Nevoic

And for the people like you who happen to live in the new Fascist America, fuck them? Fascism is not a joke you can just quarantine, it's hyper militaristic and imperialistic. If the country split, and one half was fascist, we'd be at war within a decade.

Authoritarian state capitalism is different than liberal capitalism, I wasn't trying to say they're the same as the U.S, and you correctly outlined some differences that I agree with.

As for beliefs, I also recognize many Chinese people believe they have socialism, just like many Americans believe that we live in a free democratic first world country. The similarity here is that both these takes are just state propaganda that have been successfully fed to the masses.

China has successfully reverted anything remotely socialist about the country over the last 40 years. Like I've said previously, I recognize one day they might flip the switch, eliminate all the landlords & business owners, seize the means of production, and dissolve the State. I don't believe this will happen though, and they've made no indication of even moving vaguely in this direction.

If/when the day arrives that the workers own the means of production and are no longer wage slaves to a bourgeoise class, they will have successfully installed socialism. Before that day comes you can't just execute a few billionaires and claim you have socialism, if you're at all concerned with the true state of things.

Imagine going to a niche subreddit, calling everyone in it a shitbag, and then using anything remotely hostile thrown back at you as evidence that you're right.

Let us live in peace, you're free to keep paying for tortured animal carcasses (and thank God, imagine how cruel a world it would be where animal abuse/killing was outlawed /s) and we're free to eat plants.

I don't go to meat eater communities and call out everyone there for paying into systems that abuse and torture sentient creatures, even though I would be just stating facts about what people are doing, not calling them names like you are.

This was essentially our approach for slavery, but it's fundamentally flawed. Allowing exploitation and bigotry in some other location isn't a fix.

I didn't tell anyone how to run anything, I pointed out how they're an entirely capitalist nation that pretends to be socialist. Maybe the current authoritarian regime will suddenly revert all the market reforms they've implemented over the last 3-4 decades, seize the means of production, and then dissolve the state when it's no longer needed.

I don't believe this will happen, and I don't think many people do. Most of the "socialists" that support China are more than happy with the bourgeoise class existing and exploiting working class people "for the betterment of the State". This kind of thinking falls much more in line with Mussolini than Marx.

"core values of socialism"? Like reintroducing landleeches after they were outlawed? Like allowing the bourgeoise to own the means of production and exploit the over a billion working class Chinese people in horrible conditions? Using the profit motive to "incentivize entrepreneurship"?

China is the epitome of SINO, they're an authoritarian capitalist regime.

On this note it's crazy there are people who will spend over $100 on a Windows license, when all they do is use a web browser or simple productivity apps like spreadsheets or word.

I can get if you're using some adobe products, or some game that hasn't been updated to the Linux compatible EAC, but for the vast majority of people paying over $100 (or having that cost passed onto you from the manufacturer if Windows is preinstalled) is crazy.

Capitalism hit a massive roadblock with the dawn of the internet, information has a tendency to want to be free and easily accessible, but corporations need to own our productive output to maximize profits. In the age of the internet, our productive output more and more becomes our ideas and thoughts manifest into code or other forms of digital information.

Capitalists somewhat fought off the first wave of this, but AI will be a second and more challenging wave to overcome. I hope the capitalists fail and we don't restrict the learning and power of AI so corporations can maximize profits again, but I recognize there's a world where they successfully slow down or even entirely hault these learning systems and stop the technology from developing.

We already see people like Tucker Carlson calling for bans on AI because it'll put people out of work. Of course, we should be trying to reduce the amount of work needed, but the natural tendency of capitalism in this environment is to maximize efficiency in favor of capital owners. Once workers aren't needed anymore, the best thing (from a capitalist perspective) to do is let them starve in the streets instead of "giving them stuff for just existing". We already live in a world where millions of people die from hunger a year, and almost a billion people are dangerously underfed, because global capitalism dictates these people don't deserve enough food.

People should separate the quality of the products, produced by the workers, from the batshit insane politics and mindset of the owners. I have a Tesla, and I recognize Elon is a protofascist dick, but the CEOs of other companies are just better at maintaining their image, they're part of the same parasitic class that Elon is a part of.

I bought a Tesla for the power, infrastructure, etc. but I don't generally recommend Teslas. If you don't care about 0-60 time, and you can hold out until 2024/2025, lots of EVs will adopt the NACS standard and be able to use almost the entire supercharging network. Other vehicles will likely be better and/or cheaper.

Embrace, extend, extinguish is the fear. Other companies have done it with other open standards, it's a fantastic way for corporations to kill decentralized solutions.

Proprietary/centralized ones just get bought out early on before they capture a large market share. Activitypub has 15 million users on it now, and since it's not a single company that Meta can buy out, they need an alternative approach to destroy it.

Mostly agree, but the "incentive" focus is a misnomer. Humans don't just sit around and stare at walls when they're not "incentivized". Incentives in sociopolitics is just a rebranding of coercion, getting people to do things they don't want to do. People are incentivized/coerced to work at McDonald's because otherwise they'll live on the streets, the housing scalpers will make sure of it.

FOSS exists and isn't at risk of dying. Yeah, it's ideal if the people working on FOSS things don't have to also work a soul crushing day job, and yeah maybe when their soul is crushed they'll lose interest in the things they enjoy doing, but we shouldn't frame that as them getting jaded towards FOSS projects. It's actually just depression, and it impacts other hobbies too.

All that being said, I'm all for donations to people who do FOSS work so they can escape and do the things they love, it means better FOSS products and happier developers.

I didn't equate them all to Nazis.

The people who voted for Nazis weren't a uniform mass of people. Some voted for them on promised economic reforms, some voted on the basis of making Germany great again, some voted for them because they disliked the Lügenpresse (lying press), which the Nazis talked about all the time. The thing all Nazi voters shared was that the anti-Jewish/anti-communist rhetoric didn't turn them off to voting for the party.

Similarly, there are a ton of Republicans who vote Republican for many reasons; promised economic reforms, making America great again, a dislike for "fake news", etc. The thing all Republican voters share is that the anti-Mexican/anti-trans rhetoric doesn't turn them off to voting for the party.

They're fine with the promise of building a wall to keep the Mexicans out. They're fine with legislating against trans people. They're fine with the rhetoric many southern Republicans are using about "solving the trans problem", similar to the final solution rhetoric Nazis used.

Republicans in 2023 are about as bad as Nazis were in 1930. That is to say, they've only done very lightweight rounding up of minorities and haven't started killing them en masse. Whether or not the fascist wing of the Republican party wins out and successfully genocides minorities is anyone's guess, but ignoring the similarities and history here is incredibly foolish.

Not all people who voted Republican are horrible. Not all people who voted Nazi were horrible either. The platform can get better or worse, we've seen a history where it can get worse, but it's also been shutdown before.

Either way, having spaces online that disallow protofascist or fascist parties is fine and not "unhealthy". Not every part of the internet has to allow for hateful rhetoric, it's fine to have spaces geared towards gaming, community, or just people in agreement that people supporting a bigoted party shouldn't be there.