A Walk in Gemini Space
Good morning, everyone! I hope you are having a good Friday! I am already looking forward to tonight. Because from 19:00 CEST, I will be streaming Red Dead Online with Halefa and Jonathan for the first time. I’m sure it’ll be a lot of fun, so come by tonight and join me on Twitch for lots of cowboy action!
Errata for The Private Citizen 66
Tarkov Functional Gun Presets
In power, socialism swelled the state and destroyed not just the “bourgeoisie” but the small-business owner, the family farmer, the artisan. All of this shocked non-Leninist socialists who hoped to end exploitation and alienation and break through to social democracy while still insisting on their class approach. These Marxists repudiated the Soviet Union as not socialism but a deformation, because of Russia, or Lenin, or Stalin.
After all, Marx had never advocated mass murder, but freedom. Nowhere did he say there should be collective farms formed by secret police coercion, mass deportations to frozen wastes, terrible famine. Of course, Marx had insisted that wage labor was “wage slavery,” private capital “exploitation” and “alienation,” the market “chaos,” and therefore that, to achieve lasting abundance and freedom, capitalism had to be “transcended.” The tragedy began unfolding with the very invention of “capitalism.”
Self-styled socialists in the nineteenth century, initially, had employed other terms – “the anti-social system,” “the system of bourgeois property” – but then hit upon this single all-encompassing notion whose essence (property relations, a mode of production), if replaced, would supposedly alter not merely the economy but the entire world, delivering abundance, social justice, and peace. The invention of “capitalism” was a stunning achievement for the socialists, in a way, but a tragedy for humanity, and ultimately, for the entire left, too.
Unlike Leninists, Social Democrats were never sure whether this “capitalism” would implode on its own, could be peacefully overcome inside parliaments by large worker-majority parties, or in the end required revolutionary intervention, but it had to go. Those Social Democrats who came to believe that “capitalism” was amenable to becoming more humane – capitalism with a human face – opened themselves up to accusations of being accomplices to exploitation and imperialism.
Once markets and private property were named and blamed as the source of evil, statization would be the consequence. A few socialists began, painfully, to recognize that there could be no freedom without markets and private property, but they were denounced as apostates. Compounding the tragedy of the left, traditional conservatives committed the gross error of inviting the fascists and Nazis to power in no small part because of the leftist threat and the hard-nosed view that differences between anticapitalist democratic socialists and Leninists were delusion. To top it all off, Social Democrats and Communists fought a bitter civil war over workers' allegiance.
Without Stalin there would have been no socialism, and without socialism, no Stalin.
— Stephen Kotkin, Stalin – Vol. II: Waiting for Hitler, 1929 – 1941
Addendum to My Cyberpunk 2077 Review
I recently switched from the Savage Cub to the X Cub in Microsoft Flight Simulator and started learning the Garmin glass cockpit that comes with this slightly more complicated plane. I can now use the autopilot and decided to fly from Hamsteede (EHBU) to Calais (LFAC) today. It’s been so much fun and the – REX Weather Force-provided – weather is so nice, that I might, after a quick stop, fly on to Dover and start exploring the UK for the first time.
This Morning with Her, Having Coffee
Operation «Lion Upgrade»
I’ve got quite a few streams planned this week. The plan is to stream every day from Tuesday until Saturday. I’ve got two art streams on the docket, plus PUBG and The Witcher. And I’m going to record an episode of The Private Citizen on Wednesday, of course.
More details on the stream schedule page. See you on Twitch!
Okay. Now on to the first of the two podcast episodes I released this week.
On Wednesday, my usual release day, I recorded and published an episode of The Private Citizen that covers the recent GameStop kerfuffle. If you haven’t heard about it, or don’t really understand what it was about, listen to that podcast episode. It will be worth your while, because it’s a hilarious story.
→ The Private Citizen 54: Hodl the Stonks
How a number of couch investors ruined some Wall Street guys using a mobile app. And why the Wall Street guys really don’t care. And what it means for the future.
You can subscribe to the show via a number of methods:
Oh dear. I am quite behind with telling you about podcasts I’ve recorded. 
I was just going to tell you about the episode I’d released this Wednesday and noticed that I didn’t even tell you about the one from last week. So let’s do that first:
On 27 January, I released an episode of The Private Citizen that I had planned to do for many, many months. It is about the potential of spyware in pretty much every single modern car on the market in Europe.
→ The Private Citizen 53: Clippy in Your Car
It looks like you’ve had an accident! Every new car sold in the EU has a black box in it that will activate the car’s microphone and call emergency services in the event of a crash, supplying them with the car’s location. A system that’s ripe for explotation as spyware.
You can subscribe to the show via a number of methods:
