“I think we’re in an age when nuclear deterrent is actually less effective because the West is very unlikely to use anything like a nuclear bomb, whereas our adversaries might,” he added. “Where you have technological parity but moral disparity, the actual disparity is much greater than people think.”

What kind of reality does this guy live in? Like every adversary he mentions has either adopted a "No First Use" Policy or officially states that nuclear weapons are only to be used when the very existence of the state is threatened via a conventional military force or when being attacked by nuclear weapons. Contrast this to the US which "'reserves the right to use' nuclear weapons first in the case of conflict" or the UK which reserves the right to use nuclear weapons against "rogue states" (source: wikipedia article detailing all the above mentioned first use policies). How can you claim to have any moral superiority when your fucking bloc has these murderous policies in place? The western bloc has enshrined first use into its official policy and then this guy claims that only the adversaries of the West are determined to use nuclear weapons. The hypocrisy is beyond me.

Windows 95 -> 98 -> XP -> 7 -> 8 -> OSX -> Arch (1 month) -> Gentoo (1 year) -> VOID (3 years) -> NixOS (4 years) (transitioning to Guix System now)

For reference, this was my editor hopping journey which started during my OSX days since I learned to program during this time: Sublimetext -> vim -> neovim -> emacs

First of thanks a lot for the effort that you put into creating lemmy. You have created a really friendly and welcoming place!

I have a question regarding licenses. When you started developing lemmy, what were the reasons for your choice of the AGPL? As you are marxist-leninists, did you also look into other licenses like the the Anti-Capitalist Software License?

Not sure if it's atypical, but you could try reading "Alan Carr's Easy Way to Stop Smoking" and "The Freedom Model of Addictions". The basic premise of the books is, that if you really want to quit, you will quit easily, and that in order to really want to quit you need to reevaluate the reward value of your habit instead of focusing on the negatives. You smoke because you find it pleasurable. The books guide you to better understand what part of your habit you find pleasurable exactly. Is it the nicotine rush? Or maybe the you like the social aspect of it? After finding out what exactly you find pleasurable about your habit, the books will give you pointers on how to reevaluate if the pleasure you derive from it is really all that great compared to other activities or whether it really solves the problem that you set out to solve with your habit.

Thanks for the reply! As a baby Marxist I just wanted to add that I recently listened to your Audiobook of Zak Cope‘s Divided World Divided Class and I thought that it was really eye opening as it for the first time made it clear to me, that there actually is a material basis for people in the West to buy into the liberal ideology. Living in the west one personally benefits from the bribes that the western haute bourgeoisie is able to pay its workers in inflated wages made possible by the super exploitation of labor and resources in the third world. (At least that is my understanding of the book, I‘m open for different interpretations)

So thank you for making the book available as an audiobook!

Thank you a lot for building such an awesome platform! Here are my questions:

How did you get into communism? Were there any events that had an influence on you becoming communists and what personally motivates you to keep working on lemmy even though you could earn much more as developers working on proprietary software?