axont [she/her, comrade/them] @ axont @hexbear.net

A terrible smelly person

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5 yr. ago

Living off ramen and playing video games all day would be an upgrade for me since I already kinda do that but I also have a job

fuck you. How much collateral damage are you supposed to excuse in a fight against Hamas? Thousands of dead civilians?

Israel is an apartheid state and you're an apologist for war crimes

oh wow, fascists have their own versions of video essays with titles like "The Lacanian Genius of Agent Cody Banks 2"

Is this from Spec-ops: the line? hell yea. I love when the loading messages stopped being gameplay tips and became aggressive at the player

Marx talks about most of what you just mentioned in the first chapter of Capital. Socially productive labor transforming nature is the source of value in any society. He also mentions rarity as a source of value, like I remember him specifically mentioning pearls as an example a few times.

He included machinery and technology as what he called "constant capital," and the labor is the variable capital. To say Marx didn't consider technology would suggest he was unaware of what a factory was and that he didn't observe the industrial revolution as it was happening. He was born in 1818. He watched Germany in his childhood go from empty fields full of peasants to factories, railroads, and telegraph lines in his adulthood. You know what made that technology possible? Labor? And who operates that technology? Laborers. This is all cooked into his work.

I'd also like to point you over to the Grundrisse, the chapter called Fragment on Machines, where Marx even speculates on if machinery were all fully automated, saying laborers could move aside from production and just become just "watchmen." This part is good:

"Capital itself is the moving contradiction, in that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as the sole measure and source of wealth [...] On the one side [...] it calls to life all the powers of science and of nature [...] to make the creation of wealth independent (relatively) of the labour time employed on it [...] On the other side, it wants to use labour time as the measuring rod for the giant social forces thereby created"

He's saying capitalism would have a hard tike reducing labor time to zero through technological advancement, since it would defeat the concept of value itself. In simple terms, how would you even price anything if there was no labor cost involved? How would a capitalist sell their product or assign value to it? Who would they sell it to?

Sometimes yeah it's frustrating reading it because some parts assume cultural familiarity with very ancient names or places. I think I remember in the book of Genesis an ancient military leader is named and it's said he did some kind of trick to capture a town, but it doesn't explain what he did or why.

Storytelling has gone through a lot of development over the centuries

I never had an easy time imagining a future for myself and I never had realistic goals. When I was a kid I wanted to be a Ghostbuster, then a power ranger. Then I think I disassociated for a long time, briefly got the idea to be a programmer in college, but that didn't work out since I was no good at it. Then I randomly had the idea to study genetics, which also didn't work out. I changed majors eight times in college.

Won't say what I do now so I don't get doxxed, but it's not exciting and it's a dead end job. I still don't know what I want, but maybe that's a good thing. I make music though so that's kind of neat.

Others have said it already, but anti-intellectualism at its core is alienation. It's a lack of trust in academic or professional authorities and substituting that trust for either ones own experiences or complete hallucinations. People will find alternative communities to trust, especially if they can find something that verifies their existing biases.

If you sense something's wrong with the world, but lack an ability to pinpoint it, you'll go to whoever seems most immediately relatable to you. Reactionaries like Qanon people ended up in that situation. They no longer trust authorities on information outside of cranks on Facebook.

So the question is how do you get more people to adopt a consensus of reality that's based on expertise, professional research, investigation, etc? You have to convince more people they're part of that process and that experts share their interests. America has had that before, but usually in times of conflict against a foreign enemy. The average American used to be really into space travel tech for instance.

There was also a period around the 1890s where the average American was really into electricity as a hobby, like making little circuits or trinkets. It was considered pretty normal back then to have an understanding of how simple circuits like a doorbell worked.

those games are amazing. Monolith was a really good studio before Warner Bros gutted them. Problem with the NOLF games getting a reboot/remake is the rights are split between Fox, Vivendi, and Activision. It's a complete mess and I doubt it'll ever happen sadly

There was a reboot attempted by Starbreeze in 2012 but it was a bog-standard FPS that wasn't up to the quality they normally make. It's been dead silence since.

There are some games you might enjoy that are similar to Syndicate. Tokyo 42, Satellite Reign, Brigador, and this cute little free indie game called DataJack.

Oni would be great, problem is the rights to it are split between like five different studios and it's effectively abandoned. It's why it's not on GOG, Steam, etc.

It also wouldn't surprise me if the source code has been completely lost, meaning there's no chance of an HD upscale or anything.

Ok sorry I was responding to people in my head

They're having the conversation right now. Like there was a recent incident where LGBTQ stuff was banned off Weibo (Chinese social media) and there was a public outcry that reversed the decision. It's up to China to decide how they'll progress and I'm optimistic about it.

China's censorship laws are mostly designed for protectionist reasons, like they don't want their domestic film industry overrun by Disney or Sony. They'd rather have an internal market that's not bound to international businesses. That said, their censorship board is, for better or worse, operated by a bunch of stick in the mud boomers. Hopefully it'll get better with increasing awareness among younger people and changing trends. That said, the idea that China needs its government overthrown because it censors movies or that the state isn't as progressive as it could be? That's absurd and not helping anything.

I should also mention that homosexuality was mostly seen as normal or ignored throughout Chinese history up until the 19th century. It was a theme at the time that Britain or some other western power would start involving themselves within an Asian country and rewrite local laws, including restrictions on homosexuality.

Y'all are cool at least

I mean yeah I wish representation were better. Too many regional representatives are boomers stuck in the past. I was in Shenzhen in 2019 though and met a bunch of cool queer folks though.

Nothing would ever satisfy you people lmao

There are LGBTQ movies from China so this makes no sense. One of my favorites is Lan Yu (藍宇) from 2001. Most of the characters are gay men and the plot is even critical of how the army handled the 1989 Tiananmen Square incident.

Did y'all learn about what China is like from Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoons or what

I've been arrested for protesting before. I can say all I want until I try doing something about it. That's when the cops come out.

Many people are saying it!

Any supposed wrongdoing of the DPRK pales in comparison to what the USA did to the Korean people. Nine million Korean corpses lay at the feet of American imperialism, a number that continues to grow due to continued sanctions, spying, military exercises and aggression. The alleged wrongdoings of the DPRK's entire history do not even amount to the misery inflected by a single hour of American empire.

I'm not a coward who feels the need to avoid taking stances. I'm not a coward who finds moral equivalence in imperialism and defense against imperialism. The fact that the DPRK exists at all in such a context of overt hostility should be regarded as a supreme achievement. The DPRK manages to still stand, despite its hardships and this is a testament to the resilience of the Korean people and the power of socialism.