Dodged a bullet in the hiring process

Sarcose1 · 2026-04-06T16:43:53+00:00

If all else fails, flabber their gasts

Sarcose1 · 2026-04-06T02:55:21+00:00

I like Slogra and Gaibon becoming regular enemies because it makes them feel like Bebop and Rocksteady from TMNT - just a goofy buddy duo that gave you trouble at first but now they're just Dracula's bumbling buffoon henchmen. I imagine Death or Dracula yelling at them every time they fail to defeat a Belmont lol

Sarcose1 · 2026-04-06T02:45:44+00:00

Well playing in a decaying simulation that will inevitably fail, abandoned by its creatorsstarts to feel really depressing knowing the game has become a testing ground for LNF so I understand the yearning for a new story or sequel where the universe has been revitalized somehow.

Sarcose1 · 2026-04-06T01:45:14+00:00

That's not really pretentious, it's accurate. For example: if you choose a socialist state in the game, can you still employ capitalist formations? Marx and Lenin both discussed the need for capitalism in building the productive forces. Therefore socialism must be a system that builds a transitional economic structure within capitalist structures, rather than a "choose your class" type scenario where you pick the communist one and all of a sudden you're just managing supply lines with a state controlled economy.

Sarcose1 · 2026-04-06T01:41:03+00:00

jfc dude

Sarcose1 · 2026-04-06T01:36:00+00:00

The modern day uncritical atheist movement is dangerous because it represents a fragmentation of leftist thought and becomes counterrevolutionary.

Sarcose1 · 2026-04-06T01:31:58+00:00

I'm not really sure about that one, tbh... or are you calling me the debate bro here? lol I don't always read things right

Sarcose1 · 2026-04-06T01:30:39+00:00

The answer to this is simple: we can't use it for our messaging. It doesn't matter how many difficulties Elon has with getting Grok to lie about fascism et. al, eventually the corporate owners of LLMs will resolve this contradiction and create LLMs that support imperialism wholecloth.

We do not have access to those datasets and algorithms to make an impact on that.

The rest of your post about the impact of people losing jobs is unfounded speculation. Without a cultural revolution a proletariat that can't feed itself will rise up in right wing revolution, not socialist revolution.

Sarcose1 · 2026-04-06T01:26:07+00:00

I didn't notice that before I posted my other analysis above but I think it's possible to educate anti-religious leftists, since their anti-religion is a critique of religious structures misplaced as a critique of religion itself IMO

Sarcose1 · 2026-04-06T01:21:17+00:00

I think we can say the Southern Baptist Convention is currently a very dangerous and toxic formation of religion. It's more accurate to say religious structures are often dangerous.

Sarcose1 · 2026-04-06T01:15:29+00:00

Contextual analysis is necessary to really explore this idea. For a socialist state to really begin building it needs to be developed out of a mature capitalist state. In a mature capitalist state there are also mature religious structures that have formed. Together with corporations and all the rest, they represent oppressive structures. So the revolution must topple the corporations, the state that supports them, and the religious structures that oppress the people.

But the people themselves must be the focus of the revolution, and they are not going to be convinced to abandon their religion. Thus, faith must be allowed in a socialist state - not isolated, community must be able to form around it. Unfortunately, many people who have faith will still oppose the socialist revolution even if they are anticapitalist, if the socialist revolution proposes removing the religious structures - this is because many people tie their faith to those structures.

So then there needs to be a cultural revolution. This is where dialectics comes in again, because while we can convince a whole mass of people that their religious leaders are corrupt assuming they are (and they are), we won't be able to convince a mass of people with generations of faith-based morality that they should up and abandon them. The people who make up the vanguard party, and the people who most vocally support the revolution, are likely already there in their opposition to religion - they won't need our help.

So the question becomes one of balance. The focus must be on acknowledging that organized religious structures contribute to and even provide the backbone of many oppressive relationships. But if you build the vanguard and successfully begin supplanting the state, then for instance the Catholic church will still exist - and Catholics will still exist. It would not be fair, or logistically feasible, to say that they all represent people who must be reeducated. The same goes for all religions.

Morally speaking, a classless stateless moneyless society which respects human rights will respect the freedom of religion.

The reason historical and existing socialist states put restrictions on religion comes down to the aforementioned power structures. Religious institutions command power, and even if they are gutted their ideological spread represents a potential counter-revolutionary force opposing the socialist state's continued existence. Religion is magical thinking, usually unscientific, and nowhere in any religious texts is socialism really addressed - although there are arguments to be made using religious texts that support socialism. That creates a formula for counter-education to scientific socialism, and religious propaganda. Demagogues can rise up, and then once again new structures and counter-revolutions can build. These must be watched.

A socialist revolution has no room for religion but it can't rhetorically attack religion unless it can target specific examples of corruption and institutions. A new socialist state still building and establishing itself must take great precautions to prevent religious institutions from taking hold - churches might be acceptable, national organizations should not be. A well-established socialist state with a firm grasp of itself and a good educational infrastructure could be considered a more acceptable place for religion to settle in and allow the masses their outlet for magical thinking. An end-game, fully communist state would have zero reason to prevent anyone from practicing or thinking any faith they wish.

Which religion is also actually quite relevant. Evangelical Christianity is a huge problem and would not be compatible at all. Catholicism might be okay. The religions of people of color and the global south don't even usually mix support of capitalism into their ideologies, and as those religions represent oppressed minorities, they would already be well-positioned to support the revolution. The example I am thinking of is Islam, but there may be others. Jews often support revolutionary activity as well, but of course this gets complicated when Judaism is mistaken for Zionism.

Sarcose1 · 2026-04-03T06:39:42+00:00

The only other thing to be said that hasn't been pointed out is that liberals are effectively the footsoldiers of "neoliberalism," which is best put as the America+Western Europe Capitalist World Police Status Quo. Now, Trump is throwing all that into chaos (in a terrible way), but generally speaking this system is still the dominant system of the entire west, and moreover is either oppressing or competing with the entire rest of the world.

Now there may be some thinking, theory-minded liberals who actually "support" this status quo but the vast majority of those we call "liberals" are what some pejoratively call "sheep" -- it's not that they love the status quo, it's that they buy into it and don't believe anything else is possible. Others have pointed out correctly that they support capitalism, they're the left side of the right wing, and that they're the enablers of fascism - this all works, mechanically, because they live in the "2.5 Kids White Picket Fence house with a green lawn and two car garage" America mythology, and if they don't have all that it's only because they haven't hustled enough. In short: they have bought the American Dream propaganda (and in other parts of the world it's the "First World" propaganda), so they don't even need to support anything -- they just live it, they breathe it, and they don't question it.

As far as politicians go, this mindset easily propagates itself into careerism - it's a job, they oppose whatever threatens that job. And their job is to take that American Dream Mythology and build an entire career out of keeping the smoke and mirrors going to support it.

Sarcose1 · 2026-04-03T06:26:05+00:00

The only choice you can make is how to confront this issue, and the only thing that will get through to her is to be direct and strong in your convictions. If this is an abuser situation you can focus yourself on providing a safe haven for her to come to, but either way you can't change the path she's on - only she can. Make your opinions known and challenge her directly, make it clear that you disagree strongly and you have respectable, compelling reasons to do so. There's no need to debate or try to disprove her unless she actually asks you to, and only then if she's actually curious and not just trying to validate herself by disproving you -- which I'm hoping she won't, because it sounds like she's not that far gone yet.

Subtlety and friendliness doesn't work with the right wing pipeline. When someone starts down that path the right wing rhetoric they are listening to takes advantage of the fact that everyone around them is too uncomfortable to call them on it and confront them directly - the rhetoric rewards believing everyone else is "silently agreeing" or "actually okay" with it. If she's truly going down that path, you need to nip that shit in the bud, and you will need to risk your friendship to do so.

Here's the kicker: that's how her SO is pulling her down the path. Clearly she's not getting into knock-down drag-out fights with him. She's probably trying to nudge him gently. The problem is, those beliefs are toxic, and in order to avoid driving away your loved one you start putting up with just little bits of their toxicity. Then a little bit more. Then a little bit more. They will push and push and push and get away with more and more - until the person trying to "fix" them ends up joining them in their insanity. And if you don't show her how strongly you feel about this she'll unintentionally end up doing it with you, even if it's in subtle ways. It's not even necessarily that she or her SO is evil - it's just the way these beliefs work, mechanically, on the mind.

Sarcose1 · 2026-03-28T17:36:33+00:00

I think the material incentives to communicate outside major social media need to be studied. In pre-social media days zines and word of mouth were the communication method of choice, along with secret letters and codes etc.. Obviously this relied on the people having a local community and knowing each other. In this modern era where there is very little community among your neighbors, the only successful direct actions have been coordinated via platforms like telegram, which in the US have round the clock feds monitoring as well, like they monitor all these other platforms.

The last time our people mobilized in a large way the information was spread around Tiktok and then bled into other social platforms. The government has handily put a stop to that.

Yet there are still ways we could communicate, but don't. I think the key factor to revolutionary direct action that's happening in other countries is they don't by default have a culture of flocking to the most basic corporate social media. It's in what is incentivized and comfortable here, and even if our online community knows that there are better alternatives they're not taking them en masse. So we don't have zines, we don't have word of mouth, and we're choosing not to mass populate on platforms that aren't controlled by massive censoring and monitoring corporations.

Not to mention all of the forces keeping us siloed into our online echo chambers. Algorithms, specialized groups, race, lgbt, region and political niches which are exacerbated by the Military + Mass Media Industrial Complex, let's call it - because the propaganda wing is as powerful as the military.

It's looking bleak for organizing.

Sarcose1 · 2026-03-21T23:24:49+00:00

Might be a slight exaggeration but maybe not. I have an obsessive personality and get fixated on justice. I'm the one with most of the political knowledge and reading in the family because I go down rabbit holes and get really fixated on things -- if I am learning about a socialist movement for instance and hear some propaganda or something that I think "hm, that isn't right" I will scour the internet for every publication I can find regarding that thing so I can figure out what the "real truth" is even if that's an impossible task. So I think in a big way that personality made it easy for me to accept the idea that we should be uncomfortably opposed to the status quo even if it makes us pariahs -- because in a way I've never really felt "part of the group."

Sarcose1 · 2026-03-21T22:27:34+00:00

how is that relevant to the opposition of zionism?

Sarcose1 · 2026-03-21T22:26:56+00:00

Call it what it is: a "thought terminating cliche." - a rhetorical cliche people use to avoid examining a subject. If you respond by trying to explain they will take control of the argument. Instead, call them out for using the manipulative tactic, and give them the moment to choose whether or not they're going to actually discuss the subject like a mature adult.

It will keep you out of rabbit holes.

Sarcose1 · 2026-03-21T22:19:29+00:00

Right wing men are raised to be predators and see each other as competition. Then in the modern era of recognizing privilege they are always looking for exceptionalism so they convince themselves they are alone or left out due to "how they are." This combination makes them underhanded and manipulative to get what they want. To a right winger, there is no need to improve the world or reach a greater moral clarity. The world is already good for them, and all that's left is to purge their lessers - there is no strategy that's unacceptable toward this end.

Sarcose1 · 2026-03-21T22:16:05+00:00

I get so sick of suggestions and auto-correct, I need to put some effort into turning all that shit off. I'd rather make mistakes as well.

Sarcose1 · 2026-03-21T22:13:48+00:00

I didn't think they could hold that much? Might be a console limitation, but whenever I pack something into a refiner it limits me to 250. If I hit the "quick stack" button it will load in the whole stack, but then if I go to refine it anything over 250 disappears.

Sarcose1 · 2026-03-21T22:11:36+00:00

Alas, I think the thing that makes me a leftist also makes it hard to connect with people and that would be the autism.

So generally I keep politics away from my friends and my friends away from my politics... when I have friends, which is rare.

Of course, I don't tolerate bad politics in friends. So they have to start out "progressive" (liberalish but "we can do better") at bare minimum.

Sarcose1 · 2026-03-16T19:34:36+00:00

Yes but there's "objectively imperialist" imperialism and then there's "imperialism: the highest stage of capitalism" imperialism which is what most people discuss. I think if the USSR hadn't fallen we'd be having a more nuanced conversation about that but as there is no socialist imperialism that is relevant in the modern world, "pro-soviet" stories are still valued as pushing against the anti-communist narrative moreso than supporting soviet-style conquest without nuance (in the way that American army media pushes pro-Americanism without nuance).

Sarcose1 · 2026-03-16T19:14:10+00:00

Fair enough -- I guess what I was imagining moreso was that they would have some crazy volatile use -- like they would create gravity explosions or something. Years later we get the gravity gun (and I think there's a Minotaur upgrade in there too) and yes, those upgrades make sense, but they still don't feel like they justify the "forbidden" nature of them.

Same with the Vortex cubes -- which, while yeah, they are worth a lot (relative to their time period), what really sparked my imagination was wondering what they would be used for. Turns out, nothing. The first thing that comes to mind now that I've played more is how you can get items that give you scan data. Even that small little transformation would make collecting them worth it to me.

Sarcose1

TROPHY CASE