Whether their occupations and annexations where extractive or expansionist in nature, and whether they qualify for the definition of imperialism, is discussion that can be had, although I have neither the time nor energy to have it here. What stays unchanged past this talk of semantics is the fact that they were an authoritarian and expansionist state. To quote Rosa Luxemburg:

When all this is eliminated, what really remains? In place of the representative bodies created by general, popular elections, Lenin and Trotsky have laid down the soviets as the only true representation of political life in the land as a whole, life in the soviets must also become more and more crippled. Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element. Public life gradually falls asleep, a few dozen party leaders of inexhaustible energy and boundless experience direct and rule. Among them, in reality only a dozen outstanding heads do the leading and an elite of the working class is invited from time to time to meetings where they are to applaud the speeches of the leaders, and to approve proposed resolutions unanimously – at bottom, then, a clique affair – a dictatorship, to be sure, not the dictatorship of the proletariat but only the dictatorship of a handful of politicians, that is a dictatorship in the bourgeois sense, in the sense of the rule of the Jacobins (the postponement of the Soviet Congress from three-month periods to six-month periods!) Yes, we can go even further: such conditions must inevitably cause a brutalization of public life: attempted assassinations, shooting of hostages, etc. (Lenin’s speech on discipline and corruption.)

• Rosa Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution, 1918.

1918, this was written well before Stalin’s reign of terror, in a time when general sentiment towards the revolution was full of hope. Even anarchists where quick to support the revolutionaries, but quickly became disillusioned from what they saw. To quote Trotsky, the man himself:

The working class […] cannot be left wandering all over Russia. They must be thrown here and there, appointed, commanded, just like soldiers […] Compulsion of labour will reach the highest degree of intensity during the transition from capitalism to socialism […] Deserters from labour ought to be formed into punitive battalions or put into concentration camps.”

Then later in the year, as the workers were becoming angered at their treatment:

the militarization of labour…is the indispensable basic method for the organization of our labour forces

And

Is it true that compulsory labour is always unproductive? […] This is the most wretched and miserable liberal prejudice: chattel slavery too was productive. Compulsory slave labour […] was in its time a progressive phenomenon. Labour […] obligatory for the whole country, compulsory for every worker, is the basis of socialism.

I’m sure the Ukrainian free soviets where happy to be liberated, or the sailors of Kronstadt. I’m sure the Spanish workers were glad to be shot in the back in the name of the party. The people of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were without a doubt thrilled to be occupied. The land grab in Finland liberated plenty of people, they were welcomed with open arms, yes? Communists leaders around the world felt so liberated, in fact, they bonded together in third-worldism to escape the influence of the СССР.

你说什么?

Who is talking about campaign contributions? That is a whole other issue. I’m talking about the revolving door between politics and private industry, about how you need personal connections to get the ear of politicians and these connections can be bought, and how politicians gleefully accept laundered bribes from private interest groups. There are, of course, lobbying groups doing good (like some NGOs or advocacy groups), but the system of lobbying itself is deeply flawed. But I guess that’s sorta inevitable under capitalism.

I’m not even from the US, just watching in horror as the dominant global superpower turns to open, unapologetic fascism. So continue belittling my lack of civic education if you must, but I’m afraid I’m more informed about your political process than a majority of your electorate. I wish I didn’t have to be.

and it’s been diluted by money

That’s why they said “any paid lobbying is bribery”. While anyone can sign a petition to your representative and that’s technically also lobbying, what we’re talking about here is not that. In a democracy, every person gets their voice heard. With lobbying, only the dollar speaks.

That’s true. Imperialist ideologies like capitalism or the state socialism of the CCCP have an advantage in spreading their influence globally. But there’s nothing in principle standing in the way of one world, one federation, a million tribes. Anarchism does scale quite the well in that regard

(most) Anarchists don’t have a problem with scale, just with hierarchy. We can have democratic and free associations at any scale.

I want my terminal to just work, so all this kitty stuff is overboard for me, but good for them!

A digital camera has several megabyte writes, every once in a while, filling up the SD card evenly. Even bad SD cards usually have many thousand write cycles before they degrade, so that’s not likely to be an issue. What is worse is if you have a log file, for example, that is stored in a fixed position on the card and gets updated several times a second

Oh I agree, I am happy with Helix and use it as my main editor already. I like that they’d rather take their time to figure out how to make plugins work well.

Uhhg, I’ve been waiting for module support for helix for forever, now. It’s a planned feature, but it’s been that way for ages now

That curve is so stupid on so many levels, wow.

But also, when we talk about socialism, we don’t mean “capitalism but we tax the rich”. A socialist society would not even need taxes, in the liberal sense. When the means of production are controlled democratically by the workers, by extending democracy from the political to the economic, who would you even tax, and who would the money go to?

It’s a big problem that people have been so convinced that capitalism and liberal democracy are the only way to organize society. We can do better!

What would be funny is to sticker bomb Teslas and Cybertrucks with shit like this.

Anthem for No State, Pt. I in my ass

uhh… I guess my prostate will have to sit this one out

You spend 2k on the PC instead of 600 for the console, but you save all that by then not having to pay double for internet, 90 bucks for a game and whatever much the licenced peripherals cost

Factorio puts game saves in ~/.factorio for some reason…

it’s pretty bad. steam for example has both
~/.steam and
~/.local/share/Steam
for some reason. I’m just happy I moved to an impermanent setup for my PC, so I don’t need to worry something I temporarily install is going to clutter my home directory with garbage

that’s not how that works, quantum entanglement can not be used to transmit information and thus doesn’t violate causality

wrong