GarbageShoot

I think you can be a communist if you do lone-wolf activism, you're just 99% certain to be an inadequate communist. That said, for distinguishing being a communist from a liberal who likes the consumer-lifestyle aesthetic of "communism", the difference is political action of some kind.

The concept both of social violence and violent maintainance of the status quo through cops, imperialism, etc. are helpful. So is a simple trolley-problem framing. The revolutionary socialist does not like violence (or in any case shouldn't), but they see it as necessary for the purpose of stopping the violence that is continuously enacted by the ruling class. If cops were beating someone to death for shits and giggles, would it be wrong to brick them or wrong to not brick them and let their victim suffer and die?

As always, I'm going to link that Roderic Day article on "Brainwashing" because it's good to try to sympathize with people and understand why they believe what they believe, even if they are completely wrong.

Nothing significant can get passed, anything done by executive order can be undone by executive order under a future president,

Not that it's very likely to be undone, as Biden has in fact renewed many of Trump's executive orders, e.g. on immigration and the environment.

What makes that crypto-catholicism?

That much is definitely fair, and it could definitely rattle some of the people who credulously listened before

I mean, I guess they lost their war with Vietnam (thankfully), but it's more reasonable in the context of the Korean War to say that they are the winners.

Just wait until this person finds out what people say about America's military record

Any massive object existing in a medium (i.e. not a vacuum) if it moves at all by virtue of entering space occupied partially by particles of the medium. Does the purpose of sleep include continuing to exist and not halting movement on a molecular level? Sure, I think if I went to sleep and stopped existing, I failed to sleep. If I froze on a molecular level, I would just be dead and therefore also have failed to sleep.

It's interesting how seamlessly you moved to an un-authored system from the technological and political context this was initially about. You're missing the forest for the trees here, in any case. The real point of the statement is that when you aren't talking about something trivial like molecular-level noise, but the massive and systemically enforced prison slavery system in the US (you know, just to pick an example), it is absurd to say that the production and maintenance of such conditions is somehow contrary to the purpose of the US Justice System, or just some sad incident of fate rather than a lifelong cornerstone of the US economic-political system.

By that definition, the purpose of a computer is to get hot. It of course does get hot, but a purpose is more than simply a side-effect.

Generating heat is part of how a computer operates. If some standard-model computer isn't producing heat, it probably isn't functioning very well. That said, it also does several other things, things it does with much greater efficiency than its heat generation (which has some mitigation with cooling systems, depending on the machine), so those must also be considered part of its purpose.

What cannot be considered part of its purpose is what it does not do, such as, uh, reproducing, for example.

You know as well as OP does that it just gets into endless discourse about propaganda and supposed Potemkin mosques and so on.

I think it's unfair to someone this credulous, so I will let you in on the fact that they are fucking with you when they call you a Russian bot or whatever. People are just really sick of dealing with ignorant neoliberals who treat Navalny like Tank Man. The other things they said, about him being a fascist, etc., were sincere and have even been covered in overly-sympathetic sources like Atlantic.

It's wild how up in arms liberals always get for the human rights of fascists. Eight years of kids in Donbas getting shelled: I sleep. Leader of an ethnonationalist faction gets assassinated: criminal and horrific act.