Chaotic evil, we keep the bread in the fridge.

Well, 2 weeks after that happened, I asked my teacher if I could install Linux onto the PC and they agreed. Went for a minimalist arch setup since that’s what I’m familiar with already, and it worked fine. Updates were still somewhat slow but they’d only take around 1-2 minutes maximum, excluding the download times for packages, and it ran smoothly.

That being said, Windows 10 on that craptop was fine for browsing, and boot times weren’t too bad, only taking 30s on average. It’s just that updating the system and using VS (since we were forced to use it as IDE until I switched to Linux, at that point I just went with neovim) were two major pain points.

On powerful PC’s, yeah, my home PC is a rather powerful one and it would take me around a couple minutes to update.

However, I remember two years ago having to use Windows 10 on a school PC (which was a crappy thinkpad) and it took around 1.5 hours to update after I did the mistake of arriving too early and deciding to update the laptop as “might as well, got nothing better to do”, then not being able to do anything for 1 hour.

Though admittedly, the laptop wasn’t updated for a while (guessing around half a year?) so it probably was catching up to updates.

Capitalism doesn’t have to be a liberal democracy. The sad truth is that authoritarian capitalism, while being something people don’t like, is very effective when it comes to economic growth (just look how China turned into a superpower because of it).

Does this mean that capitalism more or less goes hand-in-hand with ‘fascism’, or is authoritarianism/totalitarianism/liberalism separate from economic systems such as capitalism, socialism or communism?

Speaking of which, assuming that communism is an optional later stage of socialism (which seems to be the consensus), the vast majority of socialist/communist countries have failed due to reasons related to their totalitarian/authoritarian governments, either due to the leader’s death causing power struggles or the oppression going completely against the goals/ideals of socialism or communism and turning it into an oppressive state.

Does this mean that communist/socialist state cannot work because it requires totalitarian regime to establish authority and make everyone play by the rules? Well, no, there were lesser known attempts such as Salvador Allende’s Chile (was very successful for a year, but failed due to CIA running propaganda compaigns, strikes and promoting a coup) and Paris Commune, they both were liberal as opposed to authoritarian, but failed due to mostly outside/external factors.

While historically I agree that communism hasn’t worked out (not to be confused with socialism, which did work a few times and failed due to foreign sabotage from US), it’s only been tried a handful of times and there are things to learn from each failure that could be applied to future attempts, just like in science. Scientists didn’t go “yeah we need to stop researching x-rays as it hurt people a few times, doctor examinations are good enough” after lethal exposure killed people.

Also, the example you left above as the parent comment can literally be applied to China, which is one of the most capitalist countries in the world. Does this mean that capitalism inherently is like that?

It was a genuine question, but if I’ve struck a nerve with that somewhere, then I’m sorry.

I’m genuinely curious - what do you think communism is? There’s been a lot of definitions over the years and a lot of confusion over the subject, so I’m really interested to hear what do people such as yourself think communism really is that makes them hostile to the idea.

If you agree with something, it’s common sense, natural, apolitical. If you disagree with something, its immediately political.

That’s how it works pretty much.

While I don’t particularly agree with the example you’ve given, the idea is correct. In order to have any kind of system (especially at its inception), you need to have authoritarianism of some sort, and in the modern liberal democratic countries, this authoritarianism is in the form of the law and police, who protect private property so capitalists can do their thing.

When it comes to socialism, in almost every case it was done via a military dictatorship, and it’s rather hard to tell if this was done because everyone was copying the big ‘socialist’ countries like soviet union or china, or if dictatorships are the most practical way to do so. With dictatorships there’s a substantial risk of putting someone in power who’s just an opportunist and wants all the power above all else like Stalin, or having a party that doesn’t really care to bring on communism and it turns into oligarchy.

However, it’s not all dictators - Paris Commune was a revolution that had the dictatorship of proletariat, as in the dictator was the working class, and while it failed, it definitely was on the right track, at least in my opinion. You minimize the risks of having a singular dictator, but to succeed you need to have the majority of people on board with the idea, which is a tall order especially today where any talk of socialism is met by misinformed skepticism and years of anti-communist propaganda by the liberal democracy world.