I think this way about wall decorations that are just vaguely relevant words like “EAT” in people’s kitchens or “LIVE LAUGH LOVE” or “HOME SWEET HOME.” Might be the autism talking but looking at them feels like a message being forcibly injected into my skull and I find them very annoying. Advertisements are even worse and are genuinely infuriating.

A friend of mine talked me into playing WoW with him once. He had me spend 4 hours doing fetch quests and skipping an entire encyclopedia worth of dialogue to level up to the point that we could start playing dungeons, then during the first dungeon he told me to just follow behind everyone and collect the loot they left behind. I snapped and couldn’t do it anymore after that. I was genuinely on the verge of a mental breakdown.

This entire smear campaign is just an attempt at assigning guilt-by-association to progressives. A full-throated condemnation of Hasan Piker will only be taken as an admission of guilt for their prior association and the media will continue to use it as a line of attack, so it’s less than pointless to do so, it’s counterproductive because it would only alienate those who agree with Hasan while doing nothing to appease “moderates.”

Stop pretending you care about electability. It’s obvious you’re not doing this out of concern for Abdul’s chances of winning, but out of hatred for an online personality you have a weird parasocial vendetta against.

I keep tabs on political figures I don’t like as well. I don’t do it by watching their content regularly for years. Your online habits are abnormal and unhealthy.

I think you just outed yourself as a chronically online hate-watcher who should not be taken seriously. You realize it’s not normal to regularly watch content made by someone you hate for years, right?

The point is that you’re taking the bait set out by right-wing and Israel-backed smear campaigns and that you even care about Hasan wearing a Mao suit is a result of that. If Hillary came out and said free Palestine they would start non-stop accusing her of being a Chinese psy-op using her Mao suit preference as “evidence.” Most of the things listed in the last paragraph of your post are false such as Hasan denying the Uyghur genocide, supporting the invasion of Tibet, and lying about LGBTQ rights in China. You only believe these things about him because you have accepted the mainstream media lies about him at face value and refuse to think for yourself. As for the Houthis, characterizing them as terrorists and considering someone a terrorist supporter for reacting to their propaganda is hypocritical if you don’t apply the same logic to those reacting to US or Israeli military propaganda because they are also terrorists (and much more prolific ones at that).

None of you clowns care about Hillary Clinton wearing Mao suits, but act like it’s a problem when Hasan wears one.

Huh? Google is a corporation. Are they licking their own boots?

It’s only flat below a certain level, there’s still a c-suite to which the majority of Valve employees are subordinate to.

I’m not saying that imperialist aggression didn’t / doesn’t contribute to the collapse of socialist states - it most certainly does - I’m saying campists tend to get tunnel vision and think that it’s the only reason they fail. Cuba has actually been quite successful at enduring in spite of imperialist aggression, and I think there’s a lot of benefit in asking what it is they are doing better than past socialist states. In my opinion the answer lies in the fact that their governmental structure is far more horizontal in comparison to other attempts at socialism such as the USSR, and that has resulted in policy that is far more responsive to the specific material needs of local communities within Cuba. Contrast the USSR in which the pseudoscientific beliefs of a central authority figure turned what could have been a brief and localized food shortage into a full-blown famine spanning the entire union.

With regard to China being state capitalist, I skimmed the essay you linked well enough to see that it does not address the anarchist critique of state “socialism,” namely that state ownership does not truly constitute collective ownership because the state is a hierarchical institution that centralizes decision-making power in such a way that the will of the people affected is often ignored. Don’t get me wrong, I acknowledge the undeniable successes and advantages of central planning when compared to the neoliberal method of not planning at all beyond the fiscal quarter, but those are not the only options. I believe that horizontal planning is superior to both, and is the only way for an economy to be truly socialist in character. Examples of this being done can even be found in the revolutions that created the USSR and the PRC before they seized state power. It’s also not a discrete binary; there is a spectrum between totalitarian dictatorship and full horizontalism, and the projects which are most successful tend to veer towards the latter rather than the former.

I don’t have a problem with communism, I have a problem with hierarchy and the consolidation of power under charismatic leaders who erroneously claim to be acting in the interest of establishing communism, but that’s not even what this meme is about.

This meme is about campism, which I also have a problem with. Campists are unable to cope with the historical failures of the socialist states established by vanguardist parties, so they blame it all on external imperialist aggression from capitalist nations rather than reflect on why those projects failed. This leads to them abandoning bottom-up organizing of working-class power in favor of picking sides in geopolitical power struggles between rivaling imperialist forces, believing that true communism is only possible after the big bad US empire crumbles. They get so caught up in the game of geopolitics that they convince themselves that the US is the only country that engages in imperialism and start believing fascist Russia and state capitalist China are the “good guys” of history.

I disapprove of the Iranian regime but that doesn’t mean I support imperialist aggression against them. I feel the same way about Ukraine, and while there has been some discrimination against ethnic Russians in Ukraine it does not amount to ethnic cleansing, nor does it justify imperialist aggression. The separatist movements in Donetsk and Luhansk are far-right movements that have been artificially inflated by Russia in much the same way that the US is artificially inflating the right-wing Alberta separatist movement in Canada.

How does this make sense in response to a meme showing that I support Palestine? I know y’all love to use rule 1 to censor people for “bigotry” but at least put some effort into making it plausible.

If we’re recycling this meme I guess I’ll recycle my response and see if I get banned again for simple disagreement.

I’m responding to the meme which presents learning and critique as separate and mutually exclusive. In order to learn from something you have to critique it, and if you believe that China is not perfect then you know this and should agree with me.

There’s also another thing you’re doing that I see MLs do all the time, which is posit that Chinese socialism is uniquely suited to China and that it must be implemented differently in other places. While I do agree that this is the case, I often see MLs use this argument to excuse flaws in the implementation of socialism in China as necessary alterations required due to the particular conditions and historical circumstances in which it was created.

IMO there were many wrong turns and mistakes that China made in its socialist transition that have had lasting negative consequences, and though they can often be explained by China’s particular conditions and historical circumstances, that doesn’t excuse them.

Learning and critique are the same thing. If you look at China and go “this is perfect in every way and we should copy it,” then you aren’t actually learning anything at all. In my experience MLs don’t get angry with anarchists and others critical of China because they don’t learn from Chinese socialism, but because they don’t like the conclusions they’ve made.

I didn’t say they weren’t, I just said their prefigurative politics were more prominent. I’m of the opinion that what someone does is more important than what they say, and if they hadn’t been undermined by COINTELPRO who knows where their thinking and organizational structure would have gone. I just think there was something truly transformative about the BPP that could have grown into something beautiful if they’d had the opportunity.

The Black Panthers get a pass; they didn’t live long enough to become the villains, and there’s no guarantee that they would have. The BPP was far more prefigurative than vangaurdist, and it was the combination of these things that made them seem so threatening to the powers that be.

They’re in the wrong program then, that skill is more useful for business majors.

The person asking the McDonald’s AI how to reverse a linked list in Python is almost certainly an undergrad in a programming 101 course, so this was definitely quicker for them (although they didn’t learn anything).