axont [comrade/them, they/them]

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.

I do see it as an economic problem. Precarity is going to induce loneliness and tension. People are working more hours and there’s simply less ability to connect. There are fewer “third spaces” (places outside of work or home) these days, so people have reduced capacity to develop bonds with one another. All of that is going to generate mistrust and lack of friendship among people.

Political tensions are high too, for instance, I would refuse to live with someone who expresses casual transphobic because I wouldn’t trust them to be around me.

Furthermore this is a niche internet forum with a lot of nerds who have general social anxiety. Probably not a good cross section of a population.

The aversion to housemates represents a breakdown in social trust in general, plus people are just more precarious. You’ve got to hope your housemates can pay rent when all of you hold tenuous employment. One person losing their job is a disaster for everyone else. One person moving out can also be a crisis.

I lived with housemates around 2010 to 2016 and it was a constant struggle to keep bills paid, plus we’d have to share vehicles and that was difficult since sometimes one of us would work nights, some of us days. Also revolving door of girlfriends/boyfriends who’d come in and eat our food or borrow cars.

Not great experiences. Honestly some fun times looking back on it all. Was nice to be around friends or do movie nights. But otherwise it was a struggle to keep together.

Poor people don’t vote because they’ve completely checked out. They don’t believe either party represents their interests. They’re correct.

There is no way to vote poverty away here because the entire apparatus is already owned by the people who want widespread poverty to exist

There need to be more educational videos games that are actually fun and educational

My dream for a Disco Elysium sequel would be set centuries in the future and the events in Revachol are only flavor text in a book somewhere. I like sequels that do stuff like that.

The Siren series has a mechanic where you see what the enemies are seeing. There’s also a section of Driver: San Francisco where you’re being chased and it’s from the perspective of the person chasing you. That’s the closest I’ve ever seen.

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.

Yeah I speak two languages and my brain is still filled with irrelevant information about trains

I prefer gender neutral terms, please. I’m nonbinary

Greatest day of my life

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

Do you live somewhere where voting for Democrats even matters?

Congratulations then, you’re the pinnacle of humanity, unburdened with living among ideology like the rest of us sloppy piggies.

Yeah I wanted to see something like this. Every supposed genocide committed by communists, outside of maybe Cambodia, is very contentious among historians at best. The supposed Xinjiang genocide is not regarded as a factual occurrence by half of the world, and the fiercest proponents of an existing genocide are what …the CIA? NATO leadership? The same countries that endorsed the Iraq War? That right there should be enough to raise eyebrows. The lack of meaningful eyewitness testimony or you know, photographs or records should be something else. In 30 seconds I can watch footage of Israeli soldiers commiting war crimes and the only Chinese equivalent videos 've seen look like fairly routine prisoner transfers. Which is not great, don’t get me wrong, but having prisoners or treating prisoners unfairly or with cruelty is not genocide, nor is it some unique quality for a socialist country to have, or countries in general.

There was a 2020 statement to the UN, read by a Cuban representative, speaking on the behalf of 45 other countries who were endorsing China’s policy on Xinjiang. Among those countries are Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Belarus, Syria, Venezuela, Yemen, Sri Lanka, Palestine (this one is important), and Myanmar.

These places are completely disparate in terms of geography and state ideology, yet they all came together to very solidly proclaim China’s policy in the region does not constitute genocide. Palestine and Yemen in particular seems very egregious to me, because if anything those should be aware of what an ethnic genocide looks like, and yet they endorsed Cuba’s statements on China. Furthermore, China’s Xinjiang program ended in 2019 as far as I know. This is part of the statement those nations endorsed:

“China has undertaken a series of measures in response to threats of terrorism and extremism in accordance with the law to safeguard the human rights of all ethnic groups in Xinjiang. There was no single terrorist attack in Xinjiang in the last three years. People of all ethnic groups enjoy their happy life in a peaceful and stable environment. China maintains openness and transparency by, among other things, inviting more than 1,000 diplomats, officials of international organizations, journalists, and religious persons to visit Xinjiang who witnessed Xinjiang’s remarkable achievement.”

At a certain point maybe you need to look in the mirror and ask if it’s yourself who’s clouded by ideology in this matter

Every single time I see these complaints about getting banned I look through the modlog and find them saying something racist or transphobic. This isn’t an exception.

Ok, the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia committed genocide when they were nominally communist at the time. Is that good enough for you? It’s the most noteworthy example I can think of. Actually maybe the Shining Path too, in Peru. I never liked them or their methods.

The supposed genocide in Xinjiang is not at all the same thing. There’s no open warfare, rebellion, nothing to suggest what western nations are claiming is happening. The only evidence I’ve seen is that prisons exist in Xinjiang, and their prisons are much like prisons anywhere else on the world. All other evidence I’ve seen comes from one specific person, the deluded mind of Adrian Zenz. A man who cannot speak Chinese, has never lived in China, and he’s one guy.

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.

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