Libra

Yes, I too am aware that people often misuse words. It might be safe to assume that the guy who just demonstrated that he knows how to operate a dictionary probably isn't one of them though. Especially if you had read my comment that they were replying to, because then you would have seen that the nation I was calling an authoritarian regime (in fact, a 'whole-ass authoritarian regime') was Nazi Germany, so I don't think we were in any danger of not labeling Western colonial powers as authoritarian in this thread.

Nah, it's more that the answer to 'why is doing this?' is virtually always 'because money'. People forget that sometimes.

It's weird to juggle anywhere, but you shouldn't let that stop you cause everybody's weird in some way or another and that's fine. A park seems like as good a place as any.

Hmm, obvious troll is obvious. My apologies for assuming that you were merely confused rather than confused and malicious. I won't make that mistake again.

Joining a book and 2 movie clubs was one of the best things I've done in recent years. The book club sadly fizzled cause people didn't have time, but we have a bi-weekly movie club where we pick complex, difficult movies and talk about their themes and such, and a monthly kung-fu movie night where we just hang out and watch silly movies, and they're the highlight of my online week.

You know any discord servers for readers of sci-fi? I've looked around a couple times and the ones I've found are either tiny and inactive or huge and have way too much going on.

Find a discord server with some folks you share interests with and talk to them. I joined a ~300-person gaming/tabletop community a couple years ago and while I don't have any really close friends among them, they're great to chat and hang out and play games with. I've taken to spending the last couple hours of most days just hanging out in voice with people and shooting the shit, it's great.

Because The Guardian is using the article written by The Guardian about what good people The Guardian are to raise money for The Guardian. :P

authoritarian /ə-thôr″ĭ-târ′ē-ən, ə-thŏr″-, ô-/ adjective

Characterized by or favoring absolute obedience to authority, as against individual freedom.

"an authoritarian regime."

Look, it's right there in the example even.

If you would like to argue definitions I encourage you to spend some quality time with a dictionary. Google can point you to several.

(Premise - suppose I accept that there is such a definable thing as capitalism)

I'm not sure why you feel the need to state this in a discussion that already assumes it as a necessary precondition of, but, uh, you do you.

People blaming capitalism for everything then build a country that imports grain, while before them and after them it’s among the largest exporters on the planet (if we combine Russia and Ukraine for the “after” metric, no pun intended).

...what?

What does this have to do with literally anything, much less my comment about innovation/competition? Even setting aside the wild-assed assumptions you're making about me criticizing capitalism means I 'blame [it] for everything', this tirade you've launched into, presumably about Ukraine and the USSR, has no bearing on anything even tangentially related to this conversation.

People praising capitalism create conditions in which there’s no reason to praise it. Like, it’s competitive - they kill competitiveness with patents, IP, very complex legal systems. It’s self-regulating and self-optimizing - they make regulations and do bailouts preventing sick companies from dying, make laws after their interests, then reactively make regulations to make conditions with them existing bearable, which have a side effect of killing smaller companies.

Please allow me to reiterate: ...what?

Capitalists didn't build literally any of those things, governments did, and capitalists have been trying to escape, subvert, or dismantle those systems at every turn, so this... vain, confusing attempt to pin a medal on capitalism's chest for restraining itself is not only wrong, it fails to understand basic facts about history. It's the opposite of self-regulating because it actively seeks to dismantle regulations (environmental, labor, wage, etc), and the only thing it optimizes for is the wealth of oligarchs, and maybe if they're lucky, there will be a few crumbs left over for their simps.

That’s the problem, both “socialist” and “capitalist” ideal systems ignore ape power dynamics.

I'm going to go ahead an assume that 'the problem' has more to do with assuming that complex interacting systems can be simplified to 'ape (or any other animal's) power dynamics' than with failing to let the richest people just do whatever they want.

Such systems should be designed on top of the fact that jungle law is always allowed

So we should just be cool with everybody being poor so Jeff Bezos or whoever can upgrade his megayacht to a gigayacht or whatever? Let me say this in the politest way I know how:

LOL no.

Also, do you remember when I said this?

‘Won’t someone please think of the billionaires’ is wearing kinda thin

You know, right before you went on this very long-winded, surreal, barely-coherent ramble? Did you imagine I would be convinced by literally any of it when all it amounts to is one giant, extraneous, tedious equivalent of 'Won't someone please think of the billionaires?'

Simp harder and I bet maybe you can get a crumb or two yourself.

My metric of success for the purpose of this discussion is that we (most of us anyway) live in a capitalist economic system and not something else. It's 'succeeding' in the sense that nothing else has replaced it, like it replaced feudalism.

Obviously I don't think it's good or right or just, but I'm forced to acknowledge the fact that it's on top right now.

But it tends to be interpreted as “authority I disagree with”

I disagree with most hierarchical forms of authority, so at least statistically that seems like an adequate definition.

Conservatives have gleefully used the term

I dunno if you've noticed this, but conservatives don't seem to care much about where they get the words they turn into weapons or what they might've originally meant, so I wouldn't use them as a yardstick for the general meaning or utility of a term.

Capitalist growth drive contains the seeds of its own destruction.

I think you might've missed my point. You replied to my joking comment about authoritarianism by asking who would win between an authoritarian and an anarchist. I was countering by pointing out that we obviously care a lot more about things like justice than merely who would win, otherwise we would all back capitalism because it's winning like gangbusters right now despite being pretty unjust. The fact that it might stop winning some day really doesn't have much bearing on the point about only backing winners though, does it? I choose to assume that you've misunderstood, because the alternative is to assume that you are acting in bad faith in trying to distract from the original point.

It can’t just be vibes based individualism

Dismissing a whole-ass rich and nuanced political philosophy as 'vibes' - twice now - is not making me terribly inclined to continue giving you the benefit of the doubt for much longer though.