GarbageShoot
@GarbageShoot@hexbear.net
- Comment on don't be a coward 3 weeks ago:
Maybe there’s a rock out there made, by complete chance, in such huge proportion of silicon that it becomes more viable, I don’t give a shit. It was just an aside anyway, pick another based on the same principle if you like. Why an obligate biped? Why this size? Why not a flying creature? Why not a rotationally-symetrical monstrosity? Why not an intelligent species that physically couldn’t really be engineers but happen to live on the same planet as creatures who can? Or who just get contacted by outside life that can? I’m a dipshit who mostly prefers pulp and cosmic horror (read: fantasy) science fiction, so I’m sure someone who knows more could come up with more and better prompts.
- Comment on don't be a coward 3 weeks ago:
I can’t help but notice that you didn’t list a whole lot of traits that would be considered vital to having a fairly human sillhouette. There’s nothing here about obligate bipedalism, for example, or having just two legs in the lower part of the body at all. There’s nothing here about how the forelimbs are articulated, and whether it would look meaningfully like hands or an array of dexterous tendrils or something. And all this gritty realist speculative biology seems out of place when most sci-fi is basically a particular sub-genre of fantasy anyway. Even being generous to the sci-fi writers, supposing the universe works in a fundamentally different way from how ours does (breaking laws of relativity and entropy, commonly), why can’t some ecosystems work out to stretch your imagination of what could be an advanced species? It all seems very narrowly prescriptivist, even beyond the fact that this is fiction to the point of taking negative liberties with the bounds of what is truly realistic.
- Comment on Habits of Insects 5 weeks ago:
in middle east i wish everyone involved regime change, situation is fucked with any of current people in power staying in power. Put Netanyahu, Assad, Erdogan, Khamenei and their cabinets and top people from Hezbollah in Hague then we can talk.
Great man theory doesn’t stop being great man theory if you add “and their cabinets” after.
- Comment on Hasbro CEO Says AI Will Become Core Part of Dungeons & Dragons 3 months ago:
That’s a limp deflection. Is it really so difficult to not go around mocking people for typing errors like a 13-year-old?
- Comment on Hasbro CEO Says AI Will Become Core Part of Dungeons & Dragons 3 months ago:
Go back to Reddit
- Comment on Hasbro CEO Says AI Will Become Core Part of Dungeons & Dragons 3 months ago:
Whatever problems you might have with low-effort digital art, the two are not remotely comparable.
- Comment on My Dudes 3 months ago:
I should clarify that my position is that I use AD/BC in everyday speech, but if I had to actually publish something public facing, I certainly would use the CE/BCE system for the obvious reasons. My objection to you was not that using the system is bad, but that it’s a trivial thing and therefore (by my attempted implication) an annoying and pointless thing to try to “correct” someone on.
So I did actually read the link, and I didn’t know all of the history, but I did have pretty good familiarity with modern Discourse about it as the article outlines. I would say the only compelling addition is this:
Roman Catholic priest and writer on interfaith issues Raimon Panikkar argued that the BCE/CE usage is the less inclusive option since they are still using the Christian calendar numbers and forcing it on other nations. In 1993, the English-language expert Kenneth G. Wilson speculated a slippery slope scenario in his style guide that, “if we do end by casting aside the AD/BC convention, almost certainly some will argue that we ought to cast aside as well the conventional numbering system [that is, the method of numbering years] itself, given its Christian basis.”
I’d really like for the numbering system to change, so I suppose that’s an argument in favor of being annoying.
- Comment on My Dudes 3 months ago:
I’m aware of what it is. It’s still literally just the Christian calendar with different terminology.
- Comment on My Dudes 3 months ago:
It’s a silly way to secular-wash a Christian system. If you want a secular calendar, you should have it not oriented around the birth of Christ. Very underrated decision by the dprk to have their calendar based on the founding of the country.
- Comment on Peak Fantasy 3 months ago:
I saw a tiny bit of World Trigger and it came off as another Overpowered Protagonist manga, but then I also see people hyping it up as one of the best current manga, so idk what to make of it.
- Comment on Peak Fantasy 3 months ago:
Personally speaking, I loved it, partly because it was so ridiculous in scope. You are probably right that it’s good to read from back around when they depart, if not a little before, in order to preserve some degree of orientation given how convoluted it gets. I’ll probably need to reread a bunch too once it zooms out from the current situations that are easier to understand.
I guess the thing that I really like about it is that, when you make the effort of really paying attention to it, it all makes sense and is engaging, whereas a lot of media falls apart when you drill down on it.
- Comment on Peak Fantasy 3 months ago:
That’s right, it was just like 30 chapters or so since then most likely, and it’s all been the succession war on the boat headed there. I think most likely the story is written so that they never actually reach the Dark Continent because the ship was always meant as a vessel for the sacrificial ritual of the succession war. On a meta level, there’s not a specific enough stated goal for the expedition, so I think it’s meant to be a pie in the sky. I’m fine with that though, since the succession war has been my favorite arc in the whole manga so far. All just my personal opinion on it, of course.
- Comment on Peak Fantasy 3 months ago:
The map reminds me a little of the world in Hunter x Hunter. The viewer is initially shown a world map (a flat projection) that is basically the typical cluster of continents in a vaguely ring-like shape, but it is much later revealed that it’s not a map of the whole planet but just a fraction of the surface area, and all the inhabited continents are actually completely encircled by one giant super-continent labeled “The Dark Continent”, meaning every known ocean was just part of one super-continental lake called “Lake Mobius”.
p.s. watch/read hunter x hunter, it’s a cool manga
- Comment on Centipedes Don't Fuck 3 months ago:
They could have been fighting. Maybe there was a lack of available food or fluid.
- Comment on Golden age of English universities could be over, says head of watchdog 3 months ago:
I’m pretty sure that pandering to racists is what passes for a popular mandate there.
- Comment on Get High Like Planes 4 months ago:
I have to imagine it has a greater capacity to hold its breath than the average fish, on account of their gliding and everything.
- Comment on Crystals 4 months ago:
It’s a stupid post, but the idea is clearly that these energies, if they matter at all to human health, clearly don’t exist exclusively within crystals.
- Comment on Crystals 4 months ago:
Selling people fake remedies is always going to be to the detriment of real remedies unless they are targeted exclusively at conditions for which there are no real remedies.
Furthermore, the real issue isn’t about “letting people have their crystals”, it’s about letting people sell fake remedies, something that should be banned unconditionally. Profiting off of pretending to help people while not helping them is socially malignant.
OP is phrased in terms of attacking consumers because the poster is an idiot, as made evident by their absurd and pandering rhetorical tact.
- Comment on perspective 4 months ago:
Spatially small =/= doesn’t matter. You can’t just jump from physical characteristics to values like that. What happened to being scientific?
- Comment on Is the Federation "Communist" or Socialist? 4 months ago:
This particular string of replies was you doing a stupendously poor job of explaining anything or accomplishing anything but looking like a snob. It would be better to say nothing than to be an asshole to someone who has done nothing worse than be a slightly frustrating liberal in their own thread on a non-communist instance.
- Comment on Is the Federation "Communist" or Socialist? 4 months ago:
I’m not claiming anything I said is facts, just the way I understand it to be/how it had been explained to me quite a while ago. I could absolutely be wrong, if that’s the case I’ll gladly retract my comment based on new (to me) information. I’m far from qualified to give an authoritative answer on this topic.
I apologize for being coarse, it’s a bad habit of mine.
The way I understand it is “the government decides to build a factory because the country needs a factory” vs “the people of a region get together and build a factory because they want one”. Well, in either case nobody really owns the factory (compared to capitalism), but rather who’s in charge of it, who decides who works on what and how it comes to be.
If the government is democratic, there’s very little substantive difference here as-described, because “the government decides X” is an entity with the popular mandate doing it, and if that decision loses it the popular mandate, the people can oppose it. Likewise, if “the people” of a locality decided to build a factory in this hypothetical and a minority opposed it, if the minority cannot sway the majority, they are simply ignored.
The problem comes in when you realize that the goods produced by factories mostly aren’t for the use of the local community, they are for a much more expansive group of people. There need to be systems to coordinate production at the full scale of society so that people have some idea of who needs what. It’s compounded by the fact that the machines in the factory will themselves probably need to be imported from elsewhere.
Unfortunately the only examples of communism we’ve seen are authoritarian regimes like the Soviet Union, and currently North Korea and China (sort of). I don’t think we have a true socialist community that’s not some form of capitalist hybrid, let alone post-scarcity communism or socialism without massive corruption tainting it.
Depending on your definitions, you left out Cuba, Vietnam, and Laos. In any case, I don’t think most people are able to maintain the “real communism has never been tried” stance. Eventually, you either come down on the side that “No, they were real communism and communism is therefore evil” or “I was lied to about at least some of these countries and should give them credit”. For an anglophone, societal gravity is very much on the side of the first option, but it’s possible to reach the second conclusion if you have a strong enough motivation to dig through information. Cuba is probably the route of least resistance.
- Comment on Is the Federation "Communist" or Socialist? 4 months ago:
I’m pretty sure all those ancient societies didn’t have universal human rights and civil liberties. The concept of rights doesn’t really begin until the 1600s afaik
What in the world are you talking about? Most societies throughout history had rights for their citizens.
study.com/…/significance-of-citizenship-in-ancien…
and universal rights until the 1800s at the earliest
See my screed about America. Universal how?
There are non liberal societies right now, they’re all dictatorships with no freedoms, hence my statement
But this flatly isn’t true. Let’s pick a country that both of us probably hate: Saudi Arabia. There are lots of backwards laws and abuses, but cops still typically need a warrant to search your house and aren’t allowed to just go in and beat you to death. There are cases where they do anyway, but so it goes in most states. This black-and-white view where people are free in liberal states and there are “no freedoms” in other states is unserious.
It’s also worth pointing out, and this might go a little way to explaining your argument with someone else in this thread, that the magical way neoliberals talk about “dictatorship” doesn’t make any sense. A government might nominally operate in an autocratic way, where one dude’s word is law, but it cannot subsist on one dude’s authority. That autocrat’s authority is dependent on some class of people who interests he serves creating the material basis for him to keep ruling (Saudi Arabia is a good example, since it is an absolute monarchy that serves the capitalist class). Thus, any so-called dictatorship is really the rule of that class and not of that individual, even if it nominally goes through the decrees of the individual. Likewise, if one class is fundamentally in power, it is no less of a dictatorship if the nominal system is more open, because the real power hasn’t changed.
- Comment on Is the Federation "Communist" or Socialist? 4 months ago:
Firstly, I thought it was a moneyless society. What do the so-called businesses operate with? Secondly, owning land is not the same as using land ownership to extract a rent from people who don’t own land, which is what a landlord is. You’re asking an economic question, so economic relations are important!
I can’t think of any societies that emphasize individual rights that aren’t liberal
Genuinely, how hard are you thinking? Everywhere from Ancient Greece to Medieval Ireland to every iteration of China (except Japanese occupation) had personal rights.
“Emphasize” here is a weasel word, but can you really say it about the darling of neoliberalism, America? America abuses more rights abroad than any other country, so I guess you mean American denizens. Oh, but non-citizens get treated horribly, especially illegal immigrants but also immigrants in general, so you must just mean citizens. Then again, prisoners in America are kept in conditions consistent with its own definition of slavery, which is why there’s a cutout in the Thirteenth Amendment to permit just that, so I guess non-criminal citizens? Of course, being homeless in quite a lot of America is de-facto criminal and the homeless suffer heinous abuse by the cops with little recourse, so I guess it’s actually the housed, non-criminal citizens. Speaking of the cops, they kill over a thousand people every year, something that would be called “summary execution” if it was done by America’s enemies. Do I need to keep going? And mind you, this is all at the relative zenith of human rights in America, ignoring chattel slavery, Jim Crow, the various forms of patriarchal domination, disenfranchisement of non-land-owners, and so on.
What I’m saying is that your definition needs work.
- Comment on Is the Federation "Communist" or Socialist? 4 months ago:
Does the Federation really have private property? Are there landlords and business tyrants? Or does it just have personal property, things a person owns for their own personal use?
Personal rights also aren’t monopolized by liberalism, as much as neoliberal media tells you it is so. Personal rights also existed in classical slave societies, under feudalism, and yes, under every Marxist state (I don’t know about the weirdo ““communist”” ones like Peru or Cambodia)
- Comment on Is the Federation "Communist" or Socialist? 4 months ago:
It’s amazing how people just make things up. I genuinely have no idea where you got these definitions unless it was some hole on Reddit or similar.
What manages the means of production if not a government? Saying “the people” is as hollow as the US talking about “Freedom” and “Democracy”. “The people” cannot merely project their will into the aether and have it realized, they need some method of organization. They need to be able to administrate complex systems rather than just hang out in “primitive communism but with high technology somehow”. Whatever that system is and whatever you call it, that’s a government. In a system of democratic government that administers things, the difference between “the people” owning things and the government – here an organ that exists only so the people can manage the means of production – owning them is immaterial.
- Comment on Is the Federation "Communist" or Socialist? 4 months ago:
If you don’t want to start a political argument, that’s not the way to do it.
- Comment on Is the Federation "Communist" or Socialist? 4 months ago:
One needs to be careful with the word “liberal”, because it means very different things in different contexts (in large part due to political parties identifying themselves as “liberal”). In the stricter political-philosophical sense, liberalism is very closely tied with capitalism and the “freedom” to own things as private property (market allowing) and do what you want with it.
- Comment on Is the Federation "Communist" or Socialist? 4 months ago:
The most textbook definition of communism as a political-economic organization (rather than an ideology) is that of a “stateless, classless, moneyless society.”
- Comment on Cursed wretched marketing 5 months ago:
The hand has cyan in it
- Comment on Hero 6 months ago:
Participating in society =/= social climbing