I reject that USA has been a totalitarian cause it has had slaves or women has not always been allowed to vote.
I think you must look at the way the rest of the world was during the same time to get a honest picture of the "totalitarian state" of USA.
Hand pick some historic situation and then comparing versus a "Perfect World" (and since USA was not as good as this Perfect world.. then it must totalitarian/evil/..)
This is not an honest way to frame the argument
I think determinism would be way better than a system with some pseudo random setup.
I think hand waving away the specific language used, ie "determinism" without really talking about what it means or why it does (not) matter is dishonest.
I think that most social media is increasing the power of bad faith compared to good faith actors.
Normal perspective versus an extreme perspective then I fear that the more normal perspective people often has a more diverse situation with many other sources and influences.
A less extreme person arguing in good faith probably has many other things in his/her life to worry about, like children/parents/work/neighbours etc.
While bad faith actors often have much less distractions, and can more easily afford to just keep the point going. I think a bad faith actor will relative easy force out more moderate/normal people out of the forum or conversation thread.
Why keep going, if you got a family and work and .. to take cary about, and arguing in good faith will be hard to get anywhere good ?
I think this give a much bigger loudspeaker to people with more extrem views, and help shut up people with more moderate positions.
I suspect the the setup of social media and the tools they use, and the tools within forums influence this.
Engagement is probably increased if such extreme versus moderate is argued, and I think the more extreme position win is likely increasing income for social media.
In a debate when someone say they understand the motivation of their enemy and that the enemy is evil, this is often not very accurate.
When one side of the political side express why someone on the other side is doing something, then it is good to take a big chunk of salt..
If svn covers 99% of your use cases, then you need more experience with distributed version control systems.
Able to commit locally, examine changes work with them and then push is a something you might not need or require if you think about version system like SVN.
But if you have learned Git or Mercurial or some other distributed system you would never go back to svn.
I think you must look at the way the rest of the world was during the same time to get a honest picture of the "totalitarian state" of USA.
Hand pick some historic situation and then comparing versus a "Perfect World" (and since USA was not as good as this Perfect world.. then it must totalitarian/evil/..) This is not an honest way to frame the argument