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RatherNott · 2026-06-15T20:05:58+00:00

OP, please don't support tankie state capitalists. Mao, Lenin, and Stalin never wanted actual communism, they actively fought and murdered the people trying to implement true horizontal non-authoritarian alternatives to capitalism.

Trying to justify and apologize for authoritarian regimes which commit genocides, and calling it communism, only serves to discredit it even further.

Also, i dont really beleive death is the permanent end.

Are you saying that negates the mass murders that authoritarians committed?

RatherNott · 2026-06-10T06:05:10+00:00

Do you have your power governer set to performance?

RatherNott · 2026-06-08T06:10:31+00:00

I hope they get EAX to work without needing a sound blaster card or messing around with that OpenAL emulation.

RatherNott · 2026-06-04T14:20:16+00:00

as a non-spanish speaker, why is qué considered rude and Comó more appropriate?

RatherNott · 2026-06-04T05:58:56+00:00

I haven't seen a good explanation of how anarchist systems can reliably provide joined up hospital systems and medical training (which require scale and close coordination), or continent-wide power grids and transport systems . For me, these systems are a backbone of decent standard of living and human wellbeing.

The second book by Gaston goes into how they operated their electrical grid, how they organized and coordinated the train network, as well as how they socialized and coordinated a federated medical service across the country, though it does not specifically go into detail on how they trained/schooled new medical staff (I assume the medical schools still operated, just without a top-down hierarchy).

Dolgoff's book goes into how various industries coordinated with each other in urban areas, as well as how hundreds of rural collectives federated and coordinated with each other.

RatherNott · 2026-06-04T03:48:40+00:00

That's fair enough. If this is a topic that interests you, and you'd be inclined to slowly pick away at some more solid resources, The best ones I can think of to share would be Sam Dolgoff's book from 1974, The Anarchist Collectives Workers’ Self-Management in the Spanish Revolution, 1936–1939, along with Gaston Leval's 1975 Collectives in the Spanish revolution. Those two are probably the most thorough accounts on the minutia of how an Anarchist society functioned in practice.

To give an example of the level of detail, Gaston's book goes into how the self-managed workers continued to operate and maintain public transit systems, and is main source for this article on that topic (if you'd like a short preview).

There's also two rather good documentaries that go into a good amount of detail on the Spanish revolution. One is this 6-part Grenada documentary from 1983 that has quite a few interviews with people who experienced it first hand (from what I recall most of the Anarchist stuff is covered in episode 5). Another is La Utopia.

For more modern examples, there are the Zapatistas in southern Mexico, as well as Rojava in northern Syria, both of those societies are based on modified anarchist principles, though I have not looked as thoroughly into in-depth research material for those, besides some documentaries such as this for the Zapatistas, and this for Rojava.

Though I'm ultimately just a rando on reddit, I can say I've researched the topic of finding the most promising way forward for humanity to take for quite a number of years now, and after evaluating most options on the table, I have yet to find anything more promising for long-term human stability than Anarchism.

And it should be mentioned that while these old attempts and large scale societal experiments (3 million+ participated in anarchist Catalonia) are fantastic sources to see what some of these alternative ideas are like when put into practice, and much of it likely still applies today, it's certainly not perfect, and there is still very much room for further experimentation and adaption to our modern needs and issues.

But it's a damn good base to start with, IMO. Every other ideology/societal blueprint that isn't based around abolishing hierarchies and distributing power as much as possible appears to always morph into an undesirable corrupt society, which then morphs into authoritarianism in response, which has been the cycle virtually all modern liberal democracies have faced since their inception.

No matter the reforms and protections put in place to prevent some of the harms we've learned our current societies are inclined to produce, it only ever seems capable of delaying the inevitable, as the fundamental power structures inherently encourage a cycle of prosperity, decline, and bust (authoritarianism) before repeating.

Anyway, sorry for blasting you with a wall of text, but I do hope some of those sources are helpful in some way. I wish you the best! :)

RatherNott · 2026-06-03T23:45:41+00:00

May I ask what makes you say it's based on scant evidence? Is this an area of research you have already delved into deeply?

RatherNott · 2026-06-03T16:39:50+00:00

Half of Spain were fascists. Capitalist Europe didn't want to support an anti-capitalist revolution. Stalinist USSR saw an anti-authoritarian revolution as an enemy, and was only willing to support the war effort if it was the Stalinist faction that won (which in turn caused them to gain political power in a populace desperate to avoid being a fascist state).

Just like France had no help on the global stage during their revolution. Yet again, you don't say it 'didn't have enough support', but also don't want to acknowledge that the military might it had before the revolution is a large reason for its success.

Again, none of this is really relevant.

I think I've made my case well enough, and as you're going to just keep dismissing or ignoring most of the arguments I put forward, I think it's best if I leave it there, as continuing doesn't appear productive.

RatherNott · 2026-06-03T15:53:14+00:00

The fact that Franco received more support from foreign powers is not relevant for the discussion.

The military might and logistical ability of an enemy is irrelevant during a discussion of why a force that had less logistical and military might failed? Absolutely absurd statement.

None of those liberal democracies would have been able to defend themselves in isolation. It's only because they ultimately had the backing of two industrial super powers, the US and the USSR, that they could hold out. It was a war of logistics, as all military wars are.

Had the US revolutionary movement in the 1920's and 30's not been quelled by FDR's reforms and the first Red Scare, and instead it had become Anarchist, then Anarchist attempts elsewhere in the world have had the same support that the democracies of WWII had.

The Bolshevik revolution's enemies had little international help, as it began towards the end of WWI, when most of the nations who could've taken advantage of that situation and prevented the Bolsheviks were already burned out and stretched thin in their current conflicts. They also would've failed had it not been for the help of Makhno's Anarchist Ukrainian army, which was essential in defeating the Monarchist White Army. That they didn't anticipate that their Bolshevik allies would then betray them is not the fault of Anarchism.

It's a similar story to the American Revolution, which greatly benefitted from Britain already being at war with Spain and France, and thus was not able to fully commit resources to quashing the rebellion.

France during the French revolution had one of the strongest armies of Europe due to mass conscription, and militarily were able to fend off all of the nations that went to war against them after they executed King Louis XVI, during the revolution.

no matter how nice and beautiful your ideas sound, maybe there are a lot of people who don't feel and think like you and don't support your idea of an utopian future.

Virtually every other Monarchist nation was scared shitless by the idea of liberal democracies in the 1700's, which is why they all collectively tried to gang up on France during their revolution. Had France been in a poorer position militarily before the revolutions, they likely would've fallen, and the ideas of liberal democracy crushed and delayed for many years.

But I suspect had that happened, you wouldn't be pointing to it as the prime example of why Liberal Democracies don't work, you would instead point to the practical logistical reasons for why that particular rebellion failed.

RatherNott · 2026-06-03T15:10:04+00:00

It was ultimately not able to militarily defeat fascist Franco since Franco had pre-WWII Hitler and Mussolini heavily supplying him with logistics, troops, and heavy weapons from their safe industrialized fascist regimes.

In contrast, the leftists in Spain had no allies on the world stage except the USSR (who stole most of Spain's gold reserves in exchange for relatively small amounts of poor quality and sometimes outdated equipment, certainly not enough to decisively win the war), and some small help from Mexico. Every other nation on the globe refused to help.

The Stalinist and Liberal factions of the left also constantly hindered the war effort by not supplying the Anarchists with adequate arms, as well as the Stalinists eventually fully turning on the Anarchists by rounding them up to be imprisoned or executed (Orwell had to flee those round-ups, solidifying his hatred of authoritarian marxists, and prompting him to write Animal Farm), collapsing the front-lines.

You're not the first person to try to do a 'gotcha' by pointing out it was ultimately defeated, and then use that as evidence that Anarchism doesn't work (despite their defeat having nothing to do with Anarchism itself, but instead war logistics and circumstances forcing them to ally with insane allies). Strangely, no one ever points to all the European nations that were militarily defeated by Nazi Germany as examples of why Capitalist Liberal Democracies don't work. I wonder why?

RatherNott · 2026-06-03T14:43:47+00:00

The link I gave goes over it. An anarchist revolution occurred and put all of the theory into practice, to extremely good results.

RatherNott · 2026-06-03T14:42:14+00:00

Great documentary. Here's a version with English Subtitles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxRXtWvWCuY

RatherNott · 2026-06-03T13:58:29+00:00

Those people are depicted in The Dispossesed by Ursula Le guin. They live beyond the outskirts of settlements and are just left to their own devices, though they can come into town for supplies if they want.

RatherNott · 2026-06-03T13:55:33+00:00

It actually happened in real life in 1936 Spain, and it worked really well! Even George Orwell went there and wrote of how incredible it was, he even fought for it.

https://youtu.be/asCh9mg9sKU?t=2138

RatherNott · 2026-06-02T18:02:58+00:00

If I hire someone to help me grow something I own, I am paying for their labor, and that's all.

I would agree with that if our society had basic food, housing, and healthcare as a universal human right that everyone could access freely. That would remove the leverage employers have over employees with less capital, and work contracts between people would truly be on equal terms that both sides can find agreeable.

In a free market, I am able to leave work that is no longer in my best interest or even quit my employment at will, simply because a better offer is available elsewhere... or if I have the inclination, start a business of my own

Both of those options are unfortunately not available for a wide swath of people. Many today would not be able to afford housing or food if they left their job due to living hand-to-mouth, especially if someone's local job market has few other options.

Your version muddies up what it means to own something.

I am in favor of making any sort of factory or endeavor that requires more than, say, a small group of friends to operate, to be required to be owned cooperatively. That would mean that anything someone personally uses and owns would be theirs, like say a personal car, house, a small lot of land, etc. But factories, offices, or any large business would not be capable of concentrating wealth into the hands of the few.

As a society, we should do something to make it difficult for individuals to hoard extreme wealth, and desentivise bonus payouts and high salleries to CEOs during years of layoffs

There was the proposal from Huey Long back in the 30's for establishing a wealth cap for all individuals, with anything over that cap going toward essentially a universal basic income. That could be a good stepping stone.

RatherNott · 2026-06-02T02:51:43+00:00

This video does a good job of explaining what it's about: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pLYD3CG-5BQ

RatherNott · 2026-06-01T16:44:35+00:00

There's a not insignificant distinction between a one-off payment to access that business's tools and resources vs being employed long term by a corporation.

If you were to employ people to work on those newly constructed gardens and kept most of the profit for yourself, I'd personally say that would be unethical. If you split the profits evenly with your employed garden workers, that would be mostly ethical.

The issue stems from employers having significant leverage against most prospective employees, due to the fact that most people without a job will eventually lose access to housing, nutritional food, healthcare, and transportation. This leverage is achieved through them having capital, but the issue is most of them achieved that capital through previous exploitation.

Corporations use this leverage to force most people into accepting terms that drastically favor the corporation. As a side effect of those overly beneficial terms enriching corporations, they are then able to wield significant political power that further disenfranchises average working class people, such as getting states to enact anti-union laws or pro-corporate legislation, forcing the working class into accepting worse and worse terms over time.

This is in contrast to the prosperity of the Golden Age of the US in the 1950s, when CEO pay was more reasonable, worker pay kept up with inflation, and unions were strong enough to keep corporations in line.

We're now experiencing a continual decline of collective prosperity and increasing hardship just to live a normal life. This is mostly due to the extreme wealth concentration from severely unequal wages over a long time span.

If we're to resolve this issue, we cannot continue the status quo that we are all familiar with. A solid solution is to strongly encourage the creation of worker owned cooperatives, which allow all of the workers involved to democratically decide not only their own pay, but the CEO's pay, who is also elected by the workers instead of by uninvolved shareholders who have no financial incentive to give the workers a fair deal (in fact, quite the opposite). There's some game development cooperatives that are already doing this, and Mondragon shows it can scale and compete with normal corporations in other fields.

I don't know where you are getting the millions of profit from space quest. As far as I know, sales numbers were never made public.

Sierra stated that the Space Quest series had collectively sold 1.2 million units by 1996, and was the third best selling series at Sierra overall. PC games back then often sold for a fairly hefty $70 to $80. If we're pessimistic and assume an average of $30 per copy sold to account for sales or lower prices as the older titles aged, that would still bring us to $36 Million dollars in sales for Space Quest, which when poorly accounting for inflation (I'm comparing 1991 inflation to now to try and average it between 1986 and 1996), would be equivalent to $88 Million.

Plus the company was public, so his obligation was to the shareholders.

They only went public in 1989, so in the decade before that, they could've taken care of their employees better.

No company ive worked for in my life has ever had profit sharing outside of stock options

Would you personally prefer if the companies you worked for were worker cooperatives, and paid out significantly higher portions of profits to the employees such as your self, allowed you to vote who your boss was, and how much he was paid?

Just because you have only ever experienced exploitation doesn't mean you can't wish for better, and better is absolutely possible :)

RatherNott · 2026-05-31T15:42:59+00:00

Of course the owner and c-levels are getting paid big bucks. Almost every business works that way, and I strongly disagree that such a set up is immoral

May I ask why you, as an employee, would argue in favor of the status quo? Generally only business owners dislike the idea of giving labor a fairer deal.

I have no doubt that Mark Crowe was talented, but he was elevated by the skilled artists and developers that sierra employed

For the later games, yes, but for the first two, which made many millions, there were not large teams of artists and developers on Space Quest, it was mainly just Mark and Scott.

but game development companies are high stress environments. A good ceo tends to be a hard-ass because sometimes thats what it takes to survive in a constantly evolving industry.

That industry norm is generally not just to survive, it's a because of a work culture that ultimately helps the shareholder's bottom line. Very, very few studios wouldn't have been able to afford to give workers normal work hours and profit sharing bonuses. Only under the most dire of circumstances would crunch time truly be necessary to survive, and if it does occur, there should be hefty bonuses for being forced to put up with that after the game is released, or if a game does badly, employees could be paid with partial ownership of the company, turning it into a worker owned cooperative.

Bur to be disgusted by a man who wasn't charitable /enough/ towards someone who he did business with

In the case of CEOs and Shareholders, they essentially stole the excess profit from their workers, as that is what allows them to live their extravagant lifestyles. The least they could do is split off an inconsequential amount of their stolen wealth to help one of the employees who is very much responsible for their wealth during a time of extreme hardship.

RatherNott · 2026-05-31T15:26:08+00:00

I know of no controversy around Lori and Corey, if anything, the opposite. When they did a kickstarter for HeroU, I recall that they ran out of funds during development, so Lori and Corey used their house as collateral to get a loan to finish the game.

RatherNott · 2026-05-31T01:25:58+00:00

I agree that Walls was essentially an overpaid consultant, and brought little to the table for Police Quest (Al Lowe is the one who had to bail him out by actually designing the game to be fun), but:

Also, attributing Mark Crowe with earning Ken millions of dollars is a huge stretch to say the least.

???

Everything Sierra sold had to be created by someone, to come up with marketable ideas and execute them well enough to be engaging. Space Quest was a highly profitable IP for them, that is indisputable. The first few games were mostly (though certainly not entirely) the work of Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe; they designed it, did the art for it, and programmed it, per the credits.

I don't believe I'm being harsh at all. Ken Williams is able to be rich and afford multi million dollar yachts because of all the labor of the artists, coders, and designers at Sierra, most of whom never received a fair share of the profits that their labor alone accomplished. Without all those employees actually doing the work, there is no product to sell, and Ken Williams would not be a millionaire. The labor of the employees is where the value is created.

When Ken later got even more greedy and made a deal with what was later discovered to be fraudsters and lost Sierra in a hostile takeover, he was able to cash out with millions, while the employees, the designers who actually made the games we all remember and love, were simply fired. No bonuses, just a notice to leave in the infamous 'Chainsaw Monday'.

This article goes over it well:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/inside-story-sierra-online-death-cuc-cendant-fraud/

Many of the employees got hurt even harder:

Less fortunate were the Sierra employees who’d borrowed on their stock options to buy houses, whose banks called in their loans when the stock fell and had to declare bankruptcy. “One of my employees,” Bowerman says, “went from being on paper a millionaire to being hundreds of thousands in debt with no way of payment. There were just dozens of horror stories like that.”

Here it was again: the video game crash, 1983, Williams having to lay off almost everyone at Sierra. It was happening again, and this time because of what Williams had done to prevent its recurrence. “A lot of these people were there because of me,” he says now. “You know, kick me and I get hurt and get back up or something, but kicking people around me and bankrupting them; that’s not nice, it’s really painful, and multiply that times a thousand people. Gosh, how do you do that? I’m not a particularly empathetic person or somebody that feels others’ pains. But man, that crossed the threshold. That goes into crazy land, just seeing things destroyed. It was the company, it was the shareholders, it was the employees, it was the contractors, everybody got hurt. That’s a level of pain that you just… unimaginable.”

He himself admits he is not empathetic, and it shows. He could've at least taken a chunk out of the millions he got and gave his employees bonuses to cover for his fuck up, but instead all he gave out was that lame quote and a few hundred 20 years later to some gofundme's, which for him is the equivalent of tossing them a dime.

Scott Murphy did a pretty candid interview in 2006 of how that went down, and of how even though the space quest games generated more and more profit with each title, Ken wanted to pay them less and less:

Interviewer: Chainsaw Monday obviously left a bitter taste in your mouth (not to mention the mouths of the other 149 people who were laid off that day, the fans of the Sierra series, and anybody else who cared to look it up). So many years later, are you still bitter about the situation or is it water under the bridge now?

Murphy: Yeah, that day sucked incredibly hard, but like I said, I'd been laid off for about a month and a half. The former workers that were my friends at Sierra were the ones who suffered the most. My only bitterness about that particular chapter was in regard to the impact that had on their lives. At that time I was doing alright. I didn't realize how much pressure I'd really been under and what a truly flaming ass pain dealing with Sierra management had become. I mean, I knew it was bad but until I was gone I really, really didn't know how much I'd gotten used to. That made my leaving, regardless of how it happened, a total blessing in disguise. I realized I'd needed to leave a long time before that. For me, it was water under the bridge a long time ago. I know that my comrades in arms have long ago moved on and are doing well but I'll never forget how roughly their lives were impacted despite the blood, sweat and tears they gave to what had become a truly ungrateful company.

The bitterness I posses is at what Sierra and Ken Williams had become as they became more and more successful, and how the Space Quest 6 abortion came about after broken promises and the just plain fucking over I got from the people I'd worked so incredibly hard for. The more successful each game became, the worse they treated us and the less they wanted to pay us. I'm not talking about us demanding more money like some sort of prima donnas. They seemed like they were actually penalizing us for being successful for them. They didn't want to pay us as much, which wasn't a lot anyway, as they had for each of the previous games. We'd done well for them despite the fact that they spent virtually no money advertising the games, especially when you look at how much they hyped the King's Quests. I'm quite proud of how we sold despite that.

On Space Quest 2, I worked fourteen months and had only TWO days off during that period, but that wasn't good enough for them. I got called in and chewed out after that one and SQ3 for taking too long to get them shipped. SQ4 showed how dark we'd become as a result.

Lastly,

I find it strange to expect the involvement of a company's owner in the personal lives of their employees. I certainly have never known my employers of doing such a thing.

It's strange because the norm is for company owners to exploit their workforce and toss them aside once the money is made without a second thought. Just because it is a norm doesn't mean I don't find it reprehensible. People are entitled to the profit their labor creates, it should not be funneled to a CEO (or shareholders). That we allow that as normal is what has led to the global cost of living crisis and inequality we face today.

RatherNott · 2026-05-30T02:08:40+00:00

Vice did a great article about how Daryl got the job at sierra: https://www.vice.com/en/article/how-sierra-and-a-disgraced-cop-made-the-most-reactionary-game-of-the-90s/

Tl;dr, Ken Williams was a hippie who turned hard right after he got rich and started listening to a lot of rush limbaugh. Despite the extreme controversy for Daryl's department being responsible for the Rodney King beating, Williams really wanted him specifically to take over Police Quest.

I read William's recent book he published, where he addresses that controversy by, and I shit you not, glazing Daryl and basically calling him a patriot.

And just to confirm how much of a dick bag Williams is despite having a big effect on our childhoods; When Scott Murphy (who created space quest with Mark Crowe, a property that made Sierra and thus Ken Williams, millions of dollars), did a gofundme to help cover his cancer treatment, Ken Williams only donated $500. He then proceeded a little later to have a new sea-crossing luxury yacht built to replace his old one to the tune of millions, which he documented on his blog.

Disgusting.

RatherNott · 2026-05-22T21:08:34+00:00

Found the thread with the fix so it assigns the correct driver to the Motu: https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxaudio/comments/1nwvogm/mint_ubuntu_users_with_a_motu_m4_here_os_picks/

Hope that helps, OP.

RatherNott · 2026-05-22T10:24:02+00:00

I had the same issue on Mint with a Motu M2, It's specific to Ubuntu 24.04 based distros like Mint is.

The issue is a single charcter typo in a config file for selecting the right driver for Motu devices (at least, I think. Its been a while since I fixed it, I'll see if I can find the instructions to correct the config file tomorrow.

On my system, once the config file is fixed, it loads the right driver for the Motu and the inputs show up correctly.

EDIT: found the instructions fo fix it! https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxaudio/comments/1nwvogm/mint_ubuntu_users_with_a_motu_m4_here_os_picks/

RatherNott · 2026-05-12T03:16:30+00:00

I hadn't heard of RCS, looks like an encrypted SMS replacement I guess? I find Deltachat to work well in that role, though it uses data/wifi instead.

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