Category: General

Sucked In To Something Positive

One of the webcomics everybody seems to like is Something Positive. I’d checked it out before and given it the “eh.” It’s smart, it seemed funny sometimes, but at the time I looked at it there was a lot of soap opera going on, to which I didn’t know the backstory, and as always it was just so damned bitter.

This was 2004, the year I spent obsessively watching the Democrats spend a year losing to the worst president in generations, while continuing to take it in the shorts in terms of congressional seats and governorships. I had more than enough bitterness in my own soul to go around, I didn’t need a webcomic that gave me more.

But now that I’ve achieved some relative peace by ceasing to have any hope whatsoever for our political process as it stands, and stuff like that, for some reason I went back to Something Positive. I guess it was all the links to it on the webcomics I *do* like. Or maybe there was a hole in my heart left from having gotten about a storyline and a half behind on Scary-Go-Round for some reason. Anyway, I came back to Something Positive and started reading it from the beginning, and ya know, I’m kinda getting into it. There’s some funny stuff. The characters are horribly bitter and mean, but they do have hearts hiding under there and if you read about ’em enough you start caring about ’em. And if you read the thing from the beginning, you get to see where Choo-Choo Bear, the creepy boneless cat, came from.

I’m afraid I might actually be hooked on S*P.

Hatin’ on Ubuntu

Via Alterslash/slashdot, apparently the elder lords of Debian (including the Ian in Deb-Ian, but not the Deb apparently) are annoyed by Ubuntu because Ubuntu’s software, based on Debian’s unstable version, isn’t very compatible with Debian’s almost-stable-but-not-quite-there-still version.

I use Ubuntu now on my linux box. I used to use Debian exclusively (after having gone through a “try every distribution under the sun” phase where I’d always end up back with Debian cause it was the best thing I could find). But I stopped recommending Debian to friends about a year or so ago when I tried to help two friends install Debian’s stable version on a desktop and server machine of theirs and realized how bad it had become, at least for people like me and my friends.

The then-current stable version of Debian, Woody — which by coincidence is also the now-current stable version of Debian — had crappy-ass hardware detection, worse than any other linux distribution, I kid you not. X11 configuration was a total nightmare for the friend who wanted a desktop OS, and we had a dead rotten time trying to find drivers for the network card for the friend who wanted a server os. After those two installs I just couldn’t honestly say “hey, you should try Linux” to a friend anymore. Maybe to an enemy.

When I stopped recommending Debian it wasn’t because I’d discovered Ubuntu and liked it, it was because I stopped liking Debian and no longer had any Linux distribution I could confidently recommend. As far as I could tell, there were distros that installed well and had recent software but were hell to maintain and upgrade (anything but Debian), and one distro which was hell to install and had nasty old software but was pleasant to maintain and upgrade (Debian). I couldn’t happily recommend either of those. My linux advocacy took a dive. I drowned my sorrows in the beautiful Aqua interface of OS X and tried not to think about the proprietary software.

A few months ago I decided to give Ubuntu a shot, having heard some of the good buzz about it. As far as I’m concerned it’s everything that Debian hasn’t been for years and should have been. Yes, it’s dependent on Debian, and it is able to be so good because of the work Debian volunteers put into things. But why isn’t *Debian* able to be so good because of the work Debian volunteers put into things? Well, it’s probably because they support about 50 architectures and won’t go forward with a release till they can get an archaic version of GNOME to compile on Debian-SomeStupidProcessorIveNeverHeardOfAndOnlySixPeopleUse-64 (DEC). And real Debian guru types don’t give a crap about people less geeky and technically competent than themselves, because that takes time away from flaming each other in political wars on the dev lists. Not that I’m bitter. But if you want to see everything that’s loathsome about Linux people, try asking a question in a debian IRC channel. I only did it once. It was enough.

OK, so whatever, that’s fine, Debian has its goals and producing an operating system that I can recommend to friends and hope to keep them as friends is not one of them. That’s all good. But if somebody’s going to come around and actually produce such an OS (and Ubuntu is such an OS, usability bugs notwithstanding), then do the Debian developers have to come out hatin’ on it?

Yeah, of course they do.

I love Debian. And that’s why I hate Debian.

A Wave of Hatred

“I want you to just let a wave of intolerance wash over you… I want you to let a wave of hatred wash over you. Yes, hate is good… Our goal is a Christian nation. We have a biblical duty, we are called by God, to conquer this country. We don’t want equal time. We don’t want pluralism.”

— Randall Terry, prominent anti-abortion activist, with whom the Republican Party ended up staunchly allied over the Terry Schiavo case.

Want some more?

“The greatest crisis we face is not child killing, it’s not the sodomites, it’s not land tax, it’s not the intrusion of the federal government into our lives, our families, as they crush our liberties. The greatest crisis we face tonight is a crisis of leadership. We are facing a crisis of righteous, courageous, physically oriented, male leadership. Male leadership!

“God established patriarchy when he established the world. God established a patriarchal world. If we’re going to have true reformation in America, it is because men once again, if I may use a worn out expression, have righteous testosterone flowing through their veins. They are not afraid of the contempt of their contemporaries. They are not here to get along. They are not even here to take issue. They are here to take over!”

From Orcinus via Puddingbowl blogmarks.

With that first quote, I expected it to continue, “strike me down with your weapon, and your journey to the Dark Side will be complete.”

Impending Nonviolence In Mexico

Exciting story. Vincente Fox and company have jailed the shoo-in leftist candidate Manuel Obrador for a trivial matter (building an access road to a hospital despite a court order not to) — a transparently political move to knock him out of impending elections.

That’s basic slimeball politics, not news. However, the cool part is that Obrador seems to be preparing to lead a campaign of Martin Luther King Jr-style nonviolent civil disobedience in response.

That’s exciting. This could be a big deal. It also guarantees that this will be almost completely off the U.S. media’s radar, unfortunately. (Michael Nagler‘s The Search for a Non-Violent Future gives many examples of significant and effective nonviolent action which made no impression on the consciousness of America, including the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe, which was almost entirely the result of coordinated, well-planned nonviolent protests.)

Nonviolence has never been tried in Mexico before. I’ll be interested to see how it goes.
Via Puddingbowl blogmarks.

This is the first good political news in about five years…