Where did you get the impression that the Marxist definition of socialism was even relevant here? Bringing philosophical jargon into colloquial conversations is basically trolling at this point since philosophical/social studies jargon often use words that have zero semantic overlap with their colloquial counterpart.

Proselytize all you want but if you “um akshully” socialism in a colloquial conversation you will look like an unwashed cave troll at best.

The Latin thing is only a partial explanation. Some of it is changes in pronunciation coupled with a very authoritarian attitude to orthography. Few languages out there that changed so little in 400 years.

So for instance the -ent ending for plural verbs (“ils mangent”) is silent because the “ent” sounds were progressively dropped. Then the written suffix logically started disappearing, and only then did the Académie bring it back because it was more Latin. If it wasn’t for these reactionary fucks that rule would have been reformed centuries ago.

Unfortunately in the intervening time, knowledge of orthography became a very strong social marker. Because spelling French is so hard, the dictée came to disproportionately affect grades (seriously, old-fashioned schools still do it daily and it’s all graded and very severely), which coupled with the industrial revolution and alphabetization of the lower classes meant that shit spelling = prole = bad. So now orthography is at the center of the traditional value system which has all the conservatives pearl-clutching at the idea that children can’t spell “nénuphar” properly. Children’s purported inability to spell properly is like the number one moral panic that has sprung up every few years for the last century or two, but also orthographic reforms are woke (derogatory). The point of orthography, to conservative types, is for it to be hard so you can show off your perfect spelling to justify your social standing.

The banally evil are the federal workers who document the files, who maintain the vehicles used to deport children, the healthcare workers who gave up on this child without a fight, etc. Those are guilty of collaboration but most probably aren’t doing evil for its own sake.

The ICE guys making the arrest are the fucking Gestapo. There simply is no excuse to be made for police who arrest sick children, that is a more than sufficient condition to be called Capital E Evil.

Running Linux on closed source hardware. Classic.

I bet you aren’t even using your own open RISC-V based SBC, with fully open-source peripherals. Is your computer monitor even running an open-source firmware or are you just a FOSS poser?

I’ve mostly got experience with Battlefield in that genre but if you’re getting repeatedly killed by “campers” you’re playing the game wrong, aka aiming for KDR instead of PTFO.

Believe it or not devs are aware of the mechanical advantages of long-range weapons, so in-game objectives are intentionally littered with crates and boxes and walls to provide cover from “camping spots”. The ones getting repeatedly killed are noobs who keep walking around the objective, in the open, because they are scared of all the cover positions which might hide an enemy.

Well too fucking bad sugarlips, stop being a little bitch and rush in. Better to die clearing out the cover spots for your teammates to capture the objective than to a useless game of skeet that doesn’t generate any benefit for either team. I don’t care that you have a KDR of 1.2 and “you would have gotten more if it wasn’t for the campers”, you captured exactly zero flags and so as far as I’m concerned you’re dead weight.

… Wow sorry about that, I guess I got post-traumatic gamer rage on this topic lol

MAGA against who exactly? There don’t seem to be many high ranking Democrats willing to call out Trump on his bullshit, and none willing or capable of leading an actual separatist movement or insurrection. They’re actually even more subdued and helpless than they were in 2017.

I’d love to be wrong but I’m calling it now; when (blue) “states’ rights” get de facto dissolved and/or their midterm elections are obviously rigged, they will buckle silently and proceed with a Peaceful Transition Of Power™. Maybe their attorneys will send a Strongly Worded Letter to the Trump-appointed federal judges in charge of their case, but that’s about all the political violence the American Left has an appetite for.

States being stripped of their independence is exactly what happened to Germany in the '30s and I don’t see why the U.S. would suddenly deviate from the script. Your country is way too morally bankrupt to even entertain the idea of a popular uprising.

This can be - and has been - generalized to all industrualization.

Tolkien wrote Isengard the way he did for a reason.

The history of Brutalist architecture is closely associated with fascism as it promotes societal ideals of a neatly segmented and ordered life.

Henry Ford. Just, Henry Ford.

Elon’s technocratic nazi grandfather.

I would also like to remind everyone that fascism is simultaneously extremely dangerous but doomed to fail. That obsession for finding rigid rules where there aren’t any, of constraining the real world to simplified models, makes fascists eventually lose touch with reality because they can’t account for the messiness and human factor. At first they destroy everything they touch, kill anyone that doesn’t fit the model. They then make fatal, obviously irrational mistakes like opening an Eastern front in Europe before tidying up the Western one because the Ideology says Bolsheviks are weak. Attacking the US in Hawaii. Not installing Lidar in supposedly self-driving cars. Invading Ukraine with an incompetent army and cardboard supplies against a dug-in western-supplied army.

It’s not particularly helpful to the tens of millions killed by fascism yet, but at least we can rest assured that the fascist technosolutionists will lose and that plants will grow out of their corpse.

Yeah that’s the gender-radical answer. I’m all for it but we’re certainly not there yet despite being on the very progressive side of gender rights.

There are also the positive discrimination laws to take into account (in Belgium it’s illegal for companies to have a pay gap between men and wonen in equivalent positions) but IMO those should not rely on a central government database to be enforced.

Then there’s the fact that people usually change their names if they change their legal gender… When Robert becomes Julia there’s no need for a gender marker to guess what happened.

Side-note but this is exactly the reason why my country never asked for my ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation (and AFAIK is not legally allowed to do so). We learned from WWII that this is too great of a liability to entrust to future, potentially hostile governments. The Nazis poured over every written registry of Jewish population census to make a handy murder list, maybe we shouldn’t facilitate their job next time?

(Side-side note: because of what I just said it is very surprising that Germany keeps a registry of everyone’s religion for tax purposes, like maybe just find any other way to allocate subsidies?)

(Side³ note: I’m going to guess unfortunately my government does have “legally trans” people in a database due to the logistics of changing legal gender)

Having talked to people who were in charge of making some strategic decisions regarding a business messaging application…

Slack/Discord is “too complex and confusing”. Apparently the pile of unsorted chats, group chats, and meeting chats, are superior to Discord’s threading model.

Also corpos literally do not notice that teams is slow as molasses which is a big part of the friction. You could show them a perfect demonstration that Teams’ UI is so much slower to react to anything (nevermind load the actual resource) than the competition and that they often have a 1000+ms audio RTT in meetings (not a hyperbole) and the business people would be like “yeah, I guess? Who cares?”

Corporate types literally can’t understand that bad audio and audio latency costs a huge percentage of revenue in lost productivity because everyone’s constantly talking over each other and simultaneously being too afraid to speak because the audio delay makes it impossible to fit into a lull in the conversation and also everyone is in a competition for the tiniest shittiest mic with the worst noise canceling that somehow stacks on top of Teams’ pretty bad noise cancelation such that their voice is being noise canceled and you’re just left with like 1.2 kHz of actual range and somehow everyone seems fine to spend their entire day listening to that and aaaaaaaaa I have a headache and I want to die

Then after work you get on a discord call with the mates and everyone is crystal clear with no noticeable latency, even the students on a secondhand 30 € gaming headset.

The Linux Kernel is actually hierarchical by design. Anyone can submit a patch, but it then has to go up the maintainer chain to Linus’ final approval before landing mainline, but of course Linus doesn’t review everything himself and implicitly trusts his maintainers.

So part of the Rust drama a few months ago was accusations that despite the stated goal of rustifying some subsystems, the existing hierarchy is sometimes acting in bad faith and unwilling to learn the basics of Rust to talk ABI or generally accommodate the reasonable needs of Rust devs. Asahi Lina had an impressive writeup of her Rust contributions to the Apple Silicon GPU driver and the frequent, demotivating difficulties she had with maintainers refusing to learn anything that isn’t C or to acknowledge errors like race conditions in their C code. Some insanely talented people are being kept at arm’s length by the kernel community over petty turf wars that look very much like a symptom of institutional rot. Which isn’t very surprising to me having met some unrelated but very highly opinionated (and sometimes very confidently incorrect) greybeards of similar ilk.

I don’t have a horse in that race or a solution to the kernel issues, but it’s interesting to watch how at scale even kernel OSS devs fall into the same trappings as any institution with a hierarchy. We’re all just human, and even when working for an organization with the most noble of goals we must keep an eye out for hierarchies and institutions and rules and processes.

“whatever power decides” is legal

Not true. When Biden decided to cancel student debt, the court system said “no”. The SCOTUS isn’t subservient to “power” in general, it’s subservient to powerful fascists. Big difference. Trump has spent a decade following the Nazi playbook and acquiring complete personal control over all branches of government and people don’t seem to have fully realized that yet. That’s why things are way worse this time around. When he started his first term the SCOTUS was conservative and corrupt but not yet fascist. This time it’s fully loyalist. In case you forgot, he also had already placed a bunch of loyalists in key judicial roles that Biden didn’t fire.

He’s made sure the law won’t stop him, and now he’s purging his enemies to make sure the institutions won’t resist his unlawful orders. It’s not a “both sides” issue, it’s not even just a “the rich are winning” issue. They might get the green light to deport every union leader, but they’ll be ruling over a kingdom of ashes and blood by the time this is over. Assuming the billionaires aren’t caught up in the purge; plenty of that in autocratic regimes, oligarchs infighting is a great way to ensure loyalty because that makes them incapable of organizing to stage a coup.

Says who? Under the US legal system, anything is legal if the SCOTUS agrees with it. If Trump declared himself Führer tomorrow they’d validate that as constitutional. At this point suing the US government for its blatantly unconstitutional acts is merely a delaying tactic.

Americans must stop twiddling their thumbs while expecting Trump’s DoJ/SCOTUS/congress to work for the American people and start resisting because the key institutions have already fallen to fascism.