Crazy I was about to say the same thing!
Hugely influential in turning the GOP from "Side of politics we can debate and respectfully disagree with" to "Completely unhinged violent movement based on panic, hatred, and intellectual brain rot."
He's basically described like some bygone disaster and yet he's still kickin'. Holy crap.
There's a cozy spot in whatever hell right next to Kissinger for this vile beast. Another spot beside it waiting to be filled is likely labeled "Murdoch."
You're not wrong about how they operate.
But there's absolutely far reaching consequences to major decisions by leaders in power. Don't fool yourself thinking "It hasn't burned down yet" just because it's not a Hollywood societal-collapse movie before your eyes.
Work sucks more than ever for us now. Know why? Long-dead Reagan absolutely destroyed workers' rights and established precedents that put bosses much higher on society's totem pole. Recessions happened. People get desperate and forget that they even HAD rights as workers. Clawing this back is the battle of our time at home.
Before that? FDR's New Deal actually secured quite a bit of prosperity for people amidst a complete disaster. People still benefit from Social Security to this day, even if only a little.
Teddy Roosevelt established the National Park system. Now we're happy we don't have luxury apartments in the middle of Yosemite or Yellowstone, or fast food chains all along the Grand Canyon. (Or it hasn't been used as a landfill or something because the hole was already dug so it saves costs!)
Citizen's United is why we have trillions of dollars in shadow-money funding "both sides" of a broken system. (Although that wasn't put up to vote, the people in charge were sworn in by people that were elected.)
TL;DR: I get it. It's all stupid, we're all constantly lied to. That's super lame. We know and we hate it.
BUT:
Votes. Have. Consequences.
Oo! Or had the supreme court declare it's okay to commit any crime you want as long as you're president. That's new!
I'm also sick of the hyperbole from campaigners too but you're right. A LOT has changed that can undermine a lot of fundamental freedoms we take for granted.
Everyone knows capital-first politicians don't actually care about us. We get it.
I'm all 'bout that fancy praxis and mutual aid and all those lofty but pure concepts we definitely need to be working on. But we live in a society here.
Not voting right now is giving an out-and-out fascist a ridiculous amount of power to start crushing and punishing anybody with a different opinion.
We're doing what we can with what we have to soften the blow, so we can actually have the chance to work on the higher concepts like "changing the people involved in it."
I'd much rather be on the ground convincing people to form unions to safely backtalk their bosses, rather than rallying up guerilla units amidst a "boogaloo" because a bunch of hateful and uneducated people put a screeching orange baby on a throne who refused to leave and became "holy immortal emperor."
Lmao hyperbole aside. Seriously. Standing on the sidelines and going "hmph" is basically a vote for things that are likely Very Bad For You(TM).
"More now than EVER"
– Every political ad til the end of time.
"Walked back at the threat of trump", can you explain what you mean by this a little more? Sorry I'm just not sure what it means.
A gentle reminder that the Socialist Rifle Association is a thing! No personal experience with them, but I like that they're an underdog foil to your typical "American gun culture" stereotypes.
I should really be more active about this. I don't have the money to dump a ton of brass on the regular but I enjoy the freedom to do it while keeping my ideals!
Ha!
— Former Okie, now Nevadan, proud 50-somethingth in education for many years running
(Are we not aware of how many states there are or are we counting outlying U.S territories? Anybody's guess! 😉)
That's so much "fun" with all those tiny local offices. "Okay who is this person?"
Zero public web presence about them at all.
It'd be nice if there was something like Ballotpedia but public owned. "You want to run for an office? You need to fill out this profile."
I imagine lots of people are just like "Eh, this name sounds pretty." Lol
I thought RK bowed out, but he's still on the ballot? Odd.
So, any of those will work with almost any distro. I'd personally recommend Jellyfin because Plex is run by a private company and it has turned around and bit its users lately.
I think you might want to look up installation instructions for Jellyfin here to understand it a little better: https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/installation
As for what distro? Lots of choices! One thing to remember is there's so many ways to set things up and everyone has different preferences, so it's really difficult to just say "Do A, B, and C." But maybe I can help a bit without assuming anything about your experience level.
Jellyfin is just a ~~"front-end"~~ server app that runs on top of an OS, that you can access through a browser on your network. All it does is give you a very convenient way to serve up media files you give it access to, across your network! :)
My setup as an example: I personally run a server OS called "Proxmox", wherein I made a virtual machine for OpenMediaVault (a custom Linux OS for making a file server), which helps me run a Docker container for Jellyfin.
(Docker containers are really cool but can be a bit advanced)
But if you think of each component as a building block that you understand and set up, you will get a better idea of what you can learn or leave out for your particular setup.
But let's make it simpler! I didn't know anything about this either when I first started. Say you have an old PC with some drives laying around. You could just as well install OpenMediaVault bare metal as the OS, and install Jellyfin within it maybe. That might be enough to get you watching your backed up DVDs on your home network!
Open Media Vault is a modified version of Debian Linux, if I recall correctly. It's made specifically to get a solid file server up and running. It has a great community too.
https://www.openmediavault.org/
Here's a really good site with some server tidbits I found useful as well https://perfectmediaserver.com/
I'd also suggest checking out "selfhosted" communities here on Lemmy or maybe that "/r/" site lol.
YouTube can also be handy here, for understanding how to get things going. Things like "ProxMox home server guide" or "Jellyfin server setup", "OpenMediaVault jellyfin docker", that kinda thing. You might find one video explains a topic better for you than another.
Sorry it's super late after a long hike for me but I hope some of this helps you a little on your journey! It's definitely something to take your time in, more than a "weekend and it's finished forever" kind of project. :)
Absolutely. And if you can't, you're in the wrong marriage. If women were free to leave Republican husbands without fear of harm, red-cap affiliation would be a more telling demographic for social isolation and lonliness than it already is.