After taking a walk and taking time for some reflection. Yeah. You’re right. I don’t really know what I’m talking about and am taking a “vibes-based” approach. However for me that’s preferable to giving vanguardists any credit for anything.

That being said I did find this: https://socialismtoday.org/archive/38/spain38.html

Arms for Spain: The Untold Story of the Spanish Civil War. By Gerald Howson, John Murray, 1998. Reviewed by Dave Murray

The biggest myth to bite the dust, is that the Soviet Union under Stalin materially aided the republican side. He has tracked down documentary proof that the vast bulk of military material supplied to the republicans by Stalin was of poor quality, that the republic was charged at or above market price and that by falsifying the currency exchange rates employed in these deals, the Soviet Union defrauded the republic of at least $51m (at 1936 prices). Helpfully, Stalin arranged for the Spanish government to ship its gold reserves (in 1936 the fifth largest in the world at $518m) to the Soviet Union and, guess what, by the end of the civil war most of it had been transferred to the Soviet government as payment for arms procurement or in return for credits at the Soviet Bank in Paris. That Stalin was one of the executioners of the Spanish revolution is no surprise to us Trots, but Howson has done us a favour in furnishing us with cold hard facts.

Now I can’t find an actual open copy of the book (nor am I spending that much effort looking for it) so I can’t really give you anything more.

1. I’m not a leftist. I’m an anarchist. One that is drifting further and further from “the left” as discussions like these happen.
2. I haven’t quoted Orwell once. My source is a footnote that has Orwell’s quotes among others. My main one for the claim you made are from D.T. Cattell.
3. Are you really claiming that the front being slow is the same as them playing football? Or do you actually believe that the POUM was playing football with the fascists? because that is the only way your claim that Orwell is unreliable by refuting this makes sense.
4. I think the fact that the Communists were intentionally withholding supplies makes the claim that they were supplying anarchists complicated enough to warrant my reply, even if it was a bit too absolutist.
5. None of this matters. Our disagreement is ideological, both of our minds are made up and neither of us is budging, so why are we doing this. Especially when the subject is a civil war nearly a century ago.
6. It doesn’t matter weather or not the USSR supplied anarchists. The Communists were (same as in the own russian revolution) suppressing the anarchists and stopping them from achieving their goals. They made decisions that actively hurt the collectivized society in Aragon.

That the Communists withheld arms from the Aragon front seems established beyond question

That is my source. It’s good enough for me. The fact that Chomsky (a well respected academic*) published that is good enough for me.

*: There are ties to Epstein, but for me that doesn’t invalidate his academic opinion.

Ok. You wanna dance? Let’s dance.

The USSR did supply (provide any weapons to) anarchists in Spain.
However the Communists¹ didn’t supply (provide as many weapons as they could have to) anarchists in Spain.

¹: because as you pointed out the fault wasn’t just the USSR but Spanish as well.

I was hoping that the context made the distinction clear but clearly that is not the case.

To be honest I don’t care if the communists are Soviet or Spain. The arms that the USSR was sending didn’t reach the anarchists. That was the only claim I was refuting.

Reiterating for the sake of clarity.

That the Communists withheld arms from the Aragon front seems established beyond question, and it can hardly be doubted that the motivation was political. See, for example, D.T. Cattell, Communism and the Spanish Civil War (1955; reprinted New York: Russell & Russell, 1965), p. 110.

The fact that the footnote ends with Orwell’s own quote is just a nice tie back to the discussion.

Regarding the rest of the comment I’m not interested in reenacting “anarchist vs ML: spanish civil war” online theater. I just wanted to push back on the claim that the USSR supplied anarchists.

The USSR didn’t supply the anarchists. They The Communists actively refused to give them arms and worked against them. That was the cause of Orwell’s disdain towards them. source: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/noam-chomsky-on-anarchism#fn70

Edit: Correcting sentencing after being corrected in a reply.

"There are so many games out there that feature space travel and yet none of them really get it. The horror of an endless dark vacuum so intent on killing you that just 90 seconds in its inanimate presence is more than enough to freeze, suffocate, and explode you inside out. Space is literally the worst place in the universe.

People always think of space as above us, but it’s not really; you don’t have to look up to see space, you have to look away from safety to see space. Then, when you’re out there in the nothing, there are jewels; un-process-ibly large balls of fire and light held together by our own fucking anger, rocks that can range between husks of nothing or everything some life ever knows, and an endless amount of phenomena that would take our scientific knowledge and fuck it from arsehole to breakfast.

But video games just don’t get it. They just don’t get space. Video games set in space are either just men with big swinging dicks firing at bug-eyed monsters or fucking truck driving simulators. If exploration does happen to be the focus, you’ll find out that the main difference between the endless majesty that is life in this universe is the colour of the fucking grass. Yeah, you’re in space but it feels inaccessible like a fingerprint wouldn’t take on it; like it’s behind glass.

The Outer Wilds - fucking hell - the Outer Wilds gets space. It doesn’t care about scale or scientific accuracy, it gets the feel right. Yeah, your ship’s made from wood and the majority of planets are the size of of a badly stocked IKEA, but watching all the stars in the sky go out one by one like far off fireworks and knowing that each one could be destroying an entire history and having to do that fucking every 22 minutes – nothing. Nothing has made me feel like that before. No game, no book, no movie. It’s beyond extraordinary.

Its planets - fuck - its planets; each one a bizarre impossible place riddled with life and death and decay and nonsense. Each one dense in history and vandalised by time. Each one nightmarish and so, so beautiful and in 22 minutes, they’re gone

because the Outer Wilds isn’t even really about space, it’s about the question, the most important and terrifying and unanswerable question anyone ever asks: Why? Why bother? Why bother with any of this? People die, stars burn out, the universe will go quiet and dark and cold and in the longest run, nothing - absolutely nothing matters. Everything dies, the universe included. So why sit around the fire, playing music into a void that doesn’t care? Why huddle around the light? Why play?

Because, well - look at it. It’s mad, all of it. Life is a big stupid blob of meaningless nothing. Yet from that, we find meaning. People, things, animals, art, sofas, cereal, Rubik’s cubes, silly little games about space, whatever. None of it matters in the grand scheme but fuck the grand scheme! There’s no logical reason for life and nobody’s gonna mourn it when it’s gone, but that’s what makes it fantastic. Life is a little song that we hum to ourselves and, I wouldn’t want it other way.

The Outer Wilds is an optimistic game about nihilism. It’s a game with no invisible walls, you can complete it in ten minutes if you know what to do - which you won’t for hours - and the only limit is knowledge. It’s a game literally like no other. The universe is big and long and impossible and daft and you, you happen to be experiencing it at the exact same point that you can play the Outer Wilds as well. Embrace that coincidence. Come on, what are you waiting for? The sun could explode tomorrow."

• Daniel “NerdCubed” Hardcastle - 2019 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkA5a8ov8Dw&t=1655s

Which is my candidate for the most underrated youtuber, yeah he has 2.4 million subscribers but the videos bring in like 50k views, so it’s obviously wrong.

Not as much as the relentless positivity around capitalism.

Those extreme acts happen because of social conditions. Having access to guns does make them worse but they shouldn’t happen in the first place. The problem with mass shootings isn’t guns, it’s the people who malfunction. The solution isn’t to ban guns but to improve social programs. The only thing banning guns does is make resisting the other people with guns, whether police or criminal, a lot more difficult.

The only problem is your customer can post it online for free and there is nothing you can do about it.

Making money off of foss stopped as soon as the internet became widespread.

It’s interesting you took that post because I thought it was a great example of how the language of memes changes with platforms. As the text at the top is just a classic Meme header but twitterified.

To give an example:

For me both of these images are equivalent. They are both memes. Are they not? Its just one is using an older “In your face” style.

And so people can see the alt text I had to compile for this: A meme based on the meme of the parent comment. That’s based on a scene from King of the Hill. Peggy says “I told my readers to harness the cleaning power of amonia, with the whitening power of bleahch.” Hank, horrified, says “Peggy that’s the recipe for mustard gas” except the end of the text is changed to "that’s the recepe for A meme from lemmy that refrences a scene from king of hill where Peggy says: “I t”

You missed left 4 dead.

If anyone needs a reminder of why the bolsheviki were shit: here’s a first hand account from Emma Goldman.

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/emma-goldman-my-disillusionment-in-russia

“Vote with your wallet” is not ancap propaganda. “Abolish all money” is.

Edit: read it wrong. In my defence cap and com do sound pretty similar. And I think when I read this comment I forgot they existed which is what those oxymorons deserve.

Just as I started using anarchist.nexus as my main instance.

The two languages are polar opposites in this regard, Zig places the burden on the developer and makes it easy for them to produce memory safe software, whereas Rust places the burden on the compiler and makes it hard for developers to produce memory unsafe software.

The article even points this out. I personally think it’s very good to have these two languages for these separate use cases.The right tool for the job and all that.

No thanks. I like my theory to be from the current century. You know the one where we have stuff like the internet, imminent climate disaster and the hindsight of the soviet regime.

Also starting a cooperative is no individual solution. It’s a first step towards establishing a collective economy. Which could fuel the collective spirit and start a political movement.

I actually don’t care about the pay. As long as I can buy food and pay my bills I don’t care. I would be willing to work for less than minimum wage if it meant I could have a say in my workplace.

And honestly it doesn’t even need to be a tech syndicate. I would be willing to work for any syndicate, and most areas have some kind of IT.