uralsolo [he/him]

Russia is not an altruistic actor here

Always worth bearing in mind. The reason Crimea got taken over in 2014 and Donbas didn’t is pretty clearly because of its relatively higher strategic importance - it took a lot of provocation from NATO and Azov for Putin to change his mind about that calculation, I’ll never forget how bloodthirsty the media was especially in the month leading up to the invasion.

How many countries has China invaded or bombed from afar in the last forty years? How do China’s loan conditions compare to those of the World Bank and IMF? The notion that they’re “colonizing” anyone is completely daffy - they have long-running border disputes with some of their neighbors and a long-running leadership dispute with what remains of the previous government of China, those are completely different types of conflict.

As for Russia and Israel, the difference is that the people in the Donbas who seceded from Ukraine back in 2014 weren’t placed there to displace Ukrainians as a Russian colonial project. They’re the same people who lived in Donbas going back to the USSR’s dissolution, and they had a series of legitimate grievances when the rest of Ukraine elected a government that was actively hostile to them.

Date, Fig, Peach, and Cherry are my picks.

I don’t bother with a two piece rain suit, I just throw a bright yellow poncho on over my usual jacket and secure it around my waist. My pants are a lost cause though.

That final boss fight song still gets me pumped up like nothing else. There’s a reason UT’s fanbase got so huge, and it’s not because the game is mid.

The creator of Missile Command allegedly had this very same revelation while creating it, and suffered nightmares about nuclear annihilation. I like how the game just gets harder and harder, meaning that no matter how good you are at it, once the bombs start dropping then eventually every city will be destroyed anyway.

The ending of the communism vision quest might be my favorite moment in any game ever.

Motorcycle. If I’m going to be forced to drive to and from work, I might as well enjoy it.

I read the article and my main contention is that it doesn’t establish why we must treat the performance of sex as morally different to any other form of service work. As I said in the other comment I believe that the way we are compelled to treat sex as “different” is a manifestation of patriarchal thinking - there is nothing fundamentally different between a woman who is coerced by poverty into prostitution and a man who is coerced by poverty into agricultural work, and the ways to solve the exploitation in both cases is the same: organization of the workers against the bosses, the abolition of bosses altogether and shifting control of that industry to the workers in it, and ultimately the abolition of the capitalist mode of production that incentivizes maximum exploitation of all who participate in it.

Why do you think it is okay to have an uneven allocation of money in a society so that those on the top can do with those on the bottom as they want?

Of course I don’t think that’s okay, don’t put words in my mouth.

My contention is that sex is morally equivalent to any other form of labor, and I believe that the pedestal we put sex on as a society is a manifestation of patriarchy. It’s no coincidence that for most of human history, sex work has been one of the few labor markets where women have an advantage over men, and thus controlling sex work has been one of the major tools at the patriarchy’s disposal for controlling women’s bodies. The impulse to control sex work is the same as the impulse to force them to wear specific clothing, the only difference is that in Western societies one of those forms of control has had a massive philosophical edifice built around it and the other hasn’t.

Sex work is only inherently built around debasing and dehumanizing yourself if you consider sex itself to be debased and dehumanizing. It’s a service profession like literally any other.

The maintenance manual for your vehicle.

Do the cutscenes in any given MMORPG count? It’s a similar amount of text to a book, but nobody fukken reads that shit.

The Ultima series, especially U4, 5, and 6. To this day they are some of the best stories told in gaming history, but their appeal is limited by the fact that they came out in the DOS era - remake them with Baldur’s Gate 3 levels of production value and some QOL updates but otherwise don’t change a thing and they would contend for the best RPGs of all time.

Mine did, granted I went to a pretty nice school and was in “Honors” English and Social Studies (which meant that you did the normal English homework during summer, did a grade higher during the school year, and then did college level in junior/senior year). Pretty much every one of my teachers forced us to cite an actual book from an actual library every time we wrote an essay.

I love my Krait! I had a bigger ship for a while but something about the medium-class just feels right in E:D. I did a lot of low-temperature diamond mining back in the day, but I loved how I could load out for bounty hunting or cargo runs or whatever else I felt like doing.

I think social structures can be thought of in terms of consciousness, and whether or not they are a “higher” level of human consciousness is mostly a question of your definition of what that means.

From our perspective we are all making individual decisions, but that’s similar to how a given cell is just managing its own individual chemical reactions. What initially made humanity unique in the animal kingdom was how complex our social animal is able to be - human clans were more complex than other mammals’ packs in the same way that a vertebrate is more complex than an invertebrate. Our social animal is the one that reached the tipping point of adding technology into the mix, which allowed us to add phenomenally more complexity that what evolution on its own is able to create.

In the modern day, in the western world, people principally think of themselves as individual subjects, and as Marxists we recognize that this is one of the most critical self-defense mechanisms of liberalism, since it prevents class consciousness (and allows false consciousness to form). This is akin to how our cells are programmed by dna not to become cancerous - and when this mechanism fails and a cancer/revolutionary group forms the white blood cells/police usually stamp it out to protect the organism/capitalist society.

The big difference between society and an organism when viewed through this lense is that when an organism dies its cells all die too, but when society “dies” all the people who were part of it will naturally form a new one atop the corpse of the old. Imagine if when you died your cells all hit a reset button and your corpse formed into a new person - that might disqualify society from being thought of as a consciousness, or perhaps it’s evidence that “consciousness” is independent of life and death.

I can’t pin it down to just one, but holy shit school shootings and the way we’ve responded to them completely broke whatever part of me thought that our society was still capable of doing things. They keep upping the ante with how horrifying they are too - the high water mark currently is Uvalde, and I think that the next one that shocks the nation will involve the cops (or a “good guy with a gun”) gunning down multiple kids or parents while trying to “help” and our collective response will still be to do nothing.

Defining moment of a generation, in the way that 9/11 was for the one before it. I don’t even think we’ll really understand the impact for another couple decades - and just like with other major events the ruling class will learn the wrong lesson entirely from it, probably something like “we should never lock down for any disease ever”.

Damn you’re right that was awesome.