I've been hearing about Omarchy on nostr and X all summer. On SN, @kepford posted about Omarchy back in July (#1029614), but it dind't get much attention.

The main developer behind Omarchy, DHH, calls it a linux distribution in the introduction video on the main page (omarchy.org). So, it's an operating system that you could run instead of Windows or MacOS or Ubuntu.

More specifically, it's Arch Linux, which is a often considered an "advanced" form of Linux. Techno-ignorant folks like me use Ubuntu or maybe Mint. But the consensus seems to be that Omarchy is a Arch Linux with a bunch of preconfigured settings that just work really, really well.

In poking around trying to figure out what Omarchy is, I came across a pile of drama (little bit it reminds me of the current drama in Bitcoin...apparently getting humans to cooperate together is hard).

It seems that DHH wrote a blog post called "As I Remember London", which describes the changing demographic landscape of London and British people's reactions to it.

I'm generally pretty pro-immigration of all kinds (I'm a simple man: more people = more wealth), but even so, I thought his post was good because it also focuses on the frankly insane move towards authoritarianism on the part of the British government. King George has always been a controlling little bastard, but of late, they've amped up their efforts. DHH does a nice job of calling this out.

But it pissed off some people who work on other projects that DHH created and so there was this open letter calling for a fork of one such project -- not because of any technical reason, but because the people didn't like his political views.

DHH recently wrote another post entitled "Calling someone a "nazi" is a permission slip for violence."

I very strongly agree with his point here. While it is somewhat easy to come up with a list of things that an actual member of the Nazi party might have espoused, in our present day the word seems to have devolved into an amorphous gloop that pretty much just means "really awful person" -- and as DHH points out, it comes with a bunch of baggage that implies that the subject of the epithet is a real, physical threat (and therefore grants permission for violent behavior).

We need to be careful about words like this. Fascist gets used in the same manner. As does terrorist. These are useful words for people are interested in controlling others. You can use these words to short-circuit real debate. I often wonder how the history of the early 2000s would have gone if we had refused to accept that Al-Qaeda and co were terrorists, and rather viewed them as a state -- an enemy state with whom we were at war, but a state nonetheless.

(Scammer and shitcoiner are also words like this. Another one of these useful terms has shown up in the Bitcoin drama recently. I'll leave you to guess which it is).