CatoPosting [comrade/them, he/him]

I think in general the glass is easier to break from the inside, but hell if I know with a Tesla

I like tap water, and I like (as a treat) sodas, I still can’t stand scented drinks like La Croix lmao. Edit: I even like sparkling water.

So the Soviet Union was less efficient than the US, got it.

Maybe efficiency isn’t everything. Maybe you could try to see how, having grown up under one hierarchical boot, and then working inside of another, they could feel that hierarchy will always be oppressive and therefore should be struggled against.

My partner and I live with her mom, and we are all so much less stressed than before. Now we have the energy to clean, cook at home even when wanting nice food, etc. It’s really great.

Actual US foreign policy lmao

infinite money

Has not and never will be more than a pipe-dream invented in boardrooms by assholes shooting their industry in the foot. Same shit with “games as a service”.

yeah, that should definitely be called Capitalist Imperialism, not just Imperialism or its simply not clear communication.

So the majority of what we call empires historically, didn’t practice imperialism?

I’m sorry, but wtf is that?

My always on buy two get one free discount

invalidate other people’s relationships

No one is trying to do this. Stop putting words into people’s mouths.

authoritarian genocidal regimes

Like the United States?

I have real soft spots for the Ghost from Star Wars Rebels and the Normandy from Mass Effect.

For the Ghost though, I really love its strange shape, the WW2 bomber tail gun, and the attached shuttle. It’s both so typically Star Wars and yet still new.

I think I am essentially utilitarian about this. I don’t think it is, in general, worth an individual’s resources (time, effort, chance of being harmed) to try and rehabilitate a random adherent to hateful ideologies. People less beholden to evil are more attractive targets, and a bullet to a fascist head is a lot quicker.

Likewise though, I don’t think it is worth a society’s resources to mass execute a large subsection of their population, and so rehabilitation schemes are preferable.

To be honest though, I think most people only fall to fascist beliefs because of the appearance of an open community and the sublimation of their feelings of failure into hatred for some other group. If we ever succeed at crafting a more pro-social society where all have a place and there is a real sense of community, I think the majority of the current fash sympathizers would deradicalize themselves.

Also, on a personal note, I too lost a friend to fascism. He had reactionary views when I first met him, but also seemed to be a deep thinker that wanted a better world. Over time, I thought I had softened many of those views, and had even gotten him to accept the necessity of a universal, not-for-profit healthcare system. However, I could never find the ground to get him to deal with the (honestly pathetic) trauma of having been (supposedly) cheated on by his high school girl friend.

Dude just kept dating girls currently in, or fresh out of, high school. The relationships obviously never worked. Then he started dating a church girl (who was 17 while he was ~30) and they got married when she was like 19. He started telling me of the new found importance of god in his life, how our world was removed (this was before trump so that word held much less YIKES), how porn kept us lonely, the need for nuclear families, etc. I pushed back lightly, but he seemed happy for really the first time.

Then, predictably, they got a divorce as you don’t marry a child and think it’ll work out. His response: go full hate women MGTOW and fast track the alt-right pipeline to fascism. The last time we talked he was telling me about how helpful he’d found this new guy, Jordan Peterson. I cut ties after he said America’s downfall began with women getting the right to vote.

I once considered him like a brother. I now sometimes have nightmares about him killing me or his ex-wife.

Edit: Oh, I had a friend that dated him for a while. She confided in me when we reconnected years later that he had stalked her for years and she had gotten a restraining order and a gun because she was so scared of him. I’d already cut contact at this point, but I also never saw this side of him. We were definitely at our closest while he was also stalking her.

I don’t know if it is truly a grift, i.e. that he is doing it for money, but I do know that libs have used him to say: look, we don’t need to hate racists, sexists, homophobes, transphobes, etc. the people that they hate just need to sit down with them and have a conversation and they will magically change. I also remember a person saying that one of his supposed converts was now just affiliated with a different hate group than the Klan, but I can’t seem to find that source.

Even if Daryl Davis is legitimate, he has certainly only deradicalized people who were there for the community vs. those who actually have deeply held beliefs that black people are deserving of persecution. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be parents who disown their own kids for being gay/trans.

Obviously but I’d love one to say something like “well, these speak English so we can reason with them.” and then bring up that guy who grifts about deradicalizing klan members.

America delenda est.

Are things still sold for a profit in this hypothetical world?

corrupt communist ideals

The corrupt ideals of not killing our planet for profit

That really sucks comrade