land and end up supporting things antithetical to the ideologies they claim to subscribe to.

Statelessness is the end goal of communism, yes. I have met so-called communists that think strongarm authoritarianism is the way to get there, and for some reason believe that those authoritarians would willingly give up their power once they’ve achieved a position where they could implement said stateless society. This is basically what happened in the USSR and China, and is decidedly not the path Marx himself proposed for achieving it. A stateless communist society in Marxist thought is simply the natural progression after late stage capitalist societies, which is not a step you can simply skip over.

I don’t necessarily agree with the idea, but I think it’s important to be educated on a wide variety of schools of political thought.

Nowhere did I claim such a thing. Some leftist groups want the whole stateless thing. Go even further left into crazy land though and you run into strongarm authoritarianism.

I’d call myself a liberal in the modern sense, I certainly don’t believe that large scale stateless societies are viable but there are definitely things we can learn from ideologies further to the left than what I subscribe to.

The far lefists aren’t commies though, that’s my point. They play like they are, but really they’re just authoritarian fascists. Commies are just regular leftists, and marxist schools of thought are a totally reasonable worldview to carry even if I don’t agree with some points of it.

I don’t know of any particular sources but I do have anecdotes of watching friends and family fall into these traps on both ends of the spectrum. A couple of my leftist friends have started treading dangerously close to some pretty sour viewpoints. I mostly see it as pro-accelerationism, everything I don’t like is capitalism/neoliberalism/western values, and are totally blind to the influence propaganda has on them and the weak points in their own ideologies.

On the right, I’ve watched several of my family members go down the fox news alt right rabbit hole and end up at similarly dumb viewpoints. They also want a revolution, except everything they don’t like is liberals/communism/woke etc. They are also totally blind to the influence of propaganda and the weak points in their ideologies. The media machine in the US is set up to make this pipeline far more efficient than the leftist version.

They mostly don’t like the same things, but they’re pulling in opposite directions, and each is convinced that when the revolution comes, their side is the one that will win out, when in reality, we’ll probably just end up with the same shit, different coat of paint.

Me? I think there’s concepts we can borrow from many ideologies that can help us solve specific problems and bring about incremental change until we reach true propserity. The socialists and commies get some stuff right, so do the libertarians, the anarchists, the ancaps, etc. The only thing I think will definitely not help is tearing it all down. There is no silver bullet, it’s all just problems that are met with ever improving solutions. Sometimes we take two steps forward one step back, but I don’t think anyone can deny that the world at large is better off now than when it was almost completely ruled by monarchy, bloody violence, and slavery a few hundred years back.

They’re analogous to the far right is the main thing. Anarchism/communism/etc. is the gateway to such views. Most lefists don’t go that far (good) but some do. Same thing with the far right, they start off as libertarian, ancap, or run of the mill conservatives etc. and end up going into cuckoo land after they watch too much cable news and facebook conspiracies.

In the USA, we have an environment where it’s far easier and more beneficial to those in power to co-opt people into right wing extremism than left wing extremism, hence the outsized representation. You can definitely find countries where the opposite is true, it’s a fairly big issue in south american and southeast asian nations. What’s interesting to me is that the end goals are nearly the same, which is to implement an authoritarian state where there is a powerful insular ingroup that can exploit the masses to their benefit.

The USA skews fairly right overall so you don’t really see a lot of them here. It’s a lot easier to find them in other countries.

I’ve definitely ran into a few people IRL who have gone far enough down the rabbit hole that I’ve heard them trot out the classic stuff about how “Stalin/Mao/Fidel/etc. was good actually”

The far left would be people like tankies, where they go so extreme they end up parroting a lot of the same rhetoric you see on the far right, just through a different lens. I’ve literally interacted with people on this site who believe North Korea is secretly a utopia that the West is trying to hide with propaganda.

They don’t really have much in the way of significant political representation in this country. The far right unfortunately does.

I’d consider commies, anarchists, and anti capitalists in general to just be leftists, not far leftists. It’s not really my thing but I can at least respect it.

Sanyo Eneloops are great. I have some really old ones with a lot of cycles from my Xbox controller.

A lot of IRC communities migrated, and it’s pretty much the go to option now if you want live communications for your project or org, but don’t want something proprietary. It’s a pretty good replacement for Teams or Slack.

Actually libEI allows for exactly this. It’s very new so not widely supported yet but it’ll definitely get there eventually.

WAV is also braindead simple, effectively just a stream of raw PCM data. It would be really hard to hide any sort of payload in it.

I’m not saying an attack can’t be done, or that it won’t happen. Honestly, I’d be very surprised if it doesn’t and I fully agree with you on the additional security measures.

What I am saying is that it’s very unlikely we wouldn’t find out what’s going on before the results are set in stone at any scale larger than the tiniest local elections (which if you altered a bunch of local elections enough to exert influence, you run into the same issue of being easily detected). This would still be massively damaging to the election process, especially if the attack goes deep enough to require the election to be re-run, but not the end of our democracy.

The main point I’m trying to make is that compromising voting machines is not the hard part of rigging an election. It would require a conspiracy so complicated, that I’m not convinced there’s any group on earth that could successfully pull it off. Set aside cybersec arguments for a moment:

1. Let’s assume the worst case for security, that there is one machine per state that you can easily compromise to alter election results. This alone is doing a lot of lifting for this example.

2. Now, you have to cross your fingers and hope that the election is close enough that you can fudge the overall result without raising suspicion

3. Prior to the election, you have to plan which states to compromise, and what districts you will target for altering votes. You can only really do this in swing states and swing districts. It is usually not clear until very close to the election which places will be optimal.

4. Because you are at the mercy of RNGesus as for where you can compromise, you have to compromise a lot of extra states ahead of time to eliminate risk that you didn’t get enough swingable ones to pull of your plan. This increases head count and creates more liability.

5. If you swing any given district too far, you can raise suspicion and trigger a recount. If one district raises the alarm, the rest will follow. If you only compromised central machines and not the voting machines and ballots themselves, you fail.

6. If you can’t find enough districts to subtly alter, you fail.

7. Let’s assume you prepared for point 4 and compromised voting machines themselves. This requires massively more people involved, and if only one person gets caught, you fail.

8. To extend 6. every person involved in your conspiracy is a liability. A single double agent gets in your ranks? Fail. Somebody flakes? Fail. Somebody grows a conscious or gets busted and rats you out? Fail.

While yes, theoretically you could overcome all those obstacles, you’d have to get miraculously lucky and you’d need to not get busted for quite a long time after the election. Why even bother when you can just pay a few bucks to the right people and get news channels to convince the voters to put your guy in charge without committing any voter fraud at all?

Now all that said, I absolutely support improved election security. If nothing else, it will make it much harder to spread FUD about election integrity.

While you are correct that the cybersec practices on voting machines are embarrassingly bad, we don’t actually rely on them for the integrity of our elections in most districts. They are a convenience more than anything else, and at the first sign of any possible tampering, we can audit against paper ballots that get printed off the voting machines (which if you start altering those, it only takes one person to notice somethings off and the jig is up)

Even with their shit security, an attack would be exceedingly difficult to pull off. The machines are airgapped and audited, so you need physical access without supervision which by itself is a tall order. Then, consider that you will need to compromise dozens of machines at minimum to swing even the lowest turnout national election for the most obscure position. Finding enough people willing to risk a federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison felony charge that are smart enough to do the job and not get caught is going to be a challenge too, because if one person gets caught, then once again, the jig is up.

What is far more realistically dangerous is convincing people that the election was compromised when it wasn’t. This gets you way more bang for your buck because it’s so much easier to do, and is the primary reason I think that nobody really bothers trying to compromise the voting machines.

If you want to have an actual debate about housing supply and demand, I’m always down for reasonable discussion.

Ultimately what matters is that enough supply is built to meet buyer demand, whether it be from owner occupants or landlords. Landlords can buy up or build as much housing as they want, but as long as there’s still more available, the prices will stay reasonable and owner occupants will have no issues getting affordable housing. And buying up too much will crater the rental rates if there are significantly fewer potential tenants than available units. There are plenty of markets where this is the case, the city I am in is one of them. Someone on a $50k salary here would have no issues finding a modestly sized SFH in a reasonably nice working class neighborhood. Cheaper if you’re willing to go for a condo or townhouse.

As a landlord and someone who loves shenanigans, it’s been great. It’s never been easier to piss off dozens of people I don’t like at once.

Like, sure dude, my owning a few houses is totally the reason your city that I don’t live in won’t build new housing to meet demand, and I totally enjoy spending all of my weekends doing manual labor fixing shit for my tenants.