ferristriangle [he/him]

I’m not suggesting that what you’re speculating is impossible.

I’m suggesting your analysis is facile and uninteresting

Imagine it was true

Nice thought experiment, but in most cases we have the declassified documents from the CIA and other such organizations who originated the accusations showing that in their internal communications and records that were not public facing that they knowingly and intentionally lied to the public as part of their campaign of information warfare.

The inherent problem is that skepticism is an inexhaustible well. If the only principle guiding your analysis is skepticism, you will inevitably end up stuck in a perpetual and ultimately unproductive cycle doing little more than tilting at windmills.

This is why theory is important to study. You need to have a framework for understanding the world to build off of if you want to have any analysis that’s more insightful than “what if we imagine that he had bad thoughts? Pretty scary, huh?”

What if we imagine a purple elephant? What if we imagine flying sharks? Makes you think, doesn’t it??

You are either very credulous or intentionally engaging in bad faith, and I don’t much care to figure out which

I admire your continued professionalism

Kremlin-aligned government

Me when I want to make having completely normal relations with a directly neighboring country sound sinister, when everyone knows that a Ukraine with true self determination obviously welcomes an administration installed by a US backed coup in order to use the country as a forward outpost/cannon fodder in their ceaseless aggression and military encirclement of their geopolitical targets.

This is some professional level obliviousness, willful ignorance, and weaponized misunderstanding on display. Bravo.

it’s not as efficient as you make it sounds.

No one has referred to capitalism as efficient or entirely rational.

We are referring to the incentive structure that the capitalist mode of production creates, and which behaviors that structure rewards and therefore elevates into positions of authority.

The framework you are describing as the foundation for your analysis sounds very analogous to the anarchist concept of “authoritarian personality disorder,” and I personally don’t find that to be a very rigorous or intellectually sound framework for understanding the world. To the contrary, it is an unfalsifiable orthodoxy. You are basically starting from an assumption of ill intent, and therefore any evidence that is presented is transformed into evidence of malice by speculating on internal and inherently unknowable “bad thoughts.”

It’s an entirely unscientific way of trying to understand the world.

Historically speaking, socialism and communism are terms that are synonymous and interchangeable.

That is certainly not the case today, but the disagreement over terminology largely comes about as a result of state led suppression of communists and Red Scare tactics. As it became more dangerous to identify oneself as a communist the result was that it became more desirable/safer to identify as a socialist and also to argue that socialism was distinct from communism.

And while I’m no linguistic prescriptivist and I recognize that semantic drift happens to nearly all terminology over a long enough time frame, the issue with this changing definition is that it does not come out of any theoretical grounding or ideological framework. It is a reaction to external pressure, and that reaction by different groups and different peoples leads to the situation today where there is very little agreement or consensus regarding what people are referring to when they use these terms. They have been effectively rendered useless for the purposes of political discussion unless you first begin with a lengthy preamble about how you personally define these terms.

One popular way of making this distinction is the framing that Lenin used. He described socialism in terms of the international class struggle in the epoch of imperialism (the epoch we were currently living through). The jist is that the communist theory of “The State” is that it is definitionally an organ of class domination/class warfare. It is the instrument through which one set of class interests are enforced upon the rest of society, and during the epoch of imperialism that instrument of capitalist class domination is wielded on a global scale. Therefore, any communist party seeking to put an end to the tyranny of the capitalist class will necessarily need a plan for opposing the counter-revolution of the capitalist class and the inevitable sabotage, acts of war, and attempts of the re-domination of the working classes during the epoch of imperialism.

In other words, the working classes would require their own state organ to enforce the interests of the working classes and protect against capitalist reaction and domination. If we are talking about this in terms of the common framing of the “endpoint” of communism being a “stateless, classless” society*, the argument goes that you cannot immediately jump to a stateless society so long as capitalism still has a stranglehold over the majority of the world and imperialist nations are still empowered to wage class warfare across the globe.

This analysis of the strategy and tactics required for the liberation of the working class was referred to as socialism by Lenin. So in this framework, Socialism is the strategy a communist party uses on the path to communism. If you would like to argue that a communist party working towards communism is meaningfully distinct from being communist, you are free to do so. But the distinction is quite slim.

On the other end of the spectrum, you have people inside the imperial core who describe themselves as socialists, or more commonly democratic socialists, and what they mean when they call themselves socialist is, “I want the system to remain relatively unchanged, but we should distribute the fruits of our country’s imperial plunder more equitably by petitioning the capitalist state to administer more welfare and social programs such as universal healthcare.”

This variety of socialist has very little relation to the historical usage of the term, and comes about much more directly as a result of that Cold war/red scare reaction I mentioned above. I would argue that this kind of socialism is little more than a rebranding of liberalism, but that certainly qualifies it as being distinct from communism.

On this forum at least, if you see someone talking about socialism they are much more likely to be using a definition closer to the first definition than the second one.

(*The framing of communism as a stateless, classless, moneyless society is a very sloppy framing, but is sufficient for this discussion)

Yeah, I feel the same towards Stalin as I feel towards most figures and places that have been relentlessly smeared by Cold War and Red Scare propaganda.

And that is that the entire reason these figures are so viscously demonized is because capitalism cannot survive the threat of a good example. The ruling class needs the most radical allowable criticism of their system to be, “Sure, we have many faults, but all of the alternatives are far worse so you better not dare even thinking about fighting for positive change.”

That narrative can only function if every victory of the global proletariat is smeared as a dystopian hellscape ruled by cartoon villains. And I don’t think it’s to our benefit to cede that rhetorical ground wholesale out of fear that challenging it might be unpopular among Cold Warriors.

I had the headband snap on a nice set of wired studio headphones I had, and instead of throwing them out I removed the headband and Frankenstein’d them onto my VR headset.

What else would learning R mean? The programming language?

No one is attacking your “factual and informative” comment.

No one is disputing the difficulties you’ve highlighted. What is being disputed is your assertion that those difficulties are relevant to your assertion that China won’t be able to achieve this.

And the subject of the conversation is a technology that humans have already developed and is in use. So what is it about China/the PRC that would cause you to assert they are incapable of building/employing this technology?

Your argument is that “Hard science doesn’t care about politics,” so I assume you don’t want to imply that you’re critiquing the capabilities of China’s political system. So what’s left? Is it racism? The removed can’t achieve what other humans have already proven is possible because the removed is subhuman?

You are making a political statement whether you intend to or not, you don’t just get to whine about how you were only talking about the science and why is everyone being so mean when you only started a discussion about the science to reinforce (or deflect from) your original assertion.

No one is asking you to?

Well Israel is a settler-colonial project propped up by a global military empire who wants a military ally/outpost in the middle east, and that settler-colonial project is ripping people out of their homes to give land to settlers.

Palestinians are the ones getting ripped out of their homes, having legal rights stripped away from them, and ultimately being corralled into what are fenced-in, open air concentration camps as Israel continues expanding its borders. This is what has resulted in conditions like what we see in Gaza, which is currently one of the highest population density places on earth as a result of Palestinians having more and more of their land colonized and the families who weren’t murdered in ethnic cleansing campaigns had to live closer and closer together as they were driven out of their homes. And as more and more people keep getting shoved into smaller and areas of land as Israel closes its borders in more and more via military occupation, Israel uses its control of the land surrounding these settlements to restrict food, medicine, and electricity from getting to Palestinians. Gaza usually only gets 4 hours of electricity every day despite living in an arid climate where not having air conditioning can result in death from heat stroke on particularly hot days. ~95% of the water in Gaza is not safe to drink, so death from starvation and dehydration are both incredibly common. And with extremely limited access to medical resources, very few people live to/past middle age, with the average age in Gaza currently sitting around 19 years old. Living conditions are so bad that suicidality among children is incredibly common, with over half of people under 18 reporting that they have no will to live when surveyed. And when Israel is not expanding its borders and settling more land, it preys on the desperation of the Palestinian people who have had their lives ripped away from them by employing them for cheap labor to make the lives of the settlers more comfortable. Those are the Palestinians who also have citizenship in Israel so that they can work in Israel, but even with citizenship they are second-class citizens without access to most political and legal rights.

Israelis don’t have any particular reason to hate Palestinians, they’re just doing what every settler-colony does and they keep experiencing blowback from the people they are colonizing. All of the propaganda about thousands of years of Holy War over a Holy Land is just a founding mythos used to obscure this colonizer/colonized relationship by pretending that these are two groups on equal standing that are bickering with each other because they just can’t get along.

mismanagement

When talking about the US, it’s more often correct to assume malice rather than incompetence

US citizens don’t lack access to those things because of a lack of budget. The threat of homelessness, hunger, and health insecurity are all forms of worker discipline. The barrier to solving those things is ideological, not budgetary.

Back in the early xbox days when open world destructible environments were still novel, there were quite a few games where just running around and breaking shit was a core part of the gameplay. I’m thinking of games like “Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction.” After a while, destructible environments just became just became a bullet point on a lot of games, usually scaled back and refined so that you still had areas with sensible level design after things were broken. But I can’t recall any games where destruction was a core part of the experience being made in a long time.

So I’d love to see a game like Ultimate Destruction made to modern standards with modern physics and such. I know Red Faction: Guerilla is known for having destructible environments with very complex physics that required you to think about how a building was constructed and which supports were load bearing if you wanted to topple a building over, and that is certainly the kind of attention to detail I’d want, but it still doesn’t scratch the same itch. The environment is certainly very destructible, but your tools for destroying the environment are much more limited and the game play is much more focused on the combat with the destructible environment offering an option for how you can approach combat.

“Break things apart sandboxes” probably aren’t made anymore because it’s not actually that engaging, and I only liked it because I was a dumb kid, but I would love to see a break the world with outrageous power style of game made to modern standards.