To be fair, the real radical leaders of BLM who could have taken the protests to the next step were all found dead by suicide in cars that spontaneously combusted.
ssjmarx
joined 5 years ago
Now I'm imagining a show called Workplace Nightmares, where the hosts are a couple IWW representatives.
He infamously stormed out of a university discussion on the book because he felt everyone there was misinterpreting it.
De-Stalinization undertaken by Khruschev was basically the starting point for everything going wrong. Not that mistakes weren't made prior to this, or that the SU wasn't able to accomplish great things after it, but the trend line across Soviet history where Marxism becomes less important as a guiding ideology and the people and the party leaders' desires begin to diverge from each other starts descending there. As Xi Jinpeng puts it:
Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Why did the Communist Party of the Soviet Union fall to pieces? An important reason is that in the ideological domain, competition is fierce! To completely repudiate the historical experience of the Soviet Union, to repudiate the history of the CPSU, to repudiate Lenin, to repudiate Stalin was to wreck chaos in Soviet ideology and engage in historical nihilism. It caused Party organizations at all levels to have barely any function whatsoever. It robbed the Party of its leadership of the military. In the end the CPSU—as great a Party as it was—scattered like a flock of frightened beasts! The Soviet Union—as great a country as it was—shattered into a dozen pieces. This is a lesson from the past!
Those captions are pure :brainworms: . Imagine going somewhere and seeing it for your own eyes but instead of relaying the conversations you had with the people there and their point of view you just kept repeating the things you assumed were true before you went.
:sartre-pipe: "You know, your socialist paradise would be perfect if you abolished the age of consent."
:fidel-salute: Mary mother of God deliver me from this hell!
Oh yeah total agreement. The other planets are a bit slow, but Peragus is an actual slog.
Star War Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast: Way too many levels before you get your lightsaber in a game engine where the lightsaber combat is the most fun thing you can do. It's possible to play for hours and put it away concluding that it's just a run of the mill shooter, but that would be a big mistake.
Also both Knights of the Old Republic games take a long time to get to the good stuff. KOTOR I has Taris and Dantooine, KOTOR II has Peragus and Telos. It just takes a long time for those games to set up their main conflict, so a lot of the stuff you do on those first planets feels a bit aimless at the time you're doing it and pointless by the time you're done.
Final Fantasy XII is yet another JRPG that has this problem. The very first scene/tutorial level is actually pretty great - you see some politics happen, a betrayal, and it's all in media res while you learn the game's strange but fun combat system. Then you switch to the actual main character Vaan and it takes like six hours for the game to get interesting again.
Grand Theft Auto has a couple games with missions that revolve around breaking into military bases, killing loads of troops, and stealing a tank or a jet.
The whole series is pretty blatantly anti-American. GTAV is basically about how capitalism fucks all of its characters up and makes them terrible people, San Andreas spends a lot of time talking about how the CIA coopts and kneecaps liberation movements on behalf of capital, GTA4's main character fled the rise of capitalism in eastern europe only to find that America was exactly the same but with more cars and guns...
IDK the numbers for East Germany, bu I do know that the richest Soviets were only something like six times wealthier than the average citizen. The perks for high level officials of having a nice housing bloc and a private store are so minor compared to what the rich in America can expect - nevermind the fact that nobody in that system was born into a high level Party position. Though some western propagandists will argue that Stalin "owned" the entire Soviet state when he was in charge of it, and therefore calculate that he was the richest man in history.
I wonder if this is an example of Japanese ironic humor that just isn't crossing the language and culture barrier.
They were expecting it to be like the War on Terror, unfortunately for them their enemy had modern Russian weapons not leftover 1980s stuff.