vaguerant

joined 2 years ago
[–] vaguerant@kbin.social 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Of course it's subjective. The terminology of the left-right political divide originally referred to 18th-century France. In the 21st century, we're usually not defining the political center of a nation by how it compares to the French Parliament of 250 years ago. The center moves over time and space, and the left and right are relative to that center.

I do think this comment thread is confusing people, though, as noted in an above edit. For clarity, nobody is saying neoliberalism is a center-left movement.

[–] vaguerant@kbin.social 3 points 2 years ago

This isn't a hill I'm willing to die on at all, but it does mildly annoy me that The Open Source Definition is used by proponents to mean the same thing as "open-source". For anyone not familiar, The Open Source Definition is a document used to determine whether code should be certified by the Open Source Initiate as "OSI Certified". Proponents argue that anything which does not meet the OSI's definition is not open-source, while I think there's room in the language and the mind for disagreement on whether "open-source" and "eligible for OSI certification" are synonyms.

The OSI was originally founded with the goal of registering a trademark for "Open Source", but this was unsuccessful as the term is too broad and descriptive. Failing that, the OSI decided to instead register the trademark "OSI Certified", which can be applied to works which meet their Open Source Definition. Ultimately, what this means is that nobody owns the phrase "open-source" and it's an organic part of language which is not strictly defined by the specific terms of any certifying documents.

Over the years, there have been plenty of non-commercially licensed software with source available for use: a popular example is video, computer and arcade game emulators. The MAME emulator was for years released under its own non-commercial copyleft license before eventually being relicensed under BSD (which meets OSI's Open Source Definition), and popular SNES and Mega Drive/Genesis emulators Snes9x and Genesis Plus GX both continue to be released under similarly "open but non-commercial" licenses.

I'll happily agree that none of those are eligible to bear the "OSI Certified" trademark and that they don't meet OSI's Open Source Definition. But when people start saying they're "not open-source" it rubs me the wrong way, because we're just talking, not trying to achieve trademark certification. Not to mention that the whole nature of software licensing is to note what restrictions there are on the use of the code, e.g. most open-source, copyleft licenses deny you the right to use their code without attribution. However, we basically all agree that that's fine and you can still call a license open-source if it includes that restriction. It's a shades of gray situation that people are treating as black and white just because a definition exists which they can refer back to, with the assumption that all people must subscribe to those specific terms.

There's entirely valid counter-arguments, of course. It's useful to have strict definitions of nebulous concepts like open-source because it could cause confusion, and you have to draw the line somewhere or else the term becomes completely meaningless. e.g. You risk people referring to things like source code leaks as "open-source". There are frequently cases of people ignoring non-commercial license terms and selling those softwares (Snes9x and Genesis Plus GX are often bundled with commercial retro emulation hardware), which you could argue stems from confusion about whether or not commercial use is allowed. But the same devices often violate the licenses of OSD-compliant software as well, so it seems more likely they just don't care about open-source software licensing terms.

So anyway, Genesis Plus GX is open-source but I'm not willing to fight you about it.

[–] vaguerant@kbin.social 0 points 2 years ago (4 children)

All left-right political terminology is inherently subjective, so you can argue neoliberalism is promoted by center-left parties as long as you're defining the center as being to the right of that. Since this post seems to be about the United States, that center is already pretty far to the right as measured from, say, Denmark (picked a name out of a hat). I think the bigger argument here is about US-defaultism rather than whether or not it's OK for Americans to describe things in terms that relate to their political climate.

EDIT: I think the comment I'm replying to is confusing people. Replying solely to the words "center-left" makes it seem like the OP described neoliberalism as center-left, which people are objecting to. However, the OP only used the phrase center-left once, to say that American center-right and center-left parties have enacted neoliberal policy. As a statement of fact, the Democrats have enacted neoliberal policy. By American standards, the Democrats are regarded as center-left. This does not mean the OP was saying "neoliberalism is a center-left ideology." There is an argument to be made here that the Democrats are not a center-left party, but I think the issue is getting confused here because people are reacting as if the thing being described as "center-left" is neoliberalism, when it's actually the Democratic Party.

[–] vaguerant@kbin.social 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

For me, it felt really easy to leave because I had zero social connections on Reddit. I'm not sure if I'm the weird one, but I never learned any individual users' names or felt ways about stuff, except in the rare case that they became a meme, like shittymorph. I was there for like 12 years and nothing tied me to it. Moving to the threadiverse was as easy as changing a bookmark.

[–] vaguerant@kbin.social 13 points 2 years ago

It almost certainly won't be at launch, as the kbin API is not ready yet. Artemis, another upcoming kbin/Lemmy double-act app, is currently relying on a web scraper and self-hosted shim API to access kbin content, with the goal being to switch to the real API once it's available.

Basically, it's a lot of extra work to support kbin right now, but in the future it should be about as easy as Lemmy. I'll be interested to see if any other Lemmy apps pick up kbin support as a result, but even just a couple is more than I expected so soon.

[–] vaguerant@kbin.social 9 points 2 years ago

No, it's just saying "I won't come into your room." They can still go anywhere they want.

[–] vaguerant@kbin.social 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

He can't help being named Jimmy Wales.

[–] vaguerant@kbin.social 12 points 2 years ago

I know it's an opinion piece, but it's always kind of funny to see a word like "shitstorm" pop up in a credible news source.

[–] vaguerant@kbin.social 2 points 2 years ago

Definitely. As a fellow kbean, I was enjoying my time in our funny little walled garden, but the community suddenly expanding ten-fold overnight was pretty spectacular.

[–] vaguerant@kbin.social 6 points 2 years ago (1 children)

kbin has not been defederated from Beehaw, so interactions between those servers are continuing as normal. There's lots of posts about how "we" are defederated from Beehaw on the kbin front page, but those aren't coming from kbin itself, they're just showing up on the kbin front page because they're popular content in the threadiverse.

We (all of us, not a specific instance) should probably get into the habit of referring to our instances by name instead of just saying "us", "we", etc. because it causes exactly this kind of confusion when we don't.

[–] vaguerant@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago

Personally, I feel like having the block button constantly appearing next to every magazine name might be overkill. I'd be happy to have an interface like ...

  • Block

    • Block User
    • Block Magazine
    • Block Instance

... under the "more" menu.

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