It’s not. People act like this rise in fascism came out of nowhere and I’m saying that there were signs. People didn’t want to read them because it would have interrupted whatever fun weekend they were having, or whatever, but the signs were there. This has been an ongoing project for decades. It didn’t start with Trump and it won’t end with him either

I have to. But I don’t believe it will do anything. The United States is Balkanizing, and will cease to be a functional anything within the decade. Voting or not.

Oh, so I wasn’t feeding and clothing immigrants in the largest open air detention facility in the history of the country during the Biden admin? Weird, I guess that was a dream. I guess I dreamed all of the family separation and children in prisons back during the Obama admin too.

Nope, you should support candidates that actually care about your best interests.

In my opinion, it does not. He could choose to spend every penny he has on making life better for folks until he’s as poor as the rest of us. Instead he chooses to get richer.

I vote. I vote in the primaries, and the general elections, and the special elections. That doesn’t mean I’m deluded enough to believe it’s actually doing anything, but obviously harm reduction is the only path we have.

Trump is just continuing the same policies that every other president has put forward. Some times the have a D next to their name and they nicer things for social issues, and then everybody forgets that they’re also war criminals who are enacting a massive anti-immigrant deportation policy.

If you think Pritzger is any different, than you’re probably too stupid to realize you’ve been voting for all of this to happen the whole time.

Oh no, I’m much more cynical than that. I vote, even though I know it’s pointless.

If you really believe that we can just elect the total collapse of American culture away, then I think you need to do some soul searching. Learn to be resilient, nobody is coming to save us.

California, Illinois, Minnesota, Maine, New York, and “many others”.

I’m down with eating him last, but as long as he is one of them, I’m not voting for him. There is no such thing as an ethical billionaire

Ew, please don’t simp for billionaires

Great! Thanks! You’ve just doomed us to get the Linux Saturn, which will be appreciated by some, but ultimately fail against SuperWindows and Windows 64. After that we’ll get something beautiful, the Linux Dreamcast, but it will be too little too late, as just a few months later, Apple releases the MacStation2, which most people buy because it has a DVD player built in, and the Linux Dreamcast kind of just dies… 25 years later, and Linux is making Linux Classics compilations and new games starring Tux for the WindowsSwitch2.

My point wasn’t really about the price, but availability. You said you remembered Walkman as “way way later than the 70s” and I was just pointing out that, technically, they were kind of around the WHOLE 70s, just not priced or marketed in a way that they would have been very common, and hence why you remember them “way way later” (probably sometime around 82-84, right?)

The Walkman came out in 79 and was cheap enough for a present to a teen or young adult by 82, at the latest. Hell, if you wanted to raid your parents’ stuff, they may well have had a (mono) folio style cassette recorder or even a Sony TC-50 cassette recorder/player (which looks exactly* like a Walkman), made as early as 1968! They brought them to the Moon during the Apollo program. That’s right, cassettes technically came BEFORE 8-Tracks.

But they were too expensive until the late 70s, and by then most people already had an 8-track collection, so it took a few more years to mass adopt.

Source: I have mono demo tapes that my dad recorded from his poor Oklahoma farm town in 1970

Why so many fingers?

Like, socialism is, and should be a constant revolutionary project, not just a static position.

If you try to put it that way, that then again opens it for others to add/remove as they feel like.
While I understand that socialism is not some hard program that can exactly apply to every scenario, there has to be some tenets of it that are defended well, to prevent a malicious actor from uprooting its base.

There’s is. It’s really simple: “From each, according to their ability, to each, according to their need.” Anything else on top of that is philosophical.

My personal solution is simply that I don’t subscribe to any *-ism and don’t group myself with anything even if it tends to provide similar solutions in the current scenario, simply because in some other one, the group’s solution might end up greatly differing from what I would consider acceptable.

This is a similar tact that I took when I was about 16-17, but I find that to be a very naive point of view. Regardless of whether or not you want to apply any label to yourself (which is perfectly valid) the material conditions of the system we live in will come down on you too. So you either end up in the “We are stronger together” camp, or you end up in the “Me and mine are what needs to be protected. Other people be damned” camp. And if you find yourself in the former, you most likely align with people who call themselves socialist, and if you find yourself in the latter, well then you’re probably a bootlicker

I personally don’t subscribe to the idea of leaders who can’t justify their position. Maybe your problem is that you see socialism as a system to be implemented rather than a thing that you do? Like, socialism is, and should be a constant revolutionary project, not just a static position.

Yeah, except my quote is real, and it was actually made as a promotional item by Microsoft and HP

I swear to God, the government has done a good job of making people forget about the Snowden leak.

Many governments, all over the world, but especially the U.S. and China, can and are installing physical hardware backdoors into essentially every consumer grade phone and computer in the market.