The original definition is a community where private property is not a thing. Private property is when an individual can control the land, tools, and knowledge people need to survive. Private property is factories, not your toothbrush.

Most pro USSR, PRC, or Cuba leftists believe those countries governments controlling all or the vast majority of private property constitutes communism. Some think these countries are socialist and working their way to communism.

Many anti-communist people don’t really understand how these countries work specifically. All their ideas of what communism is are based on how they view the above communist countries.

Finally right wingers will describe California as communist because they have social programs and higher taxes than some states. Basically if the government is intervening in the market by supplying a service or good directly to a citizen that’s communism.

From what I’ve observed most people lie somewhere on this spectrum of definition.

I dream of a world where I believe problems will be resolved to the benefit of everyone and I don’t have to worry about my family’s financial wellbeing

Can confirm, I just tried to install Google pay and it said I couldn’t use it because I was running a custom ROM.

I use a Fairphone 4 running Murena’s e/os. The experience has been pretty good so far. I haven’t needed to repair the phone yet but it’s nice to know I have the option. The os doesn’t have any quirks I can’t live with. I like their app store, it gives every app a privacy score based on what logging it has and permissions it uses.

Cheap frozen pizza and a simple salad.

My SO was traumatized by her religious upbringing. The effects of purity culture have left significant scars that make it practically impossible to be physically intimate. Short kisses, holding hands, and hugging are okay but any amount of nudity is over the line. She wants to be intimate and has been working with a therapist to get there but obvious markers of success aren’t there yet. I knew all of this going in to our relationship or learned them pretty early.

Intentionally helping someone to heal from trauma in a relationship is an appealing concept to me. Being in a romantic relationship with someone I can’t be physically intimate with has some unique problems beyond the problems I had as a single person but on balance out relationship is really good. We’re forced to have really good communication fundamentals so we don’t hurt each other with our conflicting needs. That helps us with tons of aspects of our relationship.

By far this is the most comfortable, enriching, and benefitial romantic relationships I’ve been in.

Fairphone is also quite hackable. Hard to get in the US, only distributor is Murena. In Europe they’re pretty easy to find from what I hear. Sd exists but you need to power cycle the phone to access it so maybe not your best bet. Still, if I need to transfer stuff quickly USBC is really fast.

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I’ve been shopping at WinCo, it’s a further bike ride than Fred Meyer or Trader Joes but the prices are hard to beat. This year I’m looking at buying into a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture). The one I’m looking at is $400 for 12 boxes of food spread across 24 weeks. We’ll see if it’s a good deal. I’ll be planting a garden soon too. Hoping to get a 3 sisters plot or two as well as some potatoes in containers

Country is a little vague so I’ll supliment state in it’s place. I’d argue there are communist societies but no communist states. “communist states” may be an oxymoron.

A useful way to think about self described communist states is that they are attempting to build communism. Whether or not their strategies are effective is up for rigorous debate of course.

Communist societies on the other hand have existed since the dawn of humanity. I read an interesting book titled The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow. They cover a variety of indigenous groups’ economies and social structures. Some could be described as communism, others were as exploitative or worse than our current society. The San tribes are a modern example of an egalitarian society or maybe more accurately a group of egalitarian societies. I’m also interested in the Zapatistas and what the folks in Northern Syria are doing but I doubt they constitue communism.

Anyway I’m no authority on these things but I hope you found the perspective interesting. The audiobook for the Dawn of Everything is fastinating and a local library might have a copy if you want to check it out.

Amy Winehouse. If she stayed a blues singer in London she might not have had so many drug issues made worse by fame.

Any society that is not communism is not free. If your continued existence is dependant on you working for a wage you are not free. Being “free” to sign a contract that removes your rights so you can work and thus eat is not freedom.

A free society does not need to coerce you into doing things that are good for society. You do them because they are fun or fulfilling. In other words, the same reason people work on open source software.