Eldritch
Choice can be one of the huge strong suits and weak points of Linux. I know over the last 30 years I’ve switched distros a lot. My first was a two floppy slack distro. One for boot and one for root. There was no pretty X server on top of it lol.
These days for my personal systems I definitely like the rolling releases. Currently have endeavor OS on a few systems. But I still have debian Ubuntu or Fedora running on certain systems for specific tasks. They aren’t always the most up-to-date. But they are some of the more stable and secure. And when you’re serving that’s typically what you want.
Because they are separate communities on separate instances. And despite having the same name can serve highly different purposes. You might start an instance relating to your local city or town. Then if you had a technology sub on that it might be more specifically geared towards talking about technology in your city or town. Others might be more general in topic. But all are just as valid. And you can subscribe to all of them or none of them.
Just for a point of reference. Intel is only just now releasing and creating an uproar over their new core s x86 processors. Which drop hardware support for 32 and 16 but instructions. The newest of which is 30 years old. If people are this upset about a move like that yeah it will be a while till it’s replaced.
Not just big tech. It’s the story of capitalism as a whole. When we suffered the one two punch of decoupling the cash supply from a tangible asset, and the tax brackets for the Uber wealthy dropping from 90/100% to less than 10% in some cases. We were always destined for this.
And keep in mind I’m not arguing against Fiat currency. But combined did not being locked to a fixed tangible asset. And the basically supreme Court decided profit above all else ruling. It’s turned it all into a giant unrelated untamed game of abstract numbers.
The soviet union wasn’t the shit show western nations paint it as. That’s not to say that it didn’t have a ton of flaws including authoritarianism. But when it came to things like the space race they kicked the ass of every country till the US eventually landed on the moon. First satellite in orbit first person in space/orbit etc etc etc. Science and technology. Science and technology weren’t neglected either.
The biggest problem with the soviet union and other bolshevik style authoritarian communist countries. Is that they’re the only bit of socialism western nations indoctrinate their drones with. To frighten them and keep them from ever thinking about it. I’m a socialist and anti bolshevik etc etc etc. But to most westerners that’s just a head scratcher. Socialist but not bolshevik?! How can be!?
It’s about calling things what they are. Doesn’t matter if were fond of it or not. The problem with soviet/north Korean/Chinese large C Communism is their placing absolute authority in a single entity. The state the party etc. Especially when that entity is ultimately the “military”. Or derived from it. As the euphemism goes. When you’re a hammer everything looks like a nail. Addendum and when things don’t work like nails you just keep hitting them harder out of frustration.
Mao Zedong’s famine comes to mind. Lets assume that many of us here are fairly techy and nerdy. Being on a federated opensource platform as early adopters. Risky bet I know. Now would you think it’s a good idea to put someone, say a baker. Who has no experience with tech whatsoever as the supreme authority in running something like this? Let alone multiple non related essential things? You’re just asking for trouble. Maybe they will listen to advisers and take the advice to heart. Maybe they will do the normal human thing and over estimate their abilities and ignore them. There shouldn’t be a single ultimate authority that people fear to cross. True small c communism could work. But that would rely on the workers, not the state being the authority. And cooperating with other workers to fill the needs of each. The state can be an effective arbitrator for those groups. And I’m not so far down the libertarian/anarchist rabbit hole to believe we can get away with zero state authority. But the power needs to be balanced between the workers and the state.
No I have not. And I’ll be honest there’s a lot of related socialist and communist reading that I probably haven’t done. Some of it because I have fundamental disagreements with the basic premise of many of them. Such as the all too common belief that Karl Marx’s figurative call for a dictatorship of proletariat. Was literal. Which happens to be the basic underpinning premise of Big C communism. And the ultimate failure of every group that has implemented it.
In my view at least. If everyone is the proletariat. Then by definition the proletariat has an effective dictatorship. Because no one but the proletariat would have a say. The problem with making the state etc the dictator. Is that they Don’t always understand or want to understand the needs and wants of different groups. China’s government has done a lot of infrastructure projects for instance. But extremely wastefully. Because it wasn’t for, or fulfilling of the people’s needs. It was for status and to flatter the vanity of the non proletariat in the government.
There are so many more ideologies and concepts under socialism than authoritarian communism. And it’s really a shame they don’t get more attention/recognition.
