axont [she/her, comrade/them]

There are only 24 episodes of the initial run of The Jetsons and only 25 of Scooby Doo. They got aired as reruns for decades before more episodes were made. There are only 15 episodes of Mr. Bean.

If I had a jack off hand motion emoji I would post it but you'll have to settle for me simply saying you sound up your own ass

Pretending to be communists for 3 years and thousands of comments as high concept performance art

In fact we're so dedicated to this joke we read Marx and Engels and joined socialist organizations

China doing commerce in your country isn't colonization, don't be dramatic. I have no idea where you're from, but I know a Bolivian person who also complains that China is conquering their country, which is absolutely ludicrous compared to what the CIA did to Bolivia.

I probably wouldn't want this game to actually exist, but it's been stuck in my head for years so here goes. I described this one a while ago. A friend of mine was on mushrooms once and described a first person WW1 game where you're an Austro-Hungarian courier running across battlefields. There would be parkour, time management, stealth, stuff like that. Sneaking through trenches and whatever. At first the missions go ok, easy enough. But then you're given more complex missions that waste your time, or are foolishly planned.

Your character begins mumbling under their breath about how the generals are doing everything wrong, the war is lost. Your character becomes more deranged as the missions become more fruitless. Eventually your guy will start screaming deranged conspiracies and wild racist shit. There would be a mechanic where you start to need amphetamines to function.

Then in the last mission you catch sight of your reflection in a puddle and you've been playing as Hitler this whole time.

Star Trek has more historical weight behind it. It more or less created modern scifi fandom. It's probably so widely beloved because it's unlike most scifi in that it's hopeful. It sells you on the idea of a better future where everything could go right, where we can explore space and be chill with everyone. Other scifi franchises sell you on window dressing or a bad future full of the same problems we have now.

People like Star Trek because they want it to be reality in a way that other scifi stuff just doesn't do.

Authoritarian is usually code for when white people don't rule a country

What in the hell is capitalist hardware? Does my computer own a factory?

I think perhaps you should read more of what Dr. King actually advocated for and said. He didn't endorse violence, but he didn't condemn it either. He typically didn't come from it from this moralizing angle either, most of his emphasis was his belief that violence was first and foremost a poor tactic, but at the same time he understood why violence happens. You've probably heard his 1967 statement "a riot is the language of the unheard."

The original cut of the 2007 ended with Will Smith's character realizing he had been abducting and murdering conscious, aware creatures. The ending has the vampires doing a rescue mission, visibly terrified of Smith, and then he allows the one he abducted to rejoin her society.

Test audiences apparently didn't like it or didn't understand it

yeah, now I remember. They said something like we'd push a certain ideology and that's unacceptable for some reason. Yeah, we're the only ideological ones

I make one "sort of" exception for Czechoslovakia. I regard it as the only time a country became socialist by voting on it, but they had to do a coup with the implicit threat of violence to enforce the new government. The communists won a plurality in 1946 and had a coalition government. Fearing that they'd lose power, they began stacking the cops and courts with ideological communists. This fear turned out to be true after the liberal parties kept doing sneaky tactics to undermine the socialists. So in 1948 the communists had a coup to consolidate power and ally with the USSR.

And I know this wasn't "bloodless" or "civil" since this all happened in the shadow of WW2.

If you just want to limit it to Haiti, Cuba, and the USSR, then yes each of those revolutions led to a vastly more humane society than the previous one. It also depends on who you're asking. Tsar Nicholas II certainly didn't see the Soviet Union as an improvement. Cuban plantation owners with dozens of slaves didn't see socialism as an improvement. There are winners and losers in history, the losing side usually isn't going to be pleased.

And who loses in a revolution? In a successful socialist revolution it's the capitalist class, colonizers, slavers, the previous bureaucracy, regional landlords. The USSR went from a backwater literal peasant kingdom to a space faring modern country within a single generation, despite a famine and despite the brutal loss of life in WW2. It's very easy to say the country that sends women to school to become nuclear engineers is not as brutally oppressive as the country with a monarch that forcefully sends women to become nuns. How do you determine oppression? Go look at things like literacy, child mortality, education, home ownership, access to clean water, and what kind of occupations women have. By those metrics, socialist revolutions typically and vastly reduce oppression.

At-will worker here. One time I got fired for not remembering my boss's son's birthday (a son who I had never met and was also 6 years old)

I don't know why you think we're proposing a society without violence. We're proposing a society where the working class wields the violence against the capitalist class until the capitalist class ceases to exist. We don't like when violence happens to us and people in the same position as us. And if gaining more control over our own lives involves violence against the capitalist class, then that's what it takes.

I genuinely couldn't give a shit about a capitalist's supposed civil rights, and I take John Brown's advice for how to treat racists.

yeah this should be the immediate next step. The kid shouldn't feel punished. It shouldn't be a "you're not allowed because I said so." Kids can be smart and might be able to understand why Roblox is exploitative.

At least this is a better reason to take a way a kid's video game. My parents banned me from certain games/movies because they had positive depictions of black people.

When is violence permissable or moral then? Absolutely never? You have to imagine the types of situations people in the world face. I know a person from Gaza who was nearly finished with his university studies, now he lives in a tent with his mother and his little sister is dead. When I'm able to talk with him, he expresses almost nothing but violence and hatred against the Israeli state and the IDF.

Are you saying my friend Ali is in a bubble he should get out of? Or are you simply talking about your own experiences? Because even if so, you should at least feel some inclination of rage towards the people who did this to my friend.

Push heat into something is easier than pull heat out of something

lmao did someone really report me over getting their precious little white feelings hurt?

I used to think all food for adults were called Sad Meals, as opposed to Happy Meals (like at McDonald's).

I thought some wild stuff as a child that feels more fantastical than strictly dumb. Like I thought everyone was psychic except me and could hear my thoughts. I thought time worked differently depending on who I talked with. I thought the earth was both flat or round depending on where you were standing. I'd often get dreams and reality confused too. For some reason I thought dogs were people who had been cursed into becoming pets, probably because of me seeing the donkeys from Pinocchio. I thought half of people were robots fueled by pieces of the sun they'd pluck out of the sky.

This one is common, but I thought water simply phased through your body if you touched it. There was an episode of Bill Nye where he mentions that water "goes through your hand" and says it just like that. So I thought water simply phased through hands.

I think I was just abused as a kid and neglected

Metals have what're called delocalized electrons, where electrons just kind of wander around a metallic bond between atoms. Metallic bonds involve a very low level of attraction between the nucleus and its electron cloud. Turns out most elements have this, so they do metallic bonding.

It's only when atoms start to get a little wobbly do they exhibit enough electronegativity to perform ionic or covalent bonding, where the molecules donate electrons. Electronegativity increases on the right side of the periodic table when electron valency starts getting lower. And that's the non-metal side.

So the answer is basically that you need more of an electrical charge to exhibit the things we've classified as non-metals. Metals are more chill and generally less reactive.

I should also mention that non-metals have a liquid/solid metallic phase at certain temperatures and pressures. I remember a Chinese study a few years ago claiming to have made metallic nitrogen.

Edit: I just realized this was blahaj, not beehaw. I can't keep none of this stuff straight.

That was lemmy.world. Beehaw was federated for a while but then if I remember right kept saying we're not actually trans/gay friendly because we're too tankie. Then they kept insulting one of our admins, who is a trans woman herself. Like they'd say we're faking how queer we are. Then it turns out they have a really bad chaser problem and a bunch of our trans posters kept getting death threats or weird stalkers from over there. Also they're so anti-tankie they occasionally swerve into outright saying reactionary stuff. They also like saying slurs.

There was an attempt at damage control, then I think we decided to cut them off. Do I have all of that right? I really have problems remembering my Hexbearian lore, I'm sorry. We need a Bible

Others have said it already, but anti-intellectualism at its core is alienation. It's a lack of trust in academic or professional authorities and substituting that trust for either ones own experiences or complete hallucinations. People will find alternative communities to trust, especially if they can find something that verifies their existing biases.

If you sense something's wrong with the world, but lack an ability to pinpoint it, you'll go to whoever seems most immediately relatable to you. Reactionaries like Qanon people ended up in that situation. They no longer trust authorities on information outside of cranks on Facebook.

So the question is how do you get more people to adopt a consensus of reality that's based on expertise, professional research, investigation, etc? You have to convince more people they're part of that process and that experts share their interests. America has had that before, but usually in times of conflict against a foreign enemy. The average American used to be really into space travel tech for instance.

There was also a period around the 1890s where the average American was really into electricity as a hobby, like making little circuits or trinkets. It was considered pretty normal back then to have an understanding of how simple circuits like a doorbell worked.

Yeah there's no reconciliation between communist and liberal ideology. They propose fundamentally different frameworks for how the world operates. Liberals place emphasis on individual actions, intention, sentiment, or how changing people's minds is the engine of history.

Communists with a material outlook propose the primacy of material distribution and class. Liberals don't believe class exists, or that it doesn't operate as a coherent political interest group.

The worst aspect is Zack Snyder seems to think Rorschach is a cool dude with cool ideas. They made him talk normally in the movie, maybe that was so he could be more easily understood, but it didn't feel right. He's supposed to seem deranged. In the comic he talks in squiggly text boxes and in an odd kind of halting, broken English. He's not bad at speaking English, he's become so unstable and antisocial his social skills have atrophied. Jackie Earle Haley came across as too earnest or too confident. Like that scene with the therapist reading the ink blots, Rorschach in the comic comes across as pathetic. He's done, doesn't care, doesn't want to live. He says he sees flowers and trees because he just wants to leave the therapy session. In the movie he comes across as like this snickering badass ready to cause trouble. He's like "heh, you can't handle my twisted mind, doc." I hate it. Synder completely misread the scene.

At least the TV show had the guts to show Rorschach would eventually inspire a white supremacist movement

Yeah the world still operates on a capitalist framework and China buys and sells things on a global market. Unless China is carving borders, installing puppet leaders, making aggressive demands for how another nation's government should operate, forcibly moving people in other nations, using agencies like the IMF or World Bank to squeeze money out of national funds, demanding austerity, or creating a vassal state, unless China is doing a single one of those things it's entirely dramatic to say they're colonizing. Buying and selling things for cheap is what commerce is. Is it unfair China has a lot of money to use for trade? Is having more money in a trade agreement itself an act of colonization or what?

It's especially dramatic compared to the CIA, which has done multiple coups in Bolivia in the name of oil. You're comparing a country buying lithium on terms set by Bolivia to a country funding a military revolt directed by Gulf Oil.

Yes destruction of natural resources is regrettable and hopefully we can reach a position where there's no longer a need to get involved in a destructive global market. Honestly the market I'd criticize China the most for is how they never boycotted Israel, and in fact have sold guns/artillery to the IDF. They also sell guns to both sides of the Kashmir conflict. You'd have a much better case to claim China is colonizing Palestine than anywhere in Latin America.

I know this is just a forum and the libs are always confused by nuance, but exploitation does occur in socialist countries, just in a vastly different character and at a much smaller scale. Cuba for instance does have private land owners who employee workers, and China of course has various large corporations.

However these are symptoms of the positions the nations find themselves within. Socialist nations tend to find themselves in the middle of capitalist encirclement. Until the last capitalist is extinguished, class based exploitation will continue to exist.

Liberal means someone who's either misinformed about their own interests, or someone who willingly aligns with capitalist interests.

Liberal isn't some badge of honor. It's the default ideology in every western nation.

Oh, thanks for replying in good faith. A lot of people gave you hostility because you did say something that seems a little misinformed. And people get ruffled by seeing that kinda thing so often. But good on you for taking the time to read stuff.

I'd really recommend reading this: The Principles of Communism by Engels.

It's very clearly written, short, and explains what exactly communist ideology is and who it represents.

In very brief: Communists believe there are two classes, workers and business owners. This is always a hostile relationship that can't be mended, since the two want different things. So we propose the working class should abolish the business owning class.

Liberals do not believe this relationship is hostile, or they don't believe it exists. Or they believe it can be mended through the use of state intervention. That's one of the primary differences here.

I really respect the area of Kerala and its commitment to their public. Very robust educational system, healthcare, and a focus on access to clean water. That's just from stuff I've seen and read though, I've never been to India, I'm American.

I hope the best for India's future, but it seems worrying from what I hear. I would hope for greater collaboration with China and an easing of tensions with Pakistan. India is a massively diverse place though, with multiple languages and even multiple writing scripts, so sometimes it's amazing it's a functional country at all.

Most of what I hear though is about India dominated by very right wing movements, but there's a strong history of Indian working class movements as well. I'll try to be optimistic about the future. Also as an American I am fully aware of my country's horrifying exploitation of the Indian people. The Union Carbide disaster is still the worst industrial accident in history and its impact should never be forgotten

The two adaptations of Watchmen have both missed the point. The Zack Snyder movie treats the characters like gods rather than deeply flawed losers and weirdos.

The HBO series is better, and does get very close, but collapses from a meandering plot and glorifying cops

i'm tankie and gay and covered in feces (some of which is my own)

I appreciate Postal 2 because the premise is kinda funny. It's deliberately designed so you can beat it without doing any violence at all. You're given tasks like get milk, pick up your paycheck, etc. And it involves standing in lines or people berating you. You're stuck doing tedious annoying repetitive tasks, or you can get a flamethrower. I think standing in line to get Gary Coleman's autograph takes 90 minutes if you do it normally.

Otherwise it's very silly early 2000s edgy white guy dudebro humor

no, just very idiosyncratic white American racists. I don't even know where they got it from. My grandparents weren't racists and my parents never listened to Rush Limbaugh or anything.

i'm sure Chinese people need patronizing crackers from the west to instruct them on what communism actually is

The show plays into several right wing fears, like widespread gun control (cops need permission over radio to unlock their guns), black people getting paid reparations, white people living in shantytowns (nixonville), cigarettes are illegal, religious people becoming a persecuted minority, stuff like that. The first few episodes play up an angle of "what if cops mainly profiled poor white people." That's because the premise is that there's been an uninterrupted 30 year liberal hegemony under president Robert Redford, similar to how the 1980s Watchmen comic took place during an uninterrupted conservative domination with Nixon.

The glorifying cops part is because it dips into the idea there are some good cops who are struggling against an entrenched structure of bad cops. That's the whole arc of the show, the main character Angela is a "good cop" who is routing out the "bad cops" in order to repair the structure. It's the liberal nonsense idea that putting oppressed minorities into positions of power like wealth, the cops, politicians, etc will correct the structure, since the problem is presented as individuals within that structure rather than the thing itself. In the show's attempts to subvert/criticize corporate liberal dystopia, it still presents the same conclusions.

Although another way of reading it is that it's a criticism of how generic American liberals, even when granted full control over society, still manage to recreate the same conditions. That's a better and more interesting reading honestly. But I'm stuck because I know that Damon Lindelof (the writer) is himself a generic rich Hollywood liberal type.

I actually like the show by the way. Jeremy Irons was good. The Trent Reznor soundtrack is beautiful too.

Are you saying capitalists and engineers are one in the same? Maybe sometimes, but it's not capital that makes things, it's labor.

point is focus your criticisms on your own society that's 1000x worse than even the most exaggerated crimes about China, cracker. Chinese people aren't children and they can handle their own country in their own way, they don't need some forum poster condescending to them and you don't need a warped preoccupation with a country that probably has nothing to do with you

almost no one in China feels that their state is an oppressive force, they feel the opposite. The government has more than a 90% approval rating. The overwhelming majority of Chinese people view their society as legitimate and socialist. If you had any interest in democracy at all you'd respect this perspective instead of imposing your own

Nah, they don't watch that either. They're very detached and only watch football or movies with Humphrey Bogart. My best guess is they felt some kind of resentment their whole lives because they were always the poorest ones out of their siblings. All my aunts and uncles formed businesses or got moderately wealthy, whereas I grew up on the lower middle side of that spectrum. And that turned into standard American racism.