It feels like monetizing something that used to be free and built by passionate tinkerers for its own sake. It's destroying yet another part of that hacker culture some people so very often reminisce about on this site.
Me personally, I absolutely hate it. I got into programming to mod my favorite games of the time, Minecraft among them. My first exposure to actual code was through reading open source mods and trying to modify them to achieve my own ideas.
As far as I know, you can still write free mods outside the mod store to your heart's content, just as you ever could. The existence of paid mods doesn't seem to limit your ability to do that.
OP's twist on the cave allegory is funny and makes sense if you take the usual modern reading, but that is very much not what Plato meant by it.
It was just a way for him to convey his "theory of forms" in which perfect versions of all things exist somewhere, and everything we see are mere shadows of these true forms. The men in the cave are his fellow Athenians who refuse his "obvious" truth, he who has peeked out of the cave and seen the true forms. All in all, it's very literal.
In what qualities was Mussolini a socialist? Anti-capitalism never passionated him much. Indeed, he had a lot of support from the capitalist class, which he gladly took. Similarly, one of the first things the nazis did upon gaining power, was to arrest all communist and socialists, and make unions illegal within Germany.
Your mixing up of the two concepts is wrong and unhelpful. Certainly, the Soviet State was fascist in many aspects. But many fascist states emerge from capitalist economies, with help from the capitalist class.
Creating digital sovereignty requires economic protectionism, which directly contradicts a core value of the European Union: bringing down trade barriers.
> contribute to solidarity and mutual respect among peoples, free and fair trade, eradication of poverty and the protection of human rights [0]
Notably absent from these values are wishes to make the EU more resilient against foreign threats to the global supply chain.
Can confirm, this is nothing but more scaremongering from right-wing rags: Le Figaro and Le Parisien, both owned by right-wing oligarchs (Dassault and Arnault respectively) trying to fuel this climate of fear to further their economic interests by getting a right-wing demagogue elected. Both papers are caught lying all the time, like Fox News. You shouldn't be taking this seriously.
What you should take seriously though, is this amping up of right-wing populist rhetoric, manufacturing a mass hysteria about crime (when it's at its lowest point in decades) that is then used to justify increasingly authoritarian policies.
Don't get trapped by right or left they are all owned by oligarchs trying to push or pull the public towards some agenda that benefits them, sometimes other oligarchs but rarely you.
The crime is down stat is a political stat that doesn't tell you are safer. It could mean police are not going after small crimes or people just stop reporting them or they are classified differently. It could say money spent on law enforcement is working and more is needed. On the other hand it could say community outreach and educational coapaigns are working. Many previous crimes reported thats changing with a more racially diverse force.
I don't know of any left-wing oligarchs. That almost sounds like an oxymoron. Don't get trapped in bothsideism or enlightened centrism, one sides is that much more aggressive with the lies and hate.
As for the crime stat, you can always control for such things, to an extent. If we can't trust the official statistics office, then what should we base our policies off? Vibes? There are certainly things to improve with how the stats are collected and used, but you can't just go around telling everyone they're useless and providing no alternatives.
There were no socialist/communist/marxist countries, but there were dictatorships that pretended to be socialist/communist/marxist. Kinda like Hitler did, actually.
No, they're dictators. And I don't know of many of them owning TV channels or newspapers in France, which is what we were talking about. There is no left-wing oligarch, because this is nonsensical. You can't have billionaires spending millions into influencing public opinion towards aggressive wealth redistribution. Those people don't exist.
You just have bureaucrats and politicians doing that instead, securing their comfy jobs and reelection.
The equation is simple: tax one productive member of society 1000 euros - lose 1 vote. Redistribute 100 euro each - win 5 votes. The rest goes towards various government programs implemented by companies owned by friends that can redirect pay the profit in offshore accounts of relatives of said politician.
Keep in mind, until the "liberals" create a proper state that isn't easily capitulated to the far right fear, the risk of these rags becoming defacto, and these threats becoming policy, like they did in America, it's a legitimate threat.
Except the two newspapers here aren't public, they're right-wing rags: Le Figaro and Le Parisien, both owned by right-wing oligarchs (Dassault and Arnault respectively) trying to fuel this climate of fear and hate to further their economic interests by getting a right-wing demagogue elected. Both papers are caught lying all the time, like Fox News.
Don't fall into this reductionist thinking, there is no secret cabal behind it. It's not even coordinated.
This wave of authoritarianism is simply the result of well-funded right-wing populists taking advantage of an economically tough situation for the masses, after decades of neoliberalist austerity and deregulation. They're using fear and hate to further the goals of their wealthy patrons: deregulating the economy further. Mass surveillance comes for free with these people, it's purely a consequence of focusing the entire public discourse on perceived crime levels and fear of foreigners.
The two articles attacking GrapheneOS come from right-wing rags: Le Figaro and Le Parisien, who make their bread and butter painting a bleak picture of the country, when crime levels are at an all-times low. QED
If a loose collection of powerful individuals using their wealth and influence to support a certain group of politicians and ideas sounds like a cabal to you, then yes. For all practical purposes, you needn't dig deeper than "wealthy people funding pro-business politicians, using right-wing populism as a tool".
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