GarbageShoot

Do nether portals still work? Escaping hell seems like an interesting goal that might technically be possible with loot chests.

Notch is still a dick though.

Of course, but he basically just ripped off other projects (dwarf fortress, infiniminer) and coded poorly, and a great deal of his work has been gutted and replaced over the years.

That's why I said the thing to do is work on that feeling. Just because someone feels that way now doesn't mean they need to feel that way in the future, especially if they don't want to feel that way, and very few misanthropes really "like" being misanthropes even if they revel in it as cope (again, speaking from experience).

I agree with what you are directly saying, but remember that the question is based on someone having their misanthropy preventing them from doing socialism -- which, again, I can identify with from pathologies I have spent many years trying to fix in myself. Yes, Marxism is either Scientific Socialism or it's another show-and-tell affectation just like every other "analytical lens" that you learn in a philosophy or literature class, and things like moral sentiments must come second to that for it to have power as a means of social analysis.

Either we’re against political violence or not.

NYT interviewer is the third person after Kant and Gandhi to come out with the "bold" stance of not supporting either side in any war

My tendency towards avoidance is getting to me, but luckily the degree to which you lean on personal accusations gives me better reason to ignore it.

Between the quote from Beria and the section I quoted before, screening for "Will each of these people immediately take up arms against us in the likely event of Germans kicking in the door and enabling slaughter like German occupied Poland is already seeing?" makes sense. I clearly had a defective understanding of the issue and I still don't really understand it, but your pathetic sneering may as well be about "the people's stick" for how compelling I find it.

Yeah, but because we have clearly established, it's justified ipso facto for you.

No, you established that I have a weird reaction to the subject of Katyn, but I criticize the Soviets all the time and in fact probably have harsher criticisms of Lenin than most of the MLs on this board (and at least a slightly more articulated criticism of Stalin), and indeed I talk about these subjects every now and then, but it only gets so far and I only have so much patience for repeating myself just to fucking virtue signal that I'm not part of Stalin's personality cult or whatever. I have no interest in making such appeasements to a shithead concern troll like you.

the boatloads of shooting and starving

"Starving" is a weird verb to pick here. Sure wonder why the guy that Definitely Doesn't Have Ahistorical Criticisms of Stalin would use that

Also:

But your characterization of it is a nice sterile abstraction

Absolutely go fuck yourself. In the very same section I said "the kulaks who were shot had it coming and then some". Marx was speaking abstractly and I spoke in part in terms of his quote, but I also applied it, and your attempts at a manipulative framing of what I said to directly accuse me of the contrary are pathetic.

but it just bugs me that at the end of the day, whoever is in power gets to define "intolerance" and their definition might not match the majority's. And the majority might not be right either...

This is to me one of the most primal liberal problems with thinking about politics. No, communists do not support some benevolent autocrat delineating acceptable speech, it must be democratically decided with a mind to Marxist analysis. "But what if people vote wrong?" Campaign against it! Educate them! "But what if people vote so overwhelmingly wrong that such a campaign is hopeless?" Then you are talking about a state that is so overwhelmingly compromised that it doesn't fucking matter if your hypothetical Republicanist alternative tries to reign them in, because in liberal society there is already a massive extent to which popular consensus decides if you live in squalor or not based on what you say. That's what "a reputation" is in liberal society.

The only thing to do is to educate people on what their own interests are. If there is some hypothetical world where people are just determined to vote themselves into hell, then that represents a failed project and a state that must be overthrown.

Some people would consider me intolerant for being against circumcision and piercing of infants' ears, because those are deeply-held cultural traditions for some people.

There is a difference between speaking against something and banning it. This is ultimately just a question about the nature of reactionary religious practices, not "free speech" itself.

Reactionary and hate speech makes me fuckin sick. Yet I'm terrified that attempts to officially ban it just fuel persecution fetishes in people who practice it, and cause them to go further down their rabbit holes and drag more uncertain people with them.

While not as fundamental, this is another common trope among liberals, though I am glad that even radlibs have started to understand that deplatforming is good and works. Yes, the new circumstances fascists are put in give them new tools with which to recruit, but that's the dialectical nature of reality. What matters is not that they have new tools but that those new tools are predicated on them being deprived of old tools that are much, much more powerful, and being able to call yourself a fascist in open society is much more powerful to recruit new fascists than some precious little song and dance about "look at who you aren't allowed to criticize".

I would like to further point out that your likely frames of reference -- either America or states just to its left -- overwhelmingly don't prosecute what you and I would call hate speech, it is the social consensus around some of that hate speech being bad that pushes it to the fringes. It is the banning of it -- which is something that should follow from that social consensus in a democratic government -- that would for most intents and purposes stamp it out.

There's also the matter of social programs and such for the alienated and dispossessed people who it might pick up or who have even already been caught up in it. The law does not need to be punitive, and many fascists are ultimately also a type of victim who the state can help out of their fascism if the state actually wanted to do so.

For your efforts in concern trolling, you're so incredibly lazy. Do you think I'm a complete moron? Like, I don't expect you to respect me, but come the fuck on. Fine, let's use fucking NATOpedia in one of its worst capacities:

As far as I can tell, none of these people were executed for any particular crimes; they were executed for being members of counter-revolutionary parties and things like that.

As far as you can tell, really? Let's look at the very second paragraph of your link:

Of the total killed, about 8,000 were officers imprisoned during the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland, another 6,000 were police officers, and the remaining 8,000 were Polish intelligentsia the Soviets deemed to be "intelligence agents and gendarmes, spies and saboteurs, former landowners, factory owners and officials"

Maybe it's true, maybe it is not, but the charge was more severe than "member of a liberal party," though the shitty article doesn't even begin to delve into why it was done beyond that expression of the charge and then these paragraphs:

Once at the camps, from October 1939 to February 1940, the Poles were subjected to lengthy interrogations and constant political pressure by NKVD officers, such as Vasily Zarubin. The prisoners assumed they would be released soon, but the interviews were in effect a selection process to determine who would live and who would die. According to NKVD reports, if a prisoner could not be induced to adopt a pro-Soviet attitude, he was declared a "hardened and uncompromising enemy of Soviet authority".

On 5 March 1940, pursuant to a note to Joseph Stalin from Beria, six members of the Soviet Politburo – Stalin, Vyacheslav Molotov, Lazar Kaganovich, Kliment Voroshilov, Anastas Mikoyan, and Mikhail Kalinin – signed an order to execute 25,700 Polish "nationalists and counterrevolutionaries" kept at camps and prisons in occupied western Ukraine and Belarus. The reason for the massacre, according to the historian Gerhard Weinberg, was that Stalin wanted to deprive a potential future Polish military of a large portion of its talent. The Soviet leadership, and Stalin in particular, viewed the Polish prisoners as a "problem" as they might resist being under Soviet rule. Therefore, they decided the prisoners inside the "special camps" were to be shot as "avowed enemies of Soviet authority".

Remembering what a "hostile source" is (I think you might struggle with that), this is actually kind of interesting. It sure would be nice if the assholes at the CIA could have hosted a source with a full translation of the order, rather than just a sentence fragment.

In any case, I am beginning to understand it better and in the context of the imminent (though still underestimated) Nazi invasion, I see the value in killing cops and military [which seem to be what almost all of them were, the so-called "intelligentsia" were also mainly in the military, though as conscripts and seem to be best understood as militarily-trained masses] who the extensive interview process deemed a threat in the case of Nazis breaking them out of jail. Considering that the Nazis would sweep through Poland like a whirlwind not long after, there seems to me to be objects of legitimate consideration here.

Well, here's a hexbear search for "excuses terror"! There's only about 20 pages of results, but luckily about half of those are some variation of "we might having to start making excuses".

And again, you must think I'm a moron. It's a quote from Marx, and it does not refer to indiscriminate killing. In fact, it has as much to do with the destruction of state machinery and private property, and the destruction of liberal society as anything else:

Why then your hypocritical phrases, your attempt to find an impossible pretext?

We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror. But the royal terrorists, the terrorists by the grace of God and the law, are in practice brutal, disdainful, and mean, in theory cowardly, secretive, and deceitful, and in both respects disreputable.

The Prussian official piece of paper goes even to the absurd length of speaking about the "right of hospitality which was disgracefully abused" by Karl Marx, the Editor-in-Chief of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung.

I don't know very much about the killing in Katyn and you have done little to educate me, so I must ask questions. When it comes to actions of my own, or actions that I actually do know about -- you mentioned the "Holodomor" earlier like the miserable concern troll you are; the kulaks who were shot had it fucking coming and then some, while the peasants who starved were a tragedy the Soviets failed to avert -- making excuses and absurd appeals to things like "hospitality" have no place. If we understand what happened, we should offer the most direct and straightforward justification or we should condemn it (breaking the event down to constituent elements if we need to delineate). As Mao said, a revolution is not a dinner party, and love is not enough to defeat fascism, even if it is a good thing to hold as well. "Hospitality," on the other hand, can be thrown out altogether when it comes to dealing with the state or free reactionaries.

So shoot those Polish fascists. Don't shoot the Polish liberal college professor you've got in your custody as a proxy.

Is that what happened? I've been asking questions towards that end that you ignored.

So if it were random, unaligned summary executions, that would be okay? Cause from my point of view summary executions of innocent people is intrinsically bad, regardless of what theoretical framework we decide to explain them with.

You say "innocent" but we haven't established that they were innocent or even that that was more probable than them siding with fascists.

Is there a particular Polish mayor the Soviets killed in Katyn that you had in mind, or are you constructing a contra-factual counter-example out of whole cloth?

There was an infamous case of a Polish mayor that I was alluding to (actually I think there were a couple), but they were on the German side of the border because the point is that there were natively Polish pogroms and we know that even after the war, sections of the Polish population were taking any excuse to commit genocide on any minority (e.g. Germans during the postwar relocations). I know some claims about demographic information, but I know of only like one or two individual identities of people killed in Katyn.

Maybe, maybe not! Like you said it's not certain. Just a probability. It'll depend on the material conditions on the ground at the time.

So don't put it on your fuckin platform like it's something you hope to do.

I've only seen that put on an ML platform in anarcho-bidenist memes and that one tasteless and self-deprecating joke about communists in Disco Elysium. No one is saying "Let us aspire to kill as many people without trial as possible", you are battling a phantom in your brain that I can do little to help you overcome, unless you are just finding a way to concern troll about atrocity propaganda

On a systemic level, yeah, there are a ton of ways to help such people if you actually have levers of power, I was just trying to be brief in answering what a socialist who is personally a self-identified misanthropic socialist should do.

Edit: I've been a misanthrope and still need to uproot some parts of it that are embedded really deep in my personality, to the point that it feels like there's a second person underneath me who does an objectionable job managing things when I'm not paying attention to my actions. I think your diagnosis is fair.

I mean they were summary executions; those are prima facie terrible absent some pretty some massively compelling evidence (member of the Waffen-SS), right?

Did you miss the part where Polish fascists under Nazi occupation were already rounding up and slaughtering Jews and other minorities? What makes a Nazi collaborator better than SS?

Isn't that what the whole "abolish the police" thing is about?

The principle element of "abolish the police" from the standpoint of an anti-imperialist looking at America is that the police function as a sort of colonial occupation apparatus within minority communities that does virtually nothing else in those communities but maintain a brutal oppression for the purpose of economic extraction and the maintainance of a white supremacist ideology. The fact that cops effectively engage in the summary execution of, at minimum, over a thousand people a year in this country is principally bad because it is to support that project.

In a hypothetical American Social Revolution, a portion of the people who are now cops probably would need to be killed for simple logistical and threat-mitigation reasons, though of course rehabilitation is the goal and detaining most of them safely would probably be possible in most cases. Cops [and deputies], more than military or any other group that isn't a private gang (like the Klan) are the group that this is true for than any other, since they do in some places operate as rightwing death squads and are a self-selection for the most malignant personalities that can maintain an organized group and do violence themselves.

Isn't that what the whole George Floyd protests were predicated on?

If you think killing a Polish mayor who rallied his town to immolate Jews (or killing a soldier who did the immolating) is similar to the killing of George Floyd, I have nothing to say to you.

You don't get to lay the Holocaust and German crimes in Barbarossa at their feet; the timeline doesn't work out.

You're correct on this, I forgot how early it happened. Then there is merely the impending threat of annihilation that the Nazis were open about seeking for the East, further substantiated by the slaughter of ethnic minorities in German-occupied Poland, which many Polish municipal politicians, etc. were party to, to say nothing of the killing in Germany and its other occupied territories.

I mean it was constructed out of declassified Soviet documents. You can try to debunk those as forgeries

Come now, don't speak to me like I'm a Holocaust denier. If it's in the archives, it's in the archives, but what specifically is in the archives? How was it constructed? Furthermore, what got the officers imprisoned where they were and were all of those kept at those sites killed? If the prisons were just emptied, what happened to the personnel who worked there, were they just reassigned or did the prisons begin to be refilled immediately?

As I said before, it's possible that it was terrible, but I've never seen someone seriously engage with why it was done in order to establish why it should not have been done.

In any revolution, to say nothing of such an existential conflict as the Soviets in WWII, there are going to be summary executions. They are not an aspiration -- we all admire the rehabilitation accomplished by the CPC -- but if what is logistically keeping you from succeeding is the human rights of fascists, success is much more important.