askchapo

I only just now thought about the almost impossible to miss messaging of that children's book: "If you give anything to someone else they'll take and take and never stop demanding more."

Sure, that can apply in some contexts ( :porky-happy: ) but unless someone's take changes my mind about I think the message is fucked up.

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

From the 60s-90s, there were many serial killers who were caught and put into custody. But then, it just kinda... stopped? I'm aware that the amount of serial killers is unknowable, but surely, with increases in forensic technology and surveillance, there would be even more caught. But there aren't. What happened?

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

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I'm posting this before me and mine start opening presents in a few hours. :cat-vibing:

I’m so fucking :doomer: and while I know it’s a coping mechanism I fail to argue against it.

Let’s just share wholesome happy things in this thread.

Not in a great spot. My material needs are met, so don't worry about that. Just want to break out of the cycle I'm in of "oh hey, you have only a few hundred from this paycheck before you're negative again."

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 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

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?

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)

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:

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.

"Social Democracy objectively represents the moderate wing of Fascism." - J. V. Stalin

"Women hold up half of the sky." - Mao Zedong (though a more or less common saying attributed to many)

“Civilize the mind but make savage the body” - Mao Zedong

"Socialism or barbarism." - K. Kautsky

"Poor countries aren’t underdeveloped, they are overexploited." - Prof. Dr. M. Parenti.

"Who has been saved by the United States?" - Fidel Castro

"We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror." - Dr. K. Marx

But i also like more jokey ones ;

"The United States is also a one-party state but, with typical American extravagance, they have two of them." - Julius Nyerere

“Trotsky has sent in a silly letter. We shall neither print it nor reply to him.” - V. I. Lenin

"Stalin shouldn't have stopped at Berlin." - unknown

"If you don’t steal from your boss, you’re stealing from your family." - unknown

"It’s [date] and Stalin saved the world from fascism" - unknown

Mine is easy.

:pete: "I am nonpolitical and consider myself to be above partisan agendas, but as long as the Democrats are taken over by Marxist extremists, I will vote GOP every time. As a gay man, I stand to lose more if tankies get their way, like they did in the USSR."

Try to think of something advanced but theoretically possible that would rapidly proliferate. No weapons.

My first thought was some kind of farm tech leading to a second agricultural revolution, allowing AES countries to thrive despite sanctions. Some leap forward in permaculture or vertical farms or whatever.

Another idea was a breakthrough in cryptography makings comms be completely anonymous, giving insurgent movements a more even playing field.

Yes, I know from a rhetorical perspective they're a bunch of jerks who do nothing but complain, but is there an actual takedown of their ideological notions? Because just saying they suck without further explanation makes it hard to dismiss them when they pop up. I don't agree with them, I just want to know why I shouldn't. Something about statues and logic and being chained in a courtyard with wind and all that. I'm not sure where to put this, sorry.

I'll mention something different for my own contribution than my usual:

I've always hated Seinfeld, including when his show was brand new. "It's a show about nothing!" was a thought terminating cliche in the 90s that was used to pitch the show at me again and again by its fans, and also to dismiss any and all problems I had with the show and its ultra-privileged smarmy main character. If I got anything valuable out of that show and for that matter his stand up routine, it was a lifelong allergy to New Yorker comedy that front loads a whole lot of "I am a New Yorker which means I am smarter and tougher and wiser and more cultured and more sophisticated yet more grounded than you" self-aggrandizement into the set. :nyet:

EDIT: Please post your own disliked Hexbear-approved popular things! Don’t just reply to mine! :rage-cry: