@Cybolic Huh. I noticed something similar a couple days ago. That article about how SteamOS smacks Windows on the Legion Go S . . . I went to look at that guy's video on Youtube to see how the comments were looking. Dude has more than three and a half million subscribers, and the comments were a Windows hatefest. I was expecting mixed, I was expecting some people to be defending Windows and dissing SteamOS/Linux, but no . . . the cynicism and venom about Windows was just heartwarming. Microsoft should watch out, mind share might be slipping.

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I nominate this the site's greatest typo in history!

Given the general tone, I actually assumed this was deliberate in the original.

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A "harming, original story" eh?

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On the marketing stuff being done by AI . . . somehow I feel like marketing stuff was always done by AI. Maybe AI went back in time just to do marketing, I dunno.

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I have gradually come to the conclusion that there is no such thing as "small-c" conservatism. There is this idea that at least part of the right is all about resisting change, keeping things the way they are, because changes could be dangerous and make things worse, and there is a value in the familiar, being careful not to throw babies out with bathwater and so on. That "conservatism" idea as an idea has some attraction.

But in practice I have never seen any political force that described themselves as "conservative" that wasn't trying to make big, fairly serious changes to society. You never saw any of them saying "Well, we've had strong unemployment insurance in this country for decades, we shouldn't change things to weaken it in ways that might throw people into poverty and weaken the fabric of society." They always want to cut it. You never see "conservatives" saying "Trade unionism built this country, has been a strong force for a century, so we should keep union protections strong". They always want to get rid of them. In my country of Canada, the country was literally knit together by the building of a railway, it's the freaking national myth, but I never saw any "conservative" force fighting to keep the railways strong; they were always complaining that railways were subsidized while spending masses of money on highways (which is somehow not a subsidy, or something).

For my whole life, it is left-liberals who have been trying to "conserve" things--mainly the New Deal and the welfare state as we knew it--while "conservatives" tried to change them. Now it's true that the "conservative" approach to changing things tends to be psychologically backward-looking, in that they often frame the drastic changes they're making in terms of a return to an imagined past. But still, the underlying principle is not "conservation", there is a definite pattern in terms of what they want to change and what they want to keep the same and how they want to change things, and it's always about re-establishing hierarchy. Race hierarchy, gender hierarchy, religious hierarchy, income hierarchy. So to the extent that the status quo is already hierarchical, they want to keep it that way. But if the status quo has egalitarian elements, "conservatives" want to change the status quo. So no welfare state, the poor should damn well be poor, and no unions because the workers shouldn't be uppity and no taxes on the rich because the upper crust should be really upper and no gay rights because gays should be lower on the totem than straights and no separation of church and state because people who aren't our religion should be lower in the pile and so on and so forth.

The religion one is an interesting illustration. In the United States, there are a bunch of people who consider themselves "conservative" but who want evangelical religion to be much more in charge of the country. And it feels like a "return to the past" sort of thing, and they even have this whole reimagined history in which it is a return to the past. But it isn't, at all! In real US history, separation of church and state is a founding value that the founding fathers considered to be of serious importance. Most of the prominent founding fathers weren't devout; half of them were deists, not really Christians as such at all. The founding values of the US were all about Enlightenment rationalism. So these "conservatives" are in fact agents of radical change, to a state of things that never really existed.

So as far as I can tell, the term "conservatism" is either simply a PR term intended to give a positive gloss to a position that has nothing to do with the idea of conservation, or at best retention of a term that was at least partly relevant to right wing stances a hundred years ago, but has not been in pretty much anyone's living memory.

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Left and right have never been about amount of government. They have been about what government is for. There have been various specifics on both sides--sometimes the right is about racism, sometimes it isn't; sometimes it's about free trade or free markets, sometimes it isn't; usually it's about heavy policing and lots of jails, but sometimes it isn't. On the left, social anarchists want the means of production to be owned directly by the people, in co-operative sorts of things, with governance as direct democracy operating on very small scales and nothing you could really call a state or government at all, which is a strong contrast to your more centralist socialists that want a strong state owning much of the means of production, sort of on behalf of the people.

But the core feature that the right wing never abandons is resistance to egalitarianism. For the right, elites are the goal. In democracies, the right comes up with a lot of theories about why elites having more power and/or money is good for everyone . . . because that's just how economies work so as Thatcher put it "there is no alternative"; because entrepreneurs will create jobs if they have money, because meritocrats or technocrats know how to do things better and so will run society more effectively, on the flip side because the poor are inherently lazy and need their superiors to make them work harder if anything is going to get done, because it takes a strong leader to put down the (insert scapegoat here), so on and so forth. But the point behind all the rationales is that there should be hierarchy and it should be fairly steep and the group at the top should have as much as possible of the wealth and power. And when there is no democracy they tend to just drop most of the rationales, because they don't have to convince the lower orders to vote for them. So . . . what government is for, on the right, is law enforcement, the military, subsidies for favoured groups such as corporations; in capitalism it's for rearranging the rules to move money from other people to capitalists, and making that process as invisible as possible.

Hierarchy is pretty intractable. If you want to run something big like a whole country, it's very hard to get rid of (although I have personally come up with an idea for how such a thing might be done). But the idea of the left fundamentally is to push towards more egalitarianism. The social anarchists stay purist about this, renouncing all hierarchy by simply not trying to run big things at all, instead hoping for something like tons of hopefully friendly but independent little town-sized enclaves and tons of little socially controlled firms. This is sweet but most people who aren't social anarchists would consider it a very limited solution (and one which would find it very hard to defend itself against anything more organized). So, you get other sorts of socialists with increasing amounts of centralism and tolerance of hierarchy for the sake of making big things work. This does not make them farther left--if anything, I think there's a strong argument that the social anarchists are the farthest left you can be. It does make them more prone to betraying the basic egalitarian concept, when people at the top of the hierarchy say hey, I kind of like power. But where in right wing politics, steepening the hierarchy is the point, in left wing politics it's not supposed to happen--left wing hierarchies are supposed to act as if everyone was still equal, even though they aren't. This in my opinion is very difficult to pull off for any length of time, and of course it's even harder if there's no democratic control over the hierarchy. But it's still probably better to have as your political basis the idea that any hierarchy around is a necessary evil than the idea that hierarchy is fundamentally a Good Thing that we should have more of.

The ultimate problem for the left is that they have a terrible time trying to make the world work like their theories want it to. The ultimate problem of the right is when they do manage to make the world work like they want it to, the results suck horribly. (The ultimate problem of the centre is their total unwillingness to do anything good, and their complete willingness to allow evil to happen as long as they cannot obviously be blamed)

Soviet Communism and socialism have an odd relationship. So, Soviet Communism was a Marxist-based ideology although it's hard to know what Marx would have thought of it. And they pretty much bought into Marx's ideas about inevitable historical progression between systems. It was supposed to go from feudalism, to capitalism, to socialism and then ultimately to communism. The Soviet Communists were according to their theory in the process of building socialism. Actual Communism was the goal, but they were clear that they had not gotten to that goal yet. Actual Communism is this weird utopian poorly defined thing; Marx thought that after Socialism was well established for a while the state would ultimately "wither away" and there would be this post-scarcity classless paradise where people could work at what they wanted to when they wanted to. I have no idea how that's supposed to work and I don't think anyone does. But anyway, the Soviets considered the system they were operating to be socialism--communism was a future aspiration.

As to the "Socialist" in "National Socialist" . . . it was a ploy. You gotta realize, Socialism was really quite popular in Germany at the time. There were large numbers of Socialists and Communists; they nearly took over the government immediately after WW I, and were only stopped by some tactical assassinations by a proto-fascist group called the Freikorps. So putting "socialist" in the name had a chance of getting some support from the naive . . . and after all, getting support from the naive by lying has always been the core fascist game plan. But the Nazis' funding always came from wealthy industrialists. They wanted a right wing force that could face down the Communists in the streets.

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Caldathras, sorry but that's ridiculous revisionism. It has long been quite popular on the far right, seems lately they've repeated it so often it's become mainstream, but it is not true. Nazism and Soviet Communism were both bad but in very different ways, and Nazi ideology was extremely anti-socialist. I think when people start saying this kind of thing it's worth remembering how the poem goes:
"First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a trade unionist."
Obviously they weren't coming for the socialists and trade unionists because they themselves were socialists. They were coming for them because they were fiercely opposed to them. Everyone at the time knew perfectly well that the Communists and Socialists hated the Nazis and vice versa; they were always having big street battles before the Nazis got into power.

And, state elites that control everything function differently from private elites that own everything. It's like saying feudalism was the same as capitalism, just that in feudalism it was aristocratic elites that owned everything while in capitalism it's private elites that own everything--they work different, the difference in what kind of elite is screwing everything up makes big changes in how they screw everything up.

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How can "Space Marine" be remastered? The Space Marines' only master is the emperor!

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Cato, while it's certainly true that there were strong differences in ideology between the Soviet Union and the Nazis, trying to downplay Stalin's atrocities to someone with a direct personal relationship to them is a terrible idea. You just don't have standing.

Same re: Lecturing Ukrainians about how they're allowed to react to Russia. I actually am of the opinion that Russia started that war largely because of NATO, particularly US, determination to encircle and ultimately overthrow and dismember Russia. If NATO, in response to Putin's repeated requests escalating to demands, had just said OK, we won't try to bring Ukraine into NATO and arm it to the teeth, there probably would have been no war. And Ukrainian political elites played into that game. But if you're Ukrainian, none of that really matters at this point, you have no responsibility not to hate the people who've been killing your countrymen and destroying your stuff on the basis that geopolitics made them do it. An outsider trying to tell Ukrainians in what manner it would be legit for them to censor Russian content from something they're making is just being incredibly tone deaf and arrogant.

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Bug Lenovo for me, since they don't reply to my emails.

Releasing a new device for gaming that runs Linux. "Hey, some guy who runs like the most prominent website for Linux gaming wants to talk to us. Should we answer?" "Nah. What good would that do?"

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