lord of flies

How's your unelected, rich-as-**** monarch doing?

Volunteer soldiers are morally culpable for the behavior of their government. We could make arguments about the moral culpability of draftees, but let's not. A volunteer soldier who joins the military of a nation which is engaged or engages in wars of aggression (e.g. Nazi Germany, modern Israel, the USA) is morally culpable for those crimes. A volunteer soldier who is in a military with endemic corruption and commission of war crimes (e.g. Nazi Germany, modern Israel) is also culpable for those crimes, assuming he does little to nothing to stop them. Members of the Wehrmacht may not have been aware of the holocaust, but they were definitely aware that their government had declared war on Poland, France, the United States, the Soviet Union, et cetera. They were also aware that their country was racist and authoritarian. Similarly, members of the IDF might not personally engage in stuff like "breaking the bones of handcuffed prisoners so they can't escape," but they exist in a military that invades Palestine without any reasonable causus belli and in which it is very difficult to imagine a member of the IDF who is unaware of its bombing civilian targets, use of chemical weapons, looting, et cetera. That's not even getting into the extremely racially charged society of Israel itself, which a member of the IDF would also be aware of and be aware he is "defending."

Don't you live in the UK?

The people who cry out at specific undemocratic decisions would not make them if given the choice? No... it's almost as though they don't want these things done at all... and represent the popular will... No country can honestly call itself democratic unless it has functional voter recall anyway, so I don't see what the point of discussing how democratic these guys are or are not is.

Great.

Hello there. All governments rely on the consent of the governed. This doesn't apply "just" to democratic leadership. When the Shah ruled Iran, he ruled with the silent consent of the people; when he lost it, he lost the government. When Kerensky was leader of Russia, he too needed the silent consent of the governed; when he could find no one to defend his leadership, it collapsed. Almost everyone in Europe said, "Yes, we will accept the further entrenchment of the rule of capital in our nations." The things some leaders fear the most is the people. A strike? A protest? I do not even need to say how the government responds. They are afraid, because they know that without firing a shot, the people can collapse them. Because every soldier who fires a shot and every police officer who beats a civilian is a human being, who can be convinced. Who can be forced into non-action.

I'm smug as a bug in a rug.

Here's a little something I whipped together. Post what you got. I got Krezack.

If you asked a Marxist in Germany, France or Britain in 1900 if Russia or China could be communist - or even functionally socialist - without "the West" going down that road first, they would tell you "of course not." Those nations did not have the kind of proletariat that Germany did, for example, and it showed through in their approaches to socialism (vastly increase state authority rather than simply kill all the capitalists).

I'd just like to add here that this was motivated by the Western capitalists' attempts to get the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany into a war. It's worth remembering that, among his contemporaries, Chamberlain was viewed as a strong statesman. France and Britain were both pushing for a "big showdown" between the USSR and the GGR, and Stalin wanted none of that. The reason that the West was willing to tolerate Hitler for so long was because they hated communism much more than they hated fascism. There were plenty of intelligence operations by the British intended to start a war between the USSR and GGR, and Stalin, being the peaceful man that he was, didn't want to start a war.

That's really hilarious in light of this statement: Those statements don't actually contradict each other at all, and you know it.

Well, their lack of any offensive wars definitely was a contributing factor. I suppose the experience of the RCW itself, where most of the "old" officer corps who had inherited generations of proper training were killed for being violent reactionaries, was also a contributor. I can't think of any other reason, unless you're arguing that they failed because they didn't come up with mobile armor strategies at the right time.

Yes, there was a famine in the Ukraine. The Ukraine was the Soviet breadbasket, and if the Soviets had not moved that food out of the Ukraine, the soldiers and workers would have starved instead. You know as well as I do that without a functional military and strong industries, the Soviet Union would probably have collapsed before the Nazi tide.

Actually, the problem which faced the Soviet Union was its lack of a real officer corps. Officers who went to fight in, for example, Finland, did a poor job of it, were cowards, that sort of thing. Because the Soviet Union had spent over a decade peacefully and with little in the way of plans for military offensives, their officer corps naturally degraded. The purges, at worst, removed some theoretical contributions of men like Tukhachevsky on mobile warfare; but that is a relatively minor concern. To the rest; I suppose you might be right, though I\'d be quick to reform the military if the revolutionary militias were failing.

Somehow I can live with a purely defensive military. Maybe it's because I'm not an imperialist? Nobody is talking about literally voting on what to do in the middle of the battle.

In a certain way, yes.

lol How do you think the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War picked the leader of their military units? How do you think the early Bolshevik-aligned soldiers organized themselves? Officer removal via vote has historically played a pretty major role amongst ultraleftist western revolutionaries.

You speak of corporations in defensive terms, justifying their vice and greed with itself. Yes, in order to make money they have to be a ****. That's not a justification, you merry bunch of capitalist apologists. Allow me to explain the flaws with modern capitalism. A single corporation in a sea of corporations is going to have to apply its resources inefficiently, on things like industrial espionage and reverse-engineering. It will also focus on extremely short-term investments (at least, a modern corporation will). This leads to an economy which is incapable of properly propelling itself into the future. So what is necessary is a single supercorporation which owns everything and thinks in the long term. But this corporation would logically focus on its own advantages, which is why I propose that we make the corporation democratically accountable via a council democracy. Then, since it has already eclipsed the government, we hand over the military and police forces to the general populace, who form revolutionary militias and People's Guards. There, I said it.

Why do you assume that simply because you get a boner, it's erotic? You can get a boner from many things other than sex. Jeez. Get your mind out of the gutter. To be fair, Postal was a really bad game.

*Tumbleweed* Obviously you've never played Postal.

Every poster is my alt. The sooner you understand this, the better.

Although zombies were originally a symbol of rampant consumerism and modern capitalism, used to criticize these ideas (in Night of the Living Dead, they are a sort of "natural disaster" and the survivors fixate on a mall), they have become quite different. While some people prefer to use them as symbols of their bourgeois natures, they were originally meant as a criticism of this. A zombie is a unique look at man: what separates zombies from men? Well, zombies are "dumb." But how so? Zombies must be intelligent, in order to successful; they defeat the combined forces of mankind. They don't even use tools to do it! They must be masters of strategy and military tactics! They are also the idealized soviet man: preoccupied not with his own selfish desires, but with the needs of the community. A zombie will gladly sacrifice its life for its brethren, and zombies in general are more than willing to do so. Zombies serve an excellent thematic role and can be used to reinforce ideas on the nature of man. I definitely think Obsidian should consider adding them, if they haven't already.

What's up everybody, it's Lord off Lies! No More Heroes was an excellent game with real messages. As the game progresses, each boss fight begins to gradually challenge your perception of what a boss fight is supposed to be, and the cutscenes establish a goal and a method of achieving that goal. And when you reach the end... it becomes vividly clear that Travis' fixation on his dumb assassins gig was nothing more than a pointless waste of time and a distraction from the real world. His goal is unachieved, his plot unresolved. He, and the player, have fought so hard... for nothing. An excellent ending with a deep meaning: video games are a dumb distraction, if you build your life around them, you are an anime-loving manchild, much like Travis. Nothing is quite as revealing as playing Postal 2, getting bored with the incredibly bad main plot, and cheating yourself some weapons so you can go on a rampage. Then, as you piss upon someone you've beat half to death, finding yourself sporting a boner. If we are allowed to go on a rampage, it triggers something inside a person, the same something that is the reason ancient militaries tended to go on a murdering and raping spree every time they seized a city. Goal-oriented gameplay turns this off, it seems. When one plays through a video game, this basic, adolescent feeling of rampant violence is subdued by our immediate goals and plans, and by the challenges the game may present.

Allow me to answer your question with one of my own: Is RapeLay really rape-like?