Juice

Being an asshole doesn't put you at a disadvantage though. You can not be an ass and also not deadname people. Theres not a contradiction here.

Are you arguing that assholes dead name? If so then we are in total agreement.

Aw crap they tricked us with money again

it sounds like you hate human nature not communism. Anyway that sounds terrible, I wish you were able to give me more details so that I could try and learn from your friend's family's experience. I wouldn't try to doxx you, I don't have that kind of free time or energy, but I def understand the hesitation.

I guess I would argue that calling something communism doesn't make it so, and there's all different strains of communism too. For example, I've often found myself working with Trotskyists who explicitly reject forming "communes" that could become cults, and guerilla groups to seize power through violence. Even if its good for the people to form militias, trots tend to believe it isn't where the energy of the "vanguard" should be directed, and that instead people should seize political power and smash the state via those means. There's no history I'm aware of of what you're describing happening with Trotskyists, in fact there's sort of a nasty history of trotskyists getting rounded up and killed by the sort of groups you are against.

You can be a socialist and recognize the need to change the social order away from capitalism while still being suspicious of communism. Just because a guerilla group did something awful doesn't mean capitalism is good (which you don't say, you seem to have some anti imperialist critiques of capitalism yourself) or even that there is no alternative to capitalism. If this is the best system possible, the planet, all people are fucked. Something, someone has to fight against it. Capitalism can't be reformed.

Its interesting that your misanthropy seems to be directed at a system that has never existed rather than the system that actually exists. But I don't know you so maybe that's an unfair generalization. Anyway, thanks for your response, maybe next time we can have a more detailed discussion.

Edited some clarity and tone

what specific guerillas or strongholds are you referring to? its hard to learn from history without being able to name any dates, places, people, or any details at all. without those things it isnt history its just like a vibe. like you have bad vibes about communism, which youre entitled to i guess. i have a little bit more curiosity than that though. i think that if we arent discussing anything specific, then we arent discussing anything at all.

I believe the correct term is "Liquified"

This is actually kind of a dogshit analysis of US political climate. What is this used for? Is it just like training materials for supposed Russian bots? Its interesting to speculate why an org producing these materials would represent specifically these views. How and why the analysis is skewed is interesting to look into. The racism and otherizing is like bubbling underneath every statement, while it accuses the US system of being otherizing (which it is) and racist (which it is but in some different ways.)

Another thing I want to mention is like, so the Russians have all these keyboard warriors who they pay to boost certain views, and react to various positions in different ways, but what happens when these people stop getting paid? When they go home, etc., do they just stop believing these things? Its not just influencing elections or whatever, its also conditioning like hundreds or thousands of people through online encounters and real life salaries. Like I bet they have a supervisor that approves their responses and maybe pays a bonus if they are "in compliance" with the standard or whatever, very common among call center work, I imagine bot-net work would be almost identical.

Not guillotines and Molotov's, but worker solidarity and democracy

What were your experiences living under a communist regime?

HBLB took me a while but once I got good at him its an exciting fight.

There are still pockets that play it. Reddit (yuck) has the huntersbell community which last I checked still had bloodstarvedbree helping people through the game. There's also the tomb prospectors discord, which is the best community around bb IMO they explored and mapped all 1600 chalice dungeons, and the creators of the hacked FD chalices including the cummm dungeon still hang out there too.

The story dungeons are a little bland, but some of the root chalices are insane. People used to think they were all randomly generated, but some are so well designed, too well designed to be random. I found a section inside one of the hacked FRC chalices, where there is a giant oil swamp and 3 big troll pthumerians; two that shoot cannonballs which explode in the oil, and one regular hooky boy. But there is a beast possessed soul (the tall black wolf beasts that you sometimes fight as a boss in CDs) chilling in a tunnel that you can lure into the oil swamp. And remember these dudes throw fireballs too, and can attack other enemies, so he can be lured into the oil swamp and set on the giants. All of the sudden there's explosions everywhere that can one shot you, but if you get away you can watch them fight and then come behind to clean up the trolls by getting the cannon guys to shoot the other ones and then run in to go finish the last one off. Like you can imagine the devs coming up with these little scenarios, maybe dozens of different ones, as they make like 1600 discrete dungeons. So cool. Like the devs didn't have to add the CDs, but they still give a ton of content and new challenges.

Care to elaborate?

Headless Bloodletting Beast. Learning to solo the watchdog and Amygdala in cursed pthum, and then helping people in coop with those bosses after they got killed over and over and over is my favorite part of coop probably.

But fr my favorite part of the CDs is all the weird little set ups in the level 5 root dungeons. There are like puzzles in them, there aremore than a few really cool encounters that aren't bossfights at all

Exactly! the two things are the same phenomenon expressing in two different ways! This is exactly why this is such a mindfuck.

Follow my logic: in the usa by 2022, covid19 had killed over a million people. When you compare this to the total unemployed in the US, that's not just the governments padded numbers but adding together all the people in prisons, people who stopped looking for work, etc., those covid deaths were about 12% of that unemployed "surplus" population. Again, the system needs a certain number of people to be unemployed, over a million people died, which means over a million "jobs" (this includes employed and unemployed positions within the entire workforce.) At the time the media was calling it "the great resignation," where employees were just going out and getting better jobs. But where did these jobs come from? Can you really just go out and get a better job any time you want? Of course not. Try searching for a job now, good fucking luck.

Seriously, google "reserve army of labor" if you haven't already, it explains everything. So as the labor market tightens, consumption increases. People got a better job and can fix their credit up in a few months and get a loan on a car maybe for the first time. People are walking out of the grocery store with more food, or going out to eat more. Retailers notice this and raise prices in response to increased spending. this is a phenomena that Marx wrote about in value price and profit, which I might mention again.

So why were prices going up? Larry Summers gets in front of Jon Stewart and says that increase in spending equals increase in demand, when demand challenges supply then prices go up! Which is what we are generally taught. Except Marx proved that this was not the case, that inflation really was just retailers raising prices due to increase in consumer spending. Its a bit of economic slight of hand that I could explain if you want but for now I'm already long.

The federal reserve says that inflation (which is like you said, mostly driven by companies raising prices to squeeze consumers, and this is proven by the way the fed responds) is out of control, so therefore they are raising interest rates. The way this will control inflation is by making it harder and more expensive for companies to get money for large capital investments. This is all to squeeze the companies to stop hiring (since their p&l is negatively affected) and eliminate excess staff. But the companies are reluctant to let people go/stop hiring because of what they just experienced with a "tight" labor market. They have the incentives or pressures, but they need an excuse, they need a justification. Enter automation with ai. Finally the automation revolution that the media has been threatening workers with for decades is here and sorry can't halt progress you see (Ned Ludd did nothing wrong.)

Except it isnt all that. In the mean time the economy has adjusted to the depleted reserve population, the corpos were given everything they wanted or needed in order to continue to profit after the death of millions, and a new grift industry has grown up and attracted all this funding and following and clout. Didn't even have to lose that many jobs, just a bunch of high paid ones. Except interest rates are still elevated so the fed is continuing to keep that pressure on the labor market. Anyway, there's all of these cascading effects, from systems interacting with each other; therefore its more useful to understand the relation between phenomenon than it often is to try and understand that phenomena on its own.

So you're right, it was corporate policy, but it isn't greed necessarily. Definitely greed adjacent though, its like systematic greed. There are incentives and disincentives present within the system. Karl Marx was able to write about the causes of inflation 150 years ago, and they were using the same faulty excuses then. That's also why the fed decided to raise interest rates, they understood what the problem was, and the fix is and always has been to throw people into unemployment. The system is predictable, but it isn't rational.