This is probably unpopular, but Taiwan is imo not a good example of imperialism. Taiwan is where the old government has fled to and where the government there officially still claims to be the rightful goverment of China. Their official name is republic of China, which obviously leads to tensions with the “people’s republic of China”.

Imperialism is when a nation excercises significant influence and control over other independent nations. Taiwan is not an independent nation, they are a rival/competitor with similar regional claims.

A better example of Chinese imperialism could be their economic initiatives in Africa.

They say Arthemis landed on EARTH, but it actually landed on WATER (no earth far and wide). If they lie about something so obvious, what else are they lying about??

Sadly, it went to shit before his time even, which is why many were so desparate to fall for a ridiculous conman like him. He was just the final nail in the coffin.

You are mixing social democrats with democratic socialists.

The origin and core of social democracy is clearly socialist and, in many cases, Marxist. Of course this was more and more deluted over time until today, were many social democratic parties have indeed completely abandoned their socialist roots even in theory.

However, historically, social democracy overall can (and imo should) still be seen as reformist socialism, at least partially. The way I see it, it’s that the parties have abandoned social democracy by embracing neo-liberalism. have abandened those goals completely (e.g. modern German SPD, British Labour)

One could also argue that social democratic parties pretty much always had a leftist wing and a liberal wing, this is true today as well for the most part.

Its niceties are financed by imperial rent.

Isn’t everything/anything existing under capitalism financed by imperial rent?

How is it different to China, for example, who also participates in the global capitalist economy and benefits from it?

When that flow contracts, the mask comes off.

When has this happened? Do you have a specific example of a social democratic party turning fascist (actually curious)? Turning neo-liberal, sure, but to me at least, equating neo-liberalism with fascism is an oversimplification. Or is the argument that socdem turns into neo-liberalism, neo-liberalism turns into fascism, ergo socdem=fascism?

>I explicitly said “helped,” not “solely responsible.” Multiple factors converged in 1933.

Fair enough.

they preserved the bourgeois state apparatus after 1918.

they kept the reactionary judiciary, the imperial officer corps, and the bureaucratic machinery intact. They unleashed the Freikorps on the KPD.

Whether or not you believe me, it does pain me to defend the SPD, but I guess I will still do it.

They didn’t just preserve it, they were essential in building it. And that shouldn’t be surprising since in their view, socialism has to be build through a liberal democratic system instead of going straight from imperialist/monarchist to socialist.

And yes, they did a lot of “ultra-pragmatic” and desperate moves to protect the liberal republic and what was in their view the way towards socialism in the future and avoid a civil war/reversal of their gains. This does include them using Freikorps, which is imo indefensible, but it is at least somewhat explainable given the uncertainity of the situation.

And it’s easy to judge in hindsight, but the German situation was quite different from Russia. There were uprisings all over the place, socialist republics were declared, but it was much more chaotic and the working class was much more divided. Chances of right wing and monarchists forces reversing power or even taking back more power seemed plausable.

>They refused every proposal for a united working class front against the Nazis.

This is very critical and one of the biggest issues. But again, this was a mutual thing. The KPD also refused to form any kind of front against the nazis until it was too late. Both factions failed to see nazism/fascism severely underestimated the threat of the fascists.

>Stalin characterized this relationship precisely when he stated that “Social-Democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism” and that these organizations “are not antipodes, they are twins.”

And this characterization is in part what made it virtually impossible to form any kind of pragmatic alliance/front against the fascists and I honestly don’t understand what the purpose of this characterization is… Why would they work with the SPD against the fascists when the SPD was, in practice, fascist itself?

social democracy functions as the left wing of counterrevolution.

Social democracy is against revolution and pro reform. If that makes it fascist, literally everything and everyone except for revolutionary socialists are/were fascists. This worldview, imo, is shooting yourself in the foot. And I don’t understand why this view still seems to be held. Many have no issue with critial support of regimes/groups/factions for specific and pragmatic goals. And then we don’t live in Weihmar Germany anymore, there is virtually 0 revolutionary potential in the west, so what good does essentially turning virtually everyone into the enemy do?

socialdemocrats entire ideology is built upon “reforming” capitalism by implementing a welfare state to more evenly spread the profits of the super exploitation of the periphery.

Technically, it’s built on the idea that a socialist society can be/should be reached gradually by participating in parliamentary liberal political system instead of overthrowing liberal society and implementing a “dictatorship of the proletariat”.

At least that was what the original debate was about (“reform vs revolution”) that split the left apart. Since then, most social democrats have completely moved away from the idea of reaching a socialist society anytime soon (for various reasons).

The meme is pointing out the unfortunate pattern of it almost always ending in a rightward shift

The meme is clearly pointing out that “social democracy enjoyers” turn into fascists/Nazis once the economy declines. Or, if we keep OP’s caption in mind, the idea that social democrats are actually fascists “wearing a mask”.

directly helped bring Hitler to power

What helped Hitler seize power was not just the actions/inactions of the socdems and the economic collapse, but the deep split of the left overall, the ineffective political system and the relentless infighting to the point were socdems and communists saw eachother as equivalent or even a bigger threat than the fascists.

Don’t try to tell me that it’s all so easy now, I literally just went through hours of research and experimenting and samba settings and changing my disk’s fstab file just to get a folder to show up on my home network.

For most people, it is (and has been) that easy. If it works as intended, you can simply open your desktop explorer thing, click on network and have it show up. I know that because that has been my experience a couple of years ago and I was surprised at it just working so flawlessly. To be clear, I’m not denying your issues, I’m just pointing out that your experience is not automatically the average experience.

Of course there can be bugs and other issues which require troubleshooting, but that’s not specifically a linux issue.

The difference is that for non-techies, it’s harder to troubleshoot because advice you find is mostly written for techies, there is less info and there are a lot of different linux based operating systems.

For techies, it’s generally easier to troubleshoot because you can get more info out of the system (if you know how) and you generally have more power over the system.

but pretending it’s all smooth sailing and so easy and polished is misleading.

I agree, you cannot generalize a personal experience and then universally apply it to every person as well as every linux based distribution, like “it’ll work flawlessly out of the box because that’s been my experience”. You also cannot generalize it over every linux based system. I have tried a lot of different distros with different hardware and my experience has varied a lot. I have had issues and bugs with ubuntu that just didn’t happen with arch based distros.

But again, it’s virtually never smooth sailing for everyone in every case. Windows users have to troubleshoot issues and bugs too.

In recent years, I started to feel differently. Sure, it’s nice if you have 1 app/1 tool to do a lot of things, but it comes at the price of dependency. When a service/tool turns to shit (which seems to be a matter of time in most cases), it’s so much harder to find something new.

So I tend to prefer a lot of different simple tools that can do one thing only, but they can do that one thing right. And if it turms to shit, I can just replace the single tool instead of having to find an alternative that can do everything.

Generally speaking, drivers like this should be included in the kernel and there should be no need to install anything. Of course, this depends on the firmware, modell of your controller and the linux kernel version, but as far as I know, most xbox controllers should work out of the box. I have never used xbox controllers, but there has been a community developed driver project for decades.

So there was maybe a specific issue/bug, which can happen of course, but that isn’t unique to linux. The difference is that in Linux, you CAN tinker if you want to (and know what you are doing). In less open systems, that’s a lot harder and you have to hope and rely on the manufacturer to fix it.

In windows, the way it works generally is that the manufacturer developes and provides the driver. In linux, there is a chicken and egg issue. A lot of manufacturers don’t bother to develope drivers for linux because there aren’t a lot of users and there aren’t a lot of users because manufacturers don’t bother providing drivers and other software. In the case of xbox, it is even more tricky since microsoft has no real interest to get their hardware working on competing operating systems.

It has gotten a lot better in recent years, and I expect it will continue, as desktop linux slowly gains more traction, but a lot of software in general still depends on the community and third party actors.

And I’m not sure what the better alternative would be. You can run community written shell scripts in a gui, but then you have even more people who run random software written by random people without even remotely knowing what they are doing. So in that case, a barrier (like a cli) is actually useful since it might stop people without knowhow from breaking their system or installing malware.

The only “real” alternative for the average joe would be manufacturers supporting their own hardware.

they’re still just too commonly needed in every distro.

there’s always still basic functionality that just isn’t in the GUI.

Can you give a concrete example?

however, they make quite a bit of profit

Pretty sure they didn’t for a while. It’s the same approach as always. Operate at a loss, gain (nonpaying) users, maybe sell or use their data and slowly turn up whatever you are doing to make money (ads, fee).

To be fair, epic is losing money trying to gain users from steam. They weren’t profitable even before they lowered their cut.

I’m pretty sure valve could go lower than 30%, but I doubt they could go as low as 12% and still remain profitable.

The headset itself is running linux and it is meant to be used with the steam machine, which also runs on linux.

There are multiple candidates, but if elections are held in a one party state, they all belong to the same party or a party that is effectively under the dominating party’s control.

If you only drink sugary drinks, water doesn’t taste all that great in comparison.

The only teal obstacle is some anti cheat software, mostly kernel level anti cheat.

So if you want to play shooters like fortnite, pubg, valorant or rainbow six siege, you are out of luck.

Otherwise, you probably won’t have any issues.

It’s not going to work

Of course it would, at least for some of them… You can’t seriously believe that people cannot change their minds, especially conservatives, who often only have their views because of living in a bubble.

whose purpose is to convert us from our “ways”

Let them try. Let them actually lay out and present their twisted worldview. And if you don’t want to see it or hear about it, fine, block their space. It’s much more likely that they will change than it is for a leftist to change because the vast majority of leftists are actually familiar with the right and their believes. The other way around is generally a different story…

I use and love debian a lot for servers because it is super stable and relatively lightweight, but I definitely would not recommend it for desktops/notebooks, especially not to people new to linux based systems.

It’s super purist about foss, which means you only get free and open source software (no steam, discord, etc) per default and it uses an older kernel (which makes it more stable, but less feature rich and less compatible with new hardware).

If you use something like fedora, linux mint (as far as I heard) or even ubuntu, your experience would probably be a lot better.

On my private PC, I’m using a GUI/Mouse anyway (browsing, gaming, etc). I have to do 2 clicks to update.

If I use terminal, I have to open terminal, then I have to either login as root or run update as sudo, which means I have to authenticate.

If I already have an open terminal, I might be faster. Otherwise, I’m about as fast as with GUI. In any way, there is no significant benefit to updating software via terminal vs GUI, especially if you are an enduser who does not have significant experience with shells…

For many tasks I agree that a shell is better and faster once you have basic knowledge for it, but it is a reality that many basic users are not used to using a shell or are even scared to use one… And at least since I’ve been use Fedora a couple of years ago, I think using a GUI for basic stuff is reasonably viable without having a significantly worse experience and not comparable with “not using all gears in a car”.

Ok so what exactly is the big advantage you get when installing updates from a terminal as opposed to installing it via GUI? If I read your analogy, one could think it is faster, but I don’t think it is.

Even if it is, for whatever reason, not part of the repository you have installed, you can still go on steam’s website and download the package from there… In other words, the worst case scenario is literally the same experience as you would have on windows…