JohnBrownsBussy2

JohnBrownsBussy2, 9 months ago

Delta Green has some elements of this, with an occult faction of the SS (the Sonderkommando Hexen, or Karotechia in universe) communing with the Deep Ones, making use of reanimated corpses and making a last-ditch effort to destroy the world by summoning Azathoth. There’s no campaign per say, but the handler’s guide has timeline that outlines potential scenarios. I think World War Cthulhu and Acthung! Chtulhu have similar campaigns.

JohnBrownsBussy2, 9 months ago

Southern doggerland

JohnBrownsBussy2, 9 months ago

It looks jank, but it’s clearly a private condo/townhouse development, so it’s a private road and not an “official” marker.

JohnBrownsBussy2, 9 months ago

Yeah, I remember playing D&D in high school. If you don’t have a lot of maturity, it’s easy to fall into violent power fantasies that the freedom of a TRPG offers versus a CRPG.

This is why I’m really glad for modern session 0 agendas and safety tools to set expectations and keep people on the same page.

JohnBrownsBussy2, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

Less than 10% of Native Americans can speak their native language. How many Uighers and Tibetans can speak theirs?

Have you been to a reservation? I remember one that we drove through in Arizona, the Hualapai. It wasn’t just a desert, but a salt flat, utterly devoid of vegetation. Along the road, you had dilapidated pre-fabs, occupied of course by the victims that had been placed here. Not all reservations are as harrowing. I’ve visited the Navajo Nation, as well as Lakota and Ute reservations. Poverty is intense, and people do the best they can, but the reality is that these people had their lands stolen from them and were forced to the most marginal places in US, unsuitable for much agriculture and barely suitable for ranching.

There is no healing in these places, rather the victims of genocide are constantly blamed for their own poverty by the settler communities stole their land. The native peoples were devastated by covid due to the lack of healthcare resources as well.

Let’s look at the Black American community as well. It was just 3 years ago that the US had its largest protest movement in history against the police killings of unarmed Black men. And what was the response by the government and media? After a moment of groveling, to take back all promises of reform and instead funnel even more money to an increasingly militarized police force, and to engage in a panicked sensationalized crime wave reportage. Police killings continue (1 in 20 homicides are perpetrated by the police), and the economic situation hasn’t improved much for Black Americans since the Great Recession lead to a massive seizure of Black household wealth.

The situation in the US isn’t healing, it’s an oozing pustulate sore. There has been a failure to reinforce voting rights, and anything like reparations, even just targeted relief, is considered a joke and a non-starter in the halls of power. The only healing is in the minds of libs that think that donning Kente cloth and watching Black Panther constitutes absolution.

This of course is to say nothing of the murderous wars waged by the US in Iraq, Laos, Vietnam and elsewhere, and the genocides it co-sponsored in Guatamala and Indonesia. Or the general neo-colonial global financial mechanisms that lock the third world into permanent debt traps and underdevelopment.

JohnBrownsBussy2, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

1.) I think others in the thread have done a good job on the Uighers situation. On that front, I see a somewhat heavy handed anti-terror program, but the claims of genocide are fabricated and inconsistent with material reality. Of course, the Chinese reaction to terrorism was a bluntly applied education and job training program, and I can see the carcerel angle even from China-sympathetic sources. Was it good? It wasn’t great, but the program is effectively over. Compare this to the US anti-terror response which was to invade 2 countries and wage decade long occupations leading to the death and displacement of millions of people.

2.) Is the modern era literally just the past 5 years for you? Do you have the brain of a fucking goldfish? If I stabbed you in the leg are we good 5 years down the road? How about 10 years, or 20, or 50? This makes me mad because the United States was founded on the stolen land and labor of these people, and it continues to treat them like shit. What is healing to you? How can there be healing sans any sort of restitution? China has actually invested a fair amount of resources to protect the various languages and cultures that constitute its society. The US stripped every resource from the Native Americans and gives them the bare minimum to survive as individuals, nowhere near enough to recover.

JohnBrownsBussy2, 9 months ago

OOOH. A link to wikipedia. The forbidden knowledge!

porky-scared porky-scared-flipped

It’s so scarey.

But on the other hand, the tanks didn’t even run over that guy (CW): www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6F2AqzdXuI&pp=ygUhdX…www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-W-7WPWfE4&t=18swww.youtube.com/shorts/L-pJTOzyEkI

JohnBrownsBussy2, 9 months ago

A number of Socialists have latterly launched a regular crusade against what they call the principle of authority. It suffices to tell them that this or that act is authoritarian for it to be condemned. This summary mode of procedure is being abused to such an extent that it has become necessary to look into the matter somewhat more closely.

Authority, in the sense in which the word is used here, means: the imposition of the will of another upon ours; on the other hand, authority presupposes subordination. Now, since these two words sound bad, and the relationship which they represent is disagreeable to the subordinated party, the question is to ascertain whether there is any way of dispensing with it, whether — given the conditions of present-day society — we could not create another social system, in which this authority would be given no scope any longer, and would consequently have to disappear.

On examining the economic, industrial and agricultural conditions which form the basis of present-day bourgeois society, we find that they tend more and more to replace isolated action by combined action of individuals. Modern industry, with its big factories and mills, where hundreds of workers supervise complicated machines driven by steam, has superseded the small workshops of the separate producers; the carriages and wagons of the highways have become substituted by railway trains, just as the small schooners and sailing feluccas have been by steam-boats. Even agriculture falls increasingly under the dominion of the machine and of steam, which slowly but relentlessly put in the place of the small proprietors big capitalists, who with the aid of hired workers cultivate vast stretches of land.

Everywhere combined action, the complication of processes dependent upon each other, displaces independent action by individuals. But whoever mentions combined action speaks of organisation; now, is it possible to have organisation without authority?

Supposing a social revolution dethroned the capitalists, who now exercise their authority over the production and circulation of wealth. Supposing, to adopt entirely the point of view of the anti-authoritarians, that the land and the instruments of labour had become the collective property of the workers who use them. Will authority have disappeared, or will it only have changed its form? Let us see.

Let us take by way of example a cotton spinning mill. The cotton must pass through at least six successive operations before it is reduced to the state of thread, and these operations take place for the most part in different rooms. Furthermore, keeping the machines going requires an engineer to look after the steam engine, mechanics to make the current repairs, and many other labourers whose business it is to transfer the products from one room to another, and so forth. All these workers, men, women and children, are obliged to begin and finish their work at the hours fixed by the authority of the steam, which cares nothing for individual autonomy. The workers must, therefore, first come to an understanding on the hours of work; and these hours, once they are fixed, must be observed by all, without any exception. Thereafter particular questions arise in each room and at every moment concerning the mode of production, distribution of material, etc., which must be settled by decision of a delegate placed at the head of each branch of labour or, if possible, by a majority vote, the will of the single individual will always have to subordinate itself, which means that questions are settled in an authoritarian way. The automatic machinery of the big factory is much more despotic than the small capitalists who employ workers ever have been. At least with regard to the hours of work one may write upon the portals of these factories: Lasciate ogni autonomia, voi che entrate! [Leave, ye that enter in, all autonomy behind!]

If man, by dint of his knowledge and inventive genius, has subdued the forces of nature, the latter avenge themselves upon him by subjecting him, in so far as he employs them, to a veritable despotism independent of all social organisation. Wanting to abolish authority in large-scale industry is tantamount to wanting to abolish industry itself, to destroy the power loom in order to return to the spinning wheel.

Let us take another example — the railway. Here too the co-operation of an infinite number of individuals is absolutely necessary, and this co-operation must be practised during precisely fixed hours so that no accidents may happen. Here, too, the first condition of the job is a dominant will that settles all subordinate questions, whether this will is represented by a single delegate or a committee charged with the execution of the resolutions of the majority of persona interested. In either case there is a very pronounced authority. Moreover, what would happen to the first train dispatched if the authority of the railway employees over the Hon. passengers were abolished?

But the necessity of authority, and of imperious authority at that, will nowhere be found more evident than on board a ship on the high seas. There, in time of danger, the lives of all depend on the instantaneous and absolute obedience of all to the will of one.

When I submitted arguments like these to the most rabid anti-authoritarians, the only answer they were able to give me was the following: Yes, that’s true, but there it is not the case of authority which we confer on our delegates, but of a commission entrusted! These gentlemen think that when they have changed the names of things they have changed the things themselves. This is how these profound thinkers mock at the whole world.

We have thus seen that, on the one hand, a certain authority, no matter how delegated, and, on the other hand, a certain subordination, are things which, independently of all social organisation, are imposed upon us together with the material conditions under which we produce and make products circulate.

We have seen, besides, that the material conditions of production and circulation inevitably develop with large-scale industry and large-scale agriculture, and increasingly tend to enlarge the scope of this authority. Hence it is absurd to speak of the principle of authority as being absolutely evil, and of the principle of autonomy as being absolutely good. Authority and autonomy are relative things whose spheres vary with the various phases of the development of society. If the autonomists confined themselves to saying that the social organisation of the future would restrict authority solely to the limits within which the conditions of production render it inevitable, we could understand each other; but they are blind to all facts that make the thing necessary and they passionately fight the world.

Why do the anti-authoritarians not confine themselves to crying out against political authority, the state? All Socialists are agreed that the political state, and with it political authority, will disappear as a result of the coming social revolution, that is, that public functions will lose their political character and will be transformed into the simple administrative functions of watching over the true interests of society. But the anti-authoritarians demand that the political state be abolished at one stroke, even before the social conditions that gave birth to it have been destroyed. They demand that the first act of the social revolution shall be the abolition of authority. Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?

Therefore, either one of two things: either the anti-authoritarians don’t know what they’re talking about, in which case they are creating nothing but confusion; or they do know, and in that case they are betraying the movement of the proletariat. In either case they serve the reaction.

JohnBrownsBussy2, 9 months ago

The kind Vladimir Ilyich would have killed everyone here.

JohnBrownsBussy2, 9 months ago

I disagree with your definition of authoritarianism. 50.5% of a population voting to elect a representative or enact a referendum versus the 49.5% is authoritarianism. The same if the margin is 67-33, or 80-22 or 99.9 to 0.1. In any case, the minority is imposed upon by the majority. The individual is imposed upon by the collective, or even merely another individual.

Like Engels said, the revolution is certainly an authoritarian endeavor. The original expropriation was authoritarian, and the counter-expropriation would be a counter-posing authoritarianism. How can you take something from someone without imposition? If asking nicely worked, then we wouldn’t be posting here.

The opposite of authoritarianism isn’t democracy, but pure volunteerism. That would be nice.

JohnBrownsBussy2, 9 months ago

The annexations in Ukraine are illegal, but Russia annexing 5 oblasts and Ukraine being locked into a status as a neutral buffer state is not exactly a Hitlerian take-over of Europe.

JohnBrownsBussy2, 9 months ago

No, annexation is illegal under the UN charter, of which Russia is a signatory, and wars of aggression are criminal in and of themselves. I’ll condemn the illegal annexations performed by Israel and other states, and Russia’s annexations fall under the same boat.

To be even more clear, I do think that Russia would have won fair referendums in Donetsk, Luhansk and certainly Crimea. I doubt that would have been the case for the other two oblasts. Still, all of those annexations were illegal. Just because the neo-cons have flouted the UN charter in favor of the ad hoc “rules-based order” doesn’t mean others should.

JohnBrownsBussy2, 9 months ago

What’s your point, that Soros is a hypocrite? That was always obvious. Is he more of a zionist than the average American lib though?

JohnBrownsBussy2, 9 months ago

This was inevitable. For a GOP voter, to vote for anyone but Trump is an admission that the libs were right. More indictments or any other consequence will only heighten the contradiction and make them more committed.

JohnBrownsBussy2, 9 months ago

For just the British Empire in India, similar excess death accounting leads to a death toll of 1.8 billion (and $45 trillion stolen): mronline.org/…/britain-robbed-india-of-45-trillio…

JohnBrownsBussy2, 9 months ago

Was the United States Civil War imperialism?

JohnBrownsBussy2, 9 months ago

Okay, that’s consistent. Given that the modern incarnation of Taiwan was founded as a fascistic & genocidal settler colony, what was the timepoint at which a decisive end to the Chinese Civil War shifted from acceptable to unacceptable in your eyes?

JohnBrownsBussy2, 9 months ago

soviet-chad yes-chad chad-stalin chad 🇹🇩

JohnBrownsBussy2, 9 months ago

rat-salute-2 All/Active brigade: presenting for duty in the protracted people’s posting war. rat-salute

JohnBrownsBussy2, 9 months ago

To be fair, it’s not like there was any sort of coordination or plan. We’ve been complaining about how Lemmy’s current active algorithm tends to promote these sort of comment-intensive, days-long threads before federation, and now a chunk of the fediverse gets to experience the fun of a patented Hexbear struggle session. Hopefully the Lemmy devs can tune the algorithm to discourage this sort of thread getting stuck in active which thereby encourages protracted struggle.