This is classic bad online-forum-moderator behavior, that you see in all sorts of online chat and message board spaces where there's a moderator who has the power to lock threads at all. Obviously, the systemd maintainers have no obligation to adhere to any particular moderation policy on their org's github issues, but they definitely deserve mockery for this.

Have you ever been on the moderator side of this? There's ultimately no perfectly polite and collegial way to say "we've heard your concerns, but this is our decision and it's not subject to your review". Being more direct about it would only have inflamed the situation further.

My actual opinion here is that Github issue threads shouldn't exist at all; and pretty much all online communication should be redesigned in such a way as to prevent anyone taking the role of a moderator to lock down a coherent comment thread from everyone else who wants to participate. (I agree this is a hard chat UX problem).

In my ideal world, instead of having Github accounts everyone in the thread would be posting under their own personal ID (in a way similar to ATProto, Nostr, etc.), using a discussion UX that would allow Soller to seamlessly continue the thread along with any other willing participants even after the systemd maintainers blocked it from their own end (which is their right to do). Perhaps if systemd entirely forked over this, this issue comment thread could seamlessly transition into a new issue on the fork, to serve as documentation for why the fork works the way it does.

In general, sometimes the best response to a moderator banning some kind of discussion is for everyone who is subject to that ban to fork the discussion thread itself; and online communication software should more readily facilitate this.

How is a global reset going to solve the problem of not enough oil getting exported out of Arabian Gulf oil fields to provide energy to the rest of the world?

https://radicle.xyz/ is a project aiming to do exactly this.

In particular a number of other projects assume that you have a GitHub account. https://github.com/rust-lang/crates.io/issues/326 has been open for literally a decade without any meaningful work. If you want to publish a Lean software packages on Reservoir, the official Lean package registry, their requirements (https://reservoir.lean-lang.org/inclusion-criteria) not only specify a GitHub project specifically, but having at least two stars on GitHub as a "basic quality filter". Microsoft is a big funder of Lean and I can't help but think this is a deliberate restriction to increase lock-in on a Microsoft-owned platform.

That's one advantage of using "obsolete" programming languages - the community isn't designed about what online services are currently hip.

Those points are true of every technology that uses energy, including ones you use happily without thought, and whose absence would greatly increase human suffering.

Removing AI quite clearly doesn't fit into that category. It doesnt reduce human suffering, hell the primary propagandists behind it are explicitly anti-humanists and want it to replace human creativity. Thankfully its awful at that

I think this essay suffers from an attempt to define fascism so narrowly it only actually includes two countries - Nazi Germany and Mussolini's Italy, who were both defeated by the same set of powers in the same war - while simultaneously stating that there's a specific quality of fascism - namely, an unwise focus on the signifiers of military strength rather than actual military strength - that is applicable to a bunch of other governments in other situations he classifies as near-fascist to avoid arguments over whether they are actually fascist or not.

I don't think he makes the case that an unwise focus on the signifiers rather than the reality of military strength primarily explains the defeat of either Nazi Germany or Mussolini's Italy in WWII. Did the Nazis and Italian fascists actually do this to a greater extent than any of the other participants of the war? Certainly every major participant in WWII had propaganda about how good its army was, including the United States and Britain ("videos" is anachronistic for the time period, but there's plenty of American WWII military propaganda that was originally a black and white filmstrip that's been digitized on YouTube). And every major participant in the war had a great deal of actual, non-fake, military strength. Fascist Italy was certainly a junior partner to the Nazis, but Nazi Germany was primarily defeated in the incredibly bloody Eastern Front, mostly by the armies of the Soviet Union expending huge amounts of blood and treasure in order to do it. It was not a trivial victory, nor I think an inevitable one.

The Soviet Union was an officially state socialist country, an ideology that saw itself as directly opposed to fascism. Particularly under Stalin, it can hardly be described as a country "willing to engage in potentially embarrassing self-study and soul-searching" - indeed Stalin's purges of large fractions of Soviet society in the 1930s, including the military, are a commonly-cited reason why the Nazis had so much success in the initial phases of the invasion of the Soviet Union.

Of course every allied power in the war was being supplied materially by the United States, which had an extremely favorable geographical position and cultural disposition to produce material goods. Maybe whichever side in the war the US supported would've won. Or maybe some third thing would've happened, WWII is one of the most well-studied conflicts in human history (and for good reason, it was a pretty important one!), there's lots of people with lots of ideas out there about how it could've gone differently than it did.

Looking beyond Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy to other countries also weakens the argument. Let's say for the sake of argument that Franco's Spain counts as fascist. Then the fascists won the civil war, avoided fighting in WWII at all and thereby being destroyed like Nazi Germany was (although I think this was also not a foregone conclusion, and had more to do with the geopolitical calculus of the Allied Powers than anything Spain itself did at the time), and ended up surviving until Franco died of heart failure at the age of 82. At which point the country had a series of contentious-but-ultimately-peaceful political reforms resulting in its modern constitutional monarchy. This doesn't really sound like a narrative where a focus on the trappings rather than the reality of military ability resulted in a fascist nation fighting an aggressive war of choice and then losing! This might've just been Hitler specifically! (And it's not like that was the first time Germany did this sort of thing - was Kaiser Wilhelm II fascist? What about Otto von Bismark - the Franco-Prussian war went fairly well for Prussia and fairly badly for Napoleon III's France, actually, although maybe this is getting too far back in the past for labels like "fascist" to be useful).

If Salazar's Portugal was fascist, then doesn't the fact that it avoided aggressive war imply that fighting (and losing) aggressive wars isn't very diagnostic of fascism? If the fact that it lost its overseas colonial empire constituted a military failure of fascism, then what are we to make of the fact that so did Britain and France at roughly the same time and for the same set of reasons? Was France suffering from fascist overconfidence in its military when it failed to win the First Indochina War? Immediately after having been successfully conquered by Nazi Germany for a few years and then successfully expelling them along with the other allied powers in exactly the same war that Nazi Germany lost as thoroughly and completely as it is possible to lose a war?

Saddam Hussein's Iraq is also a poor example, because while it was a cult-of-personality dictatorship and there was definitely a great deal of the trappings of military strength rather than actual military strength - Hussein did not tolerate his subordinates bluntly telling him the actual truth on the ground - Iraq didn't actually lose his war of choice against Kuwait because of anything Kuwait did. He lost it because the United States, in its capacity as a global superpower, decided that it wasn't going to tolerate Iraq invading Kuwait and more-or-less unilaterally - and easily - destroyed Iraq's army in the First Gulf War. And of course in the Second Gulf War Iraq didn't really do anything, which is why so many people thought it was immoral - indeed, fascist! - for the US to wage another aggressive war of choice against Iraq, again more-or-less unilaterally, and again easily destroy Iraq's army, depose Saddam Hussein, set up a puppet government that tried and executed him, and basically run the country for another decade or so until the US got tired of it. I don't think this says anything about fascism or near-fascism, I think this says that the United States is World Police (you know, like that movie the South Park guys made, at the time).

I think the actual point of this essay is that the author is operating in a framework where he wants to compare his domestic political opponents to Nazi Germany - because that's a metaphorical framework that has been in play in liberal democracies since they were actually fighting WWII against the actual Nazis - and because he's a historian who focuses a lot on warfare, he wants to do this by arguing that actual fascist governments (both of them) were bad at war even though they had the trappings of being good at war. So therefore his domestic political opponents, who he calls fascists, must also be foolish blowhards who are actually weak and pathetic.

You don't write something like "Put bluntly, fascism is a loser’s ideology, a smothering emotional safety blanket for deeply insecure and broken people (mostly men), which only makes their problems worse until it destroys them and everyone around them." if you're trying to actually understand why various types of government performed the way they did in actual wars - you write this if you're actually talking about people in your liberal democracy who you don't like and are trying to insult. And you write "(mostly men)" if you're operating from a framework which treats masculinity as inherently suspect, which is a contemporary domestic-politics political signifier, rather than something that was relevant to explaining why the Soviet Union ultimately militarily defeated Nazi Germany.

One thing in your essay I'd like to point out, that in no common definition Friedrich - Wilhelm II or Otto von Bismarck can be defined as fascist.

they were monarchs, and leaning to the standard absolute monarchy style of leadership whenever possible.

classical Mussolini fascism is corporatism combined with nationalism and elements of communism, mostly in whatever combination The Leader thought were appropriate.

there is no way the Junker class of Prussia would let a bunch of upstart capitalists tell them how to run their empire.

I ride an electric scooter to work. An older friend of mine saw this, and reminisced about how he rode a gasoline-powered scooter to work 20 years ago in the early 2000s, and how he had to deal with the fact that it was loud and smelled of gasoline. I'm sure it was possible to buy some kind of electric scooter then, maybe even one that would've worked for his commuting needs. But I'm not surprised that lithium ion battery tech got significantly better over those 20 years, such that when I bought my scooter last year it didn't even occur to me to look and see if there was something gas-powered I could've bought.

Even at 2-3 stories, I'm skeptical that there's enough roof surface area to provide enough solar panels to individually cover the electrical use of all the inhabitants. Many 2-3 story apartment buildings don't have parking lots at all - and it's a common pro-density urbanist political project to remove the requirements to build one, because it discourages car use and also makes projects cheaper - but even if they did, a small apartment also means less surface area for solar panels over the parking lot. And once you're in a building with multiple households, that means that the solar panels - and the amount of energy every individual household draws from them - has to be managed communally. I'm glad I don't have to justify the power use of my home server to a group of my neighbors concerned about managing a common resource, and just pay my power bill to the de-facto-monopoly state-regulated electric utility company.

You would be surprised how little power european households consume, but we do have central/gas heating so the math doesn't always work out perfectly. 100-200W for lights/tv/fridge, oven/induction/kettle for 2h ~2000W a day. That's something the solar panels can most definitely handle, of course this is on case by case basis. I consume 300W at idle as I have a home server :)

Apartments have walls too, but we're getting into a territory where it might start becoming ugly.

If you care about getting the population to switch en masse from gas heating to electric-powered heat pump heating - which is an explicit social/political goal of a number of people I know, and one that I'm simultaneously sympathetic to and have serious qualms about - then everyone's gas consumption needs to go down and everyone's electricity consumption needs to go up. Also once you have a heat pump, you have an air conditioner - it's the same technology - and that means that people will want to use it to cool their dwellings in the hot months of the year, even if they weren't previously able to do this with just a gas-powered furnace, resulting in even more electricity consumption.

Honestly, I think it's fine to just keep the electric grid as it is, and not attempt to power every building only from the amount of solar electricity that it can generate from its roof area. The electric grid lets us take advantage of economies of scale, build gigantic solar arrays or nuclear power plants on cheap land outside of town, and crucially leave the management of that grid up to one well-known organization rather than a consortium of several households in an apartment.

Well yah of course, the grid is useful. But new developments should just include solar and storage and simply become the grid I think that's a no-brainer, off-grid or micro-grid would obviously better, but I'd settle for a mix.

Why should you expect in general that someone who agrees with you on one issue also agrees with you on other issues? The idea that Israel is the greatest threat to free speech at this point in time is as offensive to some people as the idea that Russia is fighting a just war in Ukraine is to some other people.

Their message seems to suggest that the claim is worth more because of who it is attributed to. Without Mearsheimer's name, it's just an utterly generic observation.

The attribution would make sense if Mearsheimer had actually said something novel, or if his association somehow made the statement more credible.