Kind of true, although for many, the comic starts at the 3rd panel.

Yes. The current modern neo-nazis behave similarly: they claim only the others (the ones they don’t like) are Nazis and their own kind just want the “freedom” to say and do what they like, e.g. get rid of people of color, or political opponents after that. They also frequently claim they’re the victims themselves (e.g. claims of “white genocide” => whites “need to fight back”)). But they would never call themselves Nazis even though they are doing Nazi things regularly. Fascists twist and redefine words and meanings to serve their own agenda.

Usually it’s corruption, but in this case I think it’s even more sinister than that… it’s the result of a total and basically irreversible digital dependency which the EU maneuvered itself into, despite warnings of numerous technical experts not to give away full control of your important digital infrastructure to some other country. But they didn’t listen because they were constantly scammed by marketing, lobbyists and short-lived tech trends to think that it’s surely the best option and there’s surely never going to be a problem if you let US-based companies control everything you need in daily personal or business life.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this comes after the US removed/disabled all US company based accounts (E-mail, Paypal, Creditcard, international banking, …) of one EU judge whose ruling heavily disfavored US big tech companies. (See: https://www.heise.de/en/news/How-a-French-judge-was-digitally-cut-off-by-the-USA-11087561.html) I think this was the main trigger for the EU why this “digital omnibus” now exists - to appease the US-based companies and, by extension, the current US regime. Because otherwise quite a lot of EU businesses and individuals could and would be teleported back to the digital '90s, simply because they chose to give away all of their digital sovereignty - because it seemed cool to do so, and because most others did so too.

The US has demonstrated the world who’s the boss in the digital realm, and everyone who doesn’t fall in line will be threatened with the deactivation or removal of all “important” US-based accounts. This maybe couldn’t have happened before due to friendlier administrations and the rule of law and contracts, but now with the current regime which doesn’t have to care anymore about past alliances or laws or regulations or contracts, there’s really not much that would stop them from doing whatever they (or the US companies) want. And while everyone is watching the US slide into a fascist authoritarianism, what people forget about is how dependent their own lives and also businesses still are on US-based companies. This will be, or is already, a weapon against whole countries to bully them into compliance with US wishes. And I think the EU is still absolutely the equivalent of a digital colony of the US - and that is fully self-inflicted. Far too many popular mistakes have been made in the past, and now those mistakes are actually having their biggest cumulative effect. Just like with the climate desaster. Which is waiting just in line after we get over this. Buckle up.

Unfortunately, most Windows users have a long history of complaining about it and then still continuing to use it.

There’s no way around it: if you keep using abusive software, you’ll stay in an abusive relationship.

It’s for window management related hotkeys. Obviously. All about windows. With a lowercase “w”.

I once said “Some people living in 2025 aren’t very far advanced from people who lived in the Dark Ages” (or Middle Age, whatever). Then somebody replied “… but they are wearing nice suits!”. That’s about the difference. The layer of modern civilization is thin.

Wikipedia has some interesting parts about it as well:

The Dark Ages is a term, now deprecated by most historians, for the Early Middle Ages (c. 5th–10th centuries), or occasionally the entire Middle Ages (c. 5th–15th centuries), in Western Europe after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, which characterises it as marked by economic, intellectual, and cultural decline.

The concept of a “Dark Age” as a historiographical periodization originated in the 1330s with the Italian scholar Petrarch, who regarded the post-Roman centuries as “dark” compared to the “light” of classical antiquity.[1][2] The term employs traditional light-versus-darkness imagery to contrast the era’s supposed darkness (ignorance and error) with earlier and later periods of light (knowledge and understanding).[

Doesn’t seem so far away now does it.

• Private notebook: linux-hardened (fallback: linux-lts)
• Private desktop: linux-zen (fallback: linux)
• Work notebook: linux-hardened (fallback: linux-lts)

They want a civil war, or rather a cultural war between civilians, to detract from a class war. They want the civilians to be fighting among themselves (i.e. left vs right), rather than uniting against ruthless billionaires and grifters in the government. Having a civil war would also make some of their false claims become “true”, e.g. that cities are “war zones” and that they “need” to utilize the Insurrection Act and put the military everywhere without any remaining legal obstructions. I mean they still do it partially already, which is bad enough, but when a civil war would actually exist (like they claim), then they could also claim that what they were lying about the whole time is actually “true” (just not at all the way they said it to be, but the end result would be kind of the same: war zones inside cities) and they’d be legally allowed to be even more oppressive than they are already. It would increase their power overall. It would lead to a guaranteed dictatorship. Dictators love using “emergencies” to grab full, unrestricted power. So it’s best to never aid them while they try to construct an emergency where there is none. That exposes their lies better.

Yes. People even believe the stupidest conspiracy myths on the internet. They’re going to absolutely believe AI-generated fake videos made to reinforce various right-wing extremist agenda talking points, and fast.

Unless the media comes from reputable sources, every video, audio and image will very soon have to be considered as being faked. They must be treated as fake by default unless proven that they’re not. And journalists should move quickly towards cryptographically signing their footage, so that it can be proven to be from that source and not manipulated.

The fact that we still have none of this stuff (or way too little), but DO have many easy means of generating fake images/video/audio already, is probably a big contributor to fascism taking over in multiple places. To quote a well-known villain from a certain video game: “You are not prepared!”

It depends on the notebook. In general, Linux is much more efficient than Windows (much less bloat), so in theory it should automatically lead to better battery life, However, on some (or even a lot of) notebook models, there are all sorts of weird manufacturer hardware choices, UEFI settings and whatnot which don’t always fully conform to specifications or have other quirks which the proprietary Windows drivers for that device circumvent and thus deal with in a way that leads to the intended positive result, but the open-source Linux drivers which usually follow the specifications will then lead to a negative result (usually: less power efficiency => increased battery drain). So it’s best to stick to notebook models and manufacturers which are known to be good devices for running Linux on them (or where the manufacturer even directly supports running Linux on), and not blindly or randomly buy a notebook hoping that Linux will run at 100% efficiency on every weird hardware combination.

Most news is bad news and you certainly are exposed to more (bad) news these days than decades earlier. That certainly must be one factor why you can get increasingly bitter about the world.

But that doesn’t mean that the situation hasn’t gotten worse. It definitely has.

The three main factors are (although #2 and #3 are related): increasingly problematic climate change and exhausting the planetary resources too quickly while at the same time polluting it more and more, increasingly ruthless neo-liberalist capitalism (leading to increasingly poor regular people and increasingly rich rich people), and the rise of right-wing extremism / fascism (related to the previous factor because whenever the population is worse off, they tend to vote more for right-wing populists lying to make everything better and knowing the true causes, while in reality they deflect from real problems and will make things even worse for the general population, and faster). And since we have the internet, local fascism doesn’t stay local. It spreads globally.

In order of priority:

1. Check for a Linux-compatible alternative
2. Try installing/running it via Bottles (a veeeery easy to use Wine frontend, hiding lots of wine complexity). Wine allows running most windows programs directly on Linux, with almost zero performance overhead.
3. Try installing/running it via winboat (basically WSL in reverse - a well-integrated Windows VM or container running on Linux so you can run pesky Windows-only programs with it) (haven’t used it myself yet)
4. Use a regular full Windows VM on Linux (likely less well integrated and more resource intensive than #3, but maybe even more compatible). Set up a shared folder between host and VM for easy file transfers.
5. Dual-boot Windows from another disk. Set up a shared folder/partition for file transfers.

1. Lie that someone is a threat (without evidence)
2. Justify killing him based on #1 (without due process)
3. Claim that anyone opposing #1/#2 is aiding the enemy
4. Justify killing that opposition based on #3/#1

Fascism 101

First, there are still technical means and operational security techniques of having and safeguarding private chats, that means if you don’t utilize them and it leaks, it’s basically your fault for either not being informed enough or for being too careless.

Second, if you do criminal things in said private chats, and it leaks, then you should be held accountable for it. Especially if, as in this case, what you did went against the constitution, human rights or similar very basic laws that no one should break, ever. In these times, no one can predict if or when such online hostility turns into real-life hostile acts. The line that separates saying hostile stuff online and actually doing it IRL is sometimes very thin. With the extreme amounts of right-wing extremist propaganda on the web these days, I’d say this is a serious matter and there’s a high chance that some individuals will forget their moral compass and just go full Nazi after being exposed to too much of this stuff.

I know, but it’s still a warning sign, even when some can’t read or understand it.

Though laughing about the current regime in USA is an understandable reaction, it’s also at the same time not a laughing matter at all. It’s a bit like a great comedian or clown who is very entertaining and goofy at first but at the end he randomly kills 1 person from the audience. Still a funny act? No. Because at the end of this craziness, people will needlessly suffer and/or die.

The country still has huge world-wide influence, and if that influence originates from crazies, that’s not great for anyone, neither for US citizens nor for any other country in the world which has to at least partly deal with the US somehow. It is, however, a great and very visible warning sign for other countries to hopefully not follow the US into such craziness.

Ironic how being so blatantly illegal makes these neo-nazis sort of… “illegal aliens” within a democracy based on law and constitution. They are already guilty of the things they accuse others of.

With low-effort crap posts like this (made even easier with GenAI) he is “recruiting” stupid people who believe anything that’s not from reputable sources (mainstream/science is boring and hard to understand, conspiracy myths are easy to "understand " and exciting) into his MAGA cult which is also consisting of right-wing extremists and “conservatives” who are easily dragged to the right and made into extremists as well.

The wealthiest entities in the economy are then allying with that cult and push more propaganda in the hopes of “recruiting” even more people into the cult.

The goal of these political and economic elites is to establish an autocracy without any painful regulations of the economy, so the goal is to get even richer at the cost of a functioning society and democracy. It’s the capitalism endgame - merge corporations with politics (going much further than previous lobbying and corruption), establish a fascist ruling class based on wealth and influence, and try to keep the population in line through lies and propaganda. They need stupids, crazies and extremists as supporters of this coup. This works best with right-wing crazies because they are the most gullible and easiest to manipulate. And by pushing propaganda on proprietary platforms, they can convert more people into the cult.

Inciting a culture war between the cult and the other part of the population protects the elites from a class war occurring. If the population is busy fighting with each other, the elites can sleep easy and continue to extract as much money as possible, for as long as possible.

Just like you wouldn’t do a trip to North Korea or some war-torn country, you shouldn’t do a trip to USA in 2025. The country is currently in deep crisis with a rogue regime consisting of neo-nazi zealots & grifters and a big chunk of the population brainwashed by regime-supported propaganda on national TV (Fox News) and other random bullsh!t on proprietary social media, also radicalizing parts of the population. Plus they can all own guns legally. It’s neither a safe nor sane country currently. Sorry for the decent Americans out there but your situation is really bad and I don’t think you can turn this around non-violently anymore.

Always prefered “medium” sparkly. Still water is just bland. Sure you can drink it if there’s nothing else but it’s just bland. When it’s too sparkly though it kind of distracts from the taste of the water itself too much I think, which also isn’t great because it subjectively feels like you didn’t drink that much because it doesn’t feel as refreshing. So I like the middle ground the most.