The Packbats' Weblog

I - and us Packbats collectively - think it's a good thing when stuff that works is kept out of the trash. That's not a terribly controversial statement, I think.

Unless you're Microsoft. Our newest computer is ten years old and they think it belongs in a landfill - even Windows 10, the OS they don't sell any more and will stop supporting next year, doesn't support it. To Microsoft, our ability to have a computer at all is only permitted if we pay to give them permission to install their latest ad service and maybe also their latest AI spyware.

Or you're Apple, and you secretly push updates that shorten the battery life of old iPhones - an update which many believe was deliberate sabotage to force updates. After all, Apple has a deliberate policy of shredding old phones rather than allowing them to be repaired, which removes the option of buying used rather than new. This is also personal for us - our iPhone 6 was working perfectly fine, and then it started overheating and running dry faster and faster.

They can do this because their software is proprietary, and their hardware is proprietary, and their customers have no choice. It's put up with the abuse or run a zombie operating system for eight years as you watch more and more of the modern world cease to support your computer.

FLOSS software isn't like that.

And yeah, there's more to it than that. It's more complicated than that. There's an entire universe of philosophical, pragmatic, and political calculation going on, conversations about rights and safety and governance structures. But our 2010 laptop, a truly delightful and fast machine to live in running Windows 7, is ... still that, running Xfce in openSUSE. Because to Unix, an Intel Core i5-520M is just another amd64-compatible CPU, and 4 GB of RAM is more than enough to run a graphical desktop environment - y'know, the thing with windows and mouse and taskbar and so on, where you can double-click a PNG file to see it pop up in an image viewer. Why would it be inadequate? They aren't selling us dissatisfaction or new shinies - they're making things work, as best as they can, in a world that doesn't want your computer or ours to survive.

Everything that's annoying about FLOSS software is because FLOSS is a world where something made mostly by 11 developers with an annual budget of under US$8000 is basic infrastructure for literally millions of users. And that's not even strange here - like, there's standards designed for interoperability, and those get created and implemented by a crowd of different projects. Instead of Microsoft designing Word documents in secret to ensure no-one else's programs can open them, you have LibreOffice using the Open Document Format that anyone else, from megacorps like Google to some random single dev making a project solo, can implement. It's just how things happen here, and it means that one person can make a project for millions that mostly works.

Even when Microsoft and Apple would rather you pay for their thing. And be locked in their house. Where they can force you to give them more money.

There's more to FLOSS than that, but there doesn't have to be more to FLOSS than that for us to care. Our computer is alive. We can't not be passionate about that.

In a college anthropology class, we had an assignment to describe some kind of set ... ritual form? I forget how they worded it - that we had experience with, and we couldn't think of anything that made sense. In the end, we decided to go with something that we were familiar with from a lot of firsthand experience but that we thought there wouldn't be much to say about: going to a classical music concert.

After all, what's there to say about the conventions and etiquette a classical music concert? They're just a normal thing, or even kinda boring, aside from the music.

...oh my goodness were we wrong about that.

Like, okay, the applause thing. You do not enter the concert hall except before the concert or during applause, lest you interrupt the music. You don't applaud during the music, ever. You don't applaud between movements of a piece that has multiple movements, ever. You applaud at the beginning of the concert when the person or people walk out onto the stage to take their bows before the performance (which they do, or which just the conductor does in the case of an orchestra), you applaud at the end of each piece (another reason to take the programme from the - *looks up word* door staff? the person who lets you in and stops you coming in while a piece is playing - is so you know how many movements each piece has and can keep track of when it will end), and you applaud some more when the concert ends because everyone likes getting a standing ovation and it's honestly almost the polite thing to do at this point, feels like.

(Although we went to a lot of really good concerts, so they probably deserved a fair few of those ovations.)

All of this was "kinda boring, I don't know what I'd talk about".

...and I think stuff like the flag thing and the National Anthem thing and the Pledge of Allegiance thing and the Founding Fathers thing and the Constitution thing are like that in the US. What's with having someone sing the National Anthem before baseball games in the US? Why are there flags in so many school classrooms in the US? Why was there a flag in the room where our local coin club met? Why did we do a pledge of allegiance before coin club meetings? Why are we as a society so invested in the opinions and words of a bunch of dead white slaveholders? This stuff - the forms and content of the US civil religion - is not boring, is not natural, is not just the way things are. There is so much to say about it.

We've been kinda aware for a while that we will sometimes encounter a thing and want to talk about it with a specific online friend group. Like, "huh - we'd want to CW this if we posted it on fedi, and it feels a little too blunt for the friend of ours on IRC, but it might be appreciated by the folx on this Discord server! Probably not that other Discord group DM we're in, though."

...but in this particular case, that particular Discord has a dedicated channel for politics talk and it obviously belongs in that channel - and we have that channel muted, because the conversations happening there drive our stress through the roof. And we don't really want to drive-by with it.

Anyway, have a comic about living in Seattle during the present police riots.

I wish there were a Christian organisation like British Muslims for Secular Democracy, who could liaise with the various gay Christian organisations, but also include those who aren't directly involved, who just think this cause is just. Then there would be a phone number for that liberal voice that the UK media could lay their hands on. If they ever wanted to call it.

In the meantime, I've started a hashtag on Twitter: #godlyforequality. If you're on Twitter, go and have a look, and let's see if we can retweet the message a long way. It's only a tiny thing. It's the least I can do.

The only extent to which hate-crime protections pertain to "thought" is in the way that all criminal law does, which is to say that motive matters. If you truly believe that the law should make no distinction between accidental manslaughter and premeditated first-degree homicide, because you truly believe that any such distinction constitutes the establishment of "thought crime," then I will accept that you are making this "thought-crime" objection to hate-crime legislation in good faith. (I'll think you're kind of an idiot, but at least a sincere idiot.) But you can't accept that distinction and still argue in good faith that hate crimes are "thought crimes."

A: Sarah Palin is lying about health care reform.

B: Whoa, hold on there. That's quite the accusation. You want to use the L-word, you're going to have to prove it.

A: That's not difficult. Here is the outrageous and demonstrably untrue lie in question, from her Facebook page:

The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.

She's accusing President Obama of trying to create a "death panel" in which bureaucrats will decide whether or not to euthanize the elderly and handicapped children. That simply isn't true. It isn't close to anything that's close to being true. She's lying.

B: So you say.

A: No, what I say is irrelevant. What matters is what she said versus what the reality is. She is lying.

B: OK, let's just say for the sake of argument that what she is saying there isn't true ...