Excrubulent
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net
- Comment on Pretty interesting when you really think about it. 2 days ago:
Nobody said imperial powers were immune to poverty. They thrive off of it, that’s where they get their soldiers. Like what, I’m supposed to ignore US imperialism because of the vast poverty that exists in that country?
Either way that doesn’t mean you get to turn away the people who were made poor by imperialism and tell them to fix their own country, regardless of how much you personally benefited.
It isn’t fucking relevant that you’re not in a wealthy country. In fact it makes it harder to understand why you’ve got no compassion for anyone else. Immigration doesn’t hurt you personally.
Someone has taken you in with faux-leftist reactionary rhetoric, but it’s clear you don’t care to learn the reality, so I don’t see much point in carrying on talking to you.
- Comment on Pretty interesting when you really think about it. 2 days ago:
Your empire didn’t end until 1976.
And absolutely none of this has anything to do with the fact that stopping people from migrating will do anything to fix poverty.
You call yourself a leftist and you have no concept of how imperialism shapes our world.
- Comment on Pretty interesting when you really think about it. 2 days ago:
- Comment on Pretty interesting when you really think about it. 3 days ago:
The weapons you would support being sent to free them in some hypothetical better world, in this world are used to ensure their emiseration. These places aren’t poor because the people just did a bad job at managing them, they are poor because they were bombed and looted.
You can go to the US’s policies in South America, their policy of keeping it under control as their own “backyard”, how the School of the Americas cranked out death squads, how neoliberalism was born with the sponsorship of a fascist coup in Chile, and how the Chicago School taught countries to privatise and disinvest from public infrastructure.
You can look at the IMF and the World Bank putting out predatory loans where the rulers of countries are bribed to sell out their own people, leaving them impoverished and in debt.
Or how the United Fruit Company kept several countries under its thumb, coining the term “banana republic”, so you could buy cheaper bananas.
Further back you can look at the rape of Africa, where European colonial powers did a campaign of unmitigated atrocities for decades, setting up imperialist structures that keep many of those nations subjugated to this day.
Or you can look at the modern example of Israel, which is sponsored by the US specifically to project power in the region. The extended wars fought by the US in that region are purely to maintain control over their oil.
I’m just pulling these off the top of my head. This is a tiny fraction of all crimes done to keep poor countries poor.
Neoliberalism works to ensure free flow of capital but restrict the movement of people, so that when their infrastructure is destroyed and they have nowhere else to go, they will be desperate enough to accept extremely low wages.
If you’re going to claim to be class conscious, you need to educate yourself on these issues and learn to have solidarity with workers everywhere. Talking about how you don’t want to sacrifice anything to make others’ lives better is the opposite of what we need to win the class war, especially when your better quality of life was bought with their blood.
- Comment on Anyone notice how Brian Thompson dies and suddenly aliens start attacking? 3 days ago:
You put a lot of effort into trying to teach someone who is clearly dedicated to not learning anything. I appreciated the information at least.
- Comment on The torque better not be too strong with this one 6 days ago:
Fair enough, I’m talking about big H5 construction screws, so a different use case maybe. Also it turns out when ARRMA uses too much threadlock on their axle set screws you can strip them really easily, and I needed more expensive special hex drivers with tught tolerances to work with them.
- Comment on The torque better not be too strong with this one 6 days ago:
I prefer to only use them when I can’t get alignment. They’re far more likely to round out the head in my experience, but they have their uses.
- Comment on The torque better not be too strong with this one 6 days ago:
This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine - it’s designed purely for automation. That’s why it’s tapered, to allow power tools to slip out before they break. That’s good for automation in the 30s, not so good for hand tools or any modern tool with a torque limiter.
You’re much better off with hex or torx, or even the square driver, which is much more tolerant of imperfect handheld tool usage.
The only reason phillips is still used is because it’s ubiquitous, it’s very much a historical oddity. It’s okay for many tasks but unfortunately the slipping out behaviour destroys the screws after a while.
- Comment on Imperialism, authoritarianism and oppression is bad all around m'kay 1 week ago:
Gaza is happening because of US imperialism. Biden said that’s what Israel does in the region very clearly.
- Comment on Perspective 1 week ago:
Anyone seriously considering prepping should listen to Robert Evans’ - of Behind the Bastards fame - podcast episodes on Worst Year Ever:
How to Save Your Community When the Government Fails
The Reasonable Person’s Guide to Prepping
TL;DL: it’s far more about food & water and building strong community ties with mutual aid than having a pile of guns and ammo
- Comment on Interesting. It's a constant reminder 1 week ago:
BOOOOOOOO! DOUBLE-DOWN! DOUBLE-DOWN! FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT!
- Comment on marketing 1 week ago:
“This is serious mum”? I mean it kind of fits.
- Comment on marketing 1 week ago:
Eh, that only matters if they can prove it was a lie. “I don’t recall” is something everyone can get away with.
- Comment on marketing 1 week ago:
The technical term is “autocannibalism”.
- Comment on marketing 1 week ago:
One whose core message you apparently completely missed.
- Comment on What happened to gaming? 2 weeks ago:
Always turn off motion blur and DoF if you can.
- Comment on Reactor goes brrr 2 weeks ago:
Always has been 👩🚀🔫👩🚀.
But actually that article is pretty thin. I believe it was originally a joke about how many astronauts are from Ohio, so they’d get ti space and it would turn out the whole planet was Ohio. It is in fact a reference to real world thing, it’s just a very obscure and strange reference.
- Comment on Damn, "Thoughts and Prayers!" 2 weeks ago:
I recall when Bernie briefly forced the subject into the public consciousness before the Dems forced him out and buried it again, there was a study done on this. It found that when universal healthcare was described in plain language without buzzwords that have been poisoned by propagandists, something like 70-80% of Amerians support it.
- Comment on Intruder 2 weeks ago:
Your story doesn’t make a lot of sense, but there are a bunch of extra details that don’t appear in either of the articles I’ve seen:
wptv.com/…/chris-gaither-11-year-old-boy-shoots-i…
globalnews.ca/…/he-started-crying-like-a-little-b…So if you want to discuss the story’s details, maybe we should agree on those details, and you can give us something more than “trust me bro”.
Also, eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable, and traumatic events make it even less reliable, and when you’re talking about a kid it’s even harder to get straight. I ask my kid what they said 10 seconds ago and they can’t give me a straight answer. Maybe just fucking lay off the child. Jesus christ.
- Comment on What are your favorite "gotta go in blind" games? 2 weeks ago:
It’s by the same guy that made The Stanley Parable, but it’s more serious.
It’s the same themes from Stanley Parable except made into an actual story instead of one long recurring joke.
I’m not saying the long recurring joke is bad - someone will probably hate that I said that - but they’re just two different things that both do their different things very well. The Stanley Parable explicitly never builds to any kind of conclusion.
- Comment on This world is cruel… 4 weeks ago:
Okay, this meme actually doesn’t contain Saddam Hussein. I know it’s a shock, you’d better sit down. Actually lie down. Lower. Lower. Keep going. There he is.
- Comment on Half-Life 2 peaks at 52,000 concurrent players, 20 years after its release 4 weeks ago:
I’ll be straight with you - I never played Ricochet. I was just doing the joke from that one guy who asked Gabe about it that one time. But the fact you ported it to the Source engine is honestly really cool.
- Comment on Half-Life 2 peaks at 52,000 concurrent players, 20 years after its release 4 weeks ago:
I mean who hasn’t at least once?
- Comment on Half-Life 2 peaks at 52,000 concurrent players, 20 years after its release 4 weeks ago:
Ricochet hasn’t recieved the love it deserves. We’ve been waiting on Ricochet 2 for decades. The fans need closure.
- Comment on I put on my robe and my wizard hat 4 weeks ago:
Nerds can be so freaky.
- Comment on 'My personal failure was being stumped': Gabe Newell says finishing Half-Life 2: Episode 3 just to conclude the story would've been 'copping out of [Valve's] obligation to gamers' 4 weeks ago:
The combat may not have been the most interesting versus basic grunts, but it never got stale. I’ve never played another game where the core gameplay changed so much so frequently.
Physics interactions -> Basic FPS -> Fan Boat -> Mounted Gun -> Gravity Gun -> Zombies & Traps -> Car -> THE CRANE FIGHT -> Rockets & Gunships -> Ant Lions -> Ant Lion Minions -> Turrets -> Resistance Squads -> Striders -> Super Gravity Gun
Honestly the HL1 combat may have been somewhat more challengjng, but it was a grind. Fights were often just frustrating. I’ve abandonded playthroughs because I didn’t feel like spending another 10 hours beating my head against the endless amounts of enemies just to get to the end of… whatever I was doing I forgot.
HL1’s big innovation was never removing control from the player just to tell the story. Beyond that they also had some interesting AI behaviour and weapons. It was a game with old-school length and old-school difficulty.
HL2’s big innovation was the physics engine, and they played with it in so many ways, whole polishing every other aspect of the design. They kept the gameplay tight and did something just long enough to explore it and then they moved on. They never forced you to hang out just repeating the same loop over and over to pad the length.
- Comment on Bushtit isn’t much better 😭 5 weeks ago:
“Black-throated bullshit” as a phrase goes pretty hard though.
- Comment on Can't sleep, he's watching 5 weeks ago:
Even if it weren’t true I would definitely tell the advertisers it was.
- Comment on Post-election blues 1 month ago:
Yup. Robert Reich posted something that ended with “Take a moment to breathe, then let the resistance begin.”
And like, buddy, I’m sorry to say, if your resistance is only just beginning, then you are resisting the wrong thing and you will be ineffective. You should be fighting the entire empire, not just the unmasked pieces of it.
The election is your chance to ask for your preferred enemy, but if you don’t get it, your job doesn’t change.
- Comment on Yeah but the one accessory she usually removed was the little swastika pin. 1 month ago:
Oh no… I implemented my AccessoryCount as an unsigned BigInt for some reason. That’s more than the particles in the known universe.
I’ll just step outside on a clear night and claim that the stars themselves are my accessories. Is that too pretentious?