My position is that people are selfish because they’re raised in a society that rewards selfishness. There’s always going to be outliers but that’s the goal of vanguardism: someone needs to steer the ship while the generational change happens. I don’t know if that’s the best path forward but it is a path and might work better with more safeguards against a Stalin or Mao or Pol Pot type but that’s a hard conversation to have when people aren’t willing to to consider any element of communism.

Gotta go further back, we could have skipped Nazis if we had properly handled the slavers and bigots in the Confederacy. American “race science” was a critical foundation for the eugenics that inspired Hitler.

At no point in here have I said that Russia isn’t a fascist state. It checks all the boxes: violent, authoritarian, nationalist, suppressing minorities and marginalized groups, single party, lots of corruption. You’re confusing my Communist sympathies with uncritical support for the modern regime dressed in red.

Well that’s easy, I don’t. Looking at the actions of Putin or Xi Jinping and saying “this is a communist state that I fully endorse” doesn’t make sense to me. But I think there’s a lot of people that look at those countries through the historical lens and resonate with the aspirations and ideals of Marx and Lenin and other political thinkers of the era and get wrapped up in the association. And America has made it really easy to bash America, that tends to land you among modern and historical rivals.

I think you’re losing some nuance but yeah “anything that goes against US interests is the priority” is a real problem in some leftist spaces (I was banned from /r/latestagecommunism for suggesting that maybe the things we hear about North Korea aren’t just Western lies to discredit a true Communist state.) Of the “big three” I see the most of that on lemmygrad so I don’t bother.

But there’s a scale of uncritical support and I think people use “tankie” a little too broadly to dismiss people rather than consider the different facets of belief. Online discourse sucks.

Oh it’s a terrible app, just the worst.

There sure is, including “vanguardism” which was what many conflate with totalitarianism because of how the Cold War shook out. Really, it was the success of anti-Communist propaganda in the Red Scares that has colored so much of our assumptions and talking points as well as the unbridled might of the American military to suppress and punish any nation that tried something other than subservience.

Hexbear is specifically the shitpost refuge of displaced terminally-online /r/chapotraphouse diaspora and it’s hard to parse the layers of irony and in-joke and I’m not invested enough in that community to try and fairly represent it here. I’m not surprised that people have an aversion to it but the amount of space it takes up in some people’s head here is bonkers. The goals and culture are very different than .ml.

At the extreme, sure. Authority/Anarchy isn’t a binary selection. (Fascism is an authoritarian position, specifically it’s a right-nationalist movement centered on cultural identity)

Anarchism isn’t the only way to be a leftist.

You’re oversimplifying (and so was I, to be totally fair). The Reddit exodus has lots of reasons. I think it has more to do with one’s thoughts on corporatization and technocultural knowledge which does correlate with left-leaning politics. I’m sure there are many who are just sick of platforms giving Trumpists tacit approval (I think this is the primary driver for people leaving twitter) but that Venn diagram is not a perfect circle.

.ml has tankies, and there’s plenty of fair criticism to direct at Dessalines and the mod team for generally cultivating a culture of knee-jerk anti-Western thought (and the inverse, more importantly) but it’s not “closer to fascism” because it leans authoritarian and drapes itself in USSR/CCP aesthetic. But it’s mostly a FOSS instance with well-deserved bashing of US imperialism and state-sponsored terrorism.

If this were a lefty echo chamber people wouldn’t hate .ml but they do.

Eh, it’s a center-left chamber at best. As evidenced by the extreme reaction to the far-left echo chambers.

It used to be good, but yeah the quality has been going down since before it sold to Nestle in 2022.

Kinda hard to accomplish anything material from the other side of the country.

Only server browser, no matchmaking.

DEVO covering (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction is way up there for me. Loses the fuzzy guitar but the lyrics land better as an odd punk song than the whining of one of the biggest rock acts in the world.

“Nothing gets my head back in the game like some Solid Oral.” “I didn’t believe the hype, but my teammate gave me Solid Oral and now I won’t settle for less.”

Sells itself, it’s perfect.

Just gonna pop in here to yell at the clouds. I hate the name “Liquid I.V.” for a powdered sports drink. It’s none of the things. It’s a dry-ass powder that doesn’t go in your veins. Fuck. And it’s presumably meant to evoke the emergency dehydration scenario of world-class athletes dying on the sideline, hooked up to saline drips to keep their muscles from cramping inside-out. Everything about the branding is crap.

The product itself is fine though.

That part is like only like five fights against humans and robots, the only tricky part is the kicky robots will ruin you if you save them for last. And you’ve been without Yuna for a bit by that point so somebody (Kimahri or Rikku) should be filling in the healer role already. It is a weird and kinda weak story sequence but I think the game starts improving after that point.