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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • I genuinely enjoyed the early game. It had a lot of promise, the build up of tension was engaging, the world they laid out was exactly the kind of FF7 techno-magical cyberpunk and sorcery mish mash Final Fantasy does well. I loved the characters as they were introduced and was curious to see whether the wanna-be boy band aesthetic would culminate in an FFX-2 style dance battle motif.

    But its obvious they just ran out of gas after the first major arc. All that world building up front, but the game completely falls apart after you leave the main continent. By then of the game, you’re literally On Rails after giving you this rich open world to explore for a hundred hours upfront. Tons of buildup but very little payoff. Not what you want in an FF title. I was deeply disappointed in FF13’s Big Hallway style of storytelling, but at least the story paid out in the end.




  • If only NASA could run experiments so that we could understand how the concept of fear-based self preservation eliminates any semblance of courage when faced with even the smallest threat to their ill-defined paradigm of manhood.

    You’re significantly underestimating how many Chud engineers NASA employs. The agency that was founded by Nazis refugees has always had a shit history on race politics, cinema hagiographies produced decades later notwithstanding.

    In a parallel universe where we have a functioning federal government

    One of the biggest jokes of the US depiction of the Space Race was how many times we got our asses drubbed by Russians with less money, manpower, and educational resources, simply because our administration was so cartoonishly incompetent. We have an obscenely wealthy federal government that can afford to fuck up on the scale of trillions of dollars and still come out ahead.






  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlI'm a leftist
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    8 days ago

    FDR was a leftist because of the policies he implemented.

    Its hard to argue a politician is something other than his policies.

    you are missing is why he implemented those policies

    The why hardly matters. Only the consequences. You can definitely argue that FDR failed to cement the more progressive programs (fully employment through public agencies, public control of finance and agriculture, a long term peaceful coexistence with the Soviet states). And for that reason, he was a kind-of failure. But I would argue putting the weight of the world on one man’s shoulders is deeply unfair. FDR took US policy as far as he could. Then it was Truman and Eisenhower and their lackeys who fumbled the bag (or capitulated to corporate interests deliberately).

    His strategy to contain the CP was to neuter the party by bringing it into the Democratic party fold, alienating their most militant members, and slowly squashing their agenda.

    The Democratic Party, as a whole, has a vested interest in neutralizing rival movements and harvesting their members. That’s not a strategy FDR invented or pioneered. Neither was the DemSoc liberalism of FDR incompatible with a more Reform Oriented American Communist Movement. The strategy worked in large part because American Communists saw FDR’s outreach to Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China as a positive turn foreshadowing a real global movement.

    I might argue that Stalin’s “Communism in One Country” and Mao’s failure to open China up until Nixon, thirty years later, that did more damage than FDR’s liberal-washing of Communist organizing efforts. I could easily argue that the Truman/Eisenhower Cold War was what ultimately did in the American Communists. Socialists couldn’t uproot Hoover from the FBI or unseat McCarthy from a strong union state like Wisconsin or keep guys like Nixon or Kennedy from worming their way into the upper echelons of the US government on a wave of mafia money.

    At some point, you have to acknowledge the failures within the leftist organizing movements that happened in the US. Deng and Khrushchev and Ho Chi Mein and Kim Il Sung didn’t collapse in the face of these problems in their home states and they all had it much worse.




  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlI'm a leftist
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    8 days ago

    He did a lot more than “save capitalism”. Social Security, the Citizens Conservation Corpse, and the full blown WW2-era command economy (complete with ration cards and production quotas and public housing for all the rapidly mobilized industrial workers) had far more in common with Stalinism than Coolidge’s laisse-faire market economy. Hell, FDR even had his share of gulags, when you consider how Japanese Internment Camps were created and administered.

    There is no future for humanity with oligarchs like him and his family

    There’s a sharp line between an oversized land baron clutching a fist full of stock certificates and a popular elected bureaucrat charged with administering the public labor force.

    Oligarchy can’t just be “guy with rich parents” or it quickly descends into austerity fetishism. Oligarchy is fundamentally anti-populist. It requires a strong centralized police force to compel a broad, disorganized public into acting against their own material interests. FDR’s New Deal was a meaningful shift away from oligarchy precisely because he adopted policies from his left-leaning proletarian base in defiance of the Depression-Era economic elites. And he implemented them with the enthusiastic support of the body public. Nobody was getting held up at gunpoint to take a salary from the Parks’ Department or to pile into Keynesian school house construction programs or to patch up wounded soldiers at the VA.

    FDR’s personal wealth gave him a platform upon which to propagandize left-liberal policies on a national stage. But his messages resonated because they had a popular basis not because he simply hammered people with Madison Avenue propaganda.





  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlCure for Fascism
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    11 days ago

    The only way to stop a Nazi is to bash them.

    There’s another, more effective and less violent and non-solipsistic way. A great deal of the power of fascism stems from their economic position. Guys like Zuck and Elon are dangerous because of their enormous wealth, not merely because of their toxic political views.

    And since you can’t just Luigi Mangione the problem of economic elitism, you need collective action at an economic level to starve out the beast.

    Incidentally, the “starve the beast” strategy is a conservative approach historically espoused and employed by Grover Norquist, Tom DeLay, and now (via the guise of DEI) Bill Ackman, Peter Thiel, and Donald Trump. Its incredibly effective, because it eliminates the ability of the opposition to effectively organize and administer large groups of professionals.


  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlCure for Fascism
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    11 days ago

    I can dislike two things at once.

    Do you normally shoot everyone you dislike?

    Fuck tankies, fuck fascists.

    Yes, yes. We know who you are.

    The Radical Centrist that goes to war with every other corner of the political spectrum and ends up turning on itself. Ur-Liberalism. The snake eating its own tail of political thought.