A Long, Long, Time Ago

Communism is when you do a lot of unpaid overtime and are expected to be grateful for the privilege, apparently.

There were many incredibly hardworking peasants and workers in the USSR who achieved astonishing things in service of the revolution, but the fact that they had to make such extraordinary sacrifices is itself a tragedy, and should not be celebrated.

The individual referred to in OP's post was actually named Nikolai Ostrovsky (Pavel Korchagin was the main character of his fictionalized autobiography). He lived a short life full of hardship and sacrifice and died at 32. I think the best way to honor his memory would be to create a world in which such sacrifices are no longer necessary.

wait till i tell "i don't dream of labor" crowd about pavel korchagin who became soviet national role model for basically working himself to multiple disabilities to save town from freezing in the winter during russian civil class war. he wrote autobiographical novel while already blind for which he became famous. and in it there was a scene where anyone who refused to work in those terrible conditions were asked to give up their communist card. because you can't claim to call yourself a communist without being ready to put in as much work as you can. and that wasn't just him ussr was able to withstand these critical first years thanks to selfless underpayed work put by it's people towards rebuilding country's wealth. getting rid of feodal lords and capitalists was enough motivation imagine that! the fact so many people who call themselves communists on here seem to be proud of flaunting their individualism and complete lack of proletarian morals is an insult to all revolutionary workers of the past. go call yourselves libertarians or something.

“We train our young men to drop fire on people, but our commanders won’t allow them to write ‘fuck’ on their airplanes because it’s obscene.”

The above thread is a typical, and entertaining, mockery of crude and reactionary youth (presumed entirely male but who knows) getting shut down by calm and minimalist mods running X-box live.

But reading through it, it’s easy to forget: these are social rules for games where you run around in grimdark settings finding other players and shooting them with realistic guns until they are a bloody mess on the floor. And then you do it again ten seconds later.

I’m not criticizing that as an illegitimate form of enjoyment, but it does seem that such an atmosphere goes pretty well in hand with crude and violent jokes, particularly usernames. This one guy calls himself ObamaDeathPanel, a morbid joke about what the true all time killer is (perhaps I should claim the usertag Capitalism.) And while that might be tasteless - that seems exactly the sort of joking nom de guerre a barbarian in that situation might take. Many of the other handles and bios don’t seem that much farther off from what an adrenaline addled machine gunner would say either.

The whole thing highlights the hypocrisy and disavowal of this corporation. We want to take the money of teenage boys who love shooting their problems into oblivion, but for mods’ sakes don’t talk like someone who does that.

They fallback on the excuse “well the Live service is E because people from other games use it”, but then that begs, why are you trying to make a social experience that is inclusive of both Call of Duty and Spyro?

What's interesting to me is that for all the fervor surrounding Muslims, I've never seen anyone do any deep investigative journalism on how religion is maintained across generations, and how deeply the parents actually believe in it. Kids are dumb and have short attention spans; do they have a parent at home constantly making serious comments about jihad, or is this a case of edgy lower-class humor? If the parents were genuine Islamists, you'd think they'd be sticking their kids into a private school, or not sending them to school at all, and the fact that they found it funny implies a lack of deep conviction. Or maybe it does and

Even preschoolers are radicalizing in Belgium “They threaten to murder ‘infidels’, slice their necks, call classmates pigs”

A recently started initiative “Network Islam-experts” records issues of radicalized students. Since 2016 there have been 481 cases of schools who encountered ‘problems’. Today for the first time a case-file was made public involving toddlers.

An East-Flemishs school network made an internal report named “indoctrination among toddlers”, it details problematic behavior:

“Citing Arabic verses during playtime, refusing to come to class because it doesn’t fit their beliefs, not coming to school on Friday for ‘religious reasons’. A girl refuses to give a boy a hand or to stand in line near boys.”

Sadly these are the least frightening cases:

A preschooler already has a ‘friend’ in Morocco she will be married to later. A child threatens to murder ‘infidels’. Calling non-Muslim students ‘pigs’. Making the motion of slicing someones neck.”

After conversation with parents it was concluded they support these actions and found them funny.

1, 2, 3

I have a knee-jerk disgust reaction to the Tweet, but it's because Israel cannot credibly claim to even value the lives of its own people, so I interpret any claim to the contrary with maximum uncharitability: "If you really wanted to save families, you'd declare a ceasefire. You value your citizens solely to the extent that they can provide cannon fodder or victims to motivate the cannon fodder."

Hey what do you mean the Israeli government is actually harvesting sperm from the corpses of IDF soldiers.

If I were a state run media outlet, you would have to waterboard this out of me. They just fucking tweeted it. Publicly. On Twitter.

It *is* a good argument; the point is to force the theist to acknowledge that their god is just one among thousands, none of whom have any persuasive evidence for their existence. What argument can Catholics offer me for the existence of God that are any different that that of a pagan and their "idol"?

I also think the analogy with Communist leaders is telling: regardless of your thoughts on Mao, Lenin, Che, etc., there is indisputable proof (often video evidence) that they all existed and said/did the things their followers claim they said/did. Rejecting them is a matter of political opinion, not denial of their factual existence. The second poster assumes the same of God; the facts are not in dispute, atheists are simply *rejecting* God, whose existence is as certain as Leon Trotsky.

"we're both atheists, I just believe in one god less than you" is rarely a good argument.

it is never a good argument when used to compare a pagan idol to the Lord.

There is a reason why neopaganism comes at a time of uncertainty and rests on either the reinvention of paganism or on irrationalism.

“ (Also, I’ll grant you there’s something to *the basic idea*, but “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” is actually untenable.)”

Could you elaborate more on this? I’m curious how you arrived to this conclusion when we produce more than enough food to feed the planet and when we (in the United States, at least) have more empty homes than homeless people. If those kinds of surpluses can be achieved with only small parts of the population engaged in agriculture and construction, what could we achieve if everyone worked to the best of their ability? Even with marginal returns on labor.

I genuinely mean it; to me, nothing is more untenable than the idea that allowing a small percentage of people to control nearly all resource and labor allocation will benefit humankind in the long run, except maybe the idea that unchecked productive activity in a competitive system will somehow miraculously save us from the ecological catastrophe caused by that activity.

funny thing about talking about capitalism/communism is if you don’t explicitly say ‘capitalism’ or ‘communism’ and take out the marxist jargon people will agree with you 90% of the time

A quick Google would seem to indicate that Napoleon also:

-Forbid Jews from migrating within France

-Heavily restricted their ability to engage in moneylending

-Cancelled all debt owed to Jewish lenders

-Forced them to adopt surnames

-Conscripted them into the army

All of which are far more anti-Semitic than the modern policy of building a welfare state and offering people the choice to leave their religious communities.

Now I'll freely admit that I'm ignorant of Napoleon beyond some broad strokes. I would assume that, as a European gentile in the eighteenth century, he had antisemitic sentiments. But like, this seems insane:

Letting Jews out of the ghettos and removing the barriers to their participation in broader society is roughly the exact opposite of antisemitism, surely. If this is an accurate summary of Napoleon's policy towards the Jews then he was in fact a great champion of Jewish freedom, and a model for gentiles to follow rather than a cautionary tale.

None of which is to say that strikebreaking is *admirable* per se. But analyzing the material precursors of our actions is the absolute bedrock of any materialism worth the name. Treating people who betray the cause – any cause – like they’re infected with some nebulous evil rather than responding to the incentives they’re presented with is magical thinking.

"Many religions now come before us with ingratiating smirks and outspread hands, like an unctuous merchant in a bazaar. They offer consolation and solidarity and uplift, competing as they do in a marketplace. But we have a right to remember how barbarically they behaved when they were strong and were making an offer that people could not refuse."

-Christopher Hitchens

Your arguments sum to "In my perfect world, there will be no Jews, no Shinto, no Hindu, no Sikhs, no nothing other than a vaguely Christian-ish 'default culture'. This to me is a positive," and you don't understand how everyone else is appalled and taking it as a negative?

Very strange that you assume "Vaguely Christian" to be a "default culture", sounds like you have some internalised Christian hegemony to deal with!

So from OP's perspective, democracy is perfectly compatible with a class society that enables unelected managers the ability to totally control all (or nearly all) media through ownership in what is more or less a state media system, but democracy is threatened only when those managers start trying to actively and obviously crack down on messages they don't like, rather than passively controlling the narrative by choosing which stories reach publication.

Besides, Bolsanaro has praised Brazil's military dictatorship and spoken highly of torture, and he also has encouraged militia violence against criminals or suspected criminals, but I guess snobby cultural gatekeeping is worse than continuing to rape the Amazon.

i’ve said it before but today i’ve been reflecting on it again.

one huge factor in bolsonaro’s election was the decentralization of media. haddad’s campaign outspent his by an order of magnitude and had way more legally mandated free tv exposure.

bolsonaro’s electorate was formed on twitter, facebook, youtube and whatsapp messenger, while the mainstream media continued to maintain that he was unacceptable.

this suggests to me that whatever ideological homeostasis that existed was maintained by media gatekeepers. and as they become increasingly unable to perform said gatekeeping, we see more and more pressure, particularly coming from the left, for social media platforms to step in and moderate their content.

take a moment, especially if this make you uncomfortable, to reflect on what the meaning of democracy is.