They’ve already bombed the vast majority of Gaza and resettled people, and the next step is almost certainly another expansion of the settler state of Israel.

Most of the millions of people that live in Gaza have been resettled into a very small area. Whether Israel decides to nuke them or force them into neighboring countries as refugees is irrelevant to their end goal of settling the territory. The Palestinians are just “rats” that need to be removed.

I’m sure they’d prefer to nuke them and just get rid of their problem once and for all; a final solution of sorts. However they do have limited political capital in this conflict, and nuking the remaining civilians does have the potential to negative impact U.S-Isrsel relations. So there’s a real chance they opt for just pushing the “human animals” out of the territories.

The end goal is near-total eradication of the natives. Similar to native americans in the U.S. Israel is a settler state, much like the U.S was, and actively drove the natives out of their homes. They’re almost done though, we’re seeing some of the final acts of the ethnic cleansing/genocide.

Once there are barely any left, they’ll feign sympathy to garner support, and that’ll be that. Another win for imperialist settler states. Nothing unique or special about it.

Yup this is the real world take IME. Code should be self documenting, really the only exception ever is “why” because code explains how, as you said.

Now there are sometimes less-than-ideal environments. Like at my last job we were doing Scala development, and that language is expressive enough to allow you to truly have self-documenting code. Python cannot match this, and so you need comments at times (in earlier versions of Python type annotations were specially formatted literal comments, now they’re glorified comments because they look like real annotations but actually do nothing).

I like your comment, but there’s an important note that needs to be made, I’m not the one who invented the conflation of organizational and electoral politics. Putting all that under the sphere of “politics; not to be discussed at work” was a convenient tactic by capitalists to delegitimize important political discussions under the guise of the important considerations you bring up.

Conflation is a powerful rhetorical strategy. Capitalists do it with other things too (legitimizing private property by putting personal property under that umbrella, somehow making you owning your own home the same “kind” of ownership as Elon Musk/Tesla owning a factory on the other side of the planet that he’s never stepped foot into).

The dual to conflation here is intersectionalism, which is important to consider too. It’s not always relevant (e.g foreign trade policy often won’t intersect with organizational politics), but it sometimes is. “right to work” ideals in electoral politics directly impacts organizational politics, so if we legitimize and normalize the latter, it’d be hard to unilaterally ban the former as well. The line gets muddy, and it’s better to stray too far on the side of allowing too much discussion so organizing can actually take place, than too much restriction.

I get some people have immense faith in capitalist rule, that you genuinely believe that the reason it’s normalized to not discuss salaries or politics is for your own good. Some people don’t believe in class antagonisms. This used to be a purely fascist position, but liberals adopted it in the mid 20th century because of how effective it is at driving complacency.

Politics used to be common in the workplace. Not necessarily electoral politics, but organizational politics, which is far more important and impactful, and also much more regulated by capitalists and the petite bourgeoise. I’ve talked to my boss about electoral politics before, and it didn’t cause issues. If I brought up unions with him I’d be fired within a month (based on how other union organizers were let go).

Yup, just like it’s employment 101 to not discuss salaries.

Lack of communication and organization is a fantastic way to keep workers in line. Genuinely all it takes are a handful of socialists in an environment of heavily exploited workers to get a union going. They can all feel the material harm capitalism is causing, but lack the language and means to express and resist that harm.

When socialists provide it (via politics in the workplace), that harms companies. When communication takes place (salary sharing, organization tactics, etc.) you place a strain on the bourgeoise to behave more inline with worker expectations. This isn’t what capitalists want.

Mercantilism and capitalism aren’t mutually exclusive, but the U.S is the opposite of mercantilist. Our imports vastly exceed our exports. China is more mercantilist, but still capitalist.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercantilism

Unless of course you’re using a different definition. If you are, feel free to provide it and then I’ll address your claims on the basis of how you intended to use those words.

The goal of semantics, and words in general, are to convey ideas. It was true in the past that socialism was a very concrete, straightforward thing. If you believed in worker control of the means of production, you were a socialist. Now there are people who say they’re socialist, and they advocate for private tyrannies for the foreseeable future (decades or sometimes even a century+). They want entire generations of humans to be wage slaves, serve the interests of capital, pay their reduced wages to land leeches and banks, and then die without having ever seen a better system.

Those systems, systems by which entire generations of people are subjugated to the interests of capital under authoritarian rule, are now called socialist or sometimes communist. And I no longer have the word to describe a system where wage slavery is immediately abolished (much like chattel slavery was), and workers take immediate control over the means of production.

Those societies/institutions were often overthrown and overrun by either conservative Marxists (e.g Lenin) or fascists (e.g Catalonia).

People say things for reasons, and those reasons aren’t always to express the true state of things. For example, it’s powerful to capture positive social sentiment around socialism without having to actually relinquish any power to the working class. It effectively destroys workers’ ability to communicate effectively about what we want to see in the world.

Back in the day, you could simply say “I’m a socialist” and that meant that you advocated for a system where workers owned the means of production, and private property didn’t exist. Now you can say the same thing, and what does it mean? Literally nothing, it’s an incoherent thing to say because it has too many contradictory meanings.

I still identify as a libertarian socialist, but every other person I talk to doesn’t understand what I mean by this (pro-China? pro-Bernie? interested in dismantling private ownership? want to slightly increase taxes on corporations and implement universal healthcare?). Most people that use the label libertarian socialist align with the original definition of socialism, and I find value in that. However for the purposes of communicating to people who don’t agree with the position, it’s effectively useless.

Destroying that avenue to communicate was definitely intentional, it subverts actual organizational efforts. The same thing has happened with unions. Essentially the entire 19th century socialist movement has been systematically destroyed through propaganda and language manipulation.

The only metric that page uses to define India as socialist is “makes a constitutional reference to socialism”. That can mean socialism is some end goal, or they just have policy inspired by socialism.

Words have definitions, so just saying “this country is socialist” is not enough evidence to declare that country is socialist, unless your definition of socialism is “a system which people call socialist”.

By that definition, America is socialist so long as I call it socialist. It becomes tautological and useless.

I haven’t read all of these, but I have read a good deal of Marx/Engles, and am working through Das Kapital currently.

I have written similar comments to this, going over the history of thought. It’s important, and not something to be taken lightly (though there is a fine line between being thorough and gishgalloping, especially in the context of forums like lemmy/reddit/etc.)

Maybe you’re of the view that communism is such a loaded word that trying to define it in just a few dozen or hundred words is a pointless exercise. That’s fine, but if the word is so loaded and complicated, you probably shouldn’t be attaching it to nation-states to try to succinctly describe part of their economic system. The only people you’d be transmitting information to are the people who have the dozen or so required readings under their belt to truly grasp what you meant by communism. At this point, the word provides no value.

No economic system can actually be totally described by a single word, ever. However, a single word can be used to describe a part of a system, and it can be used in a reliable way. I pointed to very common definitions of the words, ones you seem to disagree with, and even in the ~thousand or so words you wrote you didn’t provide clear alternative definitions. That signals to me you probably need tens of thousands of words to properly define what you mean by the word “communism”, and at that point the utility of the word is just completely lost.

It’s just semantics at the end of the day, so not too important, but I’ll play along because I happen to be someone who will call the U.S capitalist, but doesn’t understand why people call China communist.

First, I’ll start off with some definitions. If you disagree on one, provide your own and we can use those for the sake of discussion.

Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit.

_

Socialism is an economic and political philosophy encompassing diverse economic and social systems characterized by social ownership of the means of production, as opposed to private ownership.

_

Communism is a socioeconomic order centered around common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange that allocates products to everyone in the society based on need. A communist society would entail the absence of private property, social classes, money and the state (or nation state).

So essentially the easiest way to determine if your society is capitalist or socialist is the existence of private property. If the society is devoid of private property, then the question remains what kind of socialism is it (is there money? Markets? Social classes? A state?).

China isn’t even socialist by this definition, but even if it was, it would still be miles away from communist.

Nobody is exactly aware of what will result from their actions, I think the absolute best-case scenario for Palestine as a result of this post-October 7th escalation is that American youth gain a vastly increased awareness of the horrors of the Palestinian genocide.

This seems to actually have happened. American congress people are super worried about the anti-Israel sentiment rising in youth, and this is a major factor, if not the sole factor, driving the tiktok ban/forced sale attempts.

If anti-Israel sentiment stays strong for say 1-2 more decades while boomers continue to die off, America could very easily turn anti-Israel, and vote in line with Palestine and the rest of the world on widely agreed upon 2 state solutions.

Bit of a strawman, the initial complaint wasn’t that he didn’t say some words, the initial complaint was the billions in military aid and actual physical support the administration gave Israel.

The only reason words matter is if they have any impact on reality. Israel knows the U.S is giving them a lot of leeway to commit this genocide because that’s what the administration’s actions say, hence they’re two-faced.

If they decide to stop materially supporting genocide, good. They were still wrong to do it at all, and they can’t undo that, so they’re still shit-libs, but better late than never I guess, and all those dead children will just have to stay dead.

Linux is a far more reliable operating system at the kernel level, which is why the vast majority of the Internet runs on Linux, and is very stable compared to anyone’s personal computer (no matter O.S). It’s also lighter weight at its core, which is a big plus for servers.

The thing about Linux desktops that tend to be finicky is interop with some proprietary software (e.g nvidia drivers) or desktop environments (gnome can freeze/crash if you like running bleeding edge before bugs are ironed out). Windows has issues too however, free software often literally doesn’t run on Windows (requiring WSL, the same way games on Linux require wine), and the desktop environment is essentially indistinguishable from the base operating system. When you get a desktop environment crash on Windows, your system will BSOD and restart with no recourse, in Linux I can ssh into my still functioning computer and kill my DE, or drop to the TTL and do the same thing.

The end might not seem like a big deal for some people (who cares if you have to restart by a button press or kill your DE and login, they’ll take a similar amount of time), but for someone like me where reliability is a big concern (as in, uptime for the half a dozen services/containers I run for people), this is great. People watching media off of jellyfin don’t have to stop because of a DE bug, but on Windows a BSOD would stop their media (and within the last week we’ve had several BSODs on Windows PCs due to bugs relating things like adaptive sync or sometimes just unknown reasons).

For what it’s worth I also game exclusively on Linux, vk3d, dxvk, and proton are godsends. Somethings don’t work, developers who won’t flip the switch for EAC (e.g Fortnite), but for me the games I play always worked. This will actually change soon, Vanguard is coming to League and that only works on Windows, but also probably not my last install of Windows (I tried W11 when it came out because I’m just curious about new tech), but I had to do a TPMBypassCheck despite having ftpm enabled in the BIOS, and afaict, at least from people I know with similar builds to me, if this happened then firmware TPM probably isn’t being picked up by W11, and that means I need to buy a TPM module or drop to W10 to play League. Plus, vanguard is an intense rootkit with full 24/7 access to your O.S so I probably don’t want that installed anyway, even if it happened to work on Linux. Just going to stick to SoD for now in my free time lol

I’ve seen a couple of posts in here about sound. It’s wild that I’ve been through dozens of distros since the start of high school (12 years ago), installed them on at least 10 machines over that time, and can’t remember one issue with sound that took more than 15 seconds to fix (e.g discord choosing the wrong sound device because I have 6 things plugged in that can technically output sound, which also happens to my friends who use Windows).

Maybe I’m just lucky. The only issues I recall having in the last decade are essentially graphics related. Either game compatibility (though proton/wine is much better than it was in 2015) or desktop environments being finicky (freezing on sleep for example), but the latter afaict was entirely due to proprietary nvidia drivers. There are proper, high-performance open source drivers in the works, so nvidia might be on par with amd in 2-3 years on Linux (which is to say literally no issues for the vast majority of people, probably far more stable than Windows).

In the same time I’ve had lots of people come to me with problems that we’ve specifically troubleshooted and found Windows to be the issue even when it seemed like hardware problems. Like monitor flickering/black screening, and plugging in a different monitor the issue goes away. On the surface it seems like a hardware problem, but both monitors worked flawlessly on Linux for literally months. Full reinstalling Windows did not fix the issue. Upgrading from Windows 10 -> 11 did not fix the issue.

Same thing with another friend’s external SSD. For some reason it wasn’t being detected on his Windows 7 install. We installed Linux and the drive was picked up. Maybe Windows 10 would’ve also picked up the drive in this circumstance, but a lot of people hated the idea of Windows 10 at the time (this was just after Windows 10 was released, when Windows 7 still had a similar market share).

There’s likely a huge percentage of problems people attribute to hardware that are actually Windows being a shitty O.S, but nobody actually checks if Windows is the problem.

Yes, but not because the goal of having exceptions in types is bad, rather Java’s type system isn’t advanced enough to support the ideal solution here.

Scala 3 is working on experimental capture checking capabilities, which allows functions to express certain capabilities (file access, networking, db, etc.), and CanThrow capabilities (e.g exceptions at the type level) are one reification of this.

The CanThrow docs I linked have a good introduction into why Java checked exceptions are bad, and how Scala’s alternative is far better. Essentially it comes down to a lack of polymorphism in checked exceptions. In practice this means they’re incredibly verbose outside of simple usecases, and with a very easy escape hatch (RuntimeException), you don’t even get the guarantee of knowing a function without checked exceptions doesn’t throw.

Python will also have this latter issue. Python’s “typing” in general has this issue actually. Types aren’t validated unless you use an external tool, and even then Any is a leaky abstraction that can hide any level of typing errors, unlike in properly typed languages where it’s not leaky. You need it to be leaky in gradually typed environments, or you wouldn’t be able to use a ton of the Python ecosystem, but this vastly reduces the effectiveness of the typing solution.

I don’t know if Python’s solution here will address the lack of polymorphism that Java’s solution has, I’ll have to look into it more.

Activists don’t need to be one-track minded. They rarely are. I’m a vegan, socialist, anti-fascist who is against the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and for climate justice globally. There’s very strong overlap in these positions. There’s a reason you won’t find a lot of Republican vegans, or pro-Israel socialists.

Yes, sometimes people don’t put in the time to investigate these issues, and I commend you for knowing the limits of your own knowledge, I’ve recommended to people before that it’s better to just say “I don’t know enough about this issue” instead of arriving at an under-researched position. However, it’s not necessary to criticize people who are actually activists, learn about these issues, and go out into the world and advocate for change, so long as they’re advocating for the right thing.

The topic being brought up might ostracize people, but it will also put the topic into people’s minds. People like you might not know what the correct position is here, but you hear the constant pro-Israel propaganda pumped out by the U.S and might arrive at a subconscious conclusion that aligns with the imperial core.

If you hear people speaking out against the apartheid state of Israel, especially people who align with your values, you might be inclined to look into it more, or at the very least not automatically accept U.S propaganda on the issue.

I hate the phrasing “terrorist group” here. Not because what happened here wasn’t an atrocity, but because people generally refuse to call state-backed violence “terrorist” violence. The word terrorism is incredibly broad, easily describing a ton of things Israel does. Yet, we refuse to call them a terrorist organization.

Israel slaughtered hundreds of protesters 4 years ago in Gaza.

Israel and Egypt have been blockading the Gaza strip in violation of the GCIV since 2007.

In 2014, a triple-homicide was committed. Israel claimed it was Hamas, and arrested hundreds of Palestinians. Hamas sent rockets into Israel, killing 2 people, and Israel initiated Operation Protective Edge, killing thousands of Palestinians.

Not to mention the entire Israel-Palestine conflict can be traced back about 100 years, where imperialist Britain endorsed the idea of a Jewish homeland in Palestine in the Balfour Declaration. Eventually leading to the formation of Israel in the late 40s and the subsequent ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, forcing nearly a million natives to move to make way for Israel.

“terrorism” is politically charged language with the intent of making us sympathize with a certain side. Of course we’ll side with the “Israel state” and against the “Hamas terrorist group”. The language used to describe these groups already prescribes how we should view them. Western media will never describe Israel’s atrocities as terrorist actions, so people will dismiss the slaughter of tens or even hundreds of thousands of innocent Palestinians as “just war”.