I think when it comes to popular figures that are relevant in a way orwell is, the best thing for convincing people is to absolutely steelman and not make any debatable negative claims. Even if that’s completely true, you’re going to convince fewer people by saying it simply because it’s a matter of opinion and seems easily refutable in that way.

Bad strategy. Even if you’re not trying to convince the lib people will read that and think your argument is weaker.

I said “decentralize power” in this case, yes, it would be a more centralized economic structure and a more centralized government, but it’s vastly less heirarchical, because it’s significantly more democratic, I think that’s still accurate, socialists don’t want to centralize everything, power in particular is something all socialists want to decentralize, because we want power to be in the proletariats hands, and the proletariat is many.

Even in the case of a vanguard party, the ultimate goal is democratization of the economy/state, among other things.

However, i am probably ALSO being nitpicky so whatever. Communists are a nitpicky bunch.

In this case, I think saying he liked Hitler is actually weakening your argument, even if it’s completely true, it’s clear from the reading that he wished he could personally kill hitler, but found him charismatic, and is saying that charisma is what his success was found on.

All of what you said there might be true, and all of that makes your case that he was a bad man better, but doesn’t make the case that he liked him better. At the end of the day, you don’t like someone you wish you could have killed. Saying he liked hitler when the reading makes it clear he wished he could kill him makes your other claims more dubious, not stronger, you should probably refrain from that in the future if your goal is to convince people.

All of those things may be true bad things about orwell, but none of them means he was clearly a fan of hitler.

Furthermore, I think antagonizing orwell, even if he was bad is just bad praxis for convincing people to be anti-capitalist.

“Hitler could not have succeeded against his many rivals if it had not been for the attraction of his own personality, which one can feel even in the clumsy writing of Mein Kampf, and which is no doubt overwhelming when one hears his speeches. I should like to put it on record that I have never been able to dislike Hitler. Ever since he came to power — till then, like nearly everyone, I had been deceived into thinking that he did not matter — I have reflected that I would certainly kill him if I could get within reach of him, but that I could feel no personal animosity.”

liked hitler is not exactly true, he just found him charismatic, I think saying he liked him is rather misleading

This is literally the opposite of true, it’s true of highly heirarchical systems, not true of communism.

Socialist systems actually seek to decentralize power, meaning you need to be less reliant on people being saints… not more.

I don’t see why you believe that at all.

But I do worry it might be a bit TOO hand holdy?

There’s nothing you can’t do because of it. Bazzite specifically has rpm-ostree which means basically anything you can do on a non-immutable distro you can do on it. There’s no real downside. If you decide to get dirty and fuck up in a way you don’t know how to fix/don’t want to learn, you can rollback, on mint, you’ll have to reinstall.

You can still learn to do these things on bazzite, they just aren’t mandatory.

Aside from the wayland transition finishing, which I posted about above, there’s also anticheat being figured out.

Then there will be no compelling reasons for normal people not to use linux, unless you have extremely niche software that only works on windows.

Wayland is nearly done playing catchup, work should dramatically accelerate, the great transition is finally almost over.

All that’s left to get wayland to feature parity with x at this point is an accessibility protocol (which should also allow xdotool stuff to work), gnome is working on one. Once that’s done and released, a bunch of devs will be freed up to work on new stuff.

If we’re being nitpicky there’s also these two:

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/216

which will add a proper protocol for global shortcuts (right now the compositors that have implemented it have implemented it with a hack, instead of a proper protocol, extremely minor since pretty much everyone has already functionally figured this out)

and the window positioning protocol:

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/264 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/18

the last few years of linux development have essentially been defined by technical debt, we’re finally about to shake off those shackles.

You want bazzite, for this usecase, disregard anyone who suggests something that isn’t immutable, all of the immutable suggestions are valid, but if it’s not immutable, it is huge downgrade for this usecase.

Objectively bazzite is much better for beginners, the mint crowd is a bit out of date, here’s why:

bazzite is immutable, that means it updates a core system all at once with previous versions easily selectable if something breaks.

there are more advantages to immutability, and one of those is that bazzite has significantly more up to date software, this matters for a huge number of reasons, bazzite has a much more up to date desktop with vastly improved features. Mint will also hold these features back for much longer because if something goes wrong it’s catastrophic, whereas for bazzite you’d just revert to the previous version. Not that it’s likely for anything to go wrong.

Back in the day mint was the best choice, but now that this innovation has spread bazzite is just better, and the mint people haven’t updated their choice/preference. I honestly think there’s no objective reason to recommend mint over bazzite to beginners.

Bazzite is also more secure because it’s sandboxed ontop of being less likely to catastrophically fail because of immutability.

their influence on your decision making process does not imply free will

This means that nothing about free will is important in any decision making process, and thus free will is just a garbage concept that has no bearing or meaning in reality.

Even if there was such a thing as free will, it would be completely unimportant in decision making.

it is hard to imagine free will has nothing to do with why you don’t hold the tree morally responsible.

It doesn’t, let’s imagine free will separate from knowledge, reasoning, experience, etc. No amount of knowledge, reasoning, experience would prevent the tree from falling according to the laws of physics, that’s why I don’t hold the tree accountable. The tree has no knowledge, no reasoning, no experience, no morals, so, even if it could freely make the choice not to do it, because it doesn’t have those things, it doesn’t matter at all.

I agree that it is necessary in the current world, just making it clear that this isn’t a fundamental issue with being a communist, it’s a matter of policy.

Whether or not that policy makes sense right now is different, and I agree that it absolutely does in the current climate, but once there are more socialist countries, I think it’ll become a non-issue. Like I said, only authoritarian methods like controlling speech can allow socialists/communists to hold onto power in the world right now.

No, all capitalist countries that are nice places to live are guilty of imperialism, colonialism, genocide, or some combination of the three. No exceptions. All you’re noticing is that they have successfully exported their suffering at best.

Communist countries have a massive uphill battle, they have to gain wealth without imperialist exploitation AND fend off the US, who has the same military budget as the rest of the world COMBINED, this combined with the fact they usually started poor makes this a wildly unfair comparison. Only authoritarians can hold onto power when faced with all of these things.

the mere fact that in 75 years china has gotten where it has and the only issues you can really point to are matters of policy rather than fundamental failures of communism tells most of the story, communism can be essentially identical to what china does with freedom of speech, no censorship, and no genocide very easily, as none of those things have anything to do with whether a country is communist or not, with all of the benefits.

in other words capitalists can’t find flaws with communism that don’t apply to capitalism, only issues with particular implementations, the issues communists talk about are mostly fundamental to capitalism.

Do you think knowledge, reasoning, experience, and risks do not play any role in our decisions?

Sure, it is inevitable that we will make the decision we make, but it’s not that the marble will fall down every time that makes our choices significant, it’s the fact that we don’t arbitrarily make decisions.

If, because you know about determinism, you stop bothering to learn about the world, there will be a different outcome, even if that was inevitable, that’s how you influence the world. Free will doesn’t mean anything and isn’t important.

Even if there was free will, those things would be vastly more important than it. Free will is totally unimportant.

what is the difference in the case of the agent vs. the marble?

The agent made its decision based on knowledge, reasoning, experience, the risks, the morals. A marble doesn’t have knowledge, humans do, even if we’re deterministic, we can make decisions, it’s just that the decision will be made no matter what. That doesn’t free us from the responsibility of our decisions.

Just because the agent would’ve never made a different choice, doesn’t mean these things don’t matter anymore, it’s wholly irrelevant to whether or not we should punish them.

in your view, what is the difference between having a forced decision and not having a choice? and why exactly would this forced choice be punishable in the same way a free one would be?

In determinism, you still have free choices, it’s just you would’ve made that choice if time was reversed and played again, nothing changed so why would the result be different? You compared all the options, and decided to make that choice, and if we reversed time, and played it back, you’d still make that decision… but it’s not like the universe compelled you to make that decision, nobody FORCED you to make that choice, you still made a decision all on your own, even if we reversed time and you would’ve made the same one, that changes precisely nothing of importance.

in brief, god makes decisions about who is saved and who isn’t not based on conditions they follow in their life, but based on his own purposes and goals.

then he’s just a dickbag putting us all in a world to suffer for fun, when he could just make us all in heaven.

again, a calvinist would probably say that he created evil people for his glory and grace. notably, jesus dying on the cross for humanity’s sins as a display of god’s grace does not make sense without the existence of evil.

yeah it doesn’t make any sense. that doesn’t actually make it make sense, that’s just a vague set of words. So god is a dickbag that needs worship why? Quite frankly like, any decent human being is better than this god, he’s just evil.

traditionally, determinism is not compatible with moral responsibility since all actions are predetermined and it is not obvious that one can be held morally responsible for them.

this is nonsense. You’re still making choices, just because you would’ve made those choices no matter what doesn’t mean your choices aren’t punishable or your fault. It’s not that you didn’t have a choice, it’s that you would’ve made that decision no matter what based on the laws of physics. These are not incompatible ideas, and I don’t get why people struggle with this. It’s very straightforward.

to the problem of the theist test, standard christian doctrine is that your fate in heaven is predetermined and individuals have been pre-chosen by god (theological term is ‘the elect’). in that sense, your worldly life is not a ‘test’, but the idea is that the holy spirit reveals god to those who have been selected.

this is also nonsense, the point was that it was a test, god should already know who’s going to be selected, if there’s no free will, this is still all pointless. Why does god need the holy spirit to do all that nonsense if it isn’t a test? If it’s predetermined, why did god make all these evil people that were just going to be miserable in hell anyway?

yeah in the same way that there’s guns and shootings all over the world but they’re almost all concentrated in one place… american schools.

either way, communists are vastly more prepared to deal with propaganda because in capitalist societies critical thinking is destroyed by nearly every institution that can teach it.

if you go by this thread one side has nothing but propaganda. There was not one valid argument made on the capitalist side when I read this thread, I could’ve better argued for capitalism, it’s pathetic.

closest they got was china is mean to uyghurs, but capitalists do genocide every 5 seconds so that’s hardly a pro capitalist argument. At least the chinese, if they are covering it up, have the decency to cover it up, capitalists brazenly and openly happily do it, and support it!

You can use the modlog, lemmy’s web interface lets you see it

This isn’t a problem for athiests, I am a determinist athiest, we have no free will and the idea is silly in a place governed by physical laws. It honestly doesn’t matter at all to me and I don’t see any reason to care.

it’s a problem for theists because this is supposed to be a big test, god is checking if we belong in heaven. If we have no free will the test makes no sense at all.