Funnily enough, this is my even more preferred solution haha

I am for public transport centric cities, where you can safely walk across streets, and cities are designed for people, not cars.

I am 100% for everything you’ve said, including socialism.

It’s just I’m also living in the world as it currently is, and if we’re gonna have car-centric hell holes, I at least want to make breaking the rules have consequences, so car centrism is A BIT safer. Income based fines to boot.

Most certainly is a band-aid, though. Do agree.

But I just get pissed when dickheads think speeding isn’t a bit deal, or red-light cameras are just for revenue raising, as if driving a massive hunk of metal is a serious responsibility, not to be taken lightly.

Yeah, love this guy’s videos

Hence my carve out. I don’t support the privacy nightmare the US has.

I do support road safety cameras in general, if managed properly.

People don’t have the right to have no consequences for their dangerous behaviour.

Sounds like a police/privacy problem, not the idea of having cameras at all.

Police should need a warrant to access the videos.

The software should not log licence plates of every single car that comes past.

The software should be open source and developed by the public sector.

I agree what’s in place in the US is a privacy nightmare, but the idea of having cameras in general isn’t fundamentally bad.

Skill issue USA, git gud.

I don’t want the government or private companies tracking my every move

This is an issue with how the cameras are operated. I’m taking issue with people complaining that these cameras exist at all.

People claiming no system could ever be privacy-preserving aren’t being very imaginative.

I agree the surveillance state is bad, but taking a picture of someone running a red light and sending them a fine is a good thing, sorry.

What’s bad is allowing cameras to passively record every single licence plate at all times and store that information. A speed or red light camera should only take a photo/video when it detects someone speeding/running a red light, and no other information should be stored.

So, we agree. This is specifically a US police problem.

But many people argue against speed cameras and red light cameras in general, as if they have the right to endanger people’s lives.

Pit maneuvers are insane, and aren’t done in most other civilised countries.

Gonna be downvoted, because apparently this is car brain central, but the amount of mental gymnastics people will do to make red light camera enforcement “bad” is crazy.

The US’ private company control over these cameras notwithstanding.

Fuck me, so many people die on on roads, and especially at intersections.

You’d have to bury it fairly deep.

I’m Australia at least, you’d just be warming up your beer.

Glass bottles at the beach is a big no no though.

Royalists are such simps

I hope the customer service representative was granted permission to ask if they required assistance applying to education programs.

Because I’m a fairly basic Chinese (Mandarin) learner, this gave me a moment of feeling dumb before realising it’s Cantonese.

Even picking up is a data point which will mean you’ll get more spam calls, unfortunately

But this is a good habit for when you’re expecting a call from a doctor’s office or something, I’ll be using it, many thanks!

You would not expect a government based on a set of self-serving antidemocratic bureaucrats to result in such benefits

Sure, there was genuine ideological reasons for the USSRs achievements, but you’re moving the goal-posts a bit. The original claim you were disputing was whether the USSR was authoritarian, which many people agree that it was.

There can be genuine and successful efforts to improve people’s lives under any system, including in the USSR.

What was imperialist about it?

• The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and occupation of Poland
• The Winter War against Finnland
• The East German uprising of 1953

are the first to come to my mind.

It would be a lot easier to defend the USSR if they only intervened to allow the proletariat to hold referendums, but we both know this is not what happened on many occasions.

It seems to me that Russia was continuing in the tradition Russian Empire, just under new management, and was definitely the first among “equals” in the USSR and its sphere of influence.

As a side note, I’ve only done very little Wikipedia level reading on anarchocommunism, and as much as I also believe people help each other willingly, I’ve yet to hear a good defence on how it would be possible with the massive populations we have now, as opposed to pre-history.

It’s all well and good that there are federated groups, with free association, but this is fundamentally ignoring that not all regions are equally blessed in resources.

If you have money, well then you need a centralised or decentralised way of miniting the money.

If you don’t have money, well, I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to think that people will want to take care more of the people immediately around them, rather than people on the other side of the world, and since we’re not getting together on large scales to make binding decisions, then there’s no way to guarantee that everyone has a fair share.

I’m not saying that more decentralised government wouldn’t work, but I do remain thoroughly unconvinced that free association of small groups across the entire world, would lead to much equity at all.

And as much as we may dream, there WILL be dickheads ruining it for the rest of us. Humans are nice, but humans can also be awful. Pretending otherwise is foolish and doomed to failure.

I’m a socialist, and am very keen to hear your thoughts :)

In my point of view calling yourself a socialist and not being able to criticise the blatantly anti-democratic and imperial power the USSR became is weird.

Socialism (in my view of it) necessarily requires democratic structures at work as well as government.

Despite the USSR’s positives (all countries have them) let’s not pretend like they had a good template we should emulate (on governance and voting, that is).

Without democracy, you’re basically hoping the people in charge are benevolent. But then when they’re inevitably not at some point, you have no way to peacefully remove them.

Next minute you’ll be telling me China is a democracy just because they elect people the the National People’s Congress. (Another country, with many positives, which is not a democracy).

And please do not confuse my criticism of notionally socialist states (China is definitely not), with implicit praise of the “democracy” in the United States, what they have is barely democracy.

sapient

This is some human supremacist language