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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • And capitalist regimes. The Russian Federation was literally founded by a betrayal of a reformist movement in the USSR, and China consulted with Milton Goddamn Friedman on their economy, ending up with billionaires. I even saw .ml users crying about Russian *oligarchs" having their assets seized (“stolen,” as they said), and unironically citing Matt Taibbi. Not even “back in the day” Taibbi, but literally The Twitter Files. Using bought & paid for corporate propaganda to make their point.

    They’re just campists. I don’t want to run afoul of a “No True Scotsman” situation, but fuck, for people who seem to think they’re the Only True Socialists, they’re willing to drop socialism in an instant if it means they can be edgy dickheads on the internet.


  • I quit Spotify when the “New Library Experience” completely fucked the music library side of the app. If you mostly use playlists, it was a lateral change. If you used it to collect some songs here, and album there, and keep them all sorted, it’s like it dumped your entire collection on the floor and expected a thank-you for the new organization system.

    My guess, as others have mentioned, is that Spotify tries to squeeze more profits by pushing certain songs, whether because they get paid to promote them, or the royalties are lower. That’s easier to do with their playlists and recommendations, so they pushed people to that side of the app by making everything else dogshit. And now, apparently, the curated side took it too far and is awful, too.

    I still use Apple Music, which is one of like two services that actually let you organize your music in a sensible way outside of playlists. That said, after I cut cords with video streaming services and set up my own library, I think I might do the same with music.



  • A big part of the confusion comes from the fact that different people will use these terms differently.

    In a capitalist framework, there’s private property and public property. Either an individual (or or specific group) own something, anything, or it’s owned by the government.

    In a socialist framework, private property is distinguished from personal property. Personal property is your stuff that you use for yourself. Your coat, your car, your TV, etc. Private property is the means of production, or capital—things that increase a worker’s ability to do useful work. Think factories or companies, where ownership in and of itself, regardless of labor, would make the owner money. Socialists think that kind of private property shouldn’t exist, because it means wealthy people can just own stuff for a living, profiting off of the people who do the work.

    Housing can go either way. Owning a home for yourself and your family would be far closer to personal property, while owning an apartment building to collect rent would be far closer to private property.

    Socialism, for the most part and historically, is an umbrella term describing social rather than private ownership. That would include anarchism, which largely synonymous with “libertarian socialism.” Lenin, on the other hand, used it to more specifically refer to an intermediate stage between capitalism in communism, so you might see people using that more narrow definition to exclude anarchists, democratic socialists, etc.