Anarcho-Bolshevik
‘The political desperadoes and ignoramuses, who say they would “Rather be Dead than Red”, should be told that no one will stop them from committing suicide, but they have no right to provoke a third world war.’ — Morris Kominsky, 1970
- 24 Posts
- 64 Comments
I remember watching my half‐sister play Active Worlds all the way back during the dot com boom, and aside from the lack of virtual reality it sounds like it was almost identical to this: level‐building, character creation, custom textures and models, vanities like pubs and rollercoaster rides, but it had a substantially larger userbase and consequently more content. (It probably even looked better than this, too.)
That was a little over two decades ago. It should be no surprise to anybody that this latest entry in the glorified chatroom genre was dead on arrival: the only new thing that it brings is the virtual reality aspect, which isn’t good enough and just makes accessing this product more expensive.
Everything else that this offers has already been done and done better in Active Worlds, Second Life, Roblox, and other glorified chatrooms that have more than umpteen times the content of this gimmicky crap. They don’t even care enough to moderate it properly!
It would be awesome if this bankrupted Meta, but I’m sad to say that they’ll probably have to do a lot worse than this. Maybe Elon Musk can give Meta a few pointers—or seize it himself.
‘Isn’t there something monstrous about the idea that men of power and wealth will try to block much-needed health insurance for the poor by dangling the scarecrow of a phoney Lenin quotation? And even if Lenin had said this, what would be its relevance forty or forty-five years later? Must millions of Americans be barred forever from adequate medical care because of something Lenin wrote?’
— Morris Kominsky, 1970
Pity that we don’t have an antisocialist here to say ‘WHATS CAPITALISM GOTTA DO WITH THIS???????’ Because we’ve seen how obvious phenomena like marketability and profitability suddenly become foreign concepts when they’re linked to anything embarrassing.
Alternatively: ‘at least you can still get bananas. under commulism you dont get anything and they genocide your entire neighborhood if your suspect of having a banana’ (a classic evidence‐free accusation, unless you count ‘my grandparents are chinese north korean cubans from venezuela so i should know’ as evidence).
I have to admit, RationalWiki exceeded my expectations here. The Lemmygrad hit‐piece was of the same low quality as its other articles on ‘far left’ subject matters, so I am mildly surprised that they deleted it anyway.
RationalWiki is still pretty hopeless, though.
The only advantage that I saw to Musk acquiring the company was the possibility of him running it into the ground. With any luck, Twitter will go the way of MySpace or maybe even face complete dissolution before the end of the decade; it was already a poorly maintained, advert‐riddled piss bucket before and it’s just been getting shittier and shittier every year.
Wow, DLC but for electronics. It’s even more overpriced, too. Maybe capitalists should take a cue from this and start selling all of their baseline and obligatory accessories individually. You can buy a TV for $999 but have to pay $40 for the remote, $399 for a smartphone but $20 for the receiver and $10 for the speaker, $499 for a stove but every temperature costs $5 extra…
…wait…oh shit, there might be some capitalists lurking here and getting ideas! I was only joking, guys! Really!
Being right for the wrong reasons is just as lousy as being wrong in the first place.
Young adults’ standards keep evolving with each generation and I suspect that it’s only a matter of time (maybe before the end of the decade) before everybody is just as unimpressed with this tokenism as I am and will seek out better.
I doubt that the capitalist media will start publishing works that are in the style of Under Fire, Burn!, Salvador or Lion of the Desert in a desperate attempt to keep their services alive, but I think that it’s reasonably plausible that this half‐assed pandering will go the way of newspapers, ‘breastaurants’, GameStop, and cereal boxes in the previsible future. It’s getting old, young adults will demand better, and the business world will have more difficulty appeasing them.
Actually, several anonymous refugees in Miami and a report (which is still pending peer review) from the Mises Institute have informed me that Cuban doctors are ordered to immediately execute anybody asking for an abortion, which is another reason why every year more than 100,000 Cubans escape to live in the U.S. The legalization of abortion was just government propaganda all along.
Sources: come on, who are you going to trust: millions of innocents who fled communism and went on to lead successful lives, or a communist government?
Nonetheless, it must be emphasized that the tactics of the East German secret police generally consisted of openly attempting to persuade people not to take actions that damaged the State (Riecker, Schwarz, and Schneider, 1990), and that tactic was in stark contrast to the West German secret police strategy of doing everything possible to penalize people for any anti‐government opinions (Schultz, 1982).
(Source. The otherwise readworthy Stasi State or Socialist Paradise? denies that persuasion was a default tactic, but says absolutely nothing about the work that The Trimuph of Evil cites.)
In particular, many people mistakenly believe that the [planned] economies must be inefficient based on an assumption that they do not allow for decentralized decision making and result in long waiting lines and shortages. Waiting lines, shortages, and waste did often exist in [the people’s republics] because the government purposely set the prices of many goods too low to clear (and also because richer capitalist countries placed embargoes on the export of the high technology goods to [the people’s republics]). However, the low fixed prices (and the right to a job with income) did ensure that everyone in [the people’s republics] had the right to essentials like food, housing, medicine, and clothes, unlike in capitalist countries where a large portion of the population do not have access to such essentials even in far richer capitalist countries such as the USA. Also, the centralized fixing of prices greatly reduced the amount of time spent on wasteful tasks performed in capitalist countries of price shopping, price negotiation, and attempts to avoid marketing manipulation and fraud.
[…]
Given that East German income would have been higher than in West Germany without the reparations payments, it can be deduced that it would not have been necessary for East Germany to have the Berlin Wall if West Germany had made its share of the reparations payments for [Fascist] Germany’s war crimes. In particular, the burden to East Germany would have thereby been enormously reduced and would have allowed its income to be substantially higher. At the same time, West Germany’s income would have been reduced by it making its share of the payments. In this situation, it probably would not have been necessary for East Germany to have slightly longer work weeks (since it would not have been necessary to catch up with the West), nor to have such severe shortages (that could have been alleviated with greater wealth), nor to spend so little on pollution control (that reflected East Germany’s relative poverty), nor to restrict political freedoms (that East Germany did not want the richer West Germany to take advantage of), nor to have such an obnoxious secret police (whose primary purpose was to keep East Germans from leaving the country for the greater riches of West Germany). All the relative disadvantages of [economic planning] in East Germany may therefore derive, at least partially, from its postwar reparations (and not from communism).
(Source.)
I had to check to make sure that you weren’t pranking us, and I was astounded when I confirmed it. Wow.
Coincidentally, seeing people express their disappointment in Close Enough’s cancellation is actually what got me started on watching it yesterday. There are times when it feels like a generic ‘adult cartoon’, but it still makes me laugh out loud at other times and features subject matters that actually feel adult, something that few cartoons have done for me. I appreciate that.
Because, honestly? Just hearing the term ‘adult comedy’ is almost enough to induce groans in me. It’s not that I hate the concept; it’s how roughly 90% of them are executed, because they don’t typically deal with themes that most children would find uninteresting or hard to understand: depression, separation, arguing (with loved ones), financial security, difficult choices, acts of desperation, and the complex topics that you mentioned.
Instead, they’re ‘adult’ only insofar as they contain materials that Western culture traditionally considers inappropriate for children: feces, sex, flatulence, genitals, gay stuff, trans stuff, flatulence, bloody violence, feces, inconsequential drug abuse, inconsequential alcoholism, inconsequential rape, incest, STDs, profanity, more flatulence… did I mention bodily fluids? They’re basically taking a page out of Fritz the Cat only making it even worse; rapid‐firing ‘taboo’ subjects at us for cheap laughs, if that makes sense.
Anyway, I’m just ranting and getting slightly off‐topic myself here. (But it does relate to how homogeneous the market is.)
I suspect that the long‐term goal of Shoah denial, aside from sanitizing the Third Reich, is to further portray Jews as deceptive. If Shoah denial were correct, the implication would be that scores of thousands of Jews have been lying for undeserved compassion and remorse, thereby making anti‐Semitism look less unreasonable.
Of course, Fascists and neofascists have had only limited success with this strategy since the 1940s, which is why many of them prefer trivializing the Shoah by arguing that we’re far worse. I believe that Fraud, Famine and Fascism has evidence that anticommunists consciously inflated the death toll of the Soviet famine of 1932–3 after hearing about the Shoah’s death toll.
If you are interested in exploring this phenomenon, I recommend checking out Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It?. It demonstrates that many Shoah deniers are actually quite competent salesmen (figuratively, but sometimes also literally), which clashes with generalization that they’re all foul‐mouthed, trashy, unhinged skinheads. They’re also surprisingly good at frustrating Shoah survivors, because many survivors don’t know the inner and outer workings of the Shoah beyond what their life experience provided them.
Rejecting the ‘famine–genocide’ conspiracy theory doesn’t mean that most or all Ukrainians are horrible people. It means that the Soviet government had better shit to do than commit self‐harm, namely preparing for the anticommunist reinvasion.
I’ve never seen anything that suggests the USSR wanted to invade Europe (maybe you have some sources for that?)
Quite the contrary. Michael Parenti once said that ‘the American Historical Association published a set of documents that were rather intriguing—that—which they got out of the State Department under the Freedom of Information Act, which shows… that people in the State Department never believed… that the Soviets had any intention, or any interest, or any capability of invading Western Europe… in the late 1940s, or in the ’50s, or ’60s, or today for that matter.’ Unfortunately, he was not more specific than that, but it’s a good place to start.
On the other hand, Daniel Ellsberg has confirmed that Moscow had no interest in invading Western Europe. Likewise, David Holloway confirmed that ‘[t]here is no evidence to show that Stalin intended to invade Western Europe, except in the event of a major war; and his overall policy suggests that he was anxious to avoid such a war, and not merely because the United States possessed the atomic bomb.’
And the claim is incredible just from the viewpoint of common sense: why would a country that just survived the largest invasion in all of history want to gamble with its existence and remaining resources invading Western Europe? The Soviets may have loathed the Western ruling classes, but they were not suicidal either.
So why the fearmongering? Because the Fascists wanted to finish the job, and their fellow anticommunists embraced them.
Good post. It would benefit from more citations (particularly for ‘the goal of NATO was to provoke the USSR into war’), but many of these statements should be fairly easy to confirm.
I would like to add that the Estado Novo, a country that wouldn’t have qualified as democratic even by neoclassical liberalism’s own standards, cofounded the NATO. Needless to say, nobody was in a hurry to get Greece out of the NATO either when it was a military dictatorship from 1967 to 1974, or get Turkey out when it mutated into a military dictatorship twice. So much for safeguarding democracy.
The dogma that “wages determine the price of commodities,” expressed in its most abstract terms, comes to this, that “value is determined by value,” and this tautology means that, in fact, we know nothing at all about value. Accepting this premise, all reasoning about the general laws of political economy turns into mere twaddle. It was, therefore, the great merit of Ricardo that in his work On the Principles of Political Economy, published in 1817, he fundamentally destroyed the old popular, and worn-out fallacy that “wages determine prices,” a fallacy which Adam Smith and his French predecessors had spurned in the really scientific parts of their researches, but which they reproduced in their more exoterical and vulgarizing chapters.
I feel that this is particularly important to note, as the claim that higher wages increase inflation continues to remain popular among capitalist apologists. Thanks for sharing this.
In my experience, the other pedestrians that I’ve encountered haven’t been particularly friendly.
according to the governor of the Bank of England
You mean the same Bank of England that gave a loan to Fascists enabling them to settle an absurd quantity of unpaid trade credits, but apparently can’t pay workers a living wage without provoking the Apocalypse? That Bank of England?
Now see, I certainly agree with statements like this one, but after using Reddit for so long it’s hard for me to avoid imagining somebody replying to it with ‘OH YEAH? WELL UNDER COMMULISM THEY WOULD JUST KILL YOU FATALLY TO DEATH UNTIL YOU DIE SO STFU STOOPID IGNORANT TANKY READ HISTORY BOOK!!!!!!’
I know that it’s far less likely in this community, but if somebody is taking screenshots of these posts for the amusement of his dipshit anticommie friends then I am sure that somebody would say that.
I have postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome. Standing still for as little as one or two minutes is a challenge for me and people have told me before that my feet ‘looked red’ or that I suddenly looked uncomfortable when all that I was doing was standing in place. My blood pools in my feet and sometimes I can even feel them throbbing. My condition is not so severe that I need a wheelchair, but I need to sit down or I’m very uncomfortable and at serious risk of fainting.
I’m just glad that I have no plans to fly anywhere because the best that these seats might do is delay my symptoms for a short while. The absence of proper seating would be a little more serious than an ‘inconvenience’ for me.
Yesterweek I returned to Fallout 2 for the first time in several years, patched it, and it almost became an addiction for me. I started another playthrough recently, but I’m slower to attend to it because I’m getting a little burnt out.
I tried Ultima IV yesternight for several minutes, but couldn’t get into it. The interface and controls were too clunky for me, and I wasn’t interested enough in the world or the story to commit to them.
I’m unsure what I’ll play next. Unlikely to be anything current‐gen, though, given my office‐grade computer.
Somewhat off‐topic, but I’ve noticed that lately crowdfunding is becoming an increasingly popular method for studios and individuals alike, coinciding with tipping becoming an almost mandatory practice on behalf of service workers. This correlation is probably far more significant than anybody realizes; it’s as if the upper classes are slowly and subtly outsourcing the task of payment to us.
Yes! While admittedly I don’t know for sure if she ever identified herself as socialist (it seems more likely than not), I have a great deal of respect for Dorothy W. Douglas, an economic anthropologist who closely studied life in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic and the Polish People’s Republic. This is one of my favorite books and it helped me develop a more mature understanding of the people’s republics. (It seems that she also studied child labor in Imperial America, but I haven’t read that one yet.)
There are various other women that I could mention, but I can’t say with absolute certainty if they were socialists either. Others that I could mention are people that I can’t identify.
I know, but given his latest shenanigans, including breaking the record for the most money lost by a single individual, it looks reasonably possible for the near future.