That's Popper's and Milt.Friedman's way of laundering fascism as a legitimate ideology, a useful tool for capitalist domination and anti-communism.

Being against humans can't possibly be a human ideology, so fascists don''t count under this protectionist umbrella, I hope.

why does this comment dance between ultra-naive to ultra-troll in my mind?

With the democratic party moving as far to the right as it had, there was little room for the rep.party to move to, other than where it is now.

This is the US political system's reaction to the popular uprising of the Trump years, the transition of Occupy-xyz to BLM ... It is like America of the 30s reacting and ending in the AmeriKKKa of the 50s.

One thing that the American left has way overlooked is the power over 80% of the population that Sunday morning propaganda and indoctrination has. Zombies like Biden can be drawn out of the alter closets and dropped as saviors of a crisis.

The health of the democratic tendencies of the US was evaluated by the revolution the Snowden revelations created. Since there was none, consider the corpse cold and stiff.

and from which trees many fascists will hang

I hate to burst your bubble but when it comes to 6-7digits of cash at stake what does "trustworthy" even mean? You mean between millions and his word to you he will choose his word? His previously stated values and principles?

The guy who made waterfox seemed pretty nice, friendly, committed to the cause, then sold the project to a data-miner, and so did the honest people who made startpage, the trustworthy privacy minded search engine? Now they see waterfox is independent again and not part of the big multi-natinal data miner.

Mozilla once again made a sudden change that breaks your previous profile or other functionality and if you dare roll back the upgrade your profile has been ruined in transition, so you are forced to start from scratch reconfiguring, setting up you std tabs, bookmarks, history .. Same stuff with TB, addons/plugins disabled, new "features" added, whether you trust them or not, added dependencies .. you roll back you lose.

The google chrome-engine is so intrusive in the way it runs, degoogled or not, it is hell to have on a system. Maybe inside a vm without anything else other than specific browser session may be ?ok? for fluff work, nothing private I hope.

The naivity of people to accept and sometimes welcom large corporations producing FOSS is what got us to this mess, and I don't mean users, but devs, distro managers, .. if it is legally FOSS it is OK, even if it is a huge trojan horse manufactured by corporations to penetrate an other wise safe and secure system. FOSS - no corporate involvement - may be it, but will it boot? LinFound. gets millions and millions to have board seats to influence kernel, and it seems to be dancing with their wishes.

Low density suburbs are a US thing, where chaotic lack of urban planning allowed people to spread out to cheaper land to build a home while passenger cars and fuel were in abundance and cheap. Compare an urban suburban area in Germany, where the majority of population lives in satelite villages (higher density little towns) served by one or two train stations in proximity to ride to the "city"/workplace of industrial center.

This US peculiarity was formed by policy controlled by the oil and auto industries, and their puppets politicians serving their interests alone, or risk never get re-elected. You can't design a transportation system to match chaos in all other respects. It may be too late to think in terms of efficiency how to cure US pathology. It is deep embedded in US lifestyle.

Rural Europe may not have adequate public transport but by historic evolution, farmers, owners and workers, lived in the center of an agricultural area, small town, small lots, marketplace centered in the middle of the town, and transportation needs were those of going to land and back. There was always a way to do so, animals, carriages, tractors, even buses in some respects. Expanding urban centers and lack of affordable housing had people either move to such towns or find work from such towns to the city, and this created new problems and challenges. Either a box like bed-sheet efficiency in the urban slams, or a decent small house in a village 1hr away.

I can't say there are no problems outside the US, it is just that many problems of the US are only in US and exist because of special industrial interests fully represented by government against ALL interests of public nature. Housing, food, health, energy, transportation, education, are intentionally disorganized and problematic in the US, as commodities regulated by cartels of industrial interests alone. An example of this collision of paradigms is the attempt by the US to parallely form two agreements as market/trade of N.Atlantic and one in Pacific rim. New Zealand, being geographically isolated from the rest of the world, deep South in the vilent south pacific, had created a domestic pharmaceutical industry for every drug it is considered essential. To open up to a free world market and allow it to go bankrupt, the chance to have to depend for imports for pharmaceuticals was by no means in the table for negotiation. The US members pushing for the agreement thought of this reaction as extreme as radical communist reaction to "open market".

Neither of these agreements have gone too far as far as I know or read recently. Various similar problems, the covid pandemic, brought new variables in the table the US had taken for granted that it is "common sense" for the entire planet that an open market should not be intervened or challenged by any government, by any interest group, by any humans! So we can't really talk about US totalitarian neo-liberalism when there is still evidence of resistance and anti-American sentiment in the world. It is too early for humanity to adopt to Hollywood fantasies and AI.

So, a criminal can sign up, get on an on-demand bus, rob people, and get off

I wrote elsewhere in this thread extensively about what is the problem you try to solve before a proposal can be examined. Here you present such a problem, and it is so US-centric it is pathetic, I doubt very much you are from Canada for example, or even Australia, let alone the rest of the world.

Now, is the criminal a criminal before he gets into the bus/uber-taxi-van or does he become one by the time she/he exits? Anyone can be a possible criminal if you don't really know them, and still get surprised about the ones you do know.

It is amazing how deep social conditioning has gone in the US to create this culture against "sharing anything" and everyone having their own solution (after they pay for it) and having total disregard for those who can't afford an individualistic solution. You can buy education, shelter, food, health service, everything on your own in an open market for labor and commodities. Nobody needs solutions to common problems, only money to buy solutions.

You walk in Europe in any capital city and in touristy areas, and you can pin point those from the US from miles away. Criminals getting on buses, metro, public hospitals, are harder to spot.

I’ve found it to be surprisingly stable

It sounds like you have used it extensively then, because the myth is spread by people who never tried.

Arch users HAVE to know

They do know this is a popular myth spread around by the antiquities of debian/mint/ubuntu users who wait a few years for Arch users to locate any bugs.

I’ve had to switch to mint.

That bad, huh? I am sorry, I hope you get better.

you guessed it, I use joborun, like arch without systemd, runit optionally s6/66