I still have a Windows 10 or 11 PC that I only use for gaming so I don’t really “use” Windows anymore. I basically use that computer like a really kick-ass game console. Which is why I neither know nor care what version of Windows is on that PC. All my other computers run Linux now.

I had played around with Linux back in the day, but it never stuck. It was the “upgrade” from Windows 7 to 10 that pushed me to commit to Linux permanently. Now my daily driver is EndeavourOS on the laptop and Proxmox on my servers.

What was so bad going from Win7 to Win10? Win10 is painfully slow and shockingly bloated on older hardware, and doesn’t provide any new benefits that I care about. I would have had to replace my laptop for no good reason to stay with Win10. Anyway, once I installed Linux and KDE, I saw how awesome the Linux desktop experience has become and that was that. I will never go back to Windows now, even when I get a new laptop. Windows just isn’t a good operating system anymore while Linux has improved tremendously in terms of user experience.

Removed by mod

Don’t go bothering Korean Jesus. He’s busy with Korean shit.

I read somewhere that there was some drama about identity politics.

I might quibble about the Catholic Church being the “original” church since Catholicism only came about after Theodosius I made Christianity the official religion of the Roman state in 380. You could argue that Catholicism started a bit earlier under Constantine I at the First Ccouncil of Nicaea in 325, which is when the Roman state started to consolidate the various early Christian beliefs under an official “catholic” orthodoxy. The word “catholic” literally means “including a wide variety of things”. The point being that there was already a wide variety of Christian sects prior to the Council of Nicaea.

The Protestant argument against Catholicism boils down to the belief that the Catholic Church is a corrupted Christianity, not that it is non-Christian. And there is some truth to that. The pre-Nicaean churches were free-wheeling spiritualists with a wide variety of beliefs, but that all changed when the Roman state decided to create an orthodox, singular religion under its control. Protestants argue that this adaptation of religious belief to the needs of maintaining state power is the original corruption of the Catholic Church.

Now, two key facts influenced the early history of Roman Catholicism:

1. The Roman state recognized the descendants of Caesar, the Emperors, as the Pontifex Maximus, or head priest, of the Roman state. They also required that everyone adhere to the cult of the Emperor. This was purely ritualistic and was meant as a bulwark to the power of the state.

2. The vast majority of the Empire’s citizens were pagan.

Because of #1, the Roman Emperor became the head of the newly formed Catholic Church, which was a unification of Church and State. This is called Caesaropapism, and is also why the Catholic Church retains a hierarchical structure to this day and its seat is still located in the heart of the Western Roman Empire. The Pope is the spiritual successor of the Western Roman Emperor.

Because of #2, Catholicism is highly ritualistic, like paganism, and early Catholicism adopted the worship of saints, which are basically small gods. Saint worship was the bridge between paganism and Christianity.

During the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century, Luther and others made the point that the union of state power with Christianity was a corruption of “original” pre-Catholic Christianity, which was more spiritually-oriented and valued personal conviction over state orthodoxy. Interestingly, the split between Protestantism and Catholicism in Europe also more or less follows the geographic outline of the Western Roman Empire, with southern Europe largely retaining Catholicism and northern Europe largely adopting Protestantism. This implies a political dimension to the schism, not just a religious one. England is the odd man out here because their response to the schism was to create the Church of England, which is basically Catholicism without the Pope, substituting the English monarch as the head of the Church and toning down the saint worship.

The great irony of any Protestant movement that craves Christo-fascist state power is that they are advocating to become the very evil they swore to destroy back in the 1500s.

I think Americans need to absorb a bit more global context about the left-right spectrum. I see people saying that policies like universal health care, access to abortion, basic worker rights and affordable education are “far left”. Most of the proposed policies of the left in the US are centrist in the rest of the Western world. Unless you are advocating for a Communist regime along the lines of the Soviet Union or Maoist China, you aren’t really “far left”. Similarly, unless someone is advocating for a fascist dictator state, we should probably not call them “far right”. Of course, that is what Trumpists advocate for, so they really are far right!

The current bad reputation of the French is mostly because of WW2. They surrendered after only 6 weeks of fighting and then heavily collaborated with the Nazis. French collaboration was so heartfelt that they refused to hand over their navy to the British when requested to do so. They even fired on American ships and troops in North Africa when the Americans arrived to liberate them from German occupation.

The French were also enthusiastic participants in the Final Solution. According to Wikipedia, “the Nazis in France relied to a considerable extent on the co-operation of local authorities to carry out what they called the Final Solution. The government of Vichy France and the French police organized and implemented the roundups of Jews.”

After the war, De Gaulle promoted the narrative that the French heroically resisted the Nazis, but this was not at all true. The famous French Resistance was tiny until the last part of the war, and only grew once it became clear that Germany would lose. The French government also denied their role in the Holocaust for over 50 years until 1995 when Jacques Chirac finally admitted that, “[T]hose black hours soiled our history forever. … [T]he criminal madness of the occupier was assisted by the French people, by the French State. … France, that day, committed the irreparable.”

So, yeah, that’s why people dunk on France, particularly when it comes to military matters. They certainly did not live up to the ideals of the Revolution or the martial prowess of Napoleon.

I’ve been looking for a good TUI epub reader. I went to install it from the AUR and stopped when I saw it wanted to install 247 dependencies. Wow!