Valve’s revenue does not come just from the labor of their direct employees, but from all content creators that post games and other software in their platform. This is typical of the platform business, such as Uber, Airbnb, Etsy, Epic, Google App Store and others

I still have the (now) privilege of working from home. Even though I’m struggling to handle everything in my life, I don’t even know how I would be able to do everything I do today if without wfh.

I know you were joking, don’t mind my comment. Just thought about obscene that comment were, and Freud was very likely an “enlightened” individual. I guess there many people worse than him.

Despite this, I think his wife had a very slim figure. So I guess she was able to restrain Freud’s impulses and didn’t play along.

I think it’s more like women had to put up with a lot of stuff back in the 19th century…

Women and gay men get horny all the time as well. So why not forbid men from taking off their shirts in hot weather?

Witch is fine. Why not conjure a big curse to the people who came up with IPv6 addresses? Let them have piss in their blood and rotten teeth for the rest of their lives.

Not only that, but he could be under threat of being fired and losing his position, or maybe he does not care about the person at all and see his corp colleagues as his true brotherhood. Or the coroner may simply be incompetent. Too many possibilities.

The US being the US, the police or any institution cannot be trusted in matters of racism and hate crime against minorities. It’s just like the fruit of the poisonous tree principle, but applied to the whole US institutions, and specially in the case of Southern US institutions.

Yes, why not speculate on the winning side? But anyway, I don’t know the process of buying Chinese financial assets, don’t even know if it’s possible.

Yes, and it shows how these conflicts happening everywhere have nothing to do with religion, terrorism or anything. It’s just imperialism. Most Arab countries nowadays are complicit of US and Israel imperialist adventures.

Interesting how Trump’s team is wrecking havoc in the whole country. US is falling behind in production, consumption, jobs, education, science, agriculture etc.

It’s impressive how Tunisian government could lie so blatantly about the incident.

Far rightists in Brazil like the usual genocidal-subservience combo.

It’s not a simple matter of choice. Most people aren’t invested into open source, they just want to get by and do their mundane things. Most people aren’t even aware of all the privacy stuff or abusive practices of big business, it’s usually some more outspoken tech savvy person that decides to expose what the big corps are doing. So using open source is not a choice, like you would be just choosing your preferred cereal brand, but both a technical and political act. And most people are just into the system, they aren’t aware of all malicious things around them.

Not only that, but also when companies feel threatened, they start imposing new technical and legal restrictions to make using OSS harder. Since they have more control over the whole production supply chain of devices, they have more cost effective options and even partnership with hardware vendors to make using OSS very hard or impossible.

Putin is a conservative, a right winger, a nationalist, a capitalist pig, you name it. I won’t deny it. But calling him a fascist is not knowing what fascist is about.

Also, I have no problem in saying Russia is not democratic. As long as you don’t use it as an argument to justify any attack against Russia or Russians, since no place in the world is actually democratic.

Sorry, but nothing you said is uncommon in your democratic countries

Use a loophole to run for a third term of presidency by becoming prime minister.

Macron used a loophole to do a very unpopular retirement pension reform bypassing congress.

Rewrite the constitution during your third term to remove your term limit.

Didn’t know amending the constitution or re-writing it was anti-democratic. Then no democratic country would ever pass this test.

Jail your political opponents.

Like Ukraine did? https://apnews.com/article/europe-ukraine-arrests-business-government-and-politics-f50da684fab61add42348d276482477c

Or like Germany is doing right now?

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/germany-crackdown-israel-gaza-jewish-activist

Assassinate critics.

Learn about COINTELPRO.

Only allow approved opposition to run.

Ukraine again:

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/3/21/why-did-ukraine-suspend-11-pro-russia-parties

Brutally crush any democratic protests.

Can you not see what is happening right now to anti-genocide protesters? Also what about Odessa massacre?

https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/the-odessa-trade-union-massacre-ten-years-later/

Force government employees to vote for you.

AFAIK, vote is still done in secrecy in Russia.

Start a war to rally support for yourself.

Like, the Iraqi, Lybia, Afghanistan and Iran wars? Or Yugoslavia?

Take lots of weird, shirtless, old-man photos.

I think you have some kind of kink with Putin, why does this have anything to do with being democratic or not?

TLDR;

That said, the points you listed are not uncommon in any democratic countries. Unless you say that no country is democratic, therefore I will agree with you. Neither Russia nor any other country in the West or in any part in the world is actually democratic.

People need to understand what fascism is before calling everyone a fascist. I have no love for Putin and I think he is a piece of shit, but he is no fascist.

It’s impossible to exclude the US, EU and NATO involvement from the whole conflict, including the Maidan coup. Since before 2014, the region was already under a geopolitical dispute. One side (the Ukrainian right) who assumed the government were very much pro EU, ousted the more neutral president and made illegal all opposition parties. So it’s not a matter of whether you like Russia or not, this is a geopolitical conflict.

I think neutrality just means that they won’t payroll the US military industrial complex directly. Aside from that, Austria stays together with the other nations of the Western block.

You should definitely elect better leaders. If something is consensus in all so called “democracies”, is that everyone thinks everyone else need to elect better leaders. The majority of the working people, which comprises the majority of population of most (pseudo-)democratic countries are mostly unsatisfied with their governments. This is occurs repeatedly and consistently in all liberal democracies, with a few exceptions. If there’s something all liberal representative democracies look alike is that most people don’t feel their interests are being represented by their government.

There’s a reason why this happens in all capitalist societies. Note that it’s not an individual issue and the reason is not lack of education and stupidity, as people often say, as even well educated individuals do bad voting decisions. This is a social and systemic issue and it’s not a coincidence.

I won’t tell you why, I want you to think about it. Then tell my why this happens.