I don’t know. I can tell you, seeing what the game industry did to video games certainly helped me adopt an anti-capitalist lens. It was influences significantly beyond that though, that got me all the way to communism.

I mean, the game industry killed most of my passion for video games in a death by a thousand cuts. But that didn’t on its own get me in front of people who were talking anti-imperialism, talking Lenin, George Jackson, Michael Parenti.

racism, against black people

Recommend this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nxeiFpSJfc

It’s a bit anecdotal as evidence goes, to be fair, and I recommend watching it, not taking my summary of it at face value, but the general idea IIRC is: black people are more treated as a curiosity. Like being curious about someone of an ethnicity you have never seen before, who looks so different. But since China doesn’t have the racialized cultural context that the white supremacist west has, it’s not an aggressive or hateful curiosity.

There’s this mythos in western thinking that goes something like, “Racism is cause people are tribal and mistrusting of strangers.” But it’s missing how systemically racism gets developed over time in history and for what purpose(s). And China, as far as I can tell, has no reason for such a development of power in relation to black people, so they simply don’t have the racism that the west has.

As tempting as it is sometimes, doomerism is counter revolutionary. Not to be confused with being down sometimes or contending with depression. Taking a stance, even if meant in jest (and doomerism does go for dark humor sometimes) that suggests there is no hope is a problem. That’s not even getting into the problems with feeding narratives about exaggerated differences between generations, which is a divide and conquer thing, and doesn’t help us build solidarity with anyone.

There are observable differences between generations in culture and conditions they face, to a certain extent, but exaggerated statements about them that suggest helplessness or a fixed, doomed state of being is not a good idea. And the liberation cause is one where people have more in common, usually, than they have differences.

Pretty sure twitter got worse with stuff like this since Musk took over. Anecdotal, but even with all the wild BS twitter had, I could swear it used to have more of a veneer of decency on the surface at least. Now it seems like every other post that has a mildly “human decency” perspective has got accounts flooding it with stuff that reads like astroturfing for the capitalist, imperialist order.

And I know the porn bots got worse on there (that’s easy to see and I’ve not been the only one to mention it) so if those bots are getting through, it would stand to reason other bots may be getting through more as well. Not to say there aren’t real people who push this stuff, but the sheer amount of it is hard to believe as authentic “deep in propaganda” posting. And with LLMs being how they are now, it’s feasible to produce bots who can write more coherent and human-sounding BS.

Good god. That is… a lot to deal with.

Great point and healthy reminder that the practice part in theory and practice is critical to get anywhere.

And some of us live in the US, which has the highest incarceration rate in the world, is built on genocide of the indigenous (still an ongoing problem), slavery (prison labor loophole still exists), and is currently funding and supporting a genocide against the Palestinian people. You can repeat the word cosplay as many times as you want, it doesn’t suddenly make your world real and others not.

My point about you “living in anecdote” is you’re playing the internet trope “I was X and I understand it better than you” card, and so far, as far as I can tell, you have yet to even name what this mystery country is, in spite of being directly asked by someone. Meanwhile, you’re pushing garden variety “vote blue no matter who” talking points and showing repeated ignorance of what kind of person Biden is comparative to Trump and what the US is actually like.

You are not “way to the left of Biden” in actual substance. You are enabling of genocide by framing one of two runners of it as lesser evil. You call others cosplayers, but it’s you who is treating the claiming of a political label purely as a badge you put on yourself rather than something that has to be backed up by, you know, actually aligning with it.

Trump was already in office for 4 years though. It’s not some big mystery how he would act as president. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. The nature of US fascism is not identical to every other country, but you’re just ignoring history if you think it has never seriously opposed communism internally. Like, COINTELPRO for starters? Come on.

It just comes across to me like you’re inventing this arbitrary goalpost for fascism, so that you can say the US isn’t at it yet and then say vote for the other guy. With a helping of vague “I lived under anecdote” to go with it. Like what is with this language of calling people cosplayers? Where exactly do you think US citizens live, not in the US?

I’m genuinely confused as to what your politics are supposed to be.

I would say it’s closer to “the US taking the mask off on being fascist” vs. “finding ways to keep the mask on for longer”

It’s also not just about privacy. It’s also about safety (historically, ads can be a vector for viruses). And it’s about having garbage shoveled in front of you that makes the internet borderline unusable. Which comes back to capitalism and the nature of every space becoming an ad-infested hell because consume product is the god.

So, thanks for the back and forth on this. I ended up updating and it seems to be working again now. Since you figure it’s not using new functionality, my best guess is something old got deprecated in a way that my version was depending on in some part of the process.

Either way, working now, so yay.

Hi, I’m on desktop, Firefox browser. Though now I’m thinking about it, maybe I do need to look into updating my browser. I might have disabled updates at some point in order to keep things the same, but that might mess with it if depends on something newer? Hmm.

Barring any info that it might be something else, I might look into browser update later today to see if that makes any difference.

Well said, this is in line with what I remember learning in the past too, though I wasn’t sure how to put it into words. The phenomenon of capitalist realism, for example, I don’t think would be possible if economic systems were separate from the rest of social stuff. People who defend capitalism while not benefiting from it meaningfully are not just “brainwashed” in the sense of being convinced it’s a good system, their way of life and thinking is tangled up in the capitalist process. For example, the way I see some people in the US act about new products, it seems that it does not even occur to them to consider the idea of “new product” as a bad thing, only whether it is “good product” or “bad product.” Something that might be seen by a different kind of society as excess and waste is widely viewed as a form of progress and advancement under capitalism. This kind of thing, I would argue, is not just incidental, but necessary for the system to function with any longevity.

As of, I can’t recall exactly, a couple of days ago? The “Next” button at the bottom of the feed page just takes me to the same first page of results. Is anyone else experiencing this?

That’s awesome, well done!

I kinda hate it, but I also don’t tend to like “prankster” type of humor in general. In spite of that, it’s hard for me to think it’s valid to be opposed to it generally if the people involved are all okay with it. So like, two friends “roasting” each other, okay, I guess none of my business if they are truly fine with it and enjoy it. But even then, are they doing stuff similar to “aftercare”? Where they reaffirm they really do love and appreciate each other after any digging is done. Because if not, it seems like an easy way for people to be in an unhealthy dynamic, where one of them is crying inside and just going along with it to get along.

And in the context of a sub like roastme, there’s nothing close to “aftercare”, no real off button on it, and it’s complete strangers. So it seems like a horrible setup for doing it in a way that is at all healthy.

Dream chasing under capitalism is similar to buying lottery tickets hoping to win the jackpot. They’ll let a few win big here and there to legitimize the idea of upward mobility, but the reality is, you are not going to be that person. And the “but technically I could be” mentality is what drives people in gambling, just as it does in driving them to believe in the legitimacy of capitalism.

Giving citizens access to the outside world would be an interesting thing to see them deal with.

Zero self awareness in people like this. Live in a western alphabet agency bubble of information, but think others are sheltered.

I can try to get into more detail on this another time (I need to wind down for sleep) but I guess what I’m trying to get at here is that when you point at basically all states thought of as AES (maybe I missed one?) and call them revisionist in one form or another, it can end up sounding exactly like the “that wasn’t real communism” trope or in another way, end up sounding like “that was real communism and see how it sucks and fails actually in practice.” I’m trying to word this carefully because it could go in the other direction too if presented thoughtlessly, where it sounds like I’m saying that criticisms of AES projects are bad (criticism is important). The point that I hang on is, making sure we’re not de-legitimizing the theory and practice as a whole by being unfairly dismissive of how closely practice aligns with the goal, where it is on the developing path. And also just making sure we are clear on tactics vs. corruption mindset. That to use a rough war analogy, sometimes you have to retreat in order to regroup, but that doesn’t mean your army has taken a step backward in its ideological goals. Retreating has the risk of leading to giving up and compromising on what you intend, but the one doesn’t automatically follow from the other. So making sure in the weeds of it, we are clear on when something is dangerous compromising on an ideological center and when something is a more complicated tactical development that undoubtedly contains some risk of losing the ideological center, but still has that center and has a specific plan in mind for how to develop past the “retreating” into an advance.

Edit: wording

Maybe I’m missing something here, but it seems like the term “revisionist” becomes all but meaningless when you apply it in this way, like a sort of “no true scotsman” style analysis. I’m not sure I understand what your expectation is for AES states.