My naming convention for C++ is that custom types are capitalized and instances aren’t. So I might write User user;.

What makes you an actual libertarian?

I don’t have anything to suggest on Lemmy. There’s so little activity that I participate in every community where I see an interesting post, except for those communities which are specifically for people with some particular set of beliefs which I don’t share.

If you’re looking beyond Lemmy, there are are the comment sections of the SlateStarCodex/AstralCodexTen blog and the blogs it links to as well as some associated forums and subreddits. You’ll find plenty of liberal libertarians and the comments tend to be polite and high-effort, but keep in mind that a dedication to free speech means that people with opinions that can’t be discussed elsewhere participate too. It’s a bit much for me sometimes.

I acknowledge that almost all people (including me) couldn’t survive on their own. Even those that could survive (let’s say that their bunkers have robust long-term life-support systems) still couldn’t live completely alone for many years without going crazy.

I don’t reject relationships with other people, but I think they should be between independent individuals who associate with each other only because they both want to. (Violating this principle is sometimes necessary but always undesirable.) You appear to think otherwise, and I suppose that’s a fundamental value difference that can’t be resolved through debate. I do want to point out that if I were in charge, my rules wouldn’t prevent you from voluntarily living life your way. I suspect that your rules wouldn’t leave me the analogous option.

Edit: I suppose that I do feel like I have some obligations to my family members despite being related to them through no choice of my own. Is that how collectivists feel (to a lesser extent) about everyone else?

The preppers are different because they want to be left completely alone. They don’t see any acceptable role for government in their lives. I don’t think they’re being realistic. Freedom isn’t free, as the saying goes.

The techno-libertarians are much more engaged with society and do see a role for government, even if that role is small and (at least according to some of them) bizarre by conventional standards. I’m not going to deny that the bunker-building types are involved in the movement. I often don’t agree with the weirder people involved, but I like that techno-libertarians are willing to hear people out and judge their ideas rationally rather than shunning them for being weird.

(I think I might have a bunker built if I was rich enough. The expected utility of it is higher than that of, say, a second yacht. Human guards are a dead end. Probably the best thing that can be done if civilization totally collapses and you manage to get inside is blowing up the entrance so that anyone who wants to get to you has to move a thousand tons of rock first. You probably won’t ever get to leave, but it’s better than what would happen if you did.)

Almost no one pays attention to the big-L Libertarian party. Ron and Rand Paul got some attention on the national level but they weren’t even members of the party (while in office) and the party itself has never been politically relevant.

I think these days the word is associated more with Silicon Valley techno-libertarians (a group I identify with). These guys favor the free market over government regulation (which isn’t really relevant to Reddit) but they’re also very sympathetic to free-as-in-speech open-source software.

Reddit chased away the Trump supporters before the API thing happened. When it did, some people like me who are classic-liberals and libertarians also came over. After all, Lemmy is an inherently libertarian platform even when its users aren’t. When I express a political opinion objectionable to leftists, I get several times more down-votes than up-votes but I do get up-votes.

Pointing this out isn’t clever.

Software piracy satisfies the colloquial understanding of theft as the act of obtaining something without paying for it, but not the colloquial understanding of theft as the act of depriving someone else of the thing you’ve obtained. Purchasing a software license satisfies the colloquial definition of ownership as the right to do something after having paid for that right, but not the colloquial understanding of ownership as the right to do anything you want with what you have purchased. Software piracy isn’t theft in the legal sense, and purchasing a software license is not a transfer of ownership in the legal sense.

Memes like this are just pointless quibbling over words (barely more sophisticated than “You’re a doodoohead!” “No, you’re the doodoohead times a thousand!”) and contain zero insight into the morality or legality of software piracy or software licensing.

This is the first time I’ve seen a machine with both a 5.25 floppy disk drive and a CD drive. It wasn’t like that stock, was it?

Kansas City

not in Kansas

St. Louis

not in Louisiana

Fun fact: St. Louis used to be in Louisiana.

No because that would imply that Welsh is not just as valid a language as English and I don’t want to be wedi’i gywiro’n gwrtais.

I prefer names like these to names that are common words. Even the name of the language is annoying because the letter C isn’t exactly uncommon in other contexts. I can’t blame the people who named the language because they did it long before search engines were a thing, but what excuse do people now have?

You’ll find a lot of arguments for believing such things if you look for them. Some of these arguments are simply angry rants (and they appeal to angry people who aren’t inclined to think analytically) but others are quite sophisticated. Have I refuted all the sophisticated ones I’ve come across? No, that would take a lot of effort, and maybe some of them are even technically true. I’m not convinced by them primarily because I have certain assumptions about the world: conspiracy theories are generally not true, most people just want to live a good life, kindness is usually reciprocated, and so forth. Someone who holds the opposite set of assumptions (every organization is corrupt, many people are inherently evil, kindness leads to being exploited, etc.) won’t be convinced by your “knowledge against it” without even hearing you out in the same way that I’m not convinced by the arguments for it.

They make screw extractor bits with thread that winds the opposite way from the screw itself so that the bit drills into the screw while turning counterclockwise, but I don’t think that’s worth bothering with here (and I’ve never seen an extractor small enough). Just drill the head off with a normal drill bit. The body will stay stuck in the hole, but you’ll be able to take the cover off and laptops are usually held together by so many screws that a missing one won’t cause problems.

WD, Seagate

Has Seagate improved? After having multiple Seagate drives fail, I did some research on failure rates and Seagate was way worse than every other brand. Since then I have only been buying enterprise-grade WD drives. However, I did my research almost ten years ago and a lot could have changed since then.

I think you should give them more credit than that. There are, for example, real leftists (not trolls) who are extremely hostile to liberals due to disagreements about Middle East policy but still intend to vote for Harris.

the only thing that consistently unifies the democrats is what they don’t like

Opposition to Trump is currently the strongest force uniting the Democrats, but I think there’s more dividing the Democrats than just a disagreement about which issues to prioritize.

For example, someone who prioritizes abortion rights usually also supports protecting the environment and vice versa. Most abortion-rights people and environmentalists agree about what the ideal end state is (both goals accomplished). However, someone who supports affirmative action and someone who opposes affirmative action may currently vote for the same candidate but they’re clearly opposed to each other in a way that the abortion-rights person and the environmentalists aren’t. The distinction between liberals and leftists is useful for describing many disagreements of the second sort, and it’s an important distinction because the dividing line between Democrats and Republicans won’t always cut across the same issues it does now.

Silver’s descriptions of what I think and of what the people who disagree with me appear to be thinking seem correct to me, but of course I know myself better that I know people who disagree with me. I think it would be interesting to have a leftist post about the division from his side’s point of view.

I think that the idea of “liberal” as an insult is driven by the conflict between these two factions, but I’m not claiming that they are the entirety of the Democratic party. There are others, such as organized labor and religious socially conservative black people, who nonetheless reliably vote for the Democrats. I’m curious about what group you would say that you belong to.

I think that even the people who are just as bad as you say are also part of the Democratic coalition simply because both they and I will be voting for Kamala Harris in November, although they will be doing it while complaining a lot. I’ll be complaining a little because I’m never going to support any candidate 100% but my ideal candidate would still be a centrist Democrat.

With that said, I’m not sure how long this coalition will hold together because I would rather vote for a centrist Republican than for a leftist. Right now the Republican party is the one dominated by its extremists but if they return towards the center (Trump won’t live forever) and the Democrats shift left, a lot of liberals will be reconsidering their political alliances.

I think OP’s question is about why parts of the Democratic coalition are hostile to other parts of the Democratic coalition, not about why Republicans are hostile to Democrats.