askchapo

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Ask Hexbear is the place to ask and answer ~~thought-provoking~~ questions.

Rules:

  1. Posts must ask a question.

  2. If the question asked is serious, answer seriously.

  3. Questions where you want to learn more about socialism are allowed, but questions in bad faith are not.

  4. Try !feedback@hexbear.net if you're having questions about regarding moderation, site policy, the site itself, development, volunteering or the mod team.

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2051
 
 

okay now that Biggs isn't here, I need your guy's help. Biggs's birthday is coming up soon and I don't know what to get for him and I need some ideas

2052
 
 

For: The country seems to have developed alright under their rule: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.IN?locations=TM

Against: LGBT rights

I'll do more research when I'm not on mobile

2053
 
 

"R U TRIGGERED" and all its subvariants were radioactive toxic waste and turned a valid and important psychological concept into bullying vector that for a time had nearly universal acceptance.

I still see vestiges of "le epic bacon" out there but it's mostly confined to aging :grillman: types and some :up-yours-woke-moralists: cultists and a few contrarian carninist edgelords that want to "trigger the vegans." Yes I know all of the above have a lot of overlap.

2054
 
 

I thought we all loved our trash raccoon. Didn’t he own Peterson?

2055
 
 

I can't say for certain, since I've been playing literally as long as I was able to form long-term memories, but mine was most likely Super Mario World when I was around 3.

2056
2057
 
 

The Yuuzhan Vong story arc in the old Star Wars Expanded Universe wasn't exactly great, and the "nice space vampires" trend-chasing trash that followed was pretty bad, but what a lot of people don't seem to remember, and what I only remembered just now, was that the early villain figure in the Vong arc was some angry Twi'lek lady that was leading what was called the "Diversity Alliance" and was actually an asset of the Vong. Basically, space SJW that wants space diversity is actually a space religious terrorist asset. :sus-torment:

2058
 
 

I guess people are talking about the Hunter Biden laptop thing on the internet again because of :melon-musk:. That story about Hunter just leaving it at a computer repair shop seems kinda sus, doesn't it? But I'm not super interested in pulling at that thread. Anyway, at the time I did hear reports of the story getting suppressed. Is that just because it was full of pics of the dude smoking crack with his dick out, or is there also something substantial and worth keeping in mind as history unfolds behind us?

I'm asking here because I don't really want to go fishing around on the internet for Biden dick pics. That's icky. Feel free to just post PPB or whatever here too, but I'm all ears if a kindly comrade feels like filling me in.

:soviet-heart:

2059
 
 

I've started getting some holiday gifts for my family and I'd like to pick my dad up some left-leaning novels.

He reads a lot, and is a left-leaning boomer but also really liked Obama (ewww cringe).

For his birthday I picked him up " Three Penny Novel " by Brecht, but I realised that I don't know of any other socialist fiction authors other than Brecht (everything else he wrote were plays, so not really reading-friendly).

Any of you able to recommend me some socialist-influenced works of fiction/novels that I could pick him up?

Thanks :fidel-salute:

2060
0
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by LiberalSocialist@hexbear.net to c/askchapo@hexbear.net
 
 

There’s this new video by a good YouTuber - Value by Unlearning Economics. There was also an article by Ben Burgis for the Jacobin which argued the same.

Is it possible, as both these people argue, to separate Marx’s critique of capitalism from his theory of value? To keep the former and discard the latter?

Edit - I’m not siding with the video or with Burgis, btw. I think Marx’s value theory is correct. I’m just looking for people who can shine some light on this new(?) phenomena of leftists speaking out against LTV while trying “save” Marx’s critique of capital. To me, that just seems like a pointless and hopeless endeavour.

2061
2062
 
 

Whenever I see opinion poll maps on :reddit-logo: from Europe with questions like

  • Would you be ok with your son/daughter dating a person of a different race?

  • Would you be comfortable with your son/daughter dating a member of the same sex?

  • My country has too many immigrants, yes or no?

There is always a very noticeable difference between Western and Eastern Europe, with the West (and Scandanavia) being WAY more progressive, and Eastern European / former Soviet states being exceedingly conservative, particularly countries like Czech.

Why is this?

Maybe I'm just naive but I would think that the legacy of the USSR would cause the exact opposite tendency.

I also have no real context as I have never stepped foot in The Old World.

2063
 
 

they literally sit on top of the rest of the body, account for 25% of resting body glucose consumption by themselves, and don't actually do anything except order other parts of the body around and infecting themselves with idealist constructs like 'language' and 'consciousness' just so that they can better convince themselves and the rest of the body that they're the most important organs around.

2064
 
 

I found your website named after a cryptocurrency company and something doesn’t add up. There’s no cryptocurrency here for me to short and everyone keeps posting comments about how they want to get a footjob from karl marx or reenact WACO on their landlord or whatever

Why aren’t you on reddit like normal people? this website is basically a malshappen clone of the real thing, like dolly the sheep but online and with even more birth defects

—-

Edit: watch my newest video: https://hexbear.net/post/228732

2065
2066
 
 

A Genie has been enslaved and bound to a lamp. They offer you three wishes. Do you free the Genie with the first wish or the last wish?

Keep in mind, you can wish for literally anything with your free wishes.

Which way Western man?

2067
 
 

Treat Defender:

  • "Let people enjoy things"

  • Just wants to shut brain off and relax

  • Shit taste

Treat Assassin:

  • Powerful crit(icism)s

  • Appears out of nowhere and identifies flaws and weaknesses you never would've noticed but now can never ignore again

  • Mysteriously fades into shadows when their own treats come under attack

Treat Mage:

  • Nuanced, insightful analysis, can find positive/negative aspects in just about anything

  • Flexible offensive and defensive options

  • Susceptible to bullying, avoids direct confrontation

Treat Paladin:

  • Likes good things

  • Doesn't like bad things

  • Simple as

  • Nobody wants to hang with them because they feel threatened by their moral superiority and obviously correct takes

Treat Cleric:

  • Long list of rules for not engaging with things that others find frustrating and arbitrary

  • Has one specific domain of treat they enjoy

  • Wouldn't watch a Miyazaki movie because it's anime

  • Somehow keeps being right about stuff

Treat Warlock:

  • "So bad it's good," cult classics

  • Will happily explain how their favorite treat is problematic in ways you never would've considered

  • Lack of practical effects their third biggest issue with capitalism

  • Nobody told them irony is dead

TYS, add your own

2068
2069
 
 

I forgot all of the details but libs keep smugly referencing it and now I'm curious.

2070
 
 

linux mint comes with a program coincidentally called Hexchat for connecting to IRC networks. Are these obsolete at this point, or are there still places to hang out with people so i dont have to use discord?

2071
 
 

So, in my circles of friends, I am the most terminally online person. I remember being a soc-demmy kinda person (who called themselves socialist) when I joined r/cth when it hit 69,420 members.

Now here I am with opinions like "Stalin and the USSR weren't so bad" and "The tanks rolling into Hungary in 1956 were correct, actually". I feel like the community here on hexbear has kinda shifted in the same way. That said, we've steered clear of the patsoc menace, who aesthetically venerate AES while following the most regressive social/nationalist opinions of what they think of as the working class.

This has somewhat put me at odds with a lot of my RL friends, who are anarchists or trots of varying degrees. I'm generally not down with getting into spats with said RL friends, so I keep a lot of my opinions to myself. This is especially onerous with opinions about the Ukraine war.

How did I end up here? How did we..? I remember back on r/cth the line "This is enough to turn me into a tankie", or some such thing, as though being a tankie was just socialism + willingness to use violence to achieve it.

I can remember online anarchists posting fairly high profile Ls that I think split actual anarchists and left-liberals who just liked to call themselves anarchists (and now online anarchists who really like NATO? idk). But those events had a lot of people shy away from the anarchist label and kinda mull about their own beliefs. The main ones off the top of my head were CHAZ, Vaush audience watchers, and the anti-work breakdown. Certainly, I remember r/cth being a lot more awash with anarchist rhetoric and population (claimed or otherwise) than hexbear currently is.

I don't want this to be a sectarian rant session, but more a reflection of political journeys from r/cth's medicare for all socdem position to the current vibes of hexbear, both personal and pontifications of why this shift occurred.

This isn't the be-all and end-all of my thoughts of my own political evolution. I'll comment some more as I think of them (in between cleaning for rent inspection)

2072
 
 

Since unsurprisingly the Redscare people are going fash, it would be good to know who's a grifter and who's not. What's your predictions?

My predictions:


Grifters:

  1. Zizek
  2. AOC
  3. 1-2 from Cumtown (it's anyone's guess)

Not Grifters

  1. The Deprogram Boys (ok I'm still in honeymoon)
  2. Jezza (obviously)
  3. Richard Wolfe & Harriet Fraad
  4. Viki1999
2073
 
 

The Soviet leadership at the time you go back to will absolutely follow through on your advice.

For me, I'd go back to say the early 60s and tell them to invest absolutely everything they can into computers, cybernetics, linear programming, etc; and using those tools for optimal central planning of the economy. Optimal both in the sense of economic efficiency and for greater democracy in the planning decisions. Get people to feel like they have a say in the economic plans and I think you short-circuit a lot of the consumerist drives. But ultimately, you just need that computing power to run a modern centrally planned economy.

I thought about telling them to make a Xi-like anti-corruption push in the 70s or so (and Andropov was working on that before he died). But I think if you get them to focus on the stuff I mentioned above a lot of the corruption might ultimately sort itself out.

I also thought about telling Stalin that he really needs to think about maybe approaching collectivization of the farms a bit differently. But I don't know what I'd tell him to do differently though. It was a mess at first but eventually the collective farms helped get Soviet agriculture where it needed to be, I think.

2074
 
 

i don't watch many movies. stop getting mad at stuff online and tell me what to watch

2075
 
 

I know chuddery is just a facet of applied liberalism, but for the sake of distinguishing this from the other thread about the most liberal movies, try to think of movies that cut out the "reconciliation with bad people" style liberalism and go straight for the chud pleasure centers, whether intentional or not. Chuds are absolutely horrible at literary comprehension, so a lot of chud films might be unintentionally chud films.

Example of an unintentional chud movie: Starship Troopers. Verhoven never intended to inspire an entire generation of chanlords on their baby goosesteps into fascism, but here we are. https://www.indiewire.com/2016/11/paul-verhoeven-slams-starship-troopers-remake-fascist-update-perfect-trump-presidency-1201747155/#!

Example of an intentional chud movie: American Sniper. :frothingfash:

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