This post is very political, but then again, all the previous ones were too

I don’t have anything to write about computers for now. Not much is happening for me on this field. My homelab is still homelabbing, BOINC is being crunched, my Pi cluster is running, things are going their own course.

But I have this growing frustration about the state of world affairs and this is the place where I can vent it.

But STFN, this is a blog about technology, don’t add politics to it, some of you might say. To which I reply: I do not believe in the separation of politics and technology.

Everything we do with technology is connected with politics. The decisions we make in IT are, well, I don’t really want to talk in absolutes, so I will use the word “often”, often are connected to our worldview, and from our worldview come out political beliefs.

Why do I talk about selhosting Immich and not giving away all my photos to Google Images? Because I don’t like capitalism and corporations. Why do I talk about the Fediverse and GoToSocial, and not praise Twitter or TruthSocial or any other nazibar dot com? Because I believe in grassroot movements, in community, in the left-wing self-organisation. Also because of my political beliefs I give my GPU to scientists with BOINC, and not to crypto scammers.

So yes, this blog is political.

A few days ago I was listening to a podcast where Wojtek Żubr Boliński was talking with a game designer , and one of their topics was the accusation that some people raise, that modern games are “political” or even “woke” (woke is absolutely the most pointless, stupidest, umbrella term for “anything I don’t like”) and their conclusion was that games have always been political, since their beginnings, it’s just that people did not see it. Their politics have been invisible because they were of the kind that have been permeating the global life for the last decades, US good, third countries people bad, liberty good, money good, men strong, damsels in distress.

And now when some games try to break that sanctified consensus, “the gamers” are enraged because “the games are being taken over by the woke politics”.

And same with other types of media. I never watched Thunder in Paradise like Wojtek did, but I was a big fan of the A-Team. When I was 8 or so I liked it because funny guys and machine guns and explosions, but when you think about it, it’s highly political and leftist. A group of people hiding from the government, helping, for the lack of the better term, the working class from oppression.

Sigh. I don’t have a smart point here, again, just venting.

Now to other things.

I cannot reiterate how much I hate Trump and I hate Musk and I hate JD Vance and their lackeys*. For many reasons, but currently the main reason is the ongoing war.

The Western World, if we even can still use that term, should do everything they can to help Ukraine fight Russia. Not only for the obvious fact that Ukraine is an independent country and has every right to exist and prosper. But also because Russia is an aggressive, genocidal regime that will not stop at Ukraine if it falls. Eastern European countries have been invaded by those fuckers many times, and it’s obvious they want to do it again. And Trump trying to be friends with Putin over our heads is the worst possible scenario.

And then there’s Europe. The current situation, paradoxically, is a chance for Europe to finally stand on it’s own and not depend on the chaotic uncle from the other side of the Atlantic. I have a very strong belief that the European Union is the best thing to have happened to Europe in its history, and the only way for Europe to move forward, to survive even, is much closer cooperation, both commercial and military. We need a common army, a common market, and buy goods locally, not import goods from China and technology from the US. We need our own services as we have Galileo, our GPS alternative. In a way, I am becoming more and more a European nationalist.

But then there are the morons from the European far right movements, gaining ground and talking in the voice of Kreml and Trump (which is now basically the same), saying that the EU is bad, and Europe should again be just a bunch of small, isolated, chauvinist countries. That worked out very well in 1914 and 1939, didn’t it? Brexit worked out great for the UK, didn’t it?

Here in my country Konfederacja, a local far-right movement is now getting 20% of the votes in the polls, and they candidate for the president is third in the polls.

I cannot imagine why would anyone vote for the far right, but looks like I am in the vast minority (vast minority? is that a phrase?), as the party I vote for, the reasonably lefty RAZEM is constantly below 5% in the pools.

This is all so frustrating. A few weeks ago I started reading a very smart book, “Our Modern Crisis” by Murray Bookchin, but I left it, I was too tired, I need something to get my mind of the world, so I started reading The Expanse. Which of course is also very much political but in a different way :)))

There are so many other things in today’s world that make me sad or frustrated or angry or everything in between, but I’ll leave them for other posts, not everything at once :)

To end this post with a silver lining, there are things that make me feel better. To list just two, in no particular order:

There’s Solarpunk, a movement based on hope and self-organization and nature. I haven’t yet read much works of writing based in that idea, but I’m just happy it’s there. One day I will wrote more on it.

We are solarpunks because optimism has been taken away from us and we are trying to take it back.

And then there are the European Alternatives, a page showing all the ways one can move their IT life from those Silicon Valley guys to better lands.

This is the first blog post of this kind here, but I am sure there will be another ones.

You can leave me a comment here or reach out to me via email or the Fediverse, links in the footer.

Thanks for reading!

*the word lackey always reminds me of Simcity2000, because it was often used there in those newspapers with news about your city