My interpretation is that religion itself should be opposed, but not in the sense that the “new atheist” might oppose it as an expression of their own intellectual superiority but in a way which is informed by an understanding of what religion is and what purpose it serves within bourgeois society. To remove the need for the opiate by treating the affliction which causes the pain that it soothes, not to withdraw the opiate without addressing the pain.
It’s kinda an old meme that the second in a series of things is always the worst, to the point where people make a note of pointing out exceptions. It makes sense though, if you don’t change enough it feels pointless but if you change too much it won’t feel like a continuation of the same thing.
I saw a Youtube comment that said you couldn’t make The Amazing World of Bubblegum now because of snowflakes and it’s from 2011
Weren’t you on here the other day defending letting migrants drown?
You must feel like a real cool guy.
RE: ND people, that’s an interesting and I think valid observation.
It’s telling that even in a science fantasy, where all prejudice between living things has basically ended and rocks, and sentient tar pits are considered worthy of consideration, when faced with an unknown form of life in Data people still resort to denigrating him.
I agree, though obviously Lore did some bad shit, Soong and the rest of the colony don’t treat him as having a right to life. There’s a line in a Big Joel video where he talks about Ratatouille that I really like where he says, “[The protagonist] is […] bound by a moral structure that he is not a subject within” and I think that applies also to Lore - and to an extent, Data. The androids are expected, by society at large, to honour the right of living beings to exist but their right to exist is considered negotiable, conditional. Certainly outside of the crew of the Enterprise.
I think part of the reason Data integrates better is that he is programmed to internalize that contradiction, he does not see his existence as inherently valuable in the same way the federation doesn’t.
Outside of that I find Datalore to a pretty frustrating episode because the concept is so good but the execution verges on comically inept.
As a Marxist I can think of a simple way to test this hypothesis.
“Make sure to mention if you suspect any of them are Jews”
You can’t live without a spinal cord, son. Nothing unnatural about that.
Castro took away my Grandfather’s plantations.
This is surprisingly similar to the plot of Harvester.
It’s late where I am and I’m a bit scatterbrained right now, but I wanted to say I was very much affected by your post. It made me remember how I felt when I first started to understand that the way I thought about everything was not just a lie, but a maliciously constructed one.
Unfortunately I’m not the most well-read person on here, and I hope someone will jump in with a reading list (come on guys, this is the moment you’ve been waiting for).
As far as your questions, are there war crimes, or humanitarian crimes, that communists have committed? The answer really depends on how you define those concepts, but to give a simple, general answer - Yes. Communists are merely people. Though many inspirational people have been communists, it is not the personal character of communists that makes me want to be one. It is my belief that a classless society is possible and that our current capitalist society is directly responsible for an amount of death, deprivation and suffering that cannot begin to be quantified much less justified.
Diving into the details of specific injustices and on when and why we defend actions or not is stretching my writing abilities at the moment, so I’ll just say I hope you hang around, don’t take people too seriously because we like to goof, but there are lots of good, knowledgeable people here and if you keep an open mind I think you’ll be surprised what you can learn. I was. Don’t try too hard to square the circle though, a revolutionary ideology will never be redeemable in the eyes of the ideology it seeks to displace.
I assume getting offended by scary, civilityless hexbears is a rite of passage for them.
When you want to make a nail bomb but can’t find any nails.
The Reddit experience
A while ago I picked up an old, sci-fi themed city builder for DOS about settling a new planet with a generation ship after Earth gets hit with a meteor. The manual and strategy guide were hundreds of pages long, every technology, building and game mechanic were painstakingly modelled on real experimental technology. The lead designer was an ex-NASA scientist. It had infinite random planets with different environments based on the statistical probability of elements depending on which star you went to, there were monorails, a politics system, you could create an AI which could go rogue, you could build underground, trade or fight with splinter groups elsewhere on the planet, even launch more colony ships with a space elevator. All this stuff was described in the manual alongside the state of real research into the technologies, how feasible it would actually be to live on other planets, what we’d need. It was absolutely captivating. It was called Outpost. I installed it in a VM.
The game itself looked great for it’s age but it was half finished, no monorail, no other factions, no space flight, dozens of buildings in the manual weren’t in the game and to top it all off it was apparently mathematically impossible for the simulation not to death spiral. The box also contained a floppy disk with handwritten label and a patch and a printed page of patch notes starting with an apology for the state of the game and a couple of crash fixes.
Ever since then I’ve wanted to play the actual game they had in mind when they wrote that manual. Surviving Mars has some similarities but the scale is so much smaller.
Also Noctis V. I loved Noctis IV.
I disagree somewhat, I think an assassination is the targeted killing of an individual or group of individuals.
Differentiated from a military action because the intention is to kill a specific person and from murder because the goal is to effect some political gain.
It’s also the most shocking “you can’t do that to Mickey Mouse” thing they could make short of a porno (which I’d wager is also in the works) and that’s obviously their marketing angle.
I always found rusts and arks very boring, so no.