My parents have an Alexa and I have no choice in whether they install one in our house or not. I doubt they would be convinced by my pleas about privacy. So unfortunately and reduction in whatever privacy that was left is a shame.

i’m sure they will appreciate your BSD 2 Clause contributions at Microsoft HQ

explaining the difference between a Toyota and a Honda

It’s proprietary so, no thanks.

systemd is an init system and just has not played the same role in the development of GNU/Linux distributions like GNU has. before systemd there was sysvinit, and there are number of alternate init systems. It’s not about system functionality that we name operating systems.

Uh no, it’s not. GNU has been integral to the GNU/Linux project for years. Without GCC, coreutils, glibc, there would be no linux distributions. Systemd has not played the same role.

Debian GNU/Linux has been called Debian GNU/Linux since at least 1997 https://lists.debian.org/debian-announce/1997/msg00013.html

The difference is the state does not choose who their opposition is

Are you sure about that?

and you are actually allowed to replace the governing system as a whole in liberal states which was not permitted in the USSR.

What does “replacing the governing system as a whole”, look like, in practice, exactly? How is this different from the USSR?

Profit falling leading to imperialism seems like its because of profit/expansion driven leadership

Leadership is irrelevant. Firms MUST reinvest some surplus value back into the firm. This will lead to the increase of capital in the business, and lead to overaccumlation crises. Firms must find new markets for their goods, or face certain economic despair.

You run an explicitly anti-capitalist community and don’t believe in the TRPF?

Other than the end-state of communism, a stateless, moneyless society, I’m curious as to what you think counts as ‘not capitalist’?

I think socialism requires an explicitly anti-nationalist character and the elimination of the commodity form. This looks like production with quotas (use-value), probably labor vouchers (but its not a requirement) and some form of worker ownership, like workers councils.

Many of the contradictions and crises of Capitalism are still present even under worker coop models in a market economy. Surplus value is still extracted, that money must be reinvested in the business to remain competitive. Meaning the Tendency of The Rate of Profit to Fall Remains, meaning capitalist crises remain. Imperialist incentives remain, and a worker coop nation-state would be equally imperialist as one with private corporations.

“You can vote for the Party Approved candidate or not vote”

I don’t really think its functionally different in the USA (or other liberal states). Democrats and Republicans are quite literally “Party Approved Candidates”. The presence of independents is incidental, and the USSR had independents in its parliament as well. This is why I view both the USA and USSR as “democratic”, but I would view neither as socialist.

That is capitalism

That might be relevant if the USSR was actually democratic.

Are bourgeoisie liberal states democratic? Curious your thoughts.

Humans have the capacity to be that, but all you have to do is look at the entirety of human history to know that we’re not really like that. It’s a nice lie that we tell ourselves. Hierarchies of power are an integral part of human nature and always have been. Any society that centers around empathy and cooperation will eventually be corrupted by those who only seek personal gain, and the masses will follow them.

Extrapolating out “human nature” from past human behavior is a form of surface level inductive reasoning that does not hold up to scrutiny. Inductive reasoning is flawed, “humans are naturally hierarchical” isn’t an argument. It’s possible to use material analysis to determine the source of hierarchy and as humans we have the ability to change our material conditions. Also ignoring anarchist projects that succeeded in horizontalism, maybe not in militarism though.

Capital might allow UBI below subsistence, and this very well could happen to stave off crisis. It just can’t be high enough that people aren’t incentivized to sell their labor power (be a wage-slave). This is arguably what minimum wage and tax credits already are.

There are definitely “right-wing” anarchist currents that are popular and not as unhinged as how “anarcho-capitalism” is generally characterized, as in, anarchism that espouses the use of capitalism, but I have not really seen any genuinely “socially conservative”, anarchists. Pacifism is reactionary and emboldens the status quo.

You can’t have Capitalist elements like, commodity production, wage-labor, money, markets, and call that “socialism”. All of the inherent contradictions and harms of capitalism remain (because its capitalism), like theft of surplus value, imperialism, and alienation.

The term leftist is considered to come from the fact that people sitting on the “Left” in the Estates General in France. Generally, liberals, (Jacobins, Third Estate). There is very poor sourcing for this online, but Wikipedia cites some untranslated difficult to source french book.

In mainstream discourse, “left” takes on a number of meanings, but to the extent that left is meant to mean anti-capitalist, and/or, Marxist, anarchism has left wing currents, hence, left wing anarchism.

I find people are less uncomfortable when you mention Market Socialism, and show them how it’s not too radical.

Cool theory. Still Capitalism (and still creates all the same problem capitalism does).