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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • I think you’re reading more intent in my post than was actually present. I’m not denying we did genocide to 100 million natives. All I’m denying is that Jackson specifically is significantly worse than the historically reasonable alternatives to the position. Had (for instance) John Quincy Adams, one of the authors of the Monroe doctrine and a big proponent of western expansion, won the presidency, I do not doubt that a similar overall trajectory would have taken place. Maybe we wouldn’t have specifically had a trail of tears moment, but there’s more to the genocide of native americans than just the trail of tears.

    And this is absolving responsibility of all the people who maintained slavery, which one could argue is even worse than jim crow.

    How so? I believe you’re arguing in good faith, but I honestly don’t see how you come to this conclusion from what I wrote?


  • I’m not really trying to weigh and decide if 6000+ deaths and forcible removal of 100k+ people from their homes is better or worse than 100 or so years of systemic oppression followed by more, quieter oppression. Instead, I’m looking at this from the perspective of alternatives.

    After the Civil War we very nearly had a moment when we could have maybe did something real for racial equality beyond anything we’ve seen even up to the present day. The Freeman’s Bureau was fighting for wages for former slaves, and was generally a force for working class empowerment. Black congressmen were already being voted into office rapidly. If it were left to do its work, it might even have helped to innoculate the Irish- and Italian-Americans against future union busting on Black/White racial lines a few decades down the line.

    Instead, after only about a year, Andrew Johnson started fighting and dismantling the Bureau, placing the former slaveowners back into a de facto master/slave relationship with their former slaves, giving the old Southern Democrats back their political power, and generally restoring the status quo as much as possible. The Bureau itself lasted only 5 or 6 years, don’t remember. The KKK rose up because reconstruction wasn’t there anymore to prevent it, because the Democrats wanted so bad to just put all of the states back in the union and go back to bad old days, and so on.

    That was never a realistic moment that I know of in American history where people against war with the native tribes of this land had outsized power and influence. Jackson completely ignoring the Supreme Court’s ruling was awful, but while the ruling was grounded in good moral and legal principles, it was, like it or not, extremely unpopular. There wasn’t an entire party with a supermajority in Congress that could have kept up the pressure on this issue.







  • I’m not going to weigh in on the specifics of Flatpak vs AppImage, because I don’t know enough about the particulars.

    However, I think the “user choice” argument is often deployed in situations where it probably shouldn’t be.

    For instance, in this case, it’s not the user’s choice at all, but a developer’s choice, as a normal user would not be packaging their own software. They would be merely downloading one of a number of options of precompiled packages. And this is the thrust of the argument. If we take the GitHub rant at face value, some developers seem to be distributing software using AppImage, to the exclusion of other options. And then listing ways in which this is problematic.

    I, for one, would be rather annoyed if my only option were either AppImage or Flatpak, as I typically prefer use software packaged for my package manager. That is user choice, give me the option to package it myself; hopefully it’s already been done for me.

    There are some good things to be said about trust and verification, and I’m generally receptive to those arguments way more than “user choice.”



  • Because the nix package manager places all system packages under /nix/store/uniquehash-packagename-version/

    Where the unique hash is obtained via a Merkel tree of all the inputs. So in particular, binaries and libraries exist underneath those directories, not in the places you would expect from FHS.

    In order to make the system actually work, environment variables are set up and executables are patched to refer to specific paths within the Nix Store.