@Floppy Fascism attracts people, because of deceptive beauty, order, and masculinity.

If only demonized, we won’t take away its power to destroy.

I believe label Fascism was created first by outside press in response to Mussolini, not him nor his predecessors.

Fasces is the key to understand Mussolini.

He saw Roman militarism as the socialist unifier, which was influenced in part due to his exclusion from internationalist privileged circles & ironically British financiers.

@Floppy I feel like this needlessly inflates how many fascists there actually are. every time someone is revealed to be a fascist, it’s a whole news story - because it’s relatively rare.

But because you hear about every fascist who happens to maintain or lead something, they seems a lot more than the thousands of people who aren’t fascist, who are just quietly maintaining something without fanfare or big red alerts.

@Floppy
Did the xz utils guy turn out to be fascist? Did I miss something? If not, then sorry, but that one random person in Nebraska still remains among all the assholes building upon his/her work to enslave all of us.

@Floppy yeah, review thier code closely - 🤢

@Floppy Maybe we shouldn't use projects that are led

@Floppy Maybe we shouldn't use stuff that was made by a guy /hj

@Floppy ok, so you have certain percentage of fascist-made-but-still-free-code, which you can fork.

But with corporate infrastructure, fsscists can take over everything and you have no longer right to fork.

As long as it is free and open source, it is just that you are perphaps using something made by someone who turned out to be asshole later, but it works and will work. With true fascists, you are inside concentration camp and has to subdue to whatever the camp fuhrer tells you to do.

However you may dislike this, fascism is a system: system of hierarchy, control and power. Something like "standalone fascist" is nonsense. Someone with stupid behaviour and ideas, if not organized, is just asshole, not "fascist".

Fascism is working, deadly social machinery - not individual psychiv disorder.

@Floppy

It does sometimes seem like this, doesn't it?

However: One of the several real world cases that have cropped up over the years with that picture has been ntpd, and in fairness I don't think that the world knew what David L. Mills's politics were at all, or knows now.

There are a lot of quiet people like that. We've no idea what Herbert Xu, maintainer of the shell (dash) that runs much in Debian and Ubuntu, believes politically, for example.

#ntp #dash

@Floppy damn I fucking hope the readline guy doesn't turn out to be a fascist.

@Floppy
Isn't putting labels on contributors fascism in itself?

@Floppy Decentralize everything.

The "turns out" is rather load bearing since anyone with basic social competencies has usually gone "whoah that guy is an asshole" decades before he does the roman salute, but get told "nooo it's just his special way of working you have to respect his skills" by nerds.

@Floppy I wish I could downvote this, but the frequency in which this has been happening lately is very sad. I mourn being able to (naively) believe that tech was more altruistic than this 😢

Even worse somehow is the hill that people are willing to die on. Sure, it's painful to our pride to admit mistakes, but are we all so bad at learning how to empathize and improve 😭