Gosplan14_the_Third [none/use name]

Slayers is great, especially the first two seasons, before it went anime original.

Oh hey, my family did this back in early 2010s Italy. The local gold and silver dealership proudly displayed a copy of L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics near the counter, that was fun.

New Windows feature… same as a virus?

Iowa man hauls grain, becomes involved in a minor diplomatic incident. Meanwhile, someone else on the ship wonders if he’s fated to become his own ancestor.

Eeevil

So you

1. Endorse a reform-capitalist understanding of de facto Keynesian economics, increasing capitalist metrics of “prosperity”

2. Think I agree with a different school of bourgeois economics that supports measures opposed to Keynesianism

3. Think I view increased productivity and getting ahead in the competition between bourgeois economies and states as something worth pursuing and endorse measures meant to pursue those goals

I do not. I want a stateless, classless society, that meets the needs of and acts in favor of the proletariat, instead of creating new wants to be sold to give to the prole as a commodity. A society that would not destroy the planet through constant increases in productivity and output, perhaps? One where competition is recognized as a hinderance?

blames China rather than their own uncompetitiveness

that’s EXACTLY what’s being blamed. And why Germany and the west in general is having a big rise in far-right politics. The bourgeois and their supporters believe cracking the whip on the workers to reduce costs and increase profits will make the line go up again - and it likely will. In the meantime, preventing Chinese companies from capturing market shares to ensure the local bourgeois keep their influence in society and their source of wealth extracted from workers.

At the cost of workers’ wellbeing of course, while the market profits. It’s the capitalist race to the bottom and against each other.

Fascism is the ideology that the status quo is good by nature, but that there is something corrupting it - something preventing the state from being great again. Some form of parasitic force, be it foreigners, women, the jews, bankers, international enemies, communists, even other fascists.

Proletarians on the far-right often share many of the same complaints people who would also be open to having communist beliefs have. Fascism allows these complaints to form incoherent complaints, contradictory ones, etc. It is easy to be a fascist, especially considering class and elements leading to over-exploitation, like not being a cishet man, being foreign, etc. If only the people responsible for this misery would get off their asses and do stuff, everything would be fine. Of course, the policies fascists support are often against the proletarians’ interests. You also have people who know the implications of fascist rule (just as democratic rule) and they want the state to start throwing its military, economic, etc. power around the world to incite conflict and get loot.

The bourgeois on the other hand, use fascism as a weapon when it seems that the current form of capitalist rule (usually some kind of democracy) is not “working” well enough for them - that they are outperformed by foreign capital, that strikes are ongoing, that a reformist government that might or might not be popular is lowering their profits, that the current government policy is making the country unstable and risk their profits, etc. You saw this in Germany of the 1930s with Hitler’s pacts with industrialists, and you see it now in Germany when there was a secret meeting of AfD-fascists, hardline neo-nazis and some wealthy people, discussing donations to the party and how to do “re-migration”.

If reading all the theory doesn’t solidify our principles

Ah, but is the reading done? And what is read? This is not provable and can’t be answered, but for example Capital has the reputation of being this extremely difficult book people get bored of very fast.

if our organizations are still infiltrated heavily, if our message is dilluted by opportunists, and if we have people engaging in real-life praxis still falling victim to cult-like behavior and taking on fascist-adjacent viewpoints, then what do we have?

What do we have? Nothing to lose but our chains. It seems like we are taking L after L after L for the last (many) years, but we also have nothing else to do but keep getting our message across, and fight for a better world, a classless and stateless society. Giving up or watering down what we want for the sake of harm reduction/doing stuff faster is a tactic that leads to nowhere, unfortunately. Taking peasant rebellions as an example, there were many many many throughout history, and the vast majority failed. But not all. There were times where it did get better. And if it can’t? Then I’d keep trying out of spite.

And 19th century liberals… and 16th century nobles… and 3rd century slavers

“This is a place of a warning. Of reminding and remembering. The corpses of the thousands of victims of the bombings of the 13. and 14. February 1945 were burnt here. Back then, the horrors of war, brought from Germany to the entire world, returned, to our city as well.”

Not even a “Germany was a helpless victim of war crimes”, as Nazis like to talk those events.

The current hate-campaign is against people on welfare, actually. The government is implementing new rules that allow them to take away those people’s incomes if they refuse a job offer.

The official explanation is the need to save money for the budget, but is actually so little money that even the recent purchase of a few luxury helicopters cost more than the income they seek to get from the cuts. In typical bourgeois fashion, austerity as the whip hitting the wage slave on the back - threatening people who disobey, act up, maybe even… strike? with a drastic reduction in quality of life.

The current protest alliance of agrarian capitalists and petty farmers is also caused by similar things, with eliminating subsidies on fuel.

The military budget has been massively inflated since 2022 and is certainly something that is causing the current malaise (which no, Germany is not collapsing due to deindustrialization or NordStream 2 - it’s stagnant), but that’s not something from prole to bourgeois really complain about or is even talked about. It simply is, for most people. It’s more about how the socdem government is a bad manager, and that is why the right has been massively gaining popularity. Especially since culture wars are fired up by the conservatives and fascists.

When there are ads going “[join the army!] stand for your values!” (and many other such small things, such as the Green Party’s Feminist Foreign Policy)

[as I’ve seen today in Frankfurt]

while a homeless man slept on the floor the opposite side of the camera, the same kind of nonsense as in the United States has it easy to bloom - “woke” vs “normal” etc. But maybe that was never the reason for it. Who knows.

I’d say the likelihood of the current government getting re-elected is 0% it’s almost certainly going to be an old-school, 80s style neoliberal CDU government with Chancellor Merz, probably with the socdems as junior partner. Any of the other outcomes, like a fash win, BSW win (patsoc), etc. are possible, but would require a lot of dice rolls to actually form a government.

I saw people claim the communist movement was growing, but I haven’t really seen evidence of it here in Bavaria. If anything, it’s gotten rather quiet during covid and activity has never recovered. Berlin, etc. are probably the driving force behind the statement, who knows.

A country like Argentina, beyond its meat industry, isn’t really a country with a significant impact on the environment - but this will hurt the local population.

By design even, considering what the aim of the current government is.

Venezuela’s economic crisis really began after oil prices fell drastically in 2014 and the west used Chavez’s death/Maduro’s election to increase pressure on the country via sanctions which for example made buying parts to maintain oil refineries difficult. Before that, it was doing about as well, or better (of course, failing to become independent from oil exports) compared to the other countries in Latin America.

Argentina was already in a crisis for the last …20 years-ish, but this acceleration of the crisis happened in a week even as Milei backpedaled on some potentially damaging promises like cutting trade with China.

How will Europe function as they decline from relative prosperity into a hellhole similar to modern America? Will people take it lying down?

Yeah, they will. They’ll blame foreigners and immigration from Africa, the Middle East, Ukraine, etc. Those are things that won’t really stop anytime soon, and thanks to the wonders of climate change, will even increase. The fash will be given an evergreen source of scapegoats for the lack of success of the nation.

I was shocked to discover the Bozo is younger than me.

They will probably lose territory to Poland as well if this keeps up

Sigh

No they won’t. It was a fringe position in the Polish far-right before the election and now that the libs have won it’s even less likely to happen.

Or, the fighting will eventually stop and the current status quo will remain permanent. It’s hard to tell.

The libertarians are driving the government into the ground, using rules Scholz was a hardline supporter of (“Black Zero”). While horrifying because the far-right is about to win the election through either the Reaganite Merz or the fash AfD, there’s a kind of karmic irony to it.

It’s less wacky politicians (though there undoubtedly are some that actually believe that) and more nationalist propaganda - showing Poland as an island of righteousness against the removed west or something. It’s an attempt by the far-right Law and Justice Party to gain support via culture war and shocking people into disgust and hoping they back you based on that. Even at the cost of pretty blatant lies.

It works on my family, at least in part. 😕

Half Life is a GOAT game (2 is mid) and Black Mesa is a good remake. There’s also a mod that recreates the Blue Shift expansion, but I don’t know if it’s even close to being finished.