Excellent read on more progressive games

[Monte Carlo]

I'm just bemused to be lectured about the state of the Left in the 1980s from someone who was a sperm at the time.

[Meshugger]

I am having trouble to understand what this thread is about anymore, so i will just throw in a quote by Orwell:

 

 

 

“The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to taking life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists, whose real though unacknowledged motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writing of the younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States …”

[nipsen]

The point is that as soon as fear, hatred, jealousy and power worship are involved, the sense of reality becomes unhinged. And, as I have pointed out already, the sense of right and wrong becomes unhinged also. There is no crime, absolutely none, that cannot be condoned when "our" side commits it. Even if one does not deny that the crime has happened, even if one knows that it is exactly the same crime as one has condemned in some other case, even if one admits in an intellectual sense that it is unjustified -- still one cannot feel that it is wrong. Loyalty is involved, and so pity ceases to function.

..notes on Nationalism is one of Eric Blair's many very good essays. But I'm not sure people who took that quote to heart could even bear to read the entire thing.. 

 

 

 

Some of the problem being that we don't really have anything to fight for, I guess.

Massive wealth inequality, poverty, huge incarceration rates (especially for minorities), sexism, racism, slavery, child-labour, exploitation of the third world, imperialist wars...

 

Its all still there.

 

Right. We just don't have a powerful megalomaniac insisting that everything we do has a greater meaning and a larger context, where any effort we can put into it is part of the inevitability of history, march of democracy, freedom and liberty, etc.

 

So we have to motivate people to do actual things by themselves. And that - really is the most difficult thing you can do, because people who think about this stuff are often megalomaniacs themselves. Obviously, any revolutionary will be a bit crazy. But nowadays, we don't really see the point in doing anything, unless it is on that larger scale.

 

Like I said, very brave people have given up on humanity because individuals are morons who don't believe in anything other than pettiness and egotism.

 

And I could probably add that the ones who do believe in anything, tend to believe in ways to justify egotism, and swear to methods that protect their scared little minds from events that might make them change their opinions: There's no such thing as bad news for "our" side.

 

Just look at people with Rand in a picture-frame on their desk. They sit on the actual writing and justification presented to them, which is by it's own description a philosophically justified system of egotism. Where trusting in that egotism and taking it beyond mere human boundaries, is supposed to create a glorious and successful world in every respect.

 

When that doesn't happen, there's no reason to adjust. Because the entire work is dedicated to having people motivate their individual egotistical acts, and building them all together into a bridge of terror across the abyss of stagnation. And therefore it is good, no matter how many idiotic things that follow each individually egotistical act. No matter how destructive, or what personal context it is performed, an egotistical act is a good, because it motivates people to act and to create change.

 

You know what the worst part is? It is that if people actually were informed about how what they do affects others, Ayn Rand would not actually be completely idiotic. Apart from the fact that she specifically encourages people to act without the restrictions of implications, of course.

 

Meanwhile, "our group" and "our movement" continues to mill around doing nothing. Because actually motivating individual people to do anything about small things where they actually have influence - is hard. So hard. Whether it is believing in that it makes a difference, or if it is thinking it has any influence.

 

So things move on. Individual egotists are protected and encouraged to be egotists by laws and state. And the ones rebelling against it keep sanctifying imaginary goals that hopefully can't be reached.

 

 

I'm not sure what you mean by this? Are you also talking about the "mainstream left" in western countries? And what do you mean by disarray? I would say it was quite the opposite. In fact there was a lot of movements to bring awareness and change in the world during the 80s.

Such as? I'm not denying movements existed but these were primarily aiming for tiny concessions and reforms with hardly the level of mass support previous movements had.

 

This is hardly a contentious claim; leftists complaining about the modern state of the left is basically a cliché.

 

EDIT: And props to anyone who can tie this back into the thread topic.

 

:D haha.

 

You know what has been the most annoying thing for me in the last 15 years? It's that intelligent people are mostly tremendously humorless idiots. If you try to do something nice and convenient: why, there is an intelligent person there insisting that you have a widespread agenda with it and a huge philosophical justification for it. The one insisting on that may or may not be on "your team". And both sides are equally disappointed when you're just motivated by something that doesn't fit into the normal preconceptions.

 

In my opinon, feminism is a bit like piracy and the hacker scene. We won, basically. Spotify, Apple store, at least some services are selling loss-less, and they're selling digital tracks. But in the end, the tech we promoted isn't used by the artists. Very few artists actually take the time to either learn about loss-less and high definition audio. And very few see the point in creating a target for their recording that has higher definition. In fact, because so few people listen to music on anything but a mono radio in the kitchen - having high definition targets is going to make the music sound worse. So while the tech exists commercially, and that the thought behind it is good. There is little to no demand for it. The licensing schemes that would have sprouted from that tech isn't happening. And we're left with a few select artists that know their tech, who offer their music in higher definition and loss-less decoding. And we can buy delicious manna from those. But no one else but a few people really can enjoy it, or indeed do appreciate it.

 

Feminism is the same way. Feminism has won. Women can now legitimately be as much of a bastard as men can. Women can raise boys to be wimpy little overprotected ****s and there's nothing anyone can say about it. Incompetent women can run around and abuse their position as much as incompetent men. Equal rights for bastards exists.

 

Meanwhile, mutual respect exists in pockets, on the back of previous victories. Where some live together as partners, where women actually are allowed to enjoy sex as much as men, and where perspectives change and are worth something.

 

But the world elsewhere doesn't have any use for that. It may exist, and it may be convenient and lovely for those who appreciate it on the personal level. But it's too tame, too boring for the ones that fight for the right to be a bigger bastard than the rest. 

 

I mean, that's really what you get now. People get upset because women are involved, and they don't know how to deal with either themselves or other people. Either from bad upbringing or bad personal choices. Counterparts get upset because of the stupidity of it all, and try to match that with their own stupidity. And they all still call it feminism, apparently.

 

I mean, seriously - "feminism in videogames". Just have a taste on that. It used to be about wages, voting and family planning, right to decide your own life and fate.

 

And now? The importance of having young adults being exposed to whiny gays in video-games, so they won't be stuck in their safe and assumed preconceptions about gender roles.

 

Humans are hilarious.

[Prince of Wales]

Some of the problem being that we don't really have anything to fight for, I guess.

Massive wealth inequality, poverty, huge incarceration rates (especially for minorities), sexism, racism, slavery, child-labour, exploitation of the third world, imperialist wars...

 

Its all still there.

I will never understand why this is a problem. It seems to me it just stems from general pettiness and envy: "I don't want to be filthy rich, I want everyone to be filthy poor!". Which is what the "dictatorship of the proletariat" is all about, really. Making everyone equally miserable is the only way you can make everyone equal at all. And it even fails to do that.

 

It's a flawed concept. It shows a remarkable lack of understanding of human nature. Communism, collectivism, equality of opportunity and similar concepts would only work in a world where humans were ants.

 

Can we stop pretending that Western liberal democracy isn't objectively superior to the dictatorship of the proletariat or any other political system practiced in the USSR?

It would be incredibly intellectually dishonest to compare the Soviet Union in its supposed "glory days" to your standard modern Western liberal democracy.

 

At its time of greatest successes it was attempting rapid industrialisation, undergoing and recovering from a famine, prepping for a war with a major fascist state, fighting a world war with a fascist state and then recovering and re-industrialising after said war (in which it bore most of the damage).

 

It'd be tough to live through that no matter what the political system.

But here's the thing: you're measuring a system's viability by its accomplishments in the international arena. I examine its desirability from what it offers to or detracts from the individual. And while totalitarian systems may be effective when you're trying to become a world power, they do so at the expense of their citizens.

Edited July 5, 2014 by Prince of Wales

[tajerio]

 

Can we stop pretending that Western liberal democracy isn't objectively superior to the dictatorship of the proletariat or any other political system practiced in the USSR?

It would be incredibly intellectually dishonest to compare the Soviet Union in its supposed "glory days" to your standard modern Western liberal democracy.

 

At its time of greatest successes it was attempting rapid industrialisation, undergoing and recovering from a famine, prepping for a war with a major fascist state, fighting a world war with a fascist state and then recovering and re-industrialising after said war (in which it bore most of the damage).

 

It'd be tough to live through that no matter what the political system.

 

 

So, er, what then?  Do we just give Soviet-style communism a free pass, even though its leaders purposefully and openly invited the comparison you say is intellectually dishonest?  Or do we just look at what it actually achieved in a vacuum?  Well, in the latter case it still looks terrible--millions of people deliberately killed by the machinations of their leaders, thousands (at any rate) sent to gulags for their views, and meaningful growth in the standard of living drastically hampered at best.

 

There are reasons why the Soviet Union was a terrible state, but one of them is Marxism-Leninism-whatever the hell "ism" it became.

Edited July 5, 2014 by tajerio

[nipsen]

I suppose a thought might be that it's a dangerous thing to describe any system with a label, and think that ends the discussion about what it represents.

 

[insert week long lecture about communism, Marx and lesser known speeches on parliamentary systems and free speech, why "Marxism" doesn't exist, British empiricism, German commercialism. And Stalin, Manchuria, Imperialism, China and up to the never-ending Korea "conflict" here].

[Orogun01]

I swear to God, every time Bruce brings up one of his feminist threads it turns into a discussion of Marxism and class warfare.

[Barothmuk]

Don't really have much time to be making large posts so this will have to be brief. If anyone is genuinely interested in continuing this I'll make some larger posts in a couple of days.

 

I am having trouble to understand what this thread is about anymore, so i will just throw in a quote by Orwell:

quote from Orwell about pacifism

 

Is the implication here I'm a hippy dippy pacifist?

 

I will never understand why this is a problem.

Perhaps you should actively investigate it.

 

I don't mean that in a mean way mind you. It's just that, going off your post, you really don't know the opposing side's claim.

So, er, what then?  Do we just give Soviet-style communism a free pass, even though its leaders purposefully and openly invited the comparison you say is intellectually dishonest?

Very wrong.

 

I'm not advocating the soviets get a "free pass" nor did I invite people compare the Soviet Union in the 30's through 50's to any modern western liberal democracy (as I said, that would be silly).

 

What I was doing was pointing out the successes of the Soviet Union, despite their initial backwardness and horrendous conditions, especially in comparison to their contemporary peers. Although their standards of living were still lower than the major developed countries at the time rivals looked at the startling growth and productivity of the Soviet Union that dwarfed their own and estimated they'd have the 3rd highest standard of living by 1970 (and naturally this would continue to rapidly grow).

 

The argument was not that their conditions at the time were 'better', (even they would not argue that as they were still developing (as well as recovering from a major war yadda yadda)), the argument was highlighting their successes in production/development prior to the reforms of the Khrushchev era.

 

I hope I've made that clear.

[Prince of Wales]

Perhaps you should actively investigate it.

I don't mean that in a mean way mind you. It's just that, going off your post, you really don't know the opposing side's claim.

For most of my life I lived in a communist country where they just wouldn't stop droning about it. I'd say I'm fairly familiar with the "opposing side's claim". No offense, but I remain skeptical, to put it mildly.

[Blarghagh]

This thread has gone completely off-topic. Closed. If you want to talk about communism vs capitalism do so in Way Off-Topic, not here.