By these standards, most of my adult relatives are actually children.

I forget where I heard it from, but somebody said that it’s strange how we believe that if we go back in time and make a small change, it will have a huge effect on the future, but we also believe that making small changes today won’t make any difference in the future.

We have the voting system that we have today, so yes, with things as they are, people do have to vote Democrat. I am not a Democrat. I’m an independent. If we had RCV or any reasonably modern system of voting in America, I’d agree with you. But we don’t have that. We live in the real world, and the real world consequences of not voting Democrat are possibly the end of our democracy.

If you listened to the recently leaked Jenna Ellis video, you’d know for certain that this was Trump’s intent in 2020, to stay in power regardless of what the people voted for. Things are dire right here, right now. If we don’t take care of business at home, everything else falls.

Trump has already stated that he’d go after news sources that he doesn’t like if he wins the next election. So, if you like the ability to differ on opinions, as you seem to, then you cannot tolerate Trump to win, nor any of the other leading Republicans who refuse to denounce him.

So, yes, I agree, that is the great thing about opinions, that we can differ on them, but we can only do so as long as Republicans are not in power.

Vote Democrat if the Republicans winning is too much for you to handle.

The Republicans winning should be too much for anybody with a conscience to handle.

For your second point, do you say that you use Adobe or Windows?

I mean, you already know the answer to that. The point is that you don’t have to give the entire context of your computing environment every time you mention some product you use.

Linux is just the kernel.

It’s not only the kernel. It is also the name that people have settled on for differentiating the computer running the Linux kernel from a computer running Windows.

I was contrasting it with the animal “gnu”, otherwise known as the wildebeest, which is pronounced more similar to the word “new”. I suspect more people know the animal gnu than know the organization GNU.

I understand why Stallman wanted us to say GNU/Linux, because his organization needs money and wants its name out there, but that’s simply not how things get named in the real world.

First, GNU was always a mouthful. It’s always been intentionally pronounced differently from the animal. People prefer names that are not confusing and that don’t sound strange.

Second, we don’t do the same thing for other operating systems. If you’re an illustrator, you don’t say that you work on Adobe/Windows or whatever.

Third, GNU/Linux adds nothing interesting over simply “Linux”. And in fact, there have been distributions where they avoid GNU tooling due. Everybody still recognizes these as Linux.

If anything, they feel more confident, unencumbered by experience or the truth.