It’s not insanity, it’s planned. If people can’t afford to stop working, they can’t afford to strike. You want to keep people just on the side of solvency. So they keep their (rented) home, their (liened) car, etc. But they never save up enough to feel truly secure. Bad things happen, take on some more debt (credit cards, loans, etc) to compensate and then spend years paying those debts instead of saving. So you can do it all again.

It’s all planned.

It’s why governments crack down hard on community outreach and organization. People growing their own food will be less dependent on the grocery stores that are increasingly owned by only a handful of companies. If your community can at least partially feed itself, it removes one potential barrier from striking. If people in the community own their homes, they can shelter others. This removes another potential barrier. And on and on.

Capital lives in mortal terror of organized labor and thus spends gobsmacking amounts of money doing everything it can to prevent it from happening.

Easy - they’re never punished for failure. If execs lost their jobs and didn’t get a cent for being fired due to incompetence, they’d be more cautious.

Golden parachutes mean that you have no serious incentive to do a good job.

Please stop conflating Democrats with “the left.”

Democrats are centrists or even center-right. Actual leftists tend to be just as gun-happy as conservatives. Both for protection from those conservatives, and because Marx was pretty explicit about the proletariat needing to revolt.

No. It’s made up nonsense, like 99% of justifications for gun laws. The people writing the laws are rarely actually knowledgeable on the subject they’re writing legislation for.

Pretty much all of the big live service games demand kernel access for their anticheat, which typically isn’t allowed on Linux, so those games simply won’t work.

Thank you for providing us an object example lol

It can’t be slave labor if they’re paid a few cents! /s

You think Linux is going to be a better experience? What do you think someone will think the user will think when they encounter a program or game that simply refuses to run on Linux?

You’re too deep in the sauce, man. I have to reiterate that the average gamer is both horribly stupid and extremely lazy. You gotta keep that in mind. People smart enough and dedicated enough to go through the hurdles associated with gaming on a PC are likely already using one as their primary or sole platform.

Seems like there’s no horror block this year, which is pretty disappointing. Horror games appear to be spread out throughout the event rather than concentrated in a single block. Maybe there weren’t enough runners that could attend?

I mean I guess that’s true but it’s certainly a spectrum. There’s a fair difference between a Western democracy like Canada and whatever we’re saying the PRC is these days. And an even bigger difference between that and Stephen Miller’s fantasy, and there’d still be a difference between Stephen Miller’s rotten mind and what Stalin was doing.

A government must to some extent be authoritarian but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s mutually exclusive with civil and personal freedoms.

It’s certainly a ways away but Gaben won’t live forever. I’m assuming there’s a clear succession plan in place and hopefully that everyone lined up are on roughly the same wavelength but… well, there’re no guarantees.

Sorry, no. My video drivers fucked up while installing somehow and I had to blow them out with DDU and reinstall everything to get normal functioning back on my PC. I’ve had countless random errors, performance hangs, and more due to just random stupid Windows 11 shit that had to be identified and solved by repeated web searches and in a few cases obtaining and running specialized tools to cleanse my system of the filth W11 is full of.

NONE of this is part of the usual console experience. Exceptions exist, yes. And technical support when they occur is dramatically simpler because they’re all the same.

I think you’re forgetting just how fucking stupid the average person is, and how lazy they are. We’re in the era of cognitive surrender to chatGPT. You think these drooling morons want to web search how to fix a driver installation somehow getting corrupted?

Because a console will still be plug in and play.

“Gamers push back.” Just like they pushed back against $70 and $80 games by lining up around the block to buy a Switch 2 so they could buy $70 and $80 games to play on it. Like Rockstar will make a mint selling $100 copies of GTA6.

So you’re acknowledging that there’s a general consensus among historians and political scientists and rejecting it anyway?

Well, you do you I guess.

Red fascism is more or less something ginned up in the early stages of the Cold War as a way to conveniently carry the fight through to the new enemy.

Stalin was not fascist, nor is Stalinism related to fascism. Stalin was a fucking monster regardless of whatever label you prefer, though.

If we look at other cited regimes, your footing is even weaker. Mao wasn’t a fascist, and none of the leaders of the PRC since then have been. Same for Castro and Cuba. Pol Pot was one fucked up dude, but he wasn’t fascist.

Stalin is certainly the closest comparison, but he’s still not fascist.

I think it’s an overall dramatically better way of running things than capitalism for what are hopefully obvious reasons. But I also think even “partial socialism” is still an improvement. Reform is maybe not ideal but it’s still better than what we have now. So long as you don’t stop pushing for and seeking out that better, brighter future for everyone.

Could you ship of theseus your way into socialism? Who knows? I’d be willing to try though.

Gotta win elections to ram that through, though.

Given that, so far, precisely none of the Marxist-Leninist states have successfully transitioned into a classless system (or even tried to), I’d say that the last bullet point is especially relevant.

It’s awfully tempting to retain that total power over others, once given it. There’s only been a handful of people throughout history that have willingly handed the reins of power back after the crisis was resolved.

I’d be surprised that anyone would want to stop at the SocDem phase of things. Like if you actually get that far and things are going well, wouldn’t you want to take that next step? I guess it depends on perceived risk?