People are “mentally wrong” for not wanting nazis around?

Yes. When your choices are “do the hard work that would make them not-nazis” and “polarize the world so I can go on a Nazi-huting crusade and literally kill them”… there’s something sick in you that you should figure out and fix.

No. White supremacy is not a logical position

Positions generally aren’t logical at all. Of any kind.

and it can’t be argued away

Not with argument alone. Shouting arguments at them from Twitter that you’ve also gotten them banned from can’t ever work.

But they can be “interactioned” away. That means 2-way communication. In close contact. The sort of close contact that was already happening before you “threw him out of the bar”.

This isn’t speculation on my part. It’s well-established science. This shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone here. Even if sociology’s not your thing, you have to have stumbled across it from time to time.

https://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544861933/how-one-man-convinced-200-ku-klux-klan-members-to-give-up-their-robes

You’re just wrong. And the only reason to still insist you aren’t wrong, is if, deep down inside, you want to go murder people. Of course, you can’t murder just anyone… that’d be evil. So you find those who are deserving of death, and then orchestrate circumstances where, hopefully some day, you can kill them and not feel any guilt for it. That’s what you are.

Its not their goal to be convinced or even debate really,

Doesn’t sound like that’s a goal of yours either. Like, how terrified you must be that your arguments will lose that you can’t debate them?

“Oh my god, what if I changed my mind and thought like them! How do I avoid that!?!?!”

It’s pathetic.

This is not a free speech instance, and we will do no “debating”, of ethnicities right to exist.

Why not? It’s a good point to start with. Does anyone have a right to exist? And what does that even mean? And if it somehow turned out that some had a right to exist, and not others, what would the criteria even look like? How could those ever be sane? Oh gee, skin color. It’s definitely skin color that makes someone have the right to exist. This weird little pigment protein, if its amino acids are arranged in the wrong sequence!

I could tear the shit out of them in that debate. I would make them feel bad for ever having spoken the words.

You? Too scared of losing. So scared of it, that you accuse them of not wanting debate, when you refuse to do it yourself. So scared that you announce in a public forum that “well people really dont’ want to argue”… ON THE INTERNET. That’s sort of like announcing there’s no sun. At the beach. At noon.

The truth is that you hate people too. Every bit as much as they do. But among your ingroup, there are people who it is righteous to hate (Nazis), and people who aren’t (ethnicities). And you want to genocide them too, just like they want to genocide the people they hate. But you need them to strike the first blow so you can pretend they provoked you and not the other way around. It’s awfully convenient.

If you run a bar, and have a white supremacist, or misogynist sit down at your bar, and let him stay there, you now run a white supremacist bar.

This is a strange philosophy that doesn’t really hold up in the real world. Though it is taking root there the last few years, I wince when I think what it might lead to eventually.

It’s also a counter-productive philosophy. If a white supremacist sits down at your bar and you kick him out… he’s not going to cry about it and then change his ways. He will go find some place to drink where he is welcome. That place will, with absolute certainty, reinforce his beliefs. However weak or strong they were before, they will become stronger for it.

If he had stayed, what would happen? He might talk to some people who have milder views? This is guaranteed to soften his white supremacy, if not eliminate it eventually. People adopt the attitudes and beliefs of those they socialize with. They do so without even realizing it. The longer it occurs, the stronger the effect.

The only reason to kick him from the bar is if there’s something mentally wrong with yourself. If you yearn for some sort of final showdown, where you can fight the Nazis like ole great-grandpa did back in the 1940s, so you too can be a hero. You’re doing what that Kyle Rittenhouse did, creating circumstances that will inevitably lead to violence, because subconsciously you want to murder other people that you did not need to murder. It’s sort of sick.

check out the paradox of tolerance for why bigotry should never be tolerated.

Mindless drivel, that. The “paradox of tolerance” is that you never really wanted tolerance. You wanted the world to look a particular way, where everyone thinks, believes, and speaks as you do. And when they don’t do that, you want to revoke their freedom of speech and selectively punish them for it. Afraid that, given the freedom that is everyone’s birthright, that their “wrong” ideas are somehow more powerful than your “right” ideas, and that only violence can see you achieve victory.

No one can have correct thoughts, without first working through the incorrect ones. Some do it faster, most slower… but you either allow them to reach the correct conclusions on their own, or they’re not reaching them at all. They’re just being punished and brainwashed into parroting what you want them to say. If you need that to happen quicker, you do it by speaking with them. Even if it is frustrating or uncomfortable.

When means of production are owned publicly then they’re used to create things that are socially necessary and benefit most people.

That’s the theory. The practice is that they’re used poorly, and sometimes not at all. 3000 tons of left shoes. Phantom inventories floating around, trying to stave off purges.

At some point they tend to concentrate on “socially necessary” because there’s so little spare capacity left that that no luxuries can even be contemplated. So you got that part right.

And by luxuries, we aren’t talking $300 million yachts… we’re talking oil paints. Then we get the “state-sanctioned art” stuff. “When oil paints are scarce, they can’t be wasted on capitalist propaganda comrade!” and “There are secret fifth columnists who will use this Cerulean Blue and Mummy Brown to destroy our socialist utopia!”.

Gotta love “public ownership”. But when you believe in fairy tales, it’s so often difficult to see reality.

However, the key point to acknowledge here is that capitalist states are inherently violent.

Humans are monkeys. Monkeys are violent. This happens regardless of political ideology or economic systems.

Socialism is inherently violent. There will always be people who do not wish to live in socialism. And if you let them defect, soon there won’t be anyone participating. Thus, they cannot be allowed to defect. The only way to prohibit them from defecting is violence.

Meanwhile, in the United States, any of you are free to set up your own little commune, and do socialism for as long as you like. But it never works, only freeloaders show up. And then you blame capitalism for that.

Capitalism has its share of violence. But it tamps it down… there are easier and safer ways to get what you want than to bash someone over the head and take it.

Do you seriously think there were more desktop users in 2006 than there are now ?

If you’ll let me do plus-or-minus on the year 2006 and the “now”, then that’s almost certainly (going to be) true.

You seem to think I’m pining for some kind of linux-desktop utopia, which isn’t the case at all.

I think rather, that you think this is a winnable race when the Earth just opened up and swallowed all of the race cars and yours is about to fall into the abyss.

It’s just over. I’ve seen too much from random yahoos about how their primary computing experience is a phone. And it’s not as if those people are going to work and sitting down at an office computer, they work at Arby’s or whatever. The other explanation is that there’s an orchestrated conspiracy to mislead me into believing the desktop is dead by a team of millions of propagandists writing subtly about how to do common computing actions on Android, or that the desktop has just came and gone, like dumb terminals before them. Like teletypes.

Personally I think the last 20 years in computing has demonstrated that opensource is the best model for server software

Probably, but that didn’t stop Microsoft and dotnet from conquering some large fraction of that market. God knows why.

Because that’s the one where they don’t include the steering wheel at all. Or the engine block. The shocks and the other parts are inextricably linked.

I find it increasingly difficult to only use Firefox. Most of my coworkers are Chrome-only at this point. Anything that doesn’t at minimum do Firefox is a toy operating system. That said, I’m too unskilled to get something as complicated as Firefox to even build, let alone on a novel system, so maybe I have no right to gripe.

What did you get banned for, if only so I can avoid it? (Assuming I want to.)

“Piracy” is a smear term. This can’t be any more obvious than it already is, when its detractors (on up to and including federal prosecutors) refer to the activity as piracy.

No bittorrent user ever hijacked a ship and held its crew for ransom. No murder, no rape, no mayhem. Never was one a mercenary for low-intensity warfare against the Spanish.

I don’t think a term like that can be “reclaimed”, and if it could, I have no idea why you’d want to.

No, you’re not free to do this under capitalism unless you happen to be born into at least some moderate wealth.

Define moderate wealth in a way that excludes a significant portion of the population. There are counter-examples all the way down.

I can only assume that you’re not aware of the second world war that devastated USSR.

Devastated all of Europe, or so I’m told. And yet things weren’t even a tenth as bad elsewhere. And that only obviates the housing issue… the coffin problems issue was completely about keeping some out of universities where they simply were not welcome. Education for some, factory work for others… like everywhere else. (Hell, even in the US you wouldn’t be kept out of university if simply by being jewish alone, the way that it was in the Soviet Union).

That’s pretty big news to me given that homelessness is rampant in capitalist states.

It’s pretty big news to you that the homeless aren’t starving? Or do you often run around confusing food with housing?

Just thinking about what kind of human garbage one has to be to write that sentence.

Compared to the sort of human garbage that implemented it as policy for decades? Or do you mean that I’m politically inconvenient because I recognize it as such?

This was demonstrably not the case in USSR. Anyone was free to join the party and move up through the ranks.

You’re free to do this in capitalism too. And you’ll do comparable amounts of backstabbing and conspiring and other shady shit to get to the top. The occasional relatively-uncorrupt person will luck their way to the top, and their personal biases will enable them to believe that it’s meritocratic too!

Sure, it’s not always been that way. We can go back to pre-1865 and say “but black people couldn’t do it!” but that’d be disingenuous.

It also makes no sense to say that party members owned industries since the productive output of these industries did not benefit them directly.

Bezos doesn’t benefit directly either. His salary is what, $80,000/year? The billions people like to talk about isn’t even real cash. He couldn’t use that to pay for anything. It’s equity. It’s illusory money. If he tried to sell the shares, the price would tank and they’d be worthless and not the billions claimed. Amazon’s revenues are not his revenues. He can’t spend that money directly.

His billions aren’t non-existent, but they aren’t money. They are power. The power to decide how Amazon acts as a business entity. He has alot of that.

Just like the communists did over their own industries. The “elite few” communists.

The only difference is that we can quantify Bezos’ wealth, where as the numbers were hidden for the elite Soviet leaders and party members.

The substantive difference is that the means of production in USSR were publicly owned

“Public ownership” is a nonsense phrase. When I own a thing, it is mine. I can decide that no one can possess it, or that one person or another can possess it temporarily. I can give it as a gift permanently. I can charge money for it, or not. I can charge for it on a recurring basis, or not.

That’s what ownership is. But there is no ghostly “public” which has a gigantic 100ft tall translucent human face that owns something with “public ownership”. Instead, someone almost certainly not me ends up owning it, even if he or she can’t use the word “own” without getting into trouble. That man or women gets to decide who possesses it temporarily or on what basis. They get to decide to dispatch it to another man or woman, who then owns it (but can’t use the word "own). I can’t even sell my supposed “share” in this, and be excluded from the public ownership of the thing (for indeed, who would want to buy it when they have their own public share of it, and having two shares gets them no more consideration?).

This man may have made promises that I can use it or can’t on some schedule. But they can rescind those promises. In all cases, if they renege on the promises, they incur no significant penalty.

This “public ownership” seems to me to be nearly identical to “some other person not me owns it, and fuck me”.

This allowed USSR to provide everyone with food, housing, healthcare, and education.

Tell that to the people excluded from the universities with coffin problems. Or the five families hot-bunking in shitty brutalist apartment buildings how they were lucky to have housing.

Lots of things allow all different sorts of non-communist systems to provide everyone with food. It’s not that impressive in the 21st century to say “but they fed everyone”.

and a retirement guarantee by 60.

With enough vodka rations to make sure only 1 in 50 collected on it.

The trouble is that I’m not a “majority” I am a person. More to the point, I am a person who is more used to not being in the majority than I am in it. “Good for the majority” in many cases has often left me out.

It isn’t in my interest to pursue strategies that are good for the majority. There are others like me.

Such states can have many problems, but they’re an undeniable improvement over capitalism.

That’s not clear at all. Let’s go with the “at least communism fed everyone”. In the United States, literally no one starves who isn’t anorexic or similarly mentally ill. Homeless people are fat.

We can talk about other metrics too (spaces races and whatnot), but capitalism seems to at least keep up with communism in those regards without some really absurd double standards.

The default state of things in the west is that monopoly on violence is in the hands of capitalists, and it’s currently being used to subjugate the rest of the population to the will of capitalists.

Which of course never happened in the Soviet Union or Cuba, or any of the the other places?

Look, I’m not even you’re opponent here. There is a profound philosophical question here, one that if anyone actually bothers to attempt to solve it, the sort of violence you think is a solution might actually become possible.

More to the point, not just possible, but justifiable. Like, provably so. Even to people like myself who don’t conform to your ideology.

Wouldn’t it be great if, for instance, we could look at some event somewhere in the world, apply the rules, and say “in situations like this where x and y are occurring, and where z does not occur, that violence was justified”? We have those rules mostly worked out for individual scenarios. We know what self-defense looks like.

We don’t have those rules worked out for group/collective scenarios. And until we do, it will always be anxiety-inducing to contemplate the violence, and politically dangerous to even talk about it (for fear of terrorism conspiracy charges). Better still, with the rules worked out and agreed upon (mostly or wholly), we’d likely see quite alot of behavior changing in a hurry when the government realizes it is inviting justified rebellion if it doesn’t… without having to resort to the violence.

The part you have to get over first is accepting that it may truly be the case that if we figure those rules out honestly, some of your heroes may turn out to have been “not so heroic” and some of your examples of good governments may turn out to have been the tyrants their detractors have claimed all along.

and max pay was capped at 9x lowest pay.

Even in the US, there are limits on the difference in monetary compensation. Because of that, for the most prestigious/lucrative positions, non-monetary compensation is offered. At the lowest rungs, it was health insurance. When you start talking higher, then there are company cars and so forth. And for CEOs, you get equity in the form of stock options, personal assistants, etc.

The Soviets had all of these for the highest positions, just like everywhere else. The only thing different is that they made the pay difference limitation explicit and lower.

They rose to their positions through their work.

No. I think higher in the thread you mentioned how Brezhnev came from a family of metalworkers. When he became General Secretary, it wasn’t because he was the best metalworker at the foundry. It wasn’t because he was the best manager of metalworkers at the foundry. That wasn’t how anyone rose to high positions in the Soviet Union.

Like elsewhere, there is a social game. And people who play it well rise high, those who play it perfectly rise higher still. Those who can’t or won’t play it, those who are bad at it, or who are visibly bitter about it, don’t rise at all.

None of it has to do with anything resembling actual work.

but it’s certainly not because the party was some sort of an oligarchy that you seem to be insinuating here.

What is an oligarchy? Sure, we all know the dictionary definition, but those aren’t very nuanced.

The “rule by the rich”. Even in places that are clearly oligarchies, occasionally one rich person loses it all, no longer rules, or another becomes rich and starts ruling. And “rich” is relative too, no one would claim that a millionaire can’t ever be an oligarch simply because elsewhere in the world there exist billionaires.

The Party was a group of oligarchs. They did not measure their wealth the way that wealth was measured in other countries, socially it was sort of taboo to even think in those terms. But they had more luxuries, nicer homes, more real estate than anyone else in the Soviet Union. To a level that, were they in any other countries, they would have been (single digit) millionaires.

And that’s without even considering the industries that they owned. Sure, they wouldn’t use that word, because again it was taboo. But “ownership” is something that can’t ever be collective. To own something isn’t to be able to use that word to refer to it, but to control it and to be able to decide who control passes to and in what circumstances. Are you claiming that Brezhnev had no power to go to some iron mill and say “you aren’t allowed to work here anymore” to some flunky he didn’t like? Just as a western capitalist could fire someone he didn’t like? That he couldn’t put someone else in charge of that factory? That he couldn’t decide to change the floorplan and expand it? Or shut it down?

Sure, he couldn’t do it by decree like some feudal king. But the western capitalist rarely does that either (and rarer still does it without it causing him headaches). He builds consensus, gets others on the board of directors on his side. Let’s the right managers know that good things will happen if they help, and bad things will happen if they don’t. Etc.

The only real substantive differences are that some words (ownership, rich) weren’t allowed to be used. But the same qualities and circumstances permeated that nation.

It’s not so much that the state has a monopoly on violence. It’s that for it to not have a monopoly on violence, it would mean that non-state actors would have to choose to do violence.

That’s not an easy choice to make, is it? History is filled with accounts of crazies who chose violence but who chose it because they like the idea of violence more than for any other reason… and they ended up monsters. It’s admirable that people would not want to become that.

When is violence justified? Against whom? How can you safeguard things so that the even initially justifiable violence doesn’t go too far, spin out of control? More importantly, possibly, is what you do after your violence succeeds… you’ve built up this paramilitary force to perform the violence, they’ve won, and now they’re de facto in charge. You end up with goons running the show, because you needed goons to beat the other guy. You might be a goon yourself. That’s nearly always bad. You almost need some separate organization afterward, of civilians, to take over. How do you keep it separate during the struggle?

It might be more accurate to say that the state doesn’t so much have a monopoly on violence as that it’s just the only group out there sociopathic enough to want to use it.

I am no socialist, but I am surprised to agree that the Soviet Union actually did something positive. Literacy did rise to 99% from some low number. That is to their credit.

Why wouldn’t you guys find this old copypasta hilarious? It tells the truth… heroin should remain illegal, and we need a corps of 3 million cops on the beat beating down anyone who even thinks about drugs. Any libertarian who suggests otherwise is trying to corrupt your children.

It really is the libertarians who are your true enemy. Not Republicans, not Democrats. Not authoritarians and busybodies and the apathetic. It’s the people who want to leave you alone and for you to leave them alone.

Desktop usage is only kept afloat by their use in business. When you sit down in front of a desk at work, there’s a computer on it.

That also doesn’t bode well for linux, even if people could become familiar with it and comfortable with it, it’s doubtful that anyone in charge of computers in the office would be comfortable having those be linux desktops.

The age of the desktop really is over. Linux didn’t become mainstream, and now it’s completely moot. Even if you want to disagree with me emotionally, surely you see the writing on the wall? Everything I’ve said only becomes more true 5 years from now, 20 years from now. Not less.

Linux needs a time machine to go mainstream. It would have had to have happened by about 2006 or so… after that point, personal computing pretty much died. Sure, you have a desktop or laptop system in front of you, and so do I, but I contend that we are the exceptions, that we’re no longer typical.

There are people who do not use the internet with a personal computer as their primary means of using it. These people are many. These people are young, and will retain that habit their entire lives.

If it’s any consolation, personal computing is dead for all the operating systems, and no one really won.

Yeh, it’s good. But the filename scripting was always kind of difficult, glad they’ve improved that… not that it’ll do me any good, as I finally have mine the way I want.

Thank god you leftists realize how dangerous the libertarians are and how the war on drugs must continue to be prosecuted no matter how unwinnable it seems. No one should be allowed to have heroin.