Rosa Luxemburg
“If indeed the socialist commonwealth were an impossibility, then mankind would be cut off from all further economic development. In that event modern society would decay, as did the Roman empire nearly two thousand years ago, and finally relapse into barbarism.
“As things stand today capitalist civilization cannot continue; we must either move forward into socialism or fall back into barbarism.”:rosa:
Born in southeastern Poland on 5 March 1871, Rosa Luxemburg was a towering figure of the classical socialist movement— a brilliant thinker, sharp-tongued rhetorician, and trailblazing leader of the proletarian cause. The famed socialist historian and journalist Franz Mehring once called her the “best brain after Marx”. Her comrade and dear friend Clara Zetkin described her as the “sharp sword, the living flame of revolution”. Even Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin, with whom she often clashed, was compelled to acknowledge her status as an “eagle” of the Communist movement, at least in retrospect.
“Democracy is indispensable to the working class, because only through the exercise of its democratic rights, in the struggle for democracy, can the proletariat become aware of its class interests and its historic task.”:rosa:
She was, by all accounts, a truly unique figure. A Jew, a Polish woman, physically disabled and politically an irreconcilable Marxist—the obstacles to her pursuing her aims in life were legion, yet she rose to become one of the paramount leaders of the largest and strongest socialist movement in the Western world, German Social Democracy. In her short but brilliant career, she locked horns with the Prussian military elite several times and spoke as equals with Karl Kautsky, August Bebel, Victor Adler, and many other leading lights of socialism. As a political agitator she rallied masses of workers against capitalism and imperialist warfare, while also challenging Marxist orthodoxy as both a theorist and instructor at the Social Democratic party school in Berlin.
Yet since being cut down by proto-fascist thugs in January 1919, Luxemburg has been memorialized as a martyr for the revolution and a symbol of the tragic highs and lows of Germany’s twentieth century more than anything else. While her name and image remains iconic, her prodigious intellectual output and many contributions to socialist theory, have often been reduced to footnotes.
“Freedom only for the members of the government, only for the members of the Party – though they are quite numerous – is no freedom at all. Freedom is always the freedom of the one who thinks differently. Not because of any fanatical concept of justice, but because all that is instructive, wholesome and purifying in political freedom depends on this essential characteristic, and its effectiveness vanishes when ‘freedom’ becomes a special privilege.”
Karl Liebknecht
Karl Paul August Friedrich Liebknecht, born on this day in 1871, was a German socialist politician and theorist. Originally associated with the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), Liebknecht later became a co-founder with Rosa Luxemburg of both the Spartacus League and the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). Liebknecht is also known for his outspoken opposition to World War I.
The main enemy of the German people is in Germany: German imperialism, the German war party, German secret diplomacy. This enemy at home must be fought by the German people in a political struggle, cooperating with the proletariat of other countries whose struggle is against their own imperialists.
The son of Wilhelm Liebknecht, one of the founders of the SPD, Karl Liebknecht trained to be a lawyer and defended many Social Democrats in political trials. He was also a leading figure in the socialist youth movement and thus became a leading figure in the struggle against militarism.
As a deputy in the Reichstag he was one of the first SPD representatives to break party discipline and vote against war credits in December 1914. He became a figurehead for the struggle against the war. His opposition was so successful that his parliamentary immunity was removed and he was improsoned.
Freed by the November revolution he immediately threw himself into the struggle and became with Rosa Luxemburg one of the founders of the new Communist Party (KPD)
The defeated of today, they will have learned. They will be cured of the delusion of being able to find their salvation in the help of masses of confused soldiers; cured of the delusion of being able to trust in leaders who prove themselves to be feeble and impotent; cured of the belief in independent social democracy, which disdainfully abandoned them. Left only to their own devices, they will fight their coming battles, gain their coming victories. And the watchword, that the liberation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself, will have gained for them a new, deeper meaning.
In January 1919, the Spartacus League played a leading role in the Spartacist Uprising, a general strike and armed rebellion in Berlin. The uprising was crushed by the SPD government and the Freikorps (paramilitary units composed of World War I veterans). For their role in the uprising, Liebknecht and Luxemburg were both kidnapped, tortured, and murdered on January 15th, 1919.
Their contributions to European socialism are commemorated annually in Germany during the second weekend of January, an event known as the Liebknecht-Luxemburg Demonstration, or "LL-Demo" for short.
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flaming hot take.
Flatpak is nice for application developers because it allows them to bundle all the specific library versions they want, and they don't need to worry about individual distributions. It is not as good for end users because a system with hundreds of flatpaks installed on it will have tons of duplicated libraries at various versions. It is good for distributors insofar as they don't give a shit about integrating thousands of packages into a cohesive system and are content to let every dickhole with a Github account to spin their own binaries (most of them do give a shit, but they all have limits).
(don't take me too seriously, please)
If you have the choice between a Flatpak and a distro package (which you frequently do on Fedora), prefer the distro package. It will share the same dependencies as the rest of the system. E.g. if a bug gets fixed in ffmpeg ALL the packages using ffmpeg will be fixed. Of course, there are always a handful of packages where you don't have a choice and you need to use snaps / appimages / flatpaks, but it is best to keep this limited.
There is an eternal conflict between application developers and distributors. Application develops want to use whatever is most convenient for their specific situation. Distributors often need to overrule this to ensure everything works together reasonably. An application developer might desire to use the most bleeding edge version of a library, or an extremely old version. They need the dicipline of distributors to be like "no, this experimental library breaks 80% of the rest of the package repository" or "no, you should have upgraded from GTK+2 ten years ago."
(not directed at you with anger or anything)
NixOS also trades space efficiency, except it's even worse in NixOS's case because there's no programatic dedup that takes place. Flatpak apps can share runtimes and there is a problem with some apps that don't update to the latest runtime as quickly as they should but the space tradeoff is manageable. Fedora Flatpaks were created to address some of these issues (such as some flatpaks being binary wrappers).
NixOS has a "1000 instances of nixpkgs" phenomenon where people have gotten conditioned into pinning revisions of nixpkgs instead of following stable so you can have one pin of nixpkgs and another pin of nixpkgs and the difference is a WORLD rebuild and nothing else because a security patch needed to be applied. They jerk themselves off on "determinism" and "reproducibility" when they really just leech of an AWS S3 bucket doing petabytes of CI/CD. They tried fixing this with content-addressed derivations where there would be a way to update packages without triggering world rebuilds but it was never finished and never will be finished because NixOS is a burnout factory.
In any case, trading space for the ability to containerize graphical applications is the best tradeoff to make imo. Distributors can focus their attention on system components that cannot be sandboxed while app maintainers can focus on porting their application to flatpak and being able to triage on that. At the very least it's not like the Ubuntu "snap" store where it's legitimately a proprietary service.
It's really just the static vs linked binary discussion in a slightly different context. Storage space is so cheap (despite AI-related price gouging recently) that I think the flatpak approach makes a lot of sense.
Runtimes are a good middle ground, they can still receive security updates and application can deduplicate deps on yearly runtime releases.
My flatpak size never went past 5GB from usage and that was with multiple versions of the same runtime. The space tradeoff with flatpak is very often exaggerated when the benefit is that you'll never have to worry about your
/usrbeing polluted ever again or how every app is now sandboxed.