frozenspinach

Love Rhythmbox! I used it way way back when I first installed Ubuntu (back when it was good) and it was part of a special nostalgic feeling of having been ushered into this new linux world, and I think it lets you rate your songs 1-5 stars (if you want) and I had a lot of fun doing that.

Indeed, the way to combat bad media is to dispute it with good media, not hide it away and pretend it doesn’t exist.

I would call this a marketplace of ideas fallacy. Rumor and misinformation rise to the top ever bit as much as good argument, and poisoning those conversations with bad faith is now part of an explicit ideological strategy to weaponize those spaces. That phenomenon is as real as thoughtful deliberation, I would say more so.

So if you believe "combat bad with good' works as a matter of practice, I think that argument is obviously unsustainable. If it's "bad things will happen but we should keep it that way as a matter of principle" it's at least a more coherent argument. I wouldn't agree with it but I can understand why someone would find it at least a respectable idea.

that refused to play certain songs

Nazism songs.

The existence of Mien Kamph in a library’s collection doesn’t make the librarian a Nazi,

No but 100 copies of back issues of "Being A Nazi In 2025 The Magazine" probably would, and the present case is more like the latter.

tell me what content is or isn’t permissable

Nazism being the content

based on their political beliefs

Nazism being the political belief.

And how are they defining alt right?

It's music tags that literally have phrases like nazi or white power in the phrase.

Yeah I like being able to opt-in to a specific block list, or having it enabled by default but individual instances can disable it (more to neutralize bad faith arguments from trolls who want to normalize nazism), even though I want it effectively banned.

It's like 6 or 7 tags that all have the word "nazi" or "white power" in the tag. As long as Sam Hunt tracks are not being encoded that way he should be good.

Nextcloud on a paid plan from some company (e.g. Hetzner) or, if you've got the stones for it, Nextcloud self-hosted.

The reddit account has a username with the number 88 in binary, which led some to speculate its a nazi (88 = HH = Heil H*tler) dogwhistle, to which Andy Yen says its his year of birth 1988. Kinda weird, but he could just be that clueless, who knows

I mean this part I give him a pass on. It was right for people reading him to raise an eyebrow, because political signalling like that does happen, especially in a context where he's making comments like he made. But in this case it was just a nothingburger.

It doesn't make his "wasn't intended to be a political comment" excuse any less gibberish though.

I have been defending Andy Yen’s idiotic comments because he’s not American and doesn’t understand the hyper-reactive nature between US Americans and US politics

And I could see the point, kind of, even though it strained credulity on substance. He seemed more confused to me than die-hard partisan. But it's really hard to square what was effectively a blanket statement endorsing R's with his subsequent comment that it "was not intended to be a political statement" (paraphrase).

That was.... honestly a great explanation. Thank you.

But goodness what a deep and context specific cut.