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Just how fucking dense do you have to be in order to be surprised that a man who created one of the most popular operating systems on Earth, and then gave it away for free, might be a leftist?
Right wingers are extremely stupid and don’t really understand what the left stands for, they fall for all fox news strawman arguments and rage bait.
This is unfortunately true of both sides.
For example, conservatives think pro- choicers are callous baby-killers who only care about abortion because it allows them to “whore around” without consequences. Liberals on the other hand, think pro-lifers are misogynists who want to ban abortion because banning it will hurt women and because they want to make the country more like The Handmaid’s Tale.
…and leftists know that the “abortion debate” is culture warfare injected into the less-educated by billionaires to distract from class warfare.
I was just using that as an example.
Another great one is immigration. Liberals thinks conservatives want to restrict immigration because they hate foreigners. Conservatives want to stop immigration because the job market sucks and has sucked since 2008.
The reason why the job market sucks is that unions got defanged and international capital movement freed from the 80s onwards.
That’s why life for working people took 3 steps backwards compared to our parents and grandparents who could buy a house, go on holidays and have a boat on a factory wage. While we are going to have trillionaires soon and the only thing that’s cheaper is the fuel of capitalism: telecoms and wages.
The problem has never been another wage earner - the problem is pitting us against each other and us taking the bait.
I agree with you on the unions, but the other issue is that a lot of jobs have been outsourced over the years. Unfortunately, those jobs probably aren’t coming back.
Well yes, but how did we get here? The same forces that brought us are still working to keep wage slavey alive and well.
Free movement of capital, weakened unions and ceaseless propaganda pitting people against each other (welfare queens, immigrants are taking your jobs, eating the cats and dogs, work harder and you’ll be rich too, these other people are lazy, stupid, bad genes, wrong religion, the rich are better/smarter than you etc) - that’s how that happened.
There’s only one enemy and it’s not other wage earners.
To consolidate posts:
Liberals on the other hand, think pro-lifers are misogynists who want to ban abortion because banning it will hurt women and because they want to make the country more like The Handmaid’s Tale.
None of their stated reasons against abortion hold any water. There are clear ways to reduce abortion, such as comprehensive sex education and widespread availability of birth control. Since conservatives obviously are against those things, we can only conclude their reasons are bullshit. Cruelty fits the data perfectly.
Conservatives want to stop immigration because the job market sucks and has sucked since 2008.
Except there is no real link between those two, and even economics framed in conservative terms disproves it. Labor generates profit, which should mean every new worker adds to the economy, not takes away. That is, the resources they use (food, housing, etc.) are offset by the extra resources they produce in their work. There is not some fixed amount of labor the economy can have, and anything beyond that is parasitic overflow.
So again, if the stated reasons are clearly bullshit, then we are left with a question of why they’re doing it, anyway. Cruelty fits the data perfectly.
There’s some libertarians in the FOSS community as well, so it’s not a guarantee, but yeah, generally you’ll find that correlation.
In my experience the Foss community tends towards the “legal weed and less cops” style of libertarianism and less the “police exist to protect my right to 3 12 year old wives from the tyranny of criticism” style.
I can generally get along with the “coercion bad” libertarians better than with the “abolish the government because rules shouldn’t exist” crowd.Oh yeah, definitely. A lot of the people that pretend to be libertarians are actually fascists (see Musk, Thiel, Ellison), and it’s ironic that all of these people made their fortunes building on top of FOSS stacks. And even though they owe a lot to it, they still don’t understand why anyone would give away their software for free.
created one of the most popular operating systems on Earth, and then gave it away for free
He didn’t created it alone and “then” gave it away for free. Since it’s begging Linux was free and that created a community who made it the most popular OS.
“…or as I like to call it gnu plus linux…”
Watching Linus take a big public dump on someone who deserves it is one of life’s finest guilty pleasures. It’s like a Maya Angelou poem. You can tell he really cared, and meant it, and took some time to get it right.
Reading his words really slams home which side of the political spectrum truly believes in personal freedom and liberty. And it’s not the side that promotes fascism and wants to implement a Christian version of Sharia law under the Ten Commandments.
I think he isn’t a leftist, but just reasonable
I see a lot of overlap from where I’m standing.
All it takes to be a leftist these days is to not go out of your way every day to be a raging cunt.
Basic human decency. That’s seriously all it takes.
I’m sorry, is my BEING AN ASSHOLE triggering you???
Snowflake.
(do NOT make fun of my $1,000.00 USD trump branded FREEDOM sneakers or I’ll get upset 😡 they were NOT a scam)
Maybe it’s just the .world folks but yeah somehow “leftist” on this site has come to mean “left of the American center”…
One could argue Linux, GPL, and Open Source are all based on woke communist concepts.
I’d argue they are anarchist socialist, at least in terms of intellectual property as they are collaborative and free to access and use. With permissive licenses being more anarchist capitalist as you can capture and make a project uncollaborative.
collaborative and free to access and use
Except GPL which is literally “either join our socialist software revolution or fuck off and make your own software”.
I would associate most of these concepts with GNU more than Linux.
Richard Stallman is a hero.
Torvalds isn’t half bad either
He is such a good role model for being wealthy.
He is, when it comes down to it, pretty wealthy. But we are talking about the guy who created the kernel that now runs nearly every Internet service, all Android phones, most streaming devices, and a lot of various embedded devices. Anyone else with that much impact would be a billionaire many times over.
But he’s got a comfortable amount and has not exercised unreasonable ambition. A man who did someone very valuable and was well rewarded and sees no point in being any better off than he is.
If you believe in equality, you’re woke. You’re also a socialist. Because since fascism is a sincere belief in inequality based on identity, while neoliberalism (democrats) is a sincere belief in inequality based on class / wealth.
So yeah, this belief in equality or basic human decency needs to be destroyed in order to maximize profit. Invest in this propaganda, great ROI guaranteed!
neoliberalism (democrats) is a sincere belief in inequality based on class / wealth
This is actually a misconception! Liberalism (or neoliberalism, as the pejorative goes) is about allowing individuals the ability to dictate their own life on their own terms. Liberals want most of the same things you do, probably: clean air, a reduction in carbon emissions, everybody has a roof over their heads. guaranteed access to healthcare, and dense, walkable cities. The difference is the means by which liberals want to achieve these things. Liberals believe that the government should play as small a roll as necessary to guarantee these things, usually through economic incentives and staying out of the way of the free flow of commerce. Liberals do employ government action when necessary (i.e, making it illegal to dump toxic waste in to rivers).
Liberals also believe that the government should strongly guarantee legal equality and should generally do what it can to provide equal opportunities to everyone. Liberals think it should be illegal to discriminate against someone based on sex, race, sexual orientation, and other factors of one’s birth.
The point of liberalism is to lower the horizons of government. In the 16th century Europeans were quite busy slaughtering each other over what the official religion of their kingdom should be. Liberalism emerged as way to manage sectarian conflict from spilling over into actual violence by disestablishing state churches, or at least significantly reducing the political power of clergy. Liberals apply this principle to other aspects of governance
Liberals are pro-capitalism, which is the ultimate mechanism for inequality.
“Neoliberalism” isn’t a pejorative, it’s a political philosophy that has dominated the Western world for about 50 years, though it has roots much further back. It is a philosophy embraced by both Republicans and Democrats. It’s about privatization of services, lowering taxes, and deregulating corporations. It’s why we have for profit healthcare in the US, for example.
Liberals are pro-capitalism
That’s a completely US-centric view. All your liberals might be capitalists, elsewhere, various forms of social liberalism are very much alive and kicking. It’s one half of the ingredient in the EU’s compromise of “social market economy”: It’s a thing both social liberals and democratic socialists can lay claim to and, indeed, in policy terms there’s gigantic spaces of overlap. Parliament-wise it’s most directly represented mostly by Green/EFA but floats in various forms and shades in pretty much all parties.
It’s also ancient, dating back to the mid-1800s, bringing you things such as cooperative banking.
From a different angle: Marx was wrong, there’s indeed petite bourgeois who are capable of class consciousness. Also, understanding macroeconomics and how trickle down is bullshit. They may be millionaires but that’s still a billion away from a billion, they want people to have money in their pockets so you have money to visit their cinema or whatever.
Also once upon a time neoliberalism meant ordoliberalism but that’s a historical note. The current use refers to BS that indeed makes the word itself a pejorative, just as “shit” is a pejorative for shit.
I believe your argument is reductive, and ignores the complexities of the politics of people who call themselves liberals. Neoliberalism is not a coherent political or economic ideology, it’s an insult for moderates used by leftists. Most liberals are not ideological; they pick their policy preferences pragmatically, though nobody can truly claim to be perfectly unbiased and non-ideological.
And if you had argued to me in 2010 that democrats and republicans can both be described as “neoliberals”, I might agree with you, but since at LEAST 2015, republicans have completely turned their back on the most basic aspects of liberalism, becoming the anti-immigrant, anti-trade, isolationist party with no respect for the rule of law or the principles of equality or personal freedom. There was maybe a 10 year period in which republicans paid lip service to these ideals throughout the 1990s, but today Republicans can better be described by Hungarian President Victor Orban’s prescription for “illiberal democracy”, though lately they’re not too hot about democracy either.
Republicans, in contrast to liberals, believe in enforcing cultural conservatism through state power, state intervention in markets to benefit in-groups, majoritarian ruling with very slim electoral margins to the detriment of marginalized groups or opposition parties, and a general hostility to freedom of speech or the free press
Yes, liberals ARE pro-capitalism, but capitalism has been the ultimate mechanism for REDUCING inequality. Since the 1970s (the heyday of so-called neoliberalism), the number of people living in extreme poverty has gone from rougly 50% to about 10% today, accelerating in the 1990s with the downfall of communism across Europe.
To reiterate: thanks to free trade and capitalism, most of the world no longer lives in extreme poverty for the first time in human history. It is in very wealthy countries where we are able to take this for granted because we’ve been living very high standards of living since the end of the 2nd world war, which has coincided with a large gap in wealth equality. However, the living standard of the average American today is still MUCH higher than the living standards of the average American in the 1960s or 1950s.
Healthcare in the United States is not actually really a free market. The specifics of how our system works lives and dies by the letter of the law. What many blame on deregulation is in fact due to specific regulations which were written by the insurance companies. To be clear: this is called regulatory capture, which is NOT a principle of liberalism. Liberals believe in a fair and unbiased bureaucracy which serves the public and not special interest groups. The American healthcare system is a failure to live up to liberal principles. This can be said of most other policy failures in the US: housing has exploded in cost because of regulatory capture in zoning commissions, reducing supply.
Words have definitions often with histories.
Neoliberalism is a far right ideology. That’s just a fact you can look up yourself. It has almost nothing to do with classical or social liberalism which is about freeing people.
Neoliberalism is a far right ideology. That’s just a fact you can look up yourself
I’m sorry but you’re simply wrong. “Neoliberalism is a far right ideology” is inherently NOT a fact; it’s a normative statement. It’s an opinion. You can’t present your opinions (or those of people who think like you) as facts. If I said “Neoliberalism is a moderate or even left wing ideology”, I would also say that that is not a fact; it’s my opinion, and the opinion of people who think like me
Neoliberalism is very much a far right ideology.
You should probably read more. This is from Wikipedia. Neoliberalism is about freeing capital not people.
Neoliberalism has become an increasingly prevalent term in recent decades.[16][17][18][19] It has been a significant factor in the proliferation of conservative and right-libertarian organizations, political parties, and think tanks, and predominantly advocated by them.[20][21] Neoliberalism is often associated with a set of economic liberalization policies, including privatization, deregulation, depoliticisation, consumer choice, globalization, free trade, monetarism, austerity, and reductions in government spending. These policies are designed to increase the role of the private sector in the economy and society.[22][23][24][25] Additionally, the neoliberal project is oriented towards the establishment of institutions and is inherently political in nature, extending beyond mere economic considerations.[26]
The term is rarely used by proponents of free-market policies.[27] When the term entered into common academic use during the 1980s in association with Augusto Pinochet’s economic reforms in Chile, it quickly acquired negative connotations and was employed principally by critics of market reform and laissez-faire capitalism. Scholars tended to associate it with the theories of economists working with the Mont Pelerin Society, including Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Ludwig von Mises, and James M. Buchanan, along with politicians and policy-makers such as Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and Alan Greenspan.[7][28][29] Once the new meaning of neoliberalism became established as common usage among Spanish-speaking scholars, it diffused into the English-language study of political economy.[7] By 1994, the term entered global circulation and scholarship about it has grown over the last few decades
I agree that many who vote for liberals believe those things, but those are not the goal of liberal parties. The historical meaning of liberalism was the same as what is called neoliberalism today. Calling it a derogatory term is just pretending to be a victim. There IS such an ideology as “belief in inequality based on wealth” and that includes the right to survive through access to healthcare. That is reality.
You argue as if good arguments win, and ideology matters - it doesn’t work that way. Ideology is merely a tool. There is only power, or money that you can exchange for power. And those who desire nothing except power have a competitive advantage to gain more power and shape the world over people who want other things. There is a selection process that has been going for decades that precludes normal people like us two.
Politicians in the US might write some other virtues on their flags, or they might even delude themselves to believe them - that is actually best. But when the chips are down, only those who pursue power gain more power. I believe this could be scientifically proven with game theory and a simulation.
What you are doing is kind of denying that economic power (or capital, or billionaires) have an overwhelming influence on politics and policies. If you say that the conservatives or democrats or whoever does this or that for ideological reasons, you deny political reality and obscure paths to improve things. We need transparency and better tools and countermeasures to these mechanisms.
Politicians are chosen by capitalists among thousands of candidates, and only the fringe that happen to fit into their plans are funded. Those who want power above anything else and who have neoliberal tendencies. The useful idiots to capitalists.
So no, neoliberalism is not a derogatory term that should be avoided. It’s reality. Or how else do you explain Elon Musk running DOGE?
Here in the Netherlands they accuse people of being a ‘deugmens’ which literally translates as being a ‘virtuehuman’, a human with virtues. Except for possible pretentiousness, having virtues is hardly a bad thing, quite the opposite. Being politically correct has negative connotations, but most of the time it’s very easy to explain why something is politically incorrect, because the incorrect route has often proven in the past to be disastrous. People used to talk about ‘political correctness gone mad’ but now very often any political correctness is deemed bad. Woke is considered by some to be one of the worst insults you can get, but waking up and seeing that there is terrible inequity in this world, seeing that we are very whatever-centric in our thoughts/actions and questioning all that, is hardly a bad thing. Now the question is, do we need to reappropriate these words, reclaim and reframe them, or should we ignore them and move beyond them because people have been so deeply conditioned with ‘woke=bad’ no questions asked.
Well said. The people that have been clamoring “wake up sheeple” are now mad that people are “woke”.
I’ve always had a suspicion that so many simple things that trigger the right, like wearing a mask during a pandemic, do so because they are simple nice things you can do and every time they see someone doing it, they inherently know they are bad - and so they want to force others to stop being nice so they don’t have to face that reality anymore.
Gutmensch in German usually refers to people who try to appear good and make decisions they feel are good without questioning if the side effects are harmful. Also they expect others to do the same without regard for their ability to do so (e.g. I manage to avoid plastic bags, so you must too. Which is at least somewhat reasonable. But I manage to live without a car so you must too is difficult for some part of the rural population.)
In Europe, Linus is probably right of centre. Just let anyone do whatever except walk around with a gazillion firearms because that’s just insane.
nah even in Europe being trans friendly makes you at least left leaning
we’re not many miles ahead in the societal run towards progress and acceptance, the US is just sprinting the wrong way
In Europe being trans friendly has fuck-all to do with your political leanings on the left-right axis. It’s just USA warping the political discourse with their literally one-dimensional politics.
though i agree it should have fuck all to do with your political leaning, in reality there’s a strong enough correlation that ignoring it would be foolish. As a European trans person if given the choice to out myself to either a group of people i know are left leaning vs a group of people i know are right leaning i’d pick the leftists in a heartbeat
LGBT has always been a target.
The “good guys” still (chemically) castrated one of their greatest minds that won the war for ten, just because he happened to like dicks.
Theres a reason people wanted to reduce the victims of the Holocaust to just being Jewish and ignored all the other groups that both sides wanted to persacute.
They did the same thing this time, target LGBT to build the movement and are now expanded to other groups.
Hopefully everyone stands up while we still have the numbers, otherwise they’ll keep chipping away fringe groups.
You don’t even have to be trans friendly. He never said he was friendly. You can just not care about what other people do with their lives.
if someone is not outright hostile towards me when they learn i’m trans i consider them friendly :')
I’ve started replying “ok, dozer” to anyone who complains about “wholeness” to me. The ennui I have with the regressives is just beyond description anymore.
Dozer sounds too cool, now bout nappers? It sounds like the british word for diapers
I like this word to describe those responsible for us all going backwards now: regressives.
I’m going to start using this
To be fair what he’s described is at most Progressive. The left rejects the current economic model as a start. Workers owning the means of production instead of an owner class.
There’s a whole lot of river to swim between fair and equal treatment and full fledged socialism. Not everyone on “the left” sleeps with Karl Marx under their pillow.
Wait you mean the guy who made a free and open source operating system for everyone to share is left wing!?!?!? WHAT THE FFUUUU
deleted by creator
I didn’t know any of this man’s views, I shouldve started using linux sooner
There are many good reasons to use and learn Linux. Political ideology of its creators is very much not one of them.
They’re largely professional people: their politics almost never influence what they’re building in a practical way.
The (generally) accepting and tolerant culture within which it was produced is part of what made it possible for it to be what it is, but you won’t really see that in the software itself.
Not a good reason for you, this is something that is only subjective lol
honestly, do it. if your laptop gets old, no matter windows or mac, it will be dropped by windows/apple. Linux will make it last a lot longer and run it a lot smoother. Do the switch. And you can actually have your computer the way you want it, not how apple or windows want it to be.
We all should have
Linus. The hero we need. But not the hero we deserve.
He’s an asshole, but god damn it, he’s our asshole.
Everyone needs an asshole otherwise you’re just full of shit.
The Right doesn’t care what people actually believe.
They happily quote MLK on a daily basis.
Ray Bradbury was always anti-fascist, but he called out President Obama because there were no space missions during the Obama terms. After Bradbury died the Right tried to cherry pick quote to make him look like a life long Republican.
per Bradbury’s Wikipedia Article
"Bradbury considered himself a political independent.[83] Raised a Democrat, he voted for the Democratic Party until 1968. In 1952, he took out an advertisement in Variety as an open letter to Republicans, stating: “Every attempt that you make to identify the Democratic Party as the party of Communism, as the ‘left-wing’ or ‘subversive’ party, I will attack with all my heart and soul.”[84] However, Lyndon B. Johnson’s handling of the Vietnam War left Bradbury disenchanted, and from 1968 on he voted for the Republican Party in every presidential election with the exception of 1976, when he voted for Jimmy Carter. According to Bradbury’s biographer Sam Weller, Carter’s inept handling of the economy “pushed [Bradbury] permanently away from the Democrats”.[83]
Bradbury called Ronald Reagan “the greatest president” whereas he dismissed Bill Clinton, calling him a “shithead”.[85] In August 2001, shortly before the September 11 attacks, he described George W. Bush as “wonderful” and stated that the American education system was a “monstrosity”.[86] He later criticized Barack Obama for ending NASA’s crewed space flight program.[85]
In 2010, he criticized big government, saying that there was “too much government” in America, and “I don’t believe in government. I hate politics. I’m against it. And I hope that sometimes this fall, we can destroy part of our government, and next year destroy even more of it. The less government, the happier I will be".[85] Bradbury was against affirmative action, condemned what he called “all this political correctness that’s rampant on campuses”, and called for a ban of quotas in higher education.[21][85] He asserted that “[e]ducation is purely an issue of learning—we can no longer afford to have it polluted by damn politics”.[21]”
Yeah that’s uh… that sounds about right. I wonder a lot about that generation.
Would Rod Serling, a humanist at heart, who campaigned to bring black actors onto mainstream TV sets, and always sent a message that the individual should always fight against an oppressive regime… would he too be lost in a sea of republicanism as he got older and the world changed around him?
I’m glad we’ll never know.
Bradbury needed to look closer then because Obama was working on NASA to get it built back up. Trump didn’t magically make rockets available in a couple years. That stuff takes a very long lead time to get right.
That stuff takes a very long lead time to get right.
Yet somehow, people still think Mr. “We’ll be on Mars by 2025,” who is still launching rockets that explode mid-air, should be allowed to throw out this tried and true method. Surely, the idea of “move fast and break things” is more financially responsible than polluting debris and waste over the country. Fucking monorail salesman…
SpaceX was an accomplishment that got a lot done. Elon might be shit, but he hasn’t destroyed everything he’s touched.
I think he’s always been a sociopathic narcissist. However. It was around the time of the “pedo” comment or early Covid that he completely purged anyone who would tell him no, surrounded himself with yes-men, and fried his brain with drugs.
Pedo comment was the moment I realized what he actually was. I thought he seemed pretty cool before that. My class consciousness wasn’t fully evolved at that point though or I would have realized he had to be a piece of shit to be a billionaire.
Did you never hear about falcon 9 or something? SpaceX’s design process is tried and true. They used it to design the most successful rocket platform ever made. Not only is first stage reuse a massive breakthrough in it’s own right but they pulled it off with arguably the most reliable rocket in history,
