Does your local government publish advice? Some have a contact who can tell you what is safe to use in their infrastructure.

China has one leader, who is leader for life.

Are you saying that as a general statement about leadership in the PRC? If so, then you can easily disprove it with the previous leaders:

• Jiang Zemin (died 2022) - paramount leader until 2002, retired in the run-up to the 16th National Congress where Jintao had massive support to become the new party General Secretary
• Hu Jintao (alive) - paramount leader until 2012, when Xi was elected General Secretary by the 18th National Congress

To remain the party leader, you have to retain the support of the party. It’s not like a monarchy where there’s a right to be leader for life.

No, they are not ideologically communist. A ruling party is by definition not communist. They are diometrically opposed.

To clarify, ‘ideologically communist’ means being part of a movement aiming to build a ‘communist society’ (communist mode of production, classless, moneyless, etc.). It makes sense for someone to call themselves a communist despite owning money, being in a social class, living under a state. In fact, a member of the bourgeoisie can be a communist, so long as they are actually helping to build the communist movement - it just means they’re a class traitor. A communist who is part of the ruling class is a paradox, not a contradiction.

The communist movement does not imply prefiguration, where the movement has to immediately begin reflecting their ideal society - anarchist tendencies tend to prefer prefiguration as a transitional method, while Leninist tendencies tend to see overemphasis on it as utopian and reckless, favoring vanguardism, that ruling party you mentioned.

I see no reason why vanguardism contradicts the communist movement. The ideologically-driven ruling party aims to build a surrounding environment which will gradually abolish itself (‘withering away of the state’). This is a paradox, but not a contradiction. Their ruling party aims to be temporary, seen as a necessary step to make it possible to build that communist society.

I appreciate the irony of the third one.

Just use real Reagan quotes:

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Maybe we can pitch a TV show and use the budget to build housing a realistic neighborhood set.

Absolutely. This regime has shown how fragile the relationship is, and how untrustworthy the USA is as a partner.

once the democrats are back in power

This little phrase reminded me: I find it interesting how this is just assumed by many people as an eventuality when we’ve already seen a failed coup attempt last time an election ousted the Republican regime. There is this underlying faith in the liberal democracy of the US, since despite its huge flaws, it hasn’t failed in over a century. Similar with all the people who call for impeachment, police arresting ICE and other legal mechanisms.

It’s silly to trust government institutions to save one from an openly, brazenly malicious government.

It depends what you mean by movement, and where you mean.

There are already some direct action movements on the ground, like Subvertisers International, Adbusters and historically B.U.G.A.U.P to name some famous Western ones.

Many years ago, I posted about how horribly written it was, and right on cue, a neo-Nazi pipes in asking which translation it was, because apparently all the faithful translations are a Jewish trick, or something…

No reply when I posted the introduction in original German, of course.

Bombs not Food

Sulfur and charcoal, delightful!

Redlib is an alternate frontend to reddit.com.

I can’t find “Ramble” so I’m guessing they might mean Raddle, which is a reddit-like website of its own, similar to Lemmy (without federation)

If there’s no specific use-case (this is a general introduction, not Intro to Operating System Design) and this isn’t academic Computer Science teaching, then certainly a scripting language.

Easy to learn, easy to use, and much more applicable for simple automation that benefits the people learning.

C is dangerous if someone doesn’t take care. Java is verbose and personally I didn’t enjoy it one bit. You said this is a non-technical crowd and you expect them to follow at home.

Yeah, synesthesia counts!

Find a physical activity you enjoy and do it at least three times a week. Either join an organized religion or specifically curate a group of people you do a weekly activity with who will come check on you if you suddenly stop showing up.

I managed to get both these with sport teams. (At least in my area), the local sports competitions are actively looking for players, and if you have skills or enjoy a role others don’t, you can even just volunteer (instead of pay fees) in a few teams before joining one you like. And one foot in the door will likely get you invited to other teams and competitions when someone’s team needs a substitute player (or you can just ask, “Does anyone have a team that play on Thursday nights?”).

In my favorite team, I became de-facto captain of because I showed up most reliably and was the remaining member of the original team as people left and joined. One week I forgot to tell them I would be away for the match due to travel, and the next day I wake up to a couple of check-in messages just to make sure I haven’t vanished or had a bookshelf fall on me. And it’s a reassuring feeling to realize you’re part of a community that cares about each other.

An end result of liberalist idealism. (plus what others have said)

Celebrating on the 24th. It’s not even a long historical tradition in my own family or local culture, we adopted it after my grandparents celebrated a few Christmases with a Central European immigrant family in the neighborhood who start celebrating at midday 24th December and realized it enabled those of us who were married/etc to celebrate the next day with our other families. It’s much more relaxing like that, I’ve heard my friends complain after trying to fit in a breakfast, lunch and dinner at three different Christmas parties in one day to avoid offending anyone.

only a few hundred

Christmas music

There are a couple of songs I like, but honestly a lot of it is junk, which wouldn’t be too bad if they hadn’t already been playing in stalls for half a month.

The Grinch wears a top hat.

Normal is crazy, so it could be either. My shock when 🏴‍☠️ I realized that TV show episodes (not streaming) are generally 22 minutes for a half-hour slot - almost a third of TV is ads.