The rise of the megacorps was in the late 19th century as imperialism, otherwise known as “monopoly capitalism” or the Highest Stage of Capitalism.

The stage we’re in now is a further advancement known as neocolonialism, which began in the mid-20th century. You might say that neoliberalism and the rise of neoclassical economic hegemony are closely related to neocolonialism.

Combine Honnete Ober Advancer Mercantiles

• Cargo cult programming
• Five whys
• Are Your Lights On?: How to Figure Out What the Problem Really Is

Moralities aside, some find it liberating to stop caring what is & isn’t considered “weird.” Conformity definitely has its advantages, but at least consider the possibility that, for you, it may not be worth the costs. Take it from Al, or DEVO themselves for that matter.

As for morality, I’m not really a fan of it in its conventional senses. Philosophy prof. Hans-Georg Moeller, author of The Moral Fool: A Case for Amorality.

• The Problem with Sam Harris’ “Morality”
• If Morality Exists Everything Is Permitted. (Q&A)
• Hans-Georg Moeller - The Moral Fool: A Case for Amorality [interview]

That’s at least partially true, perhaps even predominantly, but there’s also the desire to have very lean distributions for containterization, and GNU is comparatively “bloated,” for lack of a better term.

The US has never been and will never be a democracy, because it was born of a bourgeois revolution[1]. The wealthy, white, male, land-owning, largely slave-owning Founding Fathers constructed a bourgeois state with “checks and balances” against the “tyranny of the majority”. It was never meant to represent the majority—the working class—and it never has, despite eventually allowing women and non-whites (at least those not disenfranchised by the carceral system) to vote.[Princeton & Northwestern] Study: US is an oligarchy, not a democracy

China, in contrast, practices democratic centralism. And its no wonder that the Chinese people are very satisfied with their government, because their quality of life has been improving over the last few generations[2], while ours has been dropping over the last ~40 years of grinding neoliberalism.

Your understanding of China comes exclusively from the imperial core propaganda you & I have been exposed to our entire lives. You’ll never understand it in any other way unless you investigate outside of the bubble we live in.

Try to mention Tienanmen square anywhere

You can in fact mention Tienanmen square in China. The idea that you can’t comes to you from Western propaganda.

• The Tian’anmen Square ‘Massacre’: The West’s Most Persuasive, Most Pervasive Lie.
• Columbia Journalism Review: The Myth of Tiananmen
• 1989 Tian’anmen Square riots
• A Note on the Tiananmen Protests
• Images from Tiananmen 1989 the West never shows (NSFW / CW: violence and death)
• Tank Man video footage. Tiananmen Square, Beijing, 1989
• How psy-ops warriors fooled me about Tiananmen Square: a warning
• [Carl Zha’s] Memories of Tiananmen Protest

Yours is also full of “propaganda”, for the imperial core.

I’m happy when any state chooses China as a partner over the imperial hegemon.

• Are We the Baddies?
• List of Atrocities committed by US authorities
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_imperialism
• The U.S. Did Not Defeat Fascism in WWII, It Discretely Internationalized It
• The blueprint of regime change operations
• Infographic: US military presence around the world The US controls about 750 bases in at least 80 countries worldwide and spends more on its military than the next 10 countries combined.
• World Incarceration Rates If Every U.S. State Were A Country

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(map is ~8 years old)

“Forward-defense ring,” a perfectly normal turn of phrase and not at all Orwellian Newspeak.

(map is ~11 years old)

Are you sad that Indonesia doesn’t want to become the United States’ pet?

Stallman, begging to be defenestrated.

All the so-called “Linux” distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux.

That’s not even true, because they don’t all have a GNU userland.

These arguments are so straw man that they give me hay fever.

🎖️

It’s bigger than it looks: our data is spread across 64,000 worksheets.

When I make espresso at home with a La Marzocco GS3 I’m cool, but when I partake from a Costco tub of caffeine pills, somehow I’m the freak.

Our “big data” is ActiveSheet.Rows.Count big.

I don’t think this concern is justified in most cases, but I’m not really in position to argue. If this were a common problem, I think I’d have heard about it, but outside of the occasional sensationalist news piece or Hollywood/TV thriller, I haven’t.

I do know an old joke, though: Before visiting a foreign country, it’s important to memorize three phrases in the local language:

1. Where is the restroom?
2. How much is it for one night?
3. Power to the people! I support your revolution!

I don’t know what a “treat monster nature” is. I haven’t traveled much outside the core, so I can’t speak to this first-hand, but my impression is that most of the world is mostly a safe place to visit. There aren’t a lot of places that are going to punish you for renting hotel rooms and eating at restaurants as an American. Most people around the world know how to distinguish between America the empire and a civilian American spending money into the local economy.

I don’t fully understand your question, and I doubt that I’m qualified to answer, because I have virtually every privilege, and I’ve never thought about international travel but from my own easy mode perspective.

You say “travel the world,” but where realistically will you travel? Westerners tend to travel almost exclusively to other imperial core countries and to popular tourist spots in the periphery that cater to imperial core tourists.