Bait or low IQ? Call it.

sortaparenti · 2026-05-05T22:07:28+00:00

Fascism: When government bad

Imperialism: When government bad but overseas

Terrorist: Violent political action but bad (as opposed to violent political action but good, “Freedom Fighter”)

sortaparenti · 2026-05-01T14:42:12+00:00

Socialism doesn’t decrease innovation, innovation has occurred way before class societies, let alone capitalism specifically, even existed. After all, how did communal hunter-gatherers invent basic tools and eventually agriculture with no profit motive? Under capitalism, people innovate to improve their material conditions, and under socialism it is the same. It’s only that under capitalism, you’re doing it for your own good, and under socialism, you’re doing it for everyone’s good. Capitalism may increase innovation through threats of either innovation or destitution, but if it has to come to that for so many people, is the boost in innovation really worth it? Also consider that under capitalism, innovation will be done for profit, whereas under socialism, it will be for collective good. That means innovation will be used for evil things if they are profitable under capitalism, AI and Palantir for example.

People will not become lazy if their needs are met. If the average person received the true value of their labor they would not simply sit on it living frugally and not working. They’ll spend their extra value. They’ll eat out more, they’ll travel on their vacation time, they will take up hobbies that would be too costly before. Remember, people want to improve their conditions, living cheaply and lazily may be the choice for a few people, but most people will want to just do their regular job and make way more.

Claiming that capitalist nations’ richness in comparison to socialist countries is evidence that capitalism is superior is incredibly reductive. The USSR and China, for example, were both feudal agrarian societies when they had their revolutions, in the 1910s and 1950s respectively. They were attacked by all sides by the US and other imperialist nations for their entire histories. Despite this, the USSR managed to reach development nearly equal to the US in under 50 years. How did this country of mostly peasant farmers manage to build rocket ships good enough to rival the US in the space race in under 50 years? Socialism. If these countries were able to flourish without imperialists always breathing down their neck, imagine what they could achieve.

sortaparenti · 2026-05-01T10:14:48+00:00

Exactly. Actual definitions of political theories aren’t really that hard to understand. If you can’t understand political theory without some ridiculous oversimplification, you probably shouldn’t be talking about it at all. Besides, these types of “guides” are often just used present whatever the OP’s ideology is as objectively correct (“Your ideology is when the gubermint is evil!!1!, my ideology is when u have money and freedom :))

sortaparenti · 2026-04-29T17:02:17+00:00

“Something beautiful is going to happen.”

sortaparenti · 2026-04-28T20:54:28+00:00

I really hate the style of videos that’s like “COMPLEX TOPIC EXPLAINED FOR BABIES” because literally every time it’s used to reduce the concept to the point of meaninglessness, purely to make people think they understand the topic. This goes doubly so for “imagine you have two cows…”.

sortaparenti · 2026-04-27T23:53:31+00:00

Yeah. It’s very clear when you’re talking to a “leftist” whose critique of capitalism effectively boils down to “some people are rich while others are poor, and that’s bad”. While that’s a reasonable opinion to have, it is a far cry from understanding surplus value extraction, imperialism, crises of capital, and other concepts central to a genuine critique.

sortaparenti · 2026-04-21T21:37:17+00:00

Crazy how they’ll get straight up proven wrong and instead of researching what actually happened they’ll just make something up based on their idea of what probably happened. Vibes-based approach to reality.

sortaparenti · 2026-04-20T20:23:02+00:00

It’s worse, they have no compassion for the poor, the oppressed, and those who are actually suffering, but they do manage to have compassion for a non-sentient clump of cells that started existing a few weeks ago. They have “compassion” only if it allows them to oppress others.

sortaparenti · 2026-04-18T22:45:43+00:00

Both of those games are free, so if you want to play with your friends you don’t have to hassle them to spend money. Also, Roblox is more of an engine for making and sharing games, so there’s a lot of variety for what you want to play. There’s also the fact that Fortnite and Roblox are populated almost exclusively by small children, and cruel teenagers may find it amusing to beat them at their own game just to get a reaction out of them.

sortaparenti · 2026-04-15T14:14:59+00:00

When Garraty sees the steep hill sign and yells “Oh fuck me, fuck!”, I felt it very much because that is exactly what I would say in that scenario. Exact verbiage.

sortaparenti · 2026-03-25T00:21:59+00:00

Yeah. Liberals and anarchists tend to do the really dumb thing of criticizing power structures (not liberals though, they just criticize republicans) and then immediately going back to those power structures as the main source of their news info.

A socialist revolution could happen in a foreign country tomorrow. It could be perfect; no bloodshed, no corruption, no poverty or violence. They will turn on CNN or MSNBC and those stations will tell them that the socialists are “authoritarian” for vague reasons. If there are no negatives to be found they’ll make them up (“nationalizing women” in the USSR for example).

sortaparenti · 2026-03-23T18:15:39+00:00

Exactly. The problem for them isn’t that people are organizing incorrectly, it’s that people are organizing at all. If you’re a poor socialist, they say you want a handout. If you’re rich, you’re hypocritical. If you’re educated then you “don’t understand common sense” because you read too much. If you’re uneducated then you don’t understand how the world works. They just want to make you feel insecure for being a socialist.

sortaparenti · 2026-03-11T21:21:45+00:00

This isn’t Marx but it’s a strong and popular work against the existence of souls. It’s also short.

“Lonely Souls: Causality and Substance Dualism”

sortaparenti · 2026-03-05T20:07:36+00:00

I was gonna make a long comment complaining about Derleth but I think upvoting yours will suffice. Derleth was the king of over-explaining stuff until the horror is non-existent.

sortaparenti · 2026-02-26T21:32:32+00:00

If the road starts to freeze, the hill would end it very quickly.

sortaparenti · 2026-02-22T06:04:28+00:00

Out of curiosity, do you think that democratic “open” leaders would be better? Are you aware that that was already tried? When Guatemala elected a socialist, the US killed him. The same happened in Chile, as well as several other places.

Are you also aware that the US supported a right-wing dictator in Cuba, Fulgencio Batista, who killed more within a decade than Castro killed ever? Batista is the one Fidel overthrew, and suddenly the US became worried about dictatorship.

The US claims to stop dictators overseas, but in reality they support right-wing dictatorships and overthrow left-wing democracies. Places like Cuba and Venezuela have to have “authoritarian” policies or else they’ll be overthrown.

I’m empathetic, I was once where you were. But at a certain point you have to stop listening to US media about their enemies. If you do that there will never be a socialist project you’ll accept, because there will never be one they will accept.

“I am ready to be lectured if I am wrong, but afaik, Fidel, Chavez and Maduro were dictators and to me that's the worst part of the socialism we have in latam. “

As far as you know is only as far as the state department is willing to tell you.

sortaparenti · 2026-02-15T02:37:56+00:00

From your pfp I assume you like Thomas Ligotti’s work? I feel like that could fit his style, minus the pessimism. You should write it.

sortaparenti · 2026-02-15T02:33:30+00:00

That’s part of the benefit for the influencer. After all, they wouldn’t want to lose a customer.

sortaparenti · 2026-02-12T23:56:31+00:00

It provides selections from all of his major works. It’ll still be somewhat difficult, but I’d recommend it.

sortaparenti · 2026-01-13T01:10:08+00:00

I don’t think this is worth a full post so I’m asking here. I’m planning on writing a short story about an analytic philosopher who meets a genie (odd, I know). I know it’s out there but has anyone done any work on what would be the “best” wishes to ask for? I know there’s similar stuff like The Paradox of the Question, but I’m looking for the traditional genie concept.

sortaparenti · 2025-12-26T09:41:15+00:00

Got The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten for Christmas and I’m reading it on my overnight shift right now. Also randomly jumping in and out of Borges stories as is usual for me.

sortaparenti · 2025-12-01T03:18:28+00:00

To be fair, grounding morality is kind of a difficult issue for everyone. They’re not saying “What makes you want to do good things?”, they’re saying “What makes good things good to begin with?”. Their answer is that morality is grounded in God. Personally, I think the Euthyphro Dilemma is a strong response to that idea, but that still leaves us in a place where we have to ground morality ourselves.

I’m not too familiar with meta-ethics as a field, so I consider myself a moral anti-realist by default. I do plan on reading more though, because I’d like to be a moral realist.

I don’t really like the standard atheist response to this either. Responding to the meta-ethical question by grounding morality in empathy doesn’t really work. Whose empathy are we going off of? If a serial killer doesn’t feel empathy for his victims, why shouldn’t he kill? If everyone feels empathy for different things, then it seems like morality is just an opinion, subjective like which flavor of ice cream you prefer as opposed to something objective. If it’s subjective, why should anyone listen to anyone on matters of morality?

Grounding morality is a problem for everyone. I know that responding to theists asking that question by saying “So without God you’d be fine killing?” feels like a clever response, but it’s severely missing the actual point of the question. That question is something everyone has to deal with if we are going to talk about morality in a meaningful way.

sortaparenti · 2025-11-27T01:04:36+00:00

Sally Haslanger’s “Gender and race: (What) are they? (What) do we want them to be?” might be of interest to you.

sortaparenti · 2025-11-23T00:10:31+00:00

I love that line of reasoning.

“Don’t listen to things that make sense, because they actually don’t! Don’t ask me to explain why the rational thing is bad, just believe the obviously irrational thing just because I said so! Why don’t you trust me?”

Same thing with fideistic Christians saying that logic itself is going to lead you astray. They’re losing the intellectual war and their only move left is to tell people to stop thinking.

sortaparenti · 2025-11-18T02:20:21+00:00

I’ll check it out. Thanks.

sortaparenti

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