BashfulBob [none/use name]

if an industry is too important for a strike it should be nationalized

Liberals have no earthly idea what nationalization means or entails. I suspect they’d be perfectly happy with a PG&E or Fannie Mae relationship, wherein the enterprise is ostensibly managed by the state but so heavily privatized as to just be a continuous stream of bailouts for private investors.

it will crash the global economy

glances at the state of the global economy

Good?

Three Quarters of a Century of Triumph

Why not Piccadilly Circus? Absolute shithole.

If we’re just blowing up shit because it looks bad, the first thing you need to drop a bomb on is the London Eye. After that, maybe aim for the folks that collect the rents, not the people just commuting through.

The only people with stakes in it are tourists, major corporations, west end theatres, and anyone rich enough to even live remotely close to it.

If you want to kill a bunch of British landlords, firebomb Australia.

it’s kind of similar to the IKEA model of providing a kit for people to assemble furniture and, afterward, feeling increased satisfaction for having accomplished something and internalizing the sense that they built the furniture

I don’t think that’s why IKEA furniture needs to be assembled. If you’ve ever tried to move a piece of pre-assembled IKEA furniture, you’ll know why it comes in pieces. There’s a reason people value hardwood. It doesn’t disintegrate as soon as you put pressure on it in the wrong direction.

if you told people to “just add water” it would break the illusion.

The illusion that butter tastes good?

I don’t think it’s fair to say he was ungenuine or just chasing a pay day.

He did a good job of delivery early on. But once he started defending George Bush Jr - a man who stacked his career on phony religious pandering - the mask dropped like a rock. No one who goes this hard for an American Christian Conservative can possibly hold the views he claimed a decade earlier.

Maybe he changed over time. Or maybe Rupert Murdoch found the price for his soul. But the guy sold out hard all through the '00s.

Christianity was the most powerful force for regression and subjugation for the last 1500 years or so.

Turns out it wasn’t Christianity, just aristocracy.

Russel Brand went the other way around and became a Christian to keep supporting western ideals.

He was always a mediocre entertainer. First he rejected Christianity as part of his dog-and-pony show. Now he’s come around, because the original bit couldn’t pull the same audience. But its always just been a performance. The only thing he cares about as the attention (and the money it generates).

Reminds me of Christopher Hitchens. A man who made a living on the talk show circuit by tweaking people’s noses and saying “Are you mad? Are you mad, yet?”

All fun and games when the people getting tweaked were self-important holy rollers. But as soon as he saw a payday in pissing on anti-war protesters by calling them Islamists, the man was urinating like a fucking fire hose.

Dawkins is just a lower-rent Hitchens.

I mean, it really depends on where they dropped it.

Piccalilli Circus seems like a shit move. But Buckingham Palace?

Reddit: “What kind of monster would threaten the lives of civilians so casually? That monster!”

Also Reddit: “The only appropriate response is to nuke St. Petersburg”.

What genocide did they commit?

The US has been trying to alternately starve Cuba and Venezuela into submission and fuel armed insurrection since their respective revolutions began. And Haiti has been under siege for centuries. How long do you get to commit social murder before it qualifies as genocide?

Americans are utterly blase about this industrial killing. But as soon as Haitian migrants get to Ohio, they start to notice the violence that’s taking place inside their own borders. Democrats only seem capable of acknowledging the humanity of people once their inside the magic border line.

the callousness with which state officials imposed national policy over the heads of locals

With Israel leveling hospitals in Gaza?

I can’t imagine a better comparison of ostensibly democratic state officials callously disregarding local public opinion than Biden sending bombs to Netanyahu to murder your Nan living abroad.

I think one thing Crusader Kings and Europa did better was building out these elaborate social relationships between aristocrats that prefigured the coalition of fiefdoms and confederacies of principalities that would eventually congeal into kingdoms, states, and empires.

One of the things a socialist revolution does is decapitate the monarchies that share all these ties back to the coalition states. French laborers and merchants guillotining the king and queen weren’t just killing their own heads of state, but the immediate family of neighboring Austria. Literally the Holy Roman Emperor’s kid sister. It wasn’t just France toying with a new economic model, but the French government converting - practically overnight - from a close political ally to the seat of a nest of villainous assassins. It wasn’t until the Napoleonic dynasty made inroads with European peers that tensions between France and the surrounding territories settled.

Similarly, the murder of the Tsar’s family in Russia brought enormous shame on his immediate family in Britain. Not to mention the smattering of German, French, and Eastern European aristocrats who were on close terms with the Romanovs prior to the war. Governments to the east - in neighboring Turkey, Iran, China, India, Korea, and Japan - who either had no relation or retained an active beef with the European monarchies were significantly more sanguine at the shift in management.

Meanwhile, the Americans under FDR were relatively conciliatory and amicable to the Stalin government. Roosevelt’s family formed bonds with Russian Revolutionaries of note. Much of the American press wasn’t particularly fond of European aristocracy. And so relations thrived until the end of the war and the resurgence of Red Scare politics. And the US was at least somewhat amicable to a Cuban revolution against Batista, right up until Fidel began threatening the American aristocracy of Jewish/Italian mafia cartels and agricultural land baronies.

I don’t think it is necessarily a given that Socialist and Capitalist economies can’t intertwine. Certainly, the US and Russia managed it during detente (my extremely capitalist father made a number of trips to Russia while working for a US based conglomerate in order to build out their O&G infrastructure). And the US and China have been co-mingling for over 60 years, despite efforts to wedge them apart. But the movements that create socialist governments ex nihilo can cause a degree of family drama at the highest reaches of the state that can pollute diplomatic policy for generations to come.

Capitalism comes for us all in the end.

But it is crazy to think of how much wealth Batista off-shored prior to fleeing the country, only to see people two generations later scrapping their knees on the poverty line. I can’t help but suspect the family got vultured by opportunists and scammers following their exodus.

The important thing is to give as good as you receive.

Biden himself helped spread a myth about genocide being committed in China.

In a vacuum, idfk. You probably could make some kind of argument regarding the very rapid industrial expansion of the Chinese bureaucracy into Xinjiang and the callousness with which state officials imposed national policy over the heads of locals.

But when Uighur=Genocide but Hamas=Had-it-Coming, what the fuck is any sane leftist supposed to say about China? We went from pointing to rapid urbanization of the western frontier and saying “This is a ruthless land grab by an imperial power!” to covering our eyes in Rafa and Beirut and Isfahan while shouting “Israel has a right to exist, okay!”

The other problem is actual genocide doesn’t bother a lot of people.

Genocide is just another political team sport. When the Bad Guys are doing genocide, its not bad because its the obliteration of whole population centers. Its bad because those populations were on Your Team and They’re Scoring Points Against You every time a swath of humanity gets culled like so much wheat caught in a combine. Israelis rant about Oct 7th because they’re upset Palestine put points on the board. That’s all.

It’s the same shit with Cuba and Venezuela and Haiti back on our side of the planet. The inhumanity is just Good Ethnicity scoring points on Bad Ethnicity. Its a big fucking game and we’re all just cheering for our side.

My neighborhood in Houston is full of legitimately good chill people who would fit into a bodega in Brooklyn as easily as a tackle shop in Kentucky. Its frustrating because I grew up in a neighborhood where people were legit just a bunch of selfish reckless assholes and this ain’t it. They’re not invested in the culture war crap, they don’t want a War with China or to crucify trans kids or whatever. But the power-mad fascists running the state government are just kinda railroading through insane bullshit because they can. Its enervating to just watch it all wash over us like a tidal wave of shit.

Imagining the plot of Hero but it’s Joey Chestnuts winning a hotdog eating title so he can get close enough to swallow Trump like in a Kirby game.

It’s Texas. California loves to Pantomime at decency then cower whenever someone calls to Woke.

Texas reveals in fascism and torments people for trying to be nice

If you’re dead serious, the first step is to get rid of the consoles themselves. Uninstall the apps. Toss out the peripherals.

But I honestly have so little free time now that I can’t imagine “giving up” video games in a realistic sense. Just get a job with a long commute that eats away all your time. Voila! No more gaming!