Rowan Thorpe

I hadn’t even heard of the underlying protocol NNCP yet, and it seems to solve out of the box several things I was trying to do in some of my own hobby-projects. I’d been battling with automating and integrating Tor/I2P, Openssl, Tox, GPG, Wireguard, etc. If NNCP lives up to the hype it will be a big shortcut, when I next get time to work on stuff :-)

The article at the end mentions they suggest dd as alternative for MacOS (due to Unix user space). It seems the balena -> rufus decision is about the easiest-onramp Mac+Win-portable option, for those uncomfortable dropping to low-level device-writing CLI tools in their current system.

Side-note: Last time I was on a friend’s Windows I installed dd simply enough both as mingw-w64 (native compiled) and under Cygwin. So for Windows users who are comfortable using dd it only requires a minor step. When I once used WSL devices were accessible too, but that was WSL1 (containerized), whereas WSL2 (virtualized) probably makes device-mapping complex(?) enough to not be worth it there.

So you confirm that we agree our most recent comments don’t constitute a constructive discourse (we agree for our own differing reasons, but that’s beside the point). So rather than itemising the hows and whys of disagreeing with your latest comment I will instead just wish you well and say goodbye. If you reply and don’t hear back from me, please know that is not out of concession or rudeness on my part, just that at some a discussion needs to stop (especially when all agree it is not constructive).

…cruelty is state policy in China.

That is a very causatively specific thing you are claiming I said, which I didn’t. Again.

Your comments are frustrating to me because they’re born out of ignorance. You have not spent the time to actually understand how Chinese system works

…if you bothered to learn a bit of history you’d see that…

I urge you to actually spend the time to learn about China instead of regurgitating demagogy.

That’s making quite a few assumptions and accusations about someone you’ve never met and know nothing about. Have you genuinely considered that many of those assumptions and accusations might be wrong? And no, I won’t (and shouldn’t) fall into the same “courtier’s reply” trap by itemising first-hand experiences, interactions, etc here because A) that would be inappropriate and should be irrelevant to a healthy discussion-focused dialogue - free of such “appeal to authority” logical fallacies, B) as stated before it is clear you keep arguing past what I’m actually saying - to how you reinterpret what I am saying, and C) after working through your false assumptions, false accusations, ad hominems, and misreading it seems you didn’t actually say anything else for me to reply to.

I made statements about various global systems of government, in general, and when you redirected and contextualised every statement to being consistently only about China, at first I did you the debater’s courtesy of addressing that, but unfortunately that courtesy has a limit, especially when you don’t reciprocate. As much as people displaying Said’s concept of Orientalism irreparably bias and taint global-context discussions, Occidentalism is also harmful for the same reason. Both of them often veer discussions into two-sided, one-dimensional (and often zero-sum) arguments to be “won”, rather than multivariable, multidimensional, fallibilistic and constructive debates. I have only been here for the latter but you are either only able or only willing to participate in the prior, so I say again it makes sense to just agree to disagree and move on. Anything else is just browbeating.

Lastly, I would have thought those ad hominems alone should be delete-worthy due to rule 1, no?

Your claim that Chinese government is a bad actor…

Although that uses many of the same words I used in that sentence it is a fundamentally different sentence from what I said.

Secondly, when I make my point (“my moral code does not allow me to accept that certain means, especially those based on cruelty, can be justified by any number of material results measured by any metrics”) you keep rebutting it by pointing me back to those very result-metrics. It means I feel we are just talking past each other in a failed dialogue on that point, meaning the only constructive response is to just “agree to disagree” on baselines regarding it.

Thirdly,

Meanwhile, idealists in the west have been preaching kindness while allowing the dictatorship of capital rule over every aspect of their lives.

On this point I agree with you entirely. Fundamentalist Capitalism (especially the end-stage variants we are seeing in some places, and the inevitable Disaster Capitalism facilitated by certain politicians) is an absolute cancer. Just as much as Fundamentalist Utilitarianism is a cancer. It seems you keep trying to use that as a gotcha, for some ideological banner I am not even waving.

I suspect my comments are frustrating you (?) because, on the one hand you are championing a political system and inherently accepting that its expediencies are acceptable, whereas I am arguing from a moral standpoint which explicitly considers many of those expediencies to be unacceptable, irrespective of the political ends. You have made many strident criticisms of many political systems and governments, many of which i concur with. I just also include the Chinese government in those criticisms along with the others.

You dismissed my moral standpoint with:

…all nice and good, but it’s ultimately meaningless while…

Conversely, I think all governmental implementations which think they can get away with sidestepping those moral baselines in the name of expedience are destined for corruption and collapse, while leaving a trail of cruelty in their wake. Not just one governmental implementation, all of them. That is why I think the presently constructive action is to accept that our respective “lines in the sand of acceptability” on these issues are different, and just agree to disagree on those points.

I think two productive things I can say in reply to your comment are:

1. Your post was about governments and rich people, yet your replies are here referring to the people and the societies. In the spirit of your post, and your reply-comment singling out China, I was replying about the Chinese government (both the things they do, and the things they normalise and accept from bad actors in society), just like I was talking about for the US, Russian, UK, and European governments in my previous comment. A lot of that comes from my empathy for Chinese people, culture, and society - quite the opposite of what it seems you interpreted.

2. I think a key to remaining in touch with our core, shared humanity is remembering that some methodological means can never be justified by any material ends, and to keep revisiting what our own personal moral code says about where that line is. Importantly, I don’t reserve that opinion for any subset of political/religious/whatever systems or subset of countries, and have particular distrust for fundamentalist (unquestioning) implementations of any and all of them. Hence, to quote the last (and clearly not by any interpretation “rule breaking”) sentence from my comment:

Kindness and humaneness is not measured in GDP and hot-button topic popularity polls

I respectfully but firmly disagree regarding three words used here: racist, tropes, parroting. I would have been willing to clarify and defend why (and why I can partially do so from lived-experience), while also empathising about how one part of what I wrote might be possible to misinterpret without that clarification. The comment has since been removed though, so it wouldn’t be productive now. I still feel it important to say that a now-invisible comment of mine being called out as something is in my opinion not that thing (so readers don’t just assume it was without hesitation), while respecting your right to claim as such, especially before seeing any followup clarifications.

Removed by mod

Firstly my comment was clearly the comment-equivalent of a shitpost to express generalised disdain for the morally bankrupt hypocritical preschool-behaviour of almost all centralised human power-structures on the global stage, so its slightly disturbing that your threshold for considering something as “analysis” sits that low.

I’m not sure why you are trying to defend China by comparing it to EU & US for me. I lampooned them too. I am an equal-opportunity cynic.

I don’t even understand how Russia, not even mentioned here, ends up taking like 4/5 of your comment.

Did you notice I used the word “extend”? …and mentioned several major countries? I think your mistake is in assuming I am either an AI bot or an intellectually equivalent human “bot” with the naive agenda of waving one team’s flag by trashing all the other flags, and hoping to be on the “winning side” of a zero-sum argument. I am old & cynical enough, especially having actually lived and worked in almost all of the mentioned countries, to have very slowly and very bitterly developed justified disillusionment with the suit-and-tie pantomime masquerading as “leadership” pretty much everywhere on the planet, and know there is no “winning side” for humans the way things are on this planet. If Russia gets more airtime in my tirade at the moment then I’d just say they (who am I kidding, “he”) needs to stop making it so damn easy by generating a virtual firehouse of cruelty purely to make line go up.

I refuse to cheerlead for any nation-state until the world becomes a very different place. Until then I only cheerlead for every single person on their path to growing up, stopping obsessively treating the very administration of people’s lives like a football match, getting off the cruel->“fake nice” spectrum, and getting on the “actual kindness” and “mutual respect” bandwagon. But lately I’ll admit I find myself doing that cheerleading rather halfheartedly and dispiritedly.

I think I would extend it thus:

In America, the rich controls the government - to screw everyone else in the country (and sometimes those outside). In China, the government controls the rich - to screw everyone else in the country (and sometimes those outside).

…and with a bonus few:

In Russia, the top of the government controls the rich who control the rest of the government - to screw anyone they can get away with screwing while waving the “just remember we have nukes” flag. In Europe, the leaders keep flip-flopping about who they should be screwing so they just take turns footgunning while announcing “I meant to do that”, and then slapping each other on the wrists for appearances. In the UK, the rich and the government take turns visiting the pawnshop with anything that isn’t screwed down, then acting shocked when swathes of the government end up effectively owned by other governments.