Thank you

In a society where the will of the majority is ignored in favour of the will of the few I think most people would agree it’s an authoritarian society

Sure. But then the reverse is true, as well. Libertarians call it “mob rule”

I might argue the Vietnam War was what really changed things. Once college became a means of draft dodging, universities filled up with blue collar kids looking for deferment.

Colleges responded by tightening enrollment standards and setting up new barriers to entry, some of which were financial.

It was free until some time in the 1960s when black people started getting involved

Black students, Jewish students, East Asian students… Anyone who wasn’t a WASP with wealthy parents.

George Bush Jr famously had to make Yale his safety school because he couldn’t qualify for UTexas.

The saying at my kids college/university was “A ‘C’ gets a degree”. And while “haha that’s funny” there were many in that group that took that literally and put in the least effort possible.

I’ve been in classes when I could ace the class in my sleep and classes where I busted ass to pass.

Grades tend to be highly subjective, not just by subject or material but by the course instructor and the school’s attitude towards GPA. Sort of a joke that getting an “A” in colleges like Harvard and Yale is easier than Boston College or Ruetgers. You’re de facto assumed smart if you’re in the Ivy League. But you have to prove yourself against the field in these more accessible schools.

Here in Sweden education is free

Free at point of service. But it’s 7% of Swedish GDP, with all of that coming from public coffers.

Compare it to the US, which spends only 5.5% of GDP on education, with the majority on the heavily privatized university level.

The math gets worse when you look at student/teacher ratios, administration overhead, building construction, and spending on extracurriculars like sports.

Americans spend less overall than their swedish counterparts, but far more on amenities that have nothing to do with the actual mechanics of education.

According to my American economics education, this proves the American system is actually more efficient. Swedes would do better to adopt our model, if they want to be A#1 Liberty Whiskey Sexy, like we are.

I have a sneaking suspicion we’re going to see a rash of system vulnerability start popping up in Win10 over the next few years. And we’ll get deluged with national news announcements that boil down to “Win10 is unsafe!! Your data is compromised!! Only 11 will save you!!”

I’ll never understand how people recommend Zorin or Mint instead of the, much more Windows-like, and HUGELY supported Kubuntu or Fedora KDE

I rebuilt an old Windows PC as a host for a Jellyfin server and used Mint because that’s what the guide recommended.

Easy setup. Everything works great. So I told my friends about it. And, naturally, they went with Mint, too, because we all know that setup works.

That’s it. That’s the only real reason why. I have a simple need and Mint got the job done.

Obama choose to release (and re-release and re-re-release) his certificate because he was constantly fighting a crisis of legitimacy. He did it out of weakness, because he was afraid what people would undermine him through doubt.

Trump is very obviously a pedophile and even more obviously does not give a shit that you know it. He’s not giving you anything, because he does not feel the need to legitimize himself to the public.

Hitler’s government qualifies as “authoritarian” in the same way that FDR’s government does. It can describe Starmer’s UK. Or Sheinbaum’s Mexico. It can be applied as easily to Lai Ching-te’s Taiwan as Xi’s China. It’s a nothingburger of a word, mostly implying you don’t like the policies of the person in charge.

I mean, it’s definitely a deliberately ill-defined term that’s used to conflate dictatorships of the bourgeoisie and dictatorships of proletariat. Also, mysteriously, never seems to describe friendly oligarchies like MBS’s Saudi Arabia, Netanyahu’s Israel, Milei’s Argentina, or Bukele’s El Salvador.

But its language that’s very intentionally borrowed from Anarcho-Capitalism, intended to defame any kind of public governing structure. The end goal of describing every governing body we don’t like as “authoritarian” is to venerate “free markets” as a utopian alternative to popular governance.

It’s not just about communism. It’s a term intended to denigrate any kind of popular government.

Far-Right: Trump

Far-Left: DSA

The Middle: ducking Amy Klobacher throwing a stapler

Sure. But the meme still holds.

It’s like the old saying

“A rising tide benefits your enemies. You must prevent it at all costs.”

Anyone who keeps up with British media wouldn’t be surprised.

Exactly

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_World#%3A~%3Atext=The+term+Third+World+arose%2Cgroups+based+on+political+divisions.

fourth world

I’m going to regret asking, but… what do you think the fourth world is? And, what did you think the first three were?

It’s a “heads-I-win / tails-you-lose” system when business can violently extract the value of labor coming and going.

Either the state protects owners of IP (inevitably a business entity looking to collect rents on its use) or it facilitates robbing the original artist (inevitably a talented individual/team that lacks the money for a lengthy legal fight). The legal system never seems to break in favor of the people themselves. It can only exist as a gradient to move wealth from the sweet of one’s brow to the pocket of one’s bosses.

The African invaders

I feel like I’m talking to a guy who was deeply offended by the movie Django Unchained.