askchapo

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.

A tweet with the same question.

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:

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:

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:

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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

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

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?

:kombucha-disgust: Last time I checked most pedos end up being hyper-religious conservatives or libertarians. Am I wrong?

Seems like chuds are projecting yet again. Imagine being the side of underage anime avatars and having the balls to accuse the left of "grooming"

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)

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

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.

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

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:

The Pursuit of Happyness is really bad. Will Smith's inspirational moment is going to the New York Stock Exchange and seeing all the happy rich guys in suits walking around, and wanting to be like them. Having to do stuff like brown-nose executives, sleep in train station bathrooms and pull his son out of daycare due to lack of money are presented not as flaws of the system but evidence of Smith's smart bootstraps-oriented thinking. This movie is the Mein Kampf of liberalism.

Starting to get that feeling in the first 26 pages. It’s great and have wanted to read it for a while now. But wondering what the take is here on it overall.

The line he literally wrote about the population size of Russia being unsuitable for socialism is like verbatim RW criticism used today and typically repeated when saying that it while it may work in small European counties it won’t here.

Need also to brush up on the Russian Revolution, having only read some of John Reed’s account.

I listened to the recent episode from "The Deprogram" podcast which had Richard Wolff on. He made an excellent point about how the modern day field of Economics utilizes a cryptic language commonly parroted by media yet unfamiliar to the average person (record inflation, stocks, federal reserve's actual role, etc) as a means to mystify and grant legitimacy to capitalism as something only "Qualified Experts" (who just so happen to support Capitalism) have authority to speak on. Literally looking up any book about "basic economics" will have the first result be a book by Chicago School snake oil salesman Thomas Sowell, who has quite the following in the Right, which is just several layers of pure ideology repackaged as "common sense".

This is an image problem that the Left need to tackle one way or another on a regular basis, whether it be in debates with such "Economists" or long typed-out critiques. And as great as the classics are, what Marx and Lenin were talking about in their times (19th/20th Century Prussia and Russia) isn't as familiar to the average Westerner today as someone actively tackling a more close-to-home environment; which is a common talking point ("bruh you can't compare those places at those times to America!")

So, in essence, I'm looking for sources which identify commonly regurgitated terms/concepts, provides definitions and contexts and, as a bonus, takes them down from a Left standpoint. Something that we can learn from and direct others to as well. I've been meaning to read the works of Graeber and Fisher but I feel like they talk either in something more abstract/specific than I'm looking for.