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Cake day: June 13th, 2024

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  • I was once responsible for a student house (we don’t have dorms in the US sense, this is the closest we have) and I have similar experiences but less extreme. My favourite was when I had forgotten to configure DHCP filtering and someone plugged in a router the wrong way so it started offering DHCP (that didn’t work) to everyone in the building, in a race with our upstream ISP.









  • A lot of Americans supported the equally illegal invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, I still don’t think they deserve even how shitty their non-occupation civil government is.

    Given how war works I’m almost certain there will be war crimes against the civil population here. Not as bad as what the Russians are doing in their occupied territories I sure as fuck hope and expect, but worse than anyone deserves. I can see Ukrainians getting to be a bit vindictive etc about this, they’ve earned it, but as armchair commentators online at a safe distance we should fucking show some empathy for people in a shitty situation they have very little control over.

    I can’t control my government and I live in a democracy. I don’t blame Russians for most of what their state does either.








  • There’s a lot of weird hippie cults, including Charles Manson’s. If your hippieism leans towards the aesthetic then it’s perfectly compatible with fascism. Not to mention the weird Californian ideology that isn’t straight fascism but sure is authoritarian in its anti-authoritarianism.

    Fascism is by definition syncretic. It eats whatever it finds and makes more of itself, with rigid power structures and might makes right logic. Every large enough movement can have a fascist version of itself.


  • Scandi here, sorry to tell you our system also sucks. It has almost exactly all the problems of the soviet system (queues, poor quality, corruption) AND the American system (inequality, horrible if you’re poor, inefficient focus on luxury production), but in moderation. You can call it better (I would, or I’d have moved), but it still sucks. You need a system that’s fair, transparent, efficient, and provides enough.

    We have the capacity to do that, but I don’t think it can be combined with capitalism. Capitalism eats everything around it (and inside it). It cannot be negotiated with, except for at most a lifetime in exceptional circumstances, usually less.

    By the way, a unique problem with social democracy is that capitalist interests have a huge incentive and ability to commandeer whatever shit implementation of democracy you have to extract profits. If you have centralised social services (housing, healthcare) they’re very very vulnerable to takeover, selling our, deregulation where private entities can cream the market and leave the difficult cases to the publicly funded variants etc etc.

    Another issue is the EU, which demands universal market liberalism. The Swedish housing system with universal public housing as opposed to social housing for the poor was explicitly fucked by this after a EU court ruling demanding they operate their rental flats like profit-driven companies, which of course completely destroyed their ability to provide the service they’re designed to provide.