Never fear! I will happily spare you the trouble, and take that old thing off your hands - free of charge! ;D
I loved that controller. Best damn gamepad I ever had. It was a sad day when it finally gave in, and broke, last year.
skaffi
joined 1 year ago
Something, something, Kohlera.
professional actor.
Hmm... Does anyone else suspect Willem Dafoe?
Democratic influence on the rules you're bound by, is that really an insignificant benefit?
From my perspective as a radical social liberal, it seems to me that totalitarian and authoritarian outcomes are inherent to any form of socialism which embrace revolution, or the complete replacement of societal institutions, and communism is of course the poster child. This seems to happen whether or not totalitarian traits existed in the ideology, before coming to power.
When you go back in history, and read letters written by the losers of party power struggles, before they lost, or read accounts of things they said, you will often find their sheer naivety to be striking, I find.
My personal theory is that several of the methods used to come to power, many of the power structures that emerge, and the eventual new institutions that are created, are strong tools for exercising power, while they often only have weak guards to prevent abuses of power. The most cynical members of a party will use and abuse them, they will come to dominate, and they will not get rid of these weaknesses in the system, thereby removing their own advantage in wielding, maintaining and grabbing for more power.
It's interesting how socialism is an ideology that is very focused on power relations and dynamics (employer vs. employee for instance), presents itself as an equaliser or a liberator of people being subject to others, and has a lot of political theory at its foundation, and yet, it seemingly has such a glaring blind spot of falling victim to itself.
I think everyone on the far left would benefit immensely, from going back and reading a whole lot of early liberal thought about power and the state. From back when it was more just a strand of political theory, than an ideology as such. And when I say they would benefit, I mean it genuinely, in that it would help them ensure that whatever political change they might become a part in bringing about, will be able to serve it's original goals, rather than quickly become corrupted.
I am struggling to think of much there that would be inherently incompatible with even far-left socialism. Except, perhaps, if your view is that the state is, and should be total and absolute, then that is of course incompatible with putting restrictions on its power, or dividing it into separate parts that must check each other.
That model's name? AI Gore.
Just to avoid catching ire for adding nuance, I want to preface everything by stating that the nazi regime was obviously a criminal scourge upon humanity, and it's perpetrators entirely irredeemable. If the nazi regime was ever falsely accused of anything, it will always just be irrelevant little details, in the face of the sheer bulk of provable horrors committed by them, their collaborators, and the weight is on the shoulders of everyone within their borders, who was of legal age and sound mind, and who didn't do anything to resist.
With that out of the way, the descendants of the Allies should stop swallowing the propaganda of their forefathers raw, and instead try to take an honest, critical look on this part of their past.
The fact of the matter is, the Nürnberg trials were a farce, more a show trial and a kangaroo court, of Victor's parading around the defeated, conducted on a legal basis that didn't exist, with many punishments (executions) being violations of the inalienable human rights that were soon after proclaimed by the victors, as an encodification of the core values that they claimed to espouse.
The trials were a mockery. Surely, it would have been possible to prosecute and punish anyone deserving of it, by the laws of the pre-1933 Weimar Republic, which, contrary to popular belief today, was not abolished in a legal manner in the first place, and so would still have jurisdiction.
Anyway, the Nürnberg trials are an awful ideal to shoot for - especially when we today finally (and fairly recently) have managed to establish a proper International Criminal Court, with authority and legal basis to dispense real justice against the perpetrators of crimes against humanity. Recognise that court, and insist on it carrying out justice. When you ignore thst court in discourse, and choose to hold up an 80 year old mock trail as the standard of justice, that just makes it all the easier for any future victor to quickly carry out their own kangaroo courts, executing based on what's politically convenient, while slowing the path towards a legal world order.
Then you're in luck, because that's something you can already have by now! Just get yourself one of the more recent-ish phones that are well supported by PostmarketOS. The things Linux phones struggle the most with these days, are the more traditional phone-things, such as text messages or calling, which may not be ready for production, as they say (although, both texts and calls have actually worked well for me as of late). But if all you want is a pocket Linux computer/PDA, and intend to carry another phone for calls and texting, that's something you can have, for the grand price of an old, second-hand phone. I've been loving my (LUKS-encrypted) OnePlus 6T, and I do actually use it for calls and texts as well!