Flatworm7591

Isn't it (at least notionally) communists who are currently busy conscripting immigrants and waging an illegal invasion and attempted genocide of Ukraine, while the US helps Israel to carry out genocide in Gaza? But I guess imperialism is ok when it's a communist state doing it?

I have zero problem with criticizing the US where I think it's deserved. I'm not American, and I don't live there. It's the double standards I don't like and MLs hiding behind "critical support" to ONLY criticize the US, or more broadly, the West. Complaining about the US supporting right wing states like Israel, while MLs give Russia a free pass for cozying up to Iran and North Korea in order to wage an imperialist war to re-vassalize Ukraine just seem like political partisanship to me. They all suck. None of them deserve a free pass, and we shouldn't buy Putin's pretexts for starting and continuing that war any more than we should accept Israel's pretexts for continuing their genocide. If all someone does is criticize the West while giving a free pass to everyone who hates the West, then they are simply propagandists as far as I'm concerned (and vice versa). Not accusing you of that specifically, but I see it all the time on some instances.

As an anarchist living in a liberal democracy, my observation is that replacing a Capitalist authoritarian State with a Communist authoritarian State in the vein of Russia or China is simply not something that I (or really any significant demographic living in the West) wants. You're never going to get a communist revolution in the US - it's nothing but a fantasy. All the failed Communist experiments around the world have destroyed its appeal as a viable alternative. Of course we could argue about why they failed, but that's really beside the point here.

Having said that, I have no doubt that Socialism is a better and more equitable economic model than Capitalism. And I think you are right, we probably do want the same end state, we are just arguing over the means to that end, and perhaps over some of the implementation details. But the question of how to get from the current state to some future anarcho-socialist state is unresolved, as you are no doubt well aware. I don't think anyone has written a convincing account of that might credibly happen in an advanced economy like the US, especially when the population is so brainwashed the working class routinely votes against their own interests.

My personal view is that the US would be well served by the creation of a third major political party that is unapologetically Socialist. I know Bernie was/is imperfect, but if he had started his own party instead of aligning with the Democrats, US politics might look very different right now. He was actually grass-roots popular, and some form of Democratic Socialism is likely the only type of Socialism that is likely to get over the line in the US as a first step back to the left. IMO it's going to be impossible to move the Democrats to the left, so we need to start over, before they assimilate and neutralize all the truly progressive candidates.

You just came to slag her off then? Fair enough, I guess. I'm not sure Putin or Xi have any better border policies to aspire to, though if Kamala opened the border up, presumably you'd be ok with her sticking all the migrants into forced labor / re-education camps for "coercive ethnic assimilation" of the Mexicans like Xi recently enshrined in legislation?

Ok, I suppose it's best to err on the side of caution.

I don't think there's currently a way to automatically sync watch history across devices, but I'd love to be wrong about that tbh, because it would be handy.

Hi OP, how come this is tagged NSFW?

I think that's simple - because she's not as progressive as you or I would like her to be on that issue. You know the Democrats - they're always inching to the right on border security for those sweet "centrist" votes, instead of moving to the left.

For me it's not just about ads, it's also about surveillance. With FreeTube you can have subscriptions without needing a linked YouTube account, and all the subscription/watch history data is stored locally. So, it's a good opt-out of Google/YouTube surveillance. And you can import/export subscriptions if you need to transfer to another device. I happen to use FreeTube for this because it is frequently updated and I like the setup, but other options exist - I'm not really promoting this option over other options, just raising some awareness about it.

Thanks for the reminder: Donate link

That's a good suggestion, I just haven't had the motivation to get that setup yet since Usenet currently meets my needs. But I'm sure it would work, yes.

Getting into the weeds a bit here lol. I do use a VPN on my personal PC, but on the media server where I have my *arr stack, I've found that using a VPN, even with split tunneling configured, allows certain TV websites to detect I'm using a VPN and block streaming content. If I wasn't using a DNS proxy, or if I ran the stack on a separate server, it probably wouldn't be an issue, but I'm not so it is :p. I'll add that if I am using only Usenet then I prefer not to run a VPN since it's reasonably safe IMO to raw dog that content, since a VPN always has some overhead involved in terms of bandwidth and latency.

Yeah, you can integrate torrents into the stack, afaik. But due to some technical considerations I don't like to run a VPN on my media server, and in my country you definitely need one for torrents.

I think it's a bit unfair too, buddy. Usenet with the *arr stack and Jellyfin is such a great experience with all that automation, once you've got it all setup. Mine's setup to preference H265 and 5.1 channel audio, and specific resolution/quality. I mean, yeah you can access much the same content completely for free using torrents instead, but it feels like going back to the steam age now to do it all manually.