Schmoo @ Schmoo @slrpnk.net

Posts

5

Comments

495

Joined

2 yr. ago

You can only continue to call this system a democracy by setting the bar very very low. Pointless to argue semantics though, better to argue substance. We won't get to a better - more representative - democracy by working within the current system; we need to apply external pressure. People don't feel that voting in this election will save democracy because they don't feel there's enough of it left to be saved. Voting in this election can at best stave off a total collapse to fascism, but that's it.

Chickens are domesticated to the point that they cannot survive in the wild / have no ecological niche. Without some small scale animal agriculture like backyard chickens they would go extinct, though you could argue it's for the best.

Personally I think small-scale egg farming is not exploitative when the chickens are treated well.

I've noticed a trend in some new American media coming out of more openly positive depictions of socialism/communism. The new HBO The Last Of Us series for example has this scene, and the new Fallout series has a more centrist/neoliberal take but at least calls out how the right uses communist as a "dirty word," though she qualifies the statement by first saying "I'm not a communist."

What you described is just welfare, not socialism. Socialism is collective ownership of the means of production, meaning there would be no need to re-distribute wealth as it would be fairly distributed from the start.

What you're thinking of is more along the lines of what Scandinavian countries have, which is just capitalism with social democracy and extensive welfare programs.

I'm speedrunning this shit.

The hate largely comes from the side of anarchists who refuse to work with MLs and spend their time trying to discredit the accomplishments of existing socialist states.

You have been discrediting the accomplishments of anarchists while I have been acknowledging the accomplishments of marxists.

While the left bickers, the right is rapidly growing in power in vast majority of western countries.

I agree, but remember this conversation was started because you were insinuating that anarchists never accomplished anything.

This is getting repetitive and we're just talking past each other so let's just agree to disagree about the USSR. I just want to make the point - which I hope we can agree on - that the revolution wouldn't have been successful without political pluralism within the ranks, and no future revolution will either. Dismissing the contributions of anarchists will only harm your cause.

What I'm pointing out is that all ideologies compete with others. That's the reality of the world. If Anarchists are not able to defend the way they want to organize society then their ideology ends up being trampled by others. That's the world we live in. Calling this victim blaming doesn't change the material reality of the world.

The Bolsheviks' had the ill-gotten might to push their agenda, but might does not make right. The Bolsheviks lied to and used the anarchists to achieve what they did, but anarchists have learned from their past mistakes and will prove you wrong.

USSR existed under siege from global capitalism throughout its whole existence, and that was the reason it was organized the way it was.

Capitalist aggression did not make necessary the regressive views on social issues and science the USSR had (which resulted in famine), nor the widespread corruption and bureaucratic inefficiency of state officials. You cannot simply excuse all flaws of the USSR by blaming global capitalism.

You're using the same argument capitalists use to dismiss socialism, namely that socialism clearly doesn't work because all socialist projects ended in collapse or continue in a state of poverty. This is, in essence, victim-blaming. Just as socialism struggles under the oppression of capitalist hegemony, anarchism struggles under the oppression of both capitalists and statists.

What Bolsheviks achieved was the betrayal of all who fought for the liberation of the proletariat. If power had gone to the Soviets as the Bolsheviks promised then the USSR would not have collapsed under the weight of its' contradictions. You speak as if the USSR only repressed the forces of reaction, but it also repressed the very same workers it claimed to support when they tried to claim the worker control of the means of production they were promised.

Nah, I'm going by the actual tangible achievements, or lack of thereof as the case may be, of anarchists based on the teachings of their thinkers.

The Bolsheviks discount anarchist achievements by claiming them as their own. Anarchists fought alongside the Bolsheviks because they promised to realize the anarchists' goal of all power to the Soviets. When it became clear the Bolsheviks lied in order to selfishly establish themselves as the intelligentsia, a privileged class, the anarchists resisted and were violently repressed by their former brothers and sisters in arms.

I would like to hear about your experiences growing up in the USSR as I know there were many positive aspects, but by betraying the values for which many of the revolutionaries fought they created a society with an unstable foundation, as evidenced by its' eventual collapse. Anarchists did not reject real world solutions, they defended them with their lives and lost. The Bolsheviks have themselves to blame for the collapse.

You claim to know with great detail and certainty what anarchists believe without citing any anarchist thinkers. All you are doing is constructing a strawman of anarchists based on vibes hoping that none will be here to refute it. Anarchy is more than the absence of the state, and none who are knowledgeable posit that anarchy will materialize without effort. Anarchists are idealists not out of naivete, but necessity. It has been born out of history that when means and ends are not unified, the means become the ends. This was true of the Russian revolution when "all power to the Soviets" became hollow words and "war communism" became the new oppressor of the people.

In my experience growing up southern baptist Christians only bring up that interpretation when convenient. The Old Testament is completely valid when they want it to be, and invalid when they don't.

No they hate this truck. It needs to be 3x the size, get 10 miles to the gallon, and be filled with useless smart features before it meets their standards.

We're lucky we don't have ancient Roman style privatized firefighters that would stand around and wait for payment before putting out your fire.

I'm from Kentucky. His name was never on any ballot I had access to. Would have voted for him if I ever actually had the opportunity to do so.

I hate how well this analogy works.

Words mean what people who use them think they mean, and Americans using the word Libertarian mean right-wing anti-government and pro-business folks. This may not have been the word's original meaning, but language changes.

You do have a >!teleporter detector!<, sort of. You can use the >!scout launcher to see when the teleporter activates by shooting the scout on the platform and hanging back. A black hole will appear when it activates and you can jump in.!<

I think it might depend on what client you're using. They're working on Sync.

I mean, the entire game can sort of be described as an easter egg hunt. If you're talking about >!warping inside the Ash Twin project!< then I get it, I got stuck on that for a while too but I love puzzle games and am used to that feeling of being stuck. I've noticed watching playthroughs that most people miss >!clues for how to tell the warp towers apart or how to apply the knowledge that warp towers activate when oriented towards the gravitational center of a destination!<, so there could've been more clues for that.

Edit: I think something that could've improved it is if they made a mini-game of the ship log to get more people to interact with it. A lot of the issues people seem to have with the game stem from them not meaningfully engaging with the clues they've been given. As it is the game relies heavily on people actively trying to piece together the puzzle themselves without any mechanism to ensure they do it.