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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Definitely recommend people read this except from the book in its entirety here: https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.htm

    But here’s a piece of it:

    "And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.

    "But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Informal groups become smaller; attendance drops off in little organizations, and the organizations themselves wither. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to—to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then you are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.

    "But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

    “And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.”


  • I don’t disagree that it could work, but I’m also not sure it’s that simple either.

    There’s a big difference in trying to get people to protest for the threat that is over the horizon than the one in power for 40 years. People just aren’t good at conceptualizing the weight of that future pain against what they currently stand to lose.

    And they could lose a lot - their job first, which also means their house and their health insurance. Not to mention plenty of laws criminalizing most protest already, where you are bound to be caught on camera or via other digital surveillance, and a single arrest on your permanent record means no future employment, and missed payments on your credit history means no future economic prospects.

    And believe me I know the risk of that is worth it, and the risks you’d have in the future are even worse, but most people in the country still aren’t ready to make that trade - hell, most still deny the direction things are headed.


  • Yeah, people abroad are wondering why Americans won’t just stand up, but the reality is that the country is massive and you need an incredible organizing effort to offer any real, organized resistance.

    And sure, some groups have tried, but you really need your opposition party, or some kind of major celebrity, or someone else with major reach to organize something that reaches every American and pulls them together to action.

    And that just hasn’t happened. Some people have spoken out, but nobody has been willing to lead that next step and really lead a movement. Words aren’t gonna be enough to counter this.
















  • To add on to this answer (which is correct):

    Your “of” can also just be a regular file if that’s easier to work with vs needing to create a new partition for the copy.

    I’ll also say you might want to use the block size parameter “bs=” on “dd” to speed things up, especially if you are using fast storage. Using “dd” with “bs=1G” will speed things up tremendously if you have at least >1GB of RAM.