Programmer, writer, mediocre artist. Average Linux enjoyer.
Yeah no, fuck this. If you’re an anarchist and you go offer your life for a state, you’re not an anarchist at all, no matter how horizontally you say you’ll do it.
Do note that CrimethInc are post-left dudebros, they have some good essays but a lot of what they write is very dumb and sometimes vehemently anti-communist.
How is this a debunking of anything? You are merely correcting technicalities as if anarchists didn’t know about them. It’s obvious that the Makhnovists and the Bolsheviks could never agree on anything, and I’ve never met any anarchist who thought the alliance was not temporary or even that it could last.
The facts still are that anarchists helped the USSR survive yet the USSR destroyed them once they were no longer useful. I do think that using this event as a blanket statement to “never ever work with statist leftists of any kind no matter what” is a bit silly given how much time has passed and how different the situation is. However its still an useful piece of history. Especially because they had that same behaviour throughout their entire lifespan - of crushing or abandoning any socialist movement that weren’t 100% aligned with theirs.
The thing is most of the people who say they’re making educated guesses are actually just being deliberately dishonest to plant dislike for a geopolitical rival in the population. And obviously Chinese state media is being dishonest too. You don’t have to pick one over the other.
Again with this. Wikipedia can’t be neutral. Nothing can be. Neutral doesn’t exist.
There is absolutely no way to be “politically unbiased” when talking about things. Being “neutral” just means being in favor of the status quo, which is not neutral at all. There is no third position, you either oppose or support the way things work right now. Bias is completely inescapable.
If you want to get an “unbiased” view of something, the only real thing you can do is to read many sources biased against both outlooks and compare and contrast. What you end up with will still be biased though, just by virtue of what you select to care about and not.
People who claim to be neutral and unbiased only say it because they think it makes them look more credible, or they have deluded themselves to be able to think they’re somehow more rational than everyone else. There is no way to not be biased as a human being.
It’s not just about the inconvenience though. Windows is paid. It’s at least 100 bucks. It’s not even “free but you are the product” like Google drive or whatever. Yet it still abuses you, controls you and exploits you, and you have to do tons of workarounds for it to not get in your way. Most of them are always temporary, as a new update reenables everything again or directly circumvents the workaround you used.
If you are locked into the ecosystem, then I do agree that it’s annoying that people think moving to Linux is seamless. It wasn’t for me, it even cost me money since I had to buy an AMD gpu for things to work well + another GPU to passthrough to a windows VM and still use Clip Studio. But if someone only uses their computer for things that can be done seamlessly on Linux, and they genuinely dislike and are against all the bullshit Windows always does, it’s worth it to tell them there is a viable alternative, and what they heard about “you have to use the command line for everything meaningful!” or “everything breaks all the time!” hasn’t been true for years.
If you hate being used by Windows so much, you really should try an alternative, unless you’re a professional that uses software that just can’t run on Linux at all, chances are you can get most of what you use a computer for working fine. In return you get freedom, privacy, choice, performance.
Or if you hate it but are too reluctant to change for whatever reason, that’s totally fine, but just say that. Don’t spread misinformation about Linux.
It’s worth it to be FOSS to take three weeks to get your Arch install just the way you like it.
Literally no one ever says this. Just use Fedora. Almost completely seamless. There’s a KDE version if you want to have the same workflow as windows without configuring anything. You don’t have to use firefox, brave or ungoogled chromium are FOSS too.
That makes him an effective propagandist, not an effective leader.
Hitler’s administration was a bunch of drug addicts, the economy 5 slave owner megacorps beaten by all other industrialized nations. They weren’t even all that well mobilized before the total war speech. Then he killed himself in embarrassment. How is any of that “effective”?
Linux isn’t that bad nowadays, though when you hit a problem it still entails quite a bit more work than when on Windows.
I really don’t understand the people who say this. Having an issue on Windows is an absolute nightmare. You have to navigate through countless menus, look through a bunch of SEO farming shit pages that say they have solutions but they actually just want to sell you DriverEasy or whatever, look through similar if you’re lucky microsoft support pages, that basically all they say is “oh, do sfc /scannow in the terminal… oh it didn’t work? delete everything and reinstall windows”
On Linux if I have an issue I lookup the error and the solution is in the first few results, which is usually “put this command in the terminal” or “change this in this config file” and everything starts working again immediately. Most of the time I don’t even have to reboot.
Sadly Clip Studio just doesn’t work on WINE at all so I have to dual boot exclusively for that little shit required in my classes.
You can choose whatever you want for whatever reason you want, but don’t spread misconceptions on the internet. With Proton, if you install a newb distro there is literally no reason to touch the commandline at all for what you want to do.
No. Stop hoping and take the houses instead.
How stable is Testing for daily use by the way?
Debian is 100% community run, it cannot “have tentacles” in it. There is no leader that takes the choices that can be influenced.
The correct term for nazi sympathizer is nazi. The correct term for nazi enabler is nazi.
Hey, thanks a lot for the respectful reply.
I don’t really understand what kind of point you’re making, though. There are plenty of economic and political systems that can reach all the development and improvement to quality of life and literacy you want, yet they do it through horrible, brutal and harmful means. You yourself would be opposed to attaining these things you’re talking about through colonialism or slavery, or even through capitalism as I’m sure you’re also against social democracy like I am. My argument is that the means communist countries used to get to these ends are bad enough that I don’t care about the ends they reached. Just like I would never care about the ends reached by colonialist means.
I am not denying capitalist countries didn’t suffer from the same problems or didn’t commit the same or even more attrocities. This doesn’t excuse anything though. I am opposed to these things by principle, no matter who does them. And I’m not going to pick between two systems that do the things I’m against all the same, but one leads to prosperity quicker. I’m not playing that game.
You don’t know their quality because you refused to engage with them on principle. You locked yourself into your own safe little bubble and found an excuse to dismiss anything that challenges you. You just have to say it’s “extremist propaganda” and you can stay safe. If you wanna do that go ahead, but to then be smug to others and tell them to educate themselves when you’re unwilling to even listen to the positions of the people you’re arguing against is incredibly dishonest. Who do you even think you’re fooling?
Why would a farmer not want to farm?
Having the smug to say “educate yourself”, only to be shown articles about the topic and refusing to engage with them is exactly the kind of brain rot I’d expect from a “centrist”
Look, I agree that it’s dumb to call yourself a socialist and have zero respect for most attempts at socialism, especially when your critique doesn’t come from anything serious but just parroting of cold war propaganda. I agree that these countries weren’t literally the devil, nor fascist, not “pretending”, that’s all fine.
But it’s still so dishonest of MLs to dig for quotes and smugly boastbout how “libertarians never succeed”. Even if we completely ignore all the very explicit and deliberate attempts at sabotage anarchists had to endure from their statist “comrades” (which we shouldn’t but we always casually seem to be forced to do in the name of “unity”), it doesn’t change the fact that vanguardist revolutions have all been incredibly flawed too.
You all are very often willing to recognize your failures, most of the people like you I have talked to seem to agree that at some point the revolution was “hijacked”, usurped, corrupted, lost aim, usually coinciding with a figure they don’t like taking over the revolutionary government and messing things up.
The supposed “strong state that crushes all opposition” being taken over by the reformist opposition and then the capitalist one in the case of the USSR and Leninists. The market reforms of Deng in the case of China and Maoists. But you all never seem to ask yourselves the question “Why was that allowed to happen?”. Why am I supposed to put my trust in some authoritarian bullshit solution specifically justified as a means to protect the revolution when it failed at doing so? Why do you have to be so smug and condescending at me for not trusting in things that didn’t work?
Why do you instead of learning from the mistakes in your methods that most of the time you yourself recognize and trying to come up with new ideas and systems for the current age, insist on still clinging to material analysis of the world of a hundred years ago as the gospel, the sole undying and absolute truth on how to Make Socialism, merely saying “it’ll totally work right this time” instead? Why do you insist on mocking and “”“dunking”“” on anyone who refuses to do that?
This is all completely false. It genuinely is just lies. You can disagree with the explanations, but to claim there literally aren’t any is just ignorance and a complete lack of good faith. Look, if you’re a socialist in the internet, you probably have dealt with confidently incorrect liberals whining about strawmen that you don’t believe, because they haven’t read anything about it - and it’s probably been incredibly frustrating. So why do you never think twice before doing the same thing with anarchists?
I’m always told to read Lenin and a ton of authoritarian essays and I always do in good faith, but it’s extremely rare for me to ever be afforded the same honour, and then all the conversations I have end up with people telling me shit like this and me having to explain anarchism 101 to them because they genuinely don’t actually know anything.
I am also always told to be charitable and nuanced about the failures and mistakes of vanguardist revolutions, but no one ever has the same honour with anarchist ones.