The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
— A.A. member https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/03/23/same/

When Imperial forces take out your sandcrawler.

I believe we need dedicated spaces for political discussion that are not based on algorithms optimized for engagement (aka outrage).

So do we, which is one of the reasons why Lemmy was created, and why Lemmy does not have algorithms for rage engagement. Lemmy is all cost and no revenue, so there is no financial incentive for it to “maximize ‘engagement.’”

The first is a way to limit bots or bad actors from participating in discussions.

Where are the actually-existing the “bot problems” on Lemmy? While it could happen, I don’t think it actually is happening to any significant extent presently.

Yeah, this is community rule 2. I’ll leave this up, but please refrain in the future, @ExtremeDullard@piefed.social.

Those states owning the means of production is exactly why bourgeois states call them authoritarian. The bourgeoisie are supposed to own the MoP, not the state.

Fewer casualties was not the real reason.

• https://liberationnews.org/u-s-dropped-nuclear-bombs-hiroshima-nagasaki/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gar_Alperovitz#The_Decision_to_Use_the_Atomic_Bomb

This video aside, it’s just not a great economics channel. Better than average, but that’s a very low bar. It does do some progressive liberal agitation, but that’s again a low bar.

Bullshit that one pulls out of one’s ass isn’t “criticism.” It’s just bullshit.

Ji had the families of everyone in the picture held as hostages to their good behaviour.

Reddit-ass comment.

^{no u}

That is good news! I wouldn’t have guessed Swift, but I can see why Swift 6—which has been GA for a year—might make sense: https://www.swift.org/blog/announcing-swift-6/

C++ interoperability

Swift 5.9 introduced bidirectional interoperability with C++ to seamlessly bring Swift to more existing projects. Swift 6 expands interoperability support to C++ move-only types, virtual methods, default arguments, and more standard library types including std::map and std::optional.

C++ types that do not have a copy constructor can now be accessed from Swift 6 as non-copyable types with ~Copyable. And for those times when it’s useful to expose a C++ type with a copy constructor as ~Copyable in Swift for better performance, a new SWIFT_NONCOPYABLE annotation can be applied to the C++ type.

Swift now also supports calls of C++ virtual methods on types annotated as SWIFT_SHARED_REFERENCE or SWIFT_IMMORTAL_REFERENCE.

When calling C++ functions or methods that have default argument values for some of their parameters, Swift now respects these default values, rather than requiring you to explicitly pass an argument.

Platform Support

Swift is designed to support development and execution on all major operating systems, and platform consistency and expansion underpins Swift’s ability to reach new programming domains. Swift 6 brings major improvements to Linux and Windows across the board, including support for more Linux distributions and Windows architectures.

I’m not going to have interest in any new browser that’s written in security nightmare languages like C or C++.

NSA Releases Guidance on How to Protect Against Software Memory Safety Issues

Commonly used languages, such as C and C++, provide a lot of freedom and flexibility in memory management while relying heavily on the programmer to perform the needed checks on memory references. Simple mistakes can lead to exploitable memory-based vulnerabilities. Software analysis tools can detect many instances of memory management issues and operating environment options can also provide some protection, but inherent protections offered by memory safe software languages can prevent or mitigate most memory management issues. NSA recommends using a memory safe language when possible. While the use of added protections to non- memory safe languages and the use of memory safe languages do not provide absolute protection against exploitable memory issues, they do provide considerable protection. Therefore, the overarching software community across the private sector, academia, and the U.S. Government have begun initiatives to drive the culture of software development towards utilizing memory safe languages.

Reappropriation is a thing.

So on the one side I will talk about how renting is not bad when the person who “owns” property lives there and get a lot of flak.

I’m a former owner-occupant of a multi-unit property. This is a textbook petit bourgeois assertion, the kind of thing that Bernie Sanders might say. He’ll rail against crony capitalism and über capitalism but not per se capitalism. Petit capitalism as a treat inevitably leads to the haute capitalism and oligarchy we suffer under today.

How do you propose we get rid of them? Because that is our end goal, which we make our plans toward reaching.

A big problem with most other leftists’ plans are their prefigurative politics. “Be the change you want to see in the world” doesn’t cut it while the world is significantly controlled by imperialist states. Until those capitalist states are dispensed with, socialist states don’t have the luxury of prefiguration, or they go the way of Allende’s Chile.

A (long) excerpt from Michael Parenti’s Blackshirts and Reds: Anticommunism & Wonderland. Here’s a snippet:

The pure socialists’ ideological anticipations remain untainted by existing practice. They do not explain how the manifold functions of a revolutionary society would be organized, how external attack and internal sabotage would be thwarted, how bureaucracy would be avoided, scarce resources allocated, policy differences settled, priorities set, and production and distribution conducted. Instead, they offer vague statements about how the workers themselves will directly own and control the means of production and will arrive at their own solutions through creative struggle. No surprise then that the pure socialists support every revolution except the ones that succeed.

The pure socialists had a vision of a new society that would create and be created by new people, a society so transformed in its fundaments as to leave little opportunity for wrongful acts, corruption, and criminal abuses of state power. There would be no bureaucracy or self-interested coteries, no ruthless conflicts or hurtful decisions. When the reality proves different and more difficult, some on the Left proceed to condemn the real thing and announce that they “feel betrayed” by this or that revolution.

The pure socialists see socialism as an ideal that was tarnished by communist venality, duplicity, and power cravings. The pure socialists oppose the Soviet model but offer little evidence to demonstrate that other paths could have been taken, that other models of socialism — not created from one’s imagination but developed through actual historical experience — could have taken hold and worked better. Was an open, pluralistic, democratic socialism actually possible at this historic juncture? The historical evidence would suggest it was not. As the political philosopher Carl Shames argued:

How do [the left critics] know that the fundamental problem was the “nature” of the ruling [revolutionary] parties rather than, say, the global concentration of capital that is destroying all independent economies and putting an end to national sovereignty everywhere? And to the extent that it was, where did this “nature” come from? Was this “nature” disembodied, disconnected from the fabric of the society itself, from the social relations impacting on it? … Thousands of examples could be found in which the centralization of power was a necessary choice in securing and protecting socialist relations. In my observation [of existing communist societies], the positive of “socialism” and the negative of “bureaucracy, authoritarianism and tyranny” interpenetrated in virtually every sphere of life.

The pure socialists regularly blame the Left itself for every defeat it suffers. Their second-guessing is endless. So we hear that revolutionary struggles fail because their leaders wait too long or act too soon, are too timid or too impulsive, too stubborn or too easily swayed. We hear that revolutionary leaders are compromising or adventuristic, bureaucratic or opportunistic, rigidly organized or insufficiently organized, undemocratic or failing to provide strong leadership. But always the leaders fail because they do not put their trust in the “direct actions” of the workers, who apparently would withstand and overcome every adversity if only given the kind of leadership available from the left critic’s own groupuscule. Unfortunately, the critics seem unable to apply their own leadership genius to producing a successful revolutionary movement in their own country.

Tony Febbo questioned this blame-the-leadership syndrome of the pure socialists:

It occurs to me that when people as smart, different, dedicated and heroic as Lenin, Mao, Fidel Castro, Daniel Ortega, Ho Chi Minh and Robert Mugabe — and the millions of heroic people who followed and fought with them — all end up more or less in the same place, then something bigger is at work than who made what decision at what meeting. Or even what size houses they went home to after the meeting. …

These leaders weren’t in a vacuum. They were in a whirlwind. And the suction, the force, the power that was twirling them around has spun and left this globe mangled for more than 900 years. And to blame this or that theory or this or that leader is a simple-minded substitute for the kind of analysis that Marxists [should make].

To be sure, the pure socialists are not entirely without specific agendas for building the revolution. After the Sandinistas overthrew the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua, an ultra-left group in that country called for direct worker ownership of the factories. The armed workers would take control of production without benefit of managers, state planners, bureaucrats, or a formal military. While undeniably appealing, this worker syndicalism denies the necessities of state power. Under such an arrangement, the Nicaraguan revolution would not have lasted two months against the U.S.-sponsored counterrevolution that savaged the country. It would have been unable to mobilize enough resources to field an army, take security measures, or build and coordinate economic programs and human services on a national scale.

For a people’s revolution to survive, it must seize state power and use it to (a) break the stranglehold exercised by the owning class over the society’s institutions and resources, and (b) withstand the reactionary counterattack that is sure to come. The internal and external dangers a revolution faces necessitate a centralized state power that is not particularly to anyone’s liking, not in Soviet Russia in 1917, nor in Sandinista Nicaragua in 1980.

Engels offers an apposite account of an uprising in Spain in 1872 in which anarchists seized power in municipalities across the country. At first, the situation looked promising. The king had abdicated and the bourgeois government could muster but a few thousand ill-trained troops. Yet this ragtag force prevailed because it faced a thoroughly parochialized rebellion. “Each town proclaimed itself as a sovereign canton and set up a revolutionary committee (junta);” Engels writes. “[E]ach town acted on its own, declaring that the important thing was not cooperation with other towns but separation from them, thus precluding any possibility of a combined attack [against bourgeois forces].” It was “the fragmentation and isolation of the revolutionary forces which enabled the government troops to smash one revolt after the other.”

Decentralized parochial autonomy is the graveyard of insurgency — which may be one reason why there has never been a successful anarcho-syndicalist revolution. Ideally, it would be a fine thing to have only local, self-directed, worker participation, with minimal bureaucracy, police, and military. This probably would be the development of socialism, were socialism ever allowed to develop unhindered by counterrevolutionary subversion and attack.

One might recall how, in 1918-20, fourteen capitalist nations, including the United States, invaded Soviet Russia in a bloody but unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the revolutionary Bolshevik government. The years of foreign invasion and civil war did much to intensify the Bolsheviks’ siege psychology with its commitment to lockstep party unity and a repressive security apparatus.

BTW, the Soviet Union wasn’t a nation-state and neither is China, but rather multinational states.

That’s right, it goes in the Squarepusher.

This isn’t particular to one Lemmy instance, nor even to Lemmy, but to ActivityPub as a whole and federated architectures in general.

This is not a private platform; it’s a public, pseudonymous one. Any person or web scraper, including the Internet Archive, can see all posts and comments.

Tankies are Authoritarian communist, as opposed to democratic or liberal communism

All states are authoritarian; all communist states to date have followed a form of democratic centralism; and “liberal communism” is an oxymoron because liberalism is founded on private ownership of the means of production.

It refers to when the soviet union put down rebellion in Hungry and Czechoslovakia by rolling in the tanks.

Neither of which were proletarian rebellions. Both were bourgeois counterrevolutions backed by western imperialist states. They were color revolutions, and these kinds of regime change operations are still happening today.

• JFK Files Reveal CIA Role in the 1956 Hungarian Uprising The tankies were right
• The 1968 Prague Spring — Counterrevolution as the “Trojan Horse” of Imperialism
• The blueprint of regime change operations How regime change happens in the 21st century with your consent

 
https://redsails.org/tankies/

Yes, because Count Eric von Rosen introduced it to the Finns first. von Rosen was Hermann Göring’s brother-in-law.