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Linux @lemmy.ml juergen @feddit.de

Linus Torvalds -- Creator of Linux -- defends gun regulation, woke communists, womens rights AND trans rights. Linux is political!

Linus' thread: (CW: bigotry and racism in the comments) https://social.kernel.org/notice/AWSXomDbvdxKgOxVAm (you need to scroll down, i can't seem to link to the comment in the screenshot)

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  • Not in food and not anywhere. Can you give me one or can you not?

    And you seem to assume that something is more political when it causes unrest.. as if the lack of unrest was making things less political. Are you confusing "political" with "cause of human conflict"?

    Even rocks have political repercusions, not only historically (I wonder if humans would even exist without Earth being a rocky planet), but also being necessary today for the survival of people across all social classes since we continue to rely on it for a lot of our structure, creation of tools in tribes and processes in our industries. And it's not without conflict between classes either, with quarries being worked on by the lower classes for the benefit of the rich.

    • I mean at this point you're just making my argument for me. my point in the first place was that most things are political and you're asking me to give a counterexample. if you believe that most things aren't political come up with the counterexample yourself.

      • No. My point is that either EVERYTHING is political (using your criteria) or no physical thing is political (using mine).

        Do you agree? (not asking if you agree with my criteria... but whether that's what we are discussing)

        The fact that there's no example of something that can be non-political in your criteria is actually true to what I was exactly saying.

        Now..

        Under your criteria: the word "political" becomes meaningless, since you can always apply it to everything.

        Under my criteria: only actions / events / purposes / opinions can be political. So a potato or a rock or a mathematical algorithm aren't things that are "per se" political. Though the actions that led to them, or the intention / purpose of their existance might be. As can be all the actions humans might take when pursuing food or any other item of value. Even when that item of value is not political on itself.

        • I just don't see the issue with a lot of things being political. I don't think it diminishes the meaning of the word and it matches the way the word is commonly used.

          • "lot's of things" != "everything".

            Is there one thing that isn't political using your criteria? Or did you use "lots of things" because you do think there might actually be an issue if "everything" was political?

            Imho, it diminishes the value of things when definitions are applied so liberally. It distracts. It suddently makes things now be about the root of a plant, instead of being about specific human actions.

            Also: I just don’t see the issue with not flagging physical things as "political". It's still possible to discuss human behavior, or discuss about food distribution, it's possible to talk about politics (the ideas and acts) without attributing human traits to a potato.

            • If everything is political then surely that's a product of the political times we live in. When you're trans like I am, politics isn't something you can choose to engage with or not. Politics is something that people use to hurt you. And while I certainly envy those who think they can opt out of politics somehow, we live on a planet with a rapidly changing climate and an ongoing mass extinction event. Politics is going to come for you too, whether you refuse to see it or not, and the time it does may not be so far away.

              That's not to say that the "political lens" through which I see the world takes away the other meanings of things. The things I interact with in the world have other meanings and other aspects too, and in a lot of cases the political aspect is not the most important one. But the political aspects of things and the relations involving things are pervasive and important to fully understanding the world, so it is fairly accurate to say that everything on Earth at least is political in some way. Even your denial of the political aspects of things is part of this, as it's part of your privilege to ignore politics.

              Sent from my apartment where I pay the rent to a landlord, on a phone made using global supply chains, on a proprietary operating system based on open-source APIs and code.

              • I'm not saying people can opt out of politics.

                I'm saying politics is in the actions, not in the objects.

                A penis or a vagina are not political. But the decisions/assumptions people might make about them, are.

                There's no such thing as "political times". Conflict has always existed. Trans people existed before too. It wasn't any less political then than now. Even if some things might have changed, it's not that before things were not politically motivated, either in one direction or another.

                Maybe some topics oscillate in popularity with the mainstream tides. Maybe opinions evolve (sometimes to polar extremes). But that doesn't make things today any less (or more) political than they were before.

368 comments