> That said, there is one party that is consistently hawk-ish and boasts about war spending. And there is another party which most often campaigns on reducing war spending.
Maybe if you only look at the war on terror years, but look at WWI and WWII and most recently Ukraine. Both parties love Pentagon spending when it's _their_ war.
Democrats did not started nor caused war in Ukraine. They were not the ones invading or threatening to invade. There is in fact difference between helping a victim of invasion to self defend and being the attacker celebrating manly man invasions.
We're not talking about starting wars versus getting involved in existing conflicts, we're not even talking about right versus wrong, we're talking about Pentagon spending and who benefits. The U.S. giving Ukraine our older weapons stockpiles so we can create NEW stockpiles doesn't speak to who started what, but that Democrats were sure in favor of increased spending while Republicans weren't. The assertion was one party always wants more spending on "defense" while one party doesn't. It simply isn't true, both parties are happy to find justifications to increase the Pentagon's budget.
I don't know how a country filled with guns can survive the normalization of calling people you disagree with Nazi, Fascist, etc. We've all been taught since grade school it was a good thing to kill Nazis, even in small percentages there are mentally unstable people who will hear you call someone a Fascist and take the logical step from "it's good to kill nazis" to "they're a nazi so I should kill them". I am both very pro freedom of speech and right to bear arms, and I think where Canada and the UK have gone with hate speech laws are too far, but I don't know how you solve this.
>It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless
>By ‘Fascism’ they mean, roughly speaking, something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class. Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’.
It of course has a technical/historical definition but it's not used in that principled way by most people.
Just like "neoliberal" this is a kind of buzzword that generates a particular emotional reaction for those on the left. Meaning people being labeled with them are not just bad but really bad.
We are an excellent example of what happens when the Hegelian Dialectic is applied successfully by the small minority.
We are also an example when a people becomes completely divorced from their cultural and religious heritage. Without a moral anchor, we are a people cast adrift, lost in confusion, calling evil good and good evil, all trying to do our own thing and benefit ourselves, consumed by greed, by self-interest.
Freedom of speech, or lack there-of, plays no role in what is happening in the United States. This country and its founding charters were written for a moral people. That the country is byzantine, crumbling, has more to do with a people who have lost their way than it has to do with this-or-that law that the government no longer heeds.
america is not a country founded on a religious heritage. and regardless of what you may think of the beginnings of the country, it very quickly became a country of immigrants. there is no religion that should be placed at the head of the country’s belief system.
It's not even a matter of calling people fascists or nazis - there's been plenty of violence towards the politicians on the opposite side of the aisle, too. Nancy Pelosi and her husband. Melissa Hortman, John and Yvette Hoffman earlier this year.
If it was just a matter of people internalizing that killing fascists is fine and thus that calling people fascists is dangerous, then we would not see the same sort of violence being perpetrated against other politicians not getting the same label.
Kirk himself suggested that a "real patriot who wanted to be a midterm hero" should bail out the man who nearly killed Pelosi's husband. The rhetoric around political violence in this country has been ratcheted up to an insane degree, with or without any accusations of fascism, and this will continue or get worse as long as that remains the case.
No one shot the Skokie march Nazis and they literally showed up at a Jewish dominated town at a time when there weren't even background checks for guns. The ACLU even defended them in court, which is unthinkable that they would stand on their principles and do that today.
There's just less tolerance for discussing or exhibiting "extreme" or highly unpopular opinions, nowadays, it seems. Although, I could definitely be wrong -- people like MLK were shot for doing same long ago.
> Although, I could definitely be wrong -- people like MLK were shot for doing same long ago.
I mean, you're almost there realizing the recency bias. The 1970s, when the Skokie Affair occurred, were arguably the high point for political violence in the post-WWII US.
“It’s good to kill Nazis” — this is certainly the prevailing sentiment in modern culture, reinforced by the vast number of books, stories, movies, and video games that support the premise. But something important is often overlooked in this view of righteousness:
1. People who believe they could never become Nazis are often the most unknowingly susceptible to it.
2. People who believe they can confidently identify a Nazi are often wrong — a mindset akin to witch hunts, where everyone is seen as a witch.
You could've stopped your sentence at "I don't know how a country filled with guns can survive."
The main downside of abusing the words nazi and fascist is that it gives an out to the actual fascists out there. When it comes to gun violence, there are a lot more (self proclaimed) neo-nazis killing innocent people than people killing them.
I'm old enough to recall MSNBC in 2011 cropping video footage of an Obama townhall protestor to only show his long-sleeve shirted back with slung open-carry rifle. They used it to immediately launch into a pundit discussion claiming that the protestors were motivated by racial animus. Turned out the protestor was black.
News manipulating footage to cast aspersions to historical boogeymen is routine. All it takes is one pundit mentioning an imagined similarity to play the edited B-roll.
"Hate speech" isn't just hateful speech, it's a specific term with a specific meaning. Being a nazi isn't an inherent characteristic of a person, it's an affiliation or ideology that they consciously choose.
No when it's a label deliberately misapplied to run of the mill conservatives. That's defamation with the purpose of generating hate against those people.
(1) A summary of lots of people's judgements of him, which line up with my judgement of his actions. I see the type of person that just barks orders, and when someone tells him it's unwise/impossible/etc he responds with "get it done". And when it doesn't magically happen "you're fired". He surrounds himself with sycophants instead of competence, which is why all of his policies have such terrible execution - one person simply cannot micro manage every detail.
Do you disagree that he is basically running the government as an extension of himself? To me, it sure seems that way when he uses chaotic tariffs to pressure other countries into making "deals" that often include his own personal financial interests.
(2) As I said, I don't understand what specific point of mine you're referring to. There are laws and enforcement in both individual liberty respecting societies, and also in dictatorships. So clearly it matters what the laws are, and how they're being enforced.
(3) No, which is why I was talking about respect for societal institutions. For every American thinker's elucidation of conservative values that I have tried to apply, if I squint I can see maybe 20-40% of them being applicable, with the rest being openly rejected.
Perhaps you would like to reference what specific set of conservative values you see Trumpism actually following? I don't mean aiming to destroy our society such to the point that conservative values will become more important, but actually applying those values to the present situation. Because as a libertarian who has entertained ideas all around the left-right political spectrum, the only thing I can find that lines up is anarcho-capitalism.
Or to come at it from a different direction, read Moldbug's "A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations". He lays out a left-right framework that seems to be underpinning much of this movement, and explicitly rejects conservatism as ineffective.
I don't see how your (1) is a refutation of a fundamental autocratic dynamic (furthermore Trump may "champion" mRNA vaccines with one side of his mouth, but he talks out of both). And you still haven't made any coherent point with your (2)s.
(3) seems to be the crux of the issue. I am giving you the opening to pick a thinker who has best articulated what you see as a good enumeration of timeless conservative values, which we can then use to judge Trumpism. Because believe it or not, I am open to changing my mind here and I really do want to understand.
If you'd like me to pick, I can certainly do that. But then I don't want to then hear that I haven't picked the "right" conservative for your taste.
Plenty of people I know believe illegal immigrants should be deported. The difference between them and people accused of being a Nazi is they don't go around calling them all rapists and murderers.
The problem isn't the claimed actions they want to take, its the dehumanization being resorted to.
You’re exaggerating greatly, of course. Among those deported are rapists and murderers, naturally, and no one has stated that everyone being deported or even targeted is one (the recent Hyundai bust comes to mind). I challenge you to find that quote.
Can you provide a source where a Republican says we need to target all immigrants? Or are you simply imagining things because the media always conflates illegal immigrants with legal ones?
Isn't the whole point of the MAGA, non woke right, not to tone police people? How are you going to stop people from abusing other who they don't agree with? That is the basics of free speech.
I’ll throw my hat in on another comment on this thread - my last wasn’t well received but ask you take it honestly.
Circa 2017 during then “punching Nazis” era of social discourse, I started a new job. The first week in I went for lunch with a Junior teammate and was told “violence against ‘Nazis’” is fine, it’s justified. I asked how. I was told, my brain is a part of the body, so if someone says something so stupid that it ‘hurts the brain,’ the speech is now assault, so counter-violence is justified.
I, with hint of irony, told my new coworker that was the stupidest thing I’d ever heard and asked if I should now assault them for hurting my brain… and was met with hostility.
I don’t quite known I’m going with this exactly, but I feel folks are not giving the world around them an honest assessment, no matter their Ivy diploma. Politics isn’t a “gotcha game” and please stop tying to make it such.
Don't forget law firms that participated in cases Trump doesn't like have been bullied into doing hundreds of millions of dollars of pro bono work for the administration. And his supreme court just decided, with no explanation, that picking people off the street based on their perceived ethnicity is OK. And people are being deported to prisons in countries they've never visited, where they spend all day shackled with no prospect of a trial.
> I don't know how a country filled with guns can survive the normalization of calling people you disagree with Nazi, Fascist, etc.
The same way it did for the last 250 years as the world's oldest Democracy. By respecting and upholding our Constitution, especially the 1st and 2nd Amendments.
Can we stop pretending like the are not serious tribalization, polarization and problems on both left and right. Both sides are insane and there is no longer any people in the center.
Genuine question: What makes you believe actual nazi and fascist beliefs are being normalized?
I have personally not seen this at all. I've seen a lot of talk about it being a thing, but I've still never seen it. I know and talk with many conservatives and they are all extremely anti-nazi and definitely do not promote fascist ideals.
There are federal law enforcement agents performing their "duties" while wearing masks. This is normalization of _something_, certainly, something that as far as I'm aware hasn't really occurred historically in the U.S. (happy to be corrected).
I'd call that something fascism because it's the word that comes to mind when I see secret policing.
That is certainly alarming and I am firmly opposed to what ICE is currently doing and what they've been ordered to do.
However, they are obviously keeping their identities a secret because they know if they don't, they will become targets of violence. I don't see how that can be attributed to fascism beyond the surace-level aesthetic of masked law enforcement. The mask itself says nothing about their ideology.
Secret police wear masks to instill fear into the population because they never know who's watching. ICE is wearing masks so they don't end up like Charlie Kirk.
> However, they are obviously keeping their identities a secret because they know if they don't, they will become targets of violence.
This seems to be what ICE/The current administration are using as the justification for the masks, but I'm not sure it matches reality.
Federal law enforcement are effectively immune from accountability at this point (qualified immunity, and destruction of Bivens [1] leave effectively zero recourse if you are a citizen who's constitutional rights have been violated by a federal agent).
So now that they are masking up they are also immune from being called out socially or in the media. There is no excuse for the police to hide their identities, they have the full power of the state behind them and to protect.
> they will become targets of violence.
What about the targets of violence coming from ICE? There seems to be real and substantial video evidence of ICE using excessive and unnecessary force all over the country. I have not, however, seen concrete evidence that suggestions federal agents are being regularly harmed by the public (Yes I saw the sandwich throwing video, no federal agents were harmed other than maybe their ego). I have seen claims from the administration that this is occurring [2], but the claims are about percent increases and I've seen some reporting that seems to indicate the publicized increase is quite misleading [3][4] "...79 assaults against immigration enforcement agents between January 21 and June 30, up from 10 that took place in the same time last year." The increase is certainly concerning but it does not seem like there is tremendous violence occurring against ICE agents on a daily basis.
> This seems to be what ICE/The current administration are using as the justification for the masks, but I'm not sure it matches reality.
This thread is literally about an assassination of a political figure. It's a very believable justification.
> What about the targets of violence coming from ICE?
As I've already stated, I am firmly opposed to what ICE is currently doing and what they've been ordered to do. I'm not justifying what they are doing. It's abhorrent. But I don't see what this question has to do with my point.
I have to strongly disagree with this. From what I've seen, it's very rare that positions espoused by those being called "nazi" have anything to do with fascism.
Often people get their impression of someone like Kirk without ever actually engaging with the content. Too many hot takes and not enough real engagement. "It's cool to hate this guy..? Ok I guess he must be evil."
Has he ever changed his mind from those debates? Or does he always pretend to "win" them?
I ask because for a while it was a common "right wing faux intellectual" thing (think Sargon of Akkad, Milo Yulianopolis etc) to go around asking to debate. Then to not actually do much factual debating or any learning of other perspectives, and claiming that the left is simply uncapable of civilized debate because they eventually just refuse to go along with the act.
When I talk to people that watch a bunch of right-wing content I shut down political topics immediately. They never change their position and are convinced their point of view is the only point of view. If you concede there's more than one side to a topic they care about, they think they've "won" and it reinforces their belief they're right about everything.
I consider myself to be a centrist. There are definitely things I like and don't like on both sides of the political spectrum. If someone gives me a solid logical argument for or against something, I'll either change my point of view or, more likely, end up with a better understanding of both perspectives.
I'm only one person, but my experience is that people on the political left or center are willing to accept the fact there are often two sides to an issue and that everything needs to be a balance. Most people on the political right won't do that.
It's really hard to argue against someone that never concedes anything especially if you're acting in good faith and acknowledge when they make a convincing argument for their point of view.
> claiming that the left is simply uncapable of civilized debate because they eventually just refuse to go along with the act
> I'm only one person, but my experience is that people on the political left or center are willing to accept the fact there are often two sides to an issue and that everything needs to be a balance. Most people on the political right won't do that.
If you say so. My experience has, broadly speaking, been the exact opposite.
I've never even met someone I would consider an extreme leftist, but I've definitely met people that parrot far right talking points all day long and they're increasing in numbers.
Almost everyone I know would be center-left or center-right except the ones that have shifted far to the right from watching influencers. The center-right people will come towards the middle, so I should have been clear that I'm talking about the new normal of right wing politics that is way further to the right than it used to be.
> I've never even met someone I would consider an extreme leftist, but I've definitely met people that parrot far right talking points all day long and they're increasing in numbers.
Again, my experience is very nearly the opposite. I have to seek out rightist views if I want to hear them (I have them in carefully curated feeds so that I can make sure I understand their logic); I can scarcely avoid being exposed to leftist ones (before the Musk takeover, even opening Twitter logged out and in an incognito tab would do this; now I can still have that experience on Bluesky and on most Mastodon instances).
> Almost everyone I know would be center-left or center-right except the ones that have shifted far to the right from watching influencers.
I have been in communities full of people who were commonly accused of having "shifted far to the right from watching influencers", and consistently noticed that no such thing had actually happened if I listened to their actual views.
> I have to seek out rightist views if I want to hear them (I have them in carefully curated feeds so that I can make sure I understand their logic).
I don't watch anything political on platforms with recommendation algorithms. If I want to understand something like a proposed law I go skim the legislation. I might read opinion articles from leaders in a field.
I pretty much only talk about politics to people I've known for decades. We should probably talk about something else. Do you like technology?
> I pretty much only talk about politics to people I've known for decades.
I'm guessing you don't know dotnet00 personally, but you still felt justified in replying with some ideological warring. My goal was not to "talk about politics" with you, but only to show that you are presenting a biased worldview that doesn't reflect a universal experience.
In many cases, yes. In at least one case I actually got to meet a "social media folk" in person. I've also in the past chatted with political livestreamers to discuss issues and solicit clarification.
I can't really comment on left-leaning equivalents, they don't really tend to bleed into my circles the way right wing ones do. I think Destiny is kind of a left wing equivalent?
I was mostly thinking about how the way they (that is, "debate me!" types) approach debate doesn't really lend itself to actual debate.
They love to throw around unnuanced statistics, relying on the ability to throw so much shit at the wall that the opponent doesn't have the time to dissect it on the spot. This one's poisonous because to viewers it lends legitimacy to numbers that may actually be deeply flawed.
Another popular tactic is to never clearly answer a question and constantly ask for more clarification than necessary. Eg when asked how many trans mass shooters there have been in some period of time, answer "too many", then when given the answer and asked how many mass shooters there have been in that period in general, deflect from the point by asking if that's counting gang violence (supposedly this is what Kirk was doing before he was shot, but I can't be sure).
With tactics like these, it's no wonder that people wisen up and begin refusing formal debate. Debating them lends legitimacy to people who are far less interested in being responsible about the truth.
A related aspect about this is age, Kirk was ~31, he's been at this since 2012. He didn't finish his college education, and his experience in politics "proper" was limited. If a 31 year old undergrad dropout with no experience in astrophysics went around claiming to debate astrophysicists on the nature of black holes, he'd be laughed off as a quack.
Many others are very similar, they are/were young and lacking in education and/or experience with what a meaningful debate looks like, instead assuming that debates work the way the idiot box likes to portray them.
Aren't they being very non-racist ? AFAIK all illegal immigrants get deported - brown or yellow or whatever. Why have immigration laws if they are not enforced ? If there should be 100% open entry & benefits to the US, then Congress should first abrogate those laws, right ? It seems in the recent past, I beg your pardon - only suckers - entered the legal way with documentation.
Because if you're racially profiling, you probably aren't tossing out the white immigrants. You may, in fact, revive the Office of Refugee and Resettlement for the creators of South American Apartheid instead.
Nah - ICE under the Trump administration has deported dozens of Irish folks who have overstayed in the US, even folks from Germany and UK. There have already been famous cases like Cliona Ward from Dublin. Lot of whites kept in solitary confinement.
You can accuse the agency of authoritarianism but not racism. They are going after everyone illegally in the US.
You might be cooked, though I don't know about anyone else, as that's an extremely uncharitable reading of my words, considering that I said that his murder shouldn't be condoned
It's interesting that you don't think I'm talking about both sides. Rush Limbaugh used to call women he disagreed with feminazis. The "tea party" under Obama used to call everything communist and fascist.
> When democracy and the rule of law are considered less important than (insert all the dem ills here), it’s not dems. It’s the voters.
Democracy and rule of law like... covering up the mental decline of a sitting president, foreign leaders lying to the American public saying Joe Biden is fine, only for him to finally expose himself so badly live on TV they jettison the man off the 2024 ticket while leaving him in office? Then imposing a candidate by fiat?
January 6th was absolutely a constitutional crisis, but it lasted less than a day. The cover-up of Biden's mental state was a multi-year constitutional crisis that still has not been fully acknowledged.
When there are two competing harms you fall back to things like who is going to put more money in my pocket. This is 100% the dem's fault.
This article isn't about people being offended at seeing sexual material on TikTok. It's about how TikTok _knew_ that children were being paid in TikTok livestreams to engage is sexual behavior. It is good that _you_ didn't consume it, but many were, andd TikTok knew that many were and let it happen to profit from it.
So unless Forbes investigates literally every social media site and app they aren't allowed to report on one, or else they're jingoistic xenophobes?
That poor argument aside, they DID in fact report on other social media sites, the same year, a few months earlier than the even did on TikTok. https://archive.is/J1kjN
i edited my comment to provide a little more context but just because someone provides reasons doesn’t mean it’s not influenced by the trend. reddit’s trend to dislike tiktok has valid points but it’s also fueled by the trend. i’ve criticized hn here on hn so this isn’t me trying to defend the site.
They also seem to hate Factorio itself, which is the reason that while they play it and tweet about it so much, they mangle its name. I don't understand it, but everyone is free to remove what they want from their own Twitter I guess.
FWIW re the mangling: According to foone, the reason they blank out the name is to avoid it showing up on searches for the game (automated or otherwise), which they say has led to a subset of fans of the game sending them transphobic comments because of the past drama and the presence of a trans flag on their twitter page.
That is not the reason I had been told and I can't easily check this (can't search -- that's the point). It is not unlikely that I have been led astray.
Do you really think triactual meant literally probably none, or do you think they were using a pretty common method of conveying their idea? Your comment actually supports what kayodelycaon and triactual are saying, that HN commenters can be so nitpicky and pedantic that they end up missing the plot entirely.
> Richard M. Stallman recently announced that he will be returning to the board of directors of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), a statement that the FSF has not denied
He's listed on fsf.org as being on the board so I don't know why they'd deny it.
> If we do not speak out against this, our silence may be misinterpreted as support.
I can't think of a group that does less than the FSF except for maybe OSI. Besides Stallman never left being the head of GNU and did OSI say anything about that?
This is a nothing statement from and almost nothing group.
> However, the problem is very simple: vast majority of work done in FreeBSD is being done by unpaid volunteers, unlike in case of RHEL/Fedora/Centos and Ubuntu/Debian.
You don't get to use the "unpaid volunteers" excuse when a good portion of FreeBSD's site is dedicated to explaining why GPL and copyleft is anti-corporate and big business should be/is afraid of it, and how BSD is more business friendly.
Red Hat is a business. FreeBSD is a volunteer/community project.
FreeBSD is a volunteer/community project that offers more business-friendly licensing than gNewSense, which is also a volunteer/community project. It is not, however, a business like Red Hat.
Red Hat development gets all that funding because Red Hat is a business. FreeBSD relies more on volunteer time because it is not a business.
Fedora is a "community" project of Red Hat. FreeBSD is a community project of, well, a community. Red Hat funds Fedora (astroturf project) as its testing ground for RHEL (commercial project), while FreeBSD is just a community project.
I don't really see your point, these two things have nothing in common. Where a commercial company has resources to provide long support (paid by, hey, customers money) the volunteer based project doesn't have them, simple as that. It doesn't change the fact that BSD license is more friendly to businesses and that's why so many companies can and DO choose FreeBSD as their technology and are completely FREE to share their code and/or money with FreeBSD. But again, that's not the point.
I'll try to refine the point I was making. For years FreeBSD has explained away their problems by saying "we don't have big business helping us" and then they turn around and say "one of our key advantages is we're more friendly to big business". At some point, you need to stop offering up ONE of those arguments because while theoretically both points can be true, you have to eventually ask if FreeBSD is so good for business, why aren't there Red Hat, IBM, or Linaro for FreeBSD? And if so many businesses ARE choosing FreeBSD, why isn't it showing up in more tangible ways? Netflix might contribute a lot back to FreeBSD, but, can I watch Netflix on my FreeBSD computer? I say this mostly out of frustration with a project and product that I do really like. FreeBSD just needs better arguments in support of it.
according to FreeBSD's own site, their GPLinBase tracker, you're incorrect. Only a handful of GNU or GPL stuff was ever in base, and your example of 'tar' isn't one of them.
It's not missing from the site. FreeBSD never used GNU tar. FreeBSD used a very small number of GNU utilities. tar, coreutils like ls, cat, etc. where never used. It was mostly things around the GNU toolchain, which ARE mentioned in the GPLinBASE wiki on the freebsd site.
I remember having to use different flags for bzip2 (j vs y) in tar on FreeBSD vs Linux about 15 years ago so I was sure they were different, but I have an image of a FreeBSD 4.10 box from June 2004 and /usr/bin/tar is indeed GNU tar.
I'm surprised the HN crowd isn't calling this out for what it is, anti capitalist BS. I've seen people talk about tactics, DRM, ethics, but the author's point was Stallman is right expect for one thing: profit. Stallman tries to explain over and over again how free software can be profitable, and the author of this post's whole point is, "nah, it can't be. Want free software? You need socialism."
Stupid article pushing tired socialism, in old arguments.
Don't really see why it needs to be called out as such. It's pretty explicitly radical leftist. Is Hacker News exclusively capitalist now? TBF I tend to avoid this site, so maybe it is.
If you think materialist analysis isn't useful, well, maybe it's not useful to you. But geez, the author didn't even get into, e.g., Marxist analysis or anything so controversial :P
I notice that the comments usually the fit the article. For example, this has tons of comments sympathetic to Stallman (he's generally pro-socialist). While some other pro-libertarian article would have mostly comments sympathetic to capitalism, libertarian, etc. This occurs on Reddit too.
So libertarian/pro-capitalist people see HN as left-leaning, while left-leaning people see HN as pro-capitalist.
I think it's quite the opposite. There's a lot of people living in the high-paid tech bubble here. Actual lefties seem thin on the ground, and less numerous than libertarians.
If HN is seen as left-leaning, then the political diversity spectrum in the US is in truly dire shape.
Far left is just as dangerous as far right, and needs to be called out. Ideologies that resulted in deaths of millions shouldn't be socially acceptable.
Yes I am a socialist and as such I employ materialistic and systemic analysis. Just calling it "anti capitalist BS" is a pretty shitty attempt at critique.
> but the author's point was Stallman is right expect for one thing: profit.
Yeah, I read it, it was a bunch of Marxist buzzwords with one important line...
"How can our politics be effective, if we don't connect them to the actual source of the problem: profit?"
You also draw a really simplistic and ignorant call to action here...
"Free software activists should accept that software freedom is not an isolated issue, with its own, completely independent value set, but is just one aspect of a wider struggle for justice, and that we can never achieve full software justice under capitalism."
I am a free software activist. I write, use, modify, and evangelize free software for my paycheck. I also think socialism is a garbage philosophy. So your goal that we shouldn't take software justice as an isolated issue is betrayed by the fact that you better hope I take it as an isolated issue, because if I don't I'm going to tie it to capitalism and fight you tooth and nail. This is why Stallman is careful to not tie it to much else. He is trying to maximize the number of people involved.
> Yeah, I read it, it was a bunch of Marxist buzzwords
I tried to keep it buzzword free, if it was understandable, what's the problem?
> You also draw a really simplistic and ignorant call to action here...
Well this is a critique of an ideology. The majority of the text deals with what's wrong with it, and only general pointers are given as an alternative. However I believe they are enough to get free software people to question parts of their approach and start researching important topics for themselves. I never set out to write an article titled "How to free the whole society in 10 easy steps".
> I am a free software activist. I write, use, modify, and evangelize free software for my paycheck.
That's great, this article was aimed at you. What concrete problems do you have with the article? I hardly said "Stallman is not a socialist and is therefore wrong about everything", I created arguments from the ground-up, and I believe they deserve to be engaged in such a manner.
> I also think socialism is a garbage philosophy.
All of us have our personal backgrounds and beliefs which are hard to get over. You say socialism is a garbage philosophy, well, what do you think about exploitation of workers, of the huge amounts of labor we waste as a society, of unequal distribution of wealth both inside and between countries? What do you think about imperialistic wars? Do you believe your interests align with the interests of those who own the means of production and exchange, those who control finances? I hardly believe you like any of this.
You don't have to identify as a socialist to begin thinking about problems which the current system has. I certainly didn't, in the start. But as I started reading more and more, I slowly realized how Marxism was the most thorough analysis of capitalism and its problems, and how it formalized the most effective ideology of the working class.
We fundamentally disagree. You, as a Marxist, see it as us versus them. That economics, money, and means of production (in this case software) is a zero sum game and that if others have, then someone has not. If the rich have money, they took it from the poor. If there is closed/proprietary software, that has subtracted from free/open software. And that is not true. Money isn't zero sum, Windows can have their proprietary software and GNU can have their free-as-in-freedom software. You don't have to, better yet, you don't get to force (and socialism IS force) other people.
I want people to want FOSS. I want people to be free, that's why I want them to use FOSS. Part of freedom is the choice to make unethical choices. Using government levers to force is the opposite of freedom.
I employ a materialist analysis of society in which means of production are owned by the few, and in which the majority of the people have to sell most of their time simply to have food. This is an undeniable fact of reality, and you merely choose to ignore it. Your ideology obscures simple facts of economic life in capitalistic society, I mean your entire comment completely lacks substance: what do you even mean by "If the rich have money, they took it from the poor"? Which part of my beliefs are you attacking? It's completely vague.
> and socialism IS force
This, again, completely lacks substance. Even by bourgeois ideologue standards.
> Part of freedom is the choice to make unethical choices
Pure ideology. The point is to look beyond individual choices, and analyze how the entire system functions. It is impossible to make ethical choices under capitalism.
"I employ a materialist analysis of society" translation: I regurgitate Marx's works.
"and in which the majority of the people have to sell most of their time simply to have food." as opposed to farmers who work 16 hours a day to grow food. Different occupations sell for different value and require different time.
"This is an undeniable fact of reality, and you merely choose to ignore it" a smug way of saying 'I'm right and you're wrong'.
"I mean your entire comment completely lacks substance: what do you even mean by "If the rich have money, they took it from the poor"? Which part of my beliefs are you attacking? It's completely vague." I'm attacking the fundamental assertions of Marx's conflict theory. Redistributing wealth is predicated on the ideology that someone having lots of money is the cause of someone else not having money. So you redistribute it from one person to the other, ignore any rights of the person to their private property.
"> and socialism IS force
This, again, completely lacks substance. Even by bourgeois ideologue standards." - Not only isn't it lacking substance, it's empirically true. Given your next poorly thought out statement...
"The point is to look beyond individual choices" - look beyond individual choices? There is only the individual choice if you have freedom. If I don't have the individual right to choose that means I'm being forced. Hence, socialism IS force.
Maybe if you only look at the war on terror years, but look at WWI and WWII and most recently Ukraine. Both parties love Pentagon spending when it's _their_ war.