I knew suckless were assholes whose software philosophy was unworkable in the real world, but their casual nazism just makes me want to avoid them more.
East German Communism and Nazism were both odious, but they are largely incompatible forms of odiousnesses.
When you take together all the fashy things they do, it kind of establishes a pattern that maaaaybe they don't believe in brotherhood and equality.
"I took some more time to read it up and from what I could see, I found that indeed cultural marxism has become more of a political slogan rather than a normal theoretical term in the USA.
Here in Germany the term “Kulturmarxismus” is much less politically charged from what I can see and thus I was surprised to get this response after I just had “translated” this term into English. It might be a lesson to first get some background on how this might be perceived internationally, however, it is a gigantic task for every term that might come around to you.
So to reiterate my question, what term could be better used instead? :)"
I don't speak German well enough to really have an opinion on the veracity of the claims here, but I see no reason to immediately assume the worst or to doubt that this is how this particular person intended to use this term (regardless of how it's used in Germany in general). People get confused about language all the time, and I'd rather look at the full context instead of getting all hung up on a single term.
This is not an endorsement of those views – far from it – but I really take issue how people just just to the worst possible conclusions on things like this.
What makes this an especially thorny issue is that there has been a very real fascination with cultural subversion among Western left-wing radicals since the 1960s and 1970s, on the model of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution ("Destroy the Four Olds, usher in the Four News!") and quite a few of those left-wing radical groups did indeed meld these Maoist ideas with those of the Frankfurt School (for example, "Marx, Mao, Marcuse!" was a common street slogan in the French protests of the late 1960s).
So one could retrospectively surmise that not all of the descriptions one sees in the more conspiratorial accounts of "Cultural Marxism" are entirely without merit. The difference is one of scale, time frame and perhaps motive: was this a purposeful conspiracy involving the Frankfurt School itself from the outset, or just something that arose later within Western radical politics, out of deeply misguided fascination with what was going on in places like China and perhaps Cambodia? It seems clear that the former description is quite wrong, and that those who cling to it are indeed doing so in bad faith. But I can see how some of this could be quite confusing!
Yes true, and half of the males have the Springerstiefel (from the militaryservice) on, because they have no other watertight shoes at home.
I want to add, for context, because I understand when Americans don't understand this: These types of "jokes" don't fly _culturally _in _Germany. If you glorify national socialism or the holocaust, even in humor, you are likely pretty close to that mindset anyway. It's really no joking matter here. And the suckless group _really plays with the local neonazi image... it's at most 90% joke.
FWIW, from another picture of that event, camo-trousers-guy looks like he's male-pattern-baldness-bald, not shaved-head-bald https://suckless.org/conferences/2017/slcon2017.png
Only one fellow appears to have a shaved head.
Kicking contributors out of open source projects, or dis-inviting speakers from technical conferences due to their purely personal opinions has been going on for a while now.
You don't need to act on wrongthink to get unpersoned by the mob.
This has, of course, led to a situation where there are still a bunch of nazis, misogynists, etc, in our profession and communities, but they've learned to STFU and/or engage with much better OPSEC. So now you'll never actually know. Out of sight, out of mind.
(to stay somewhat on-topic, yes, suckless, and dwm in particular, is awesome)
In order to truly democratize access to computers, you must meet your users where they are. That means you have to put in a lot of hard work and abandon your academic elitist norms of "elegance" in favor of empathy. The real world is messy, your users have messy minds, so your software is going to be accordingly complex and messy. Embrace this. Your users will be better off for it.
Empathy is inimical to the Unix philosophy. "Do one thing and do it well" forces the user to cobble solutions together out of the tools they have lying around, and not all of them can do this. This causes stress. The empathetic programmer seeks to minimize stress by putting everything the user may wish to do within their reach, the unempathetic programmer just doesn't care. If you can't understand the system on its own terms, well, sucks to be you. This creates a hierarchy of haves and have-nots: power users, hackers, and the l33t who can engage with the system on its own terms, and "lusers" who cannot engage with it meaningfully at all, which suits the power users just fine -- that's the endgame of Unix-philosophy fundamentalism.
Nazism and fascism are political philosophies embraced by unempathetic people, so it's no surprise when a bunch of empathy-deficient Unix-philosophy hardliners also turn out to be Nazis.
The only lack of empathy I see here is a failure in understanding that not everyone uses computers in the same way as you prefer. That's okay, we're all different. You can do your thing and what works for you, and I'll do mine and what works for me.
Signed.
One of those unempathetic Unix types and Nazi.
Your users are human, so you can’t predict everything all of us will do. This is why we want hackable tools to reassemble, rather than sealed appliances.
"But Hitler also started his movement in the Bierkeller!!!1" ;-)
I can both hate the ideology and accept the software as having utility for me (not that I think I’ve used any of it, but in principle I have no problem with people being fascinated by TempleOS even though I am against a lot of the things the author has stated he stands for).