Why would we want to increase working hours? That’s the opposite of progress in society. Why would we ever think this is necessary?

Conservatives will put our country in debt, they will make it less safe, they’ll blame the most marginalized groups as they enrich themselves and their friends, and they will ask you to work more and for longer.

This is why the AFD are succeeding, because what people see as the most safe options are also the ones destroying their country and worsening our lives.

Educate your friends, educate your neighbors, organize with your unions, don’t give an inch to the conservatives. Demand progress, not societal decline.

I assumed pretty immediately upon hearing him in a couple of interviews that he was exactly this right winger camoflaughing as a centralist. I gave the game the benefit of the doubt because I hadn’t seen any hard evidence but I’ll stop talking kindly about the game based on this info.

Politics is how we organize our society. Most of everything is political. When society starts organizing movements against groups of people, stripping away rights, and generally being Nazis you have to get more political to stop them. Taking no position is taking a position. Join the rebellion or support the empire, there is no in-between.

That’s a stupid comparison and I think that’s self-evident. I’m not interested in having a conversation about this with the quality of output you’re displaying. I hope this does as well as it deserves and that you’re getting paid upfront.

I’m responding to your advertisement buddy. I don’t have to go to a landfill to know it’s a dump.

A social media platform advertising to “centralists” or the anti-modding crowd is actually advertising to the right wing crowd and likely the worst of them.

This sounds like truth social but instead of being pro-republican it’s just pro-hatred, misinformation, and extreme takes.

Seems like the opposite of what an educated (or intelligent) and good person would want.

Unfortunately, the snippet from the Wikipedia article you quoted exactly exemplifies my understanding of the genre tags and how I’ve seen them used since I was old enough to get on the Internet and read such things.

Zelda has, for me, always been an action adventure game. I don’t think I’d called Zelda breath of the wild an RPG game or an ARPG game but that’s because the item portion of the game felt incomparable to a game like Witcher or Diablo where every piece of your character is an item that can be upgraded.

That being said, I’m not exactly the biggest Zelda fan and BotW was like 10 years ago for me.

That’s the joke and it’s good you picked up on it.

People need to face the consequences of their beliefs within the circle of their loved ones. If that fails, the next social circle upwards like their friends. But right now it feels like even that has failed and now people are okay with letting awful beliefs fester in their neighbors because it’s “politics”. That’s not okay, as this comic relies on.

I guess I haven’t heard Souls-Like or games like Zelda or Witcher 3 (what I’d call Action Adventure I guess or RPG) called an ARPG although they fit the name well enough that maybe I have and today I’m falling on the other side of a fuzzy line.

Yes, I was referring to Diablo, PoE, Last Epoch, and the rest of the “looter” ARPG’s or what I’d just call ARPG’s. Maybe this is why the Diablo-like meme came up? To further drill in to the genre.

I’m waiting for their multiplayer patch to play the game in full but I enjoyed the combat in the first 10 minutes and an excited to play it. ARPGs need to evolve past the idle games most of the current popular ones devolve into.

Which I understand and agree with. But to come to LateStageCapitalism and claim people who want to minimize taxes have the same motives as the people who want to minimize worker wages is I think too reductive for my taste.

I think the working man shoots himself in the foot when they push to minimize taxing. I think people need to hold taxation and public services in high esteem and it needs to be a pride for people. I think at the same time we have to be honest and outraged by how our tax dollars are spent (in the US at least.

The US being corrupt doesn’t change the principle, it just changes how we address this specific instance. But the people who shake their fist at union dues are doing LateStageCapitalisms’ work for the oligarchs, just the same as taxes. We should be pushing for more taxes on the wealthy, tax billionaires out of existence and cap millionaires at something reasonable and safe for democracy like let’s say 5 million in assets.

Taxes can be a formidable tool against corporations and for the people.

But building a good community through the funding of public services via taxation is a moral/ethical good.

Striving to reduce labor costs to enrich yourself, especially to the detriment of that labor and to an excessive degree of wealth for yourself, is a moral/ethical evil.

Taxation, when run by and for the people who generate it, is a good thing that people should strive to support. It’s a misunderstanding to not view taxation in a well working system (examining individual systems, not the whole in some binary fashion) as a cost efficiency for things you already want - childcare, education, healthcare, public transportation (busses, trams/railcars, trains, bicycle infrastructure), insurance, energy, food, research, protection, charity, infrastructure, etc.

You’re saying a large complex issue has many ways of tackling it to improve it? And that some random 3 paragraph response suggesting we improve the system by trying anything isn’t a full write up on the exact policy choices we should implement down to the letter of the law?

/s

Yes, obviously improving wages would help people afford things. Yes, helping construction workers improve their process would help make housing costs cheaper. There’s a thousand easy to implement ideas that would help the problem. ONE of those is “don’t treat housing like an investment vehicle akin to stocks”. Housing should be for housing, not for the wealthy to make a steady stream of income off of relatively poorer people. Landlords serve no function except for in a society where owning and trading homes is an expensive, slow, and bureaucratic process. Landlords are simply a means for money to transfer from the less wealthy to the more wealthy. They are an unnecessary cost that inflates the price of housing to the benefit of an extremely small number of people.

To be extremely clear, this is not the only solution. This may not even be a silver bullet. I am not listing the 1000 page legal proposal you can implement in your country tomorrow. My goal is to simply shift the common perception of landlords from “they totally have to exist and wow I love giving them money every month for absolutely nothing - boy owning things sure seems like a burden, thankfully I’ll never have to worry about that because I couldn’t afford to own something even if I wanted to” to “of course landlords are bad for society.” Or even “landlords are by and large capitalistic parasites that slow progress towards a more equitable society by draining people with less wealth of their means of becoming wealthy. Society doesn’t need them, even if you can think of reasons to have temporary housing there are better means than some rich person raising the rent every year on you.”

Sure, we can allow some small percentage of the overall housing to be owned by businesses whose sole purpose is providing a good rental housing experience for those in transit. But that’s fundamentally different than parasitic landlords whose only job is owning a property and periodically scheduling the cheapest maintenance workers to do actual work they can.

This isn’t your governments legislation branch, I’m not proposing a 100 page documentation. I’m simply suggesting a policy direction which is housing should be for housing, not for investment or for rent collection. If someone makes money off of someone they should provide a meaningful service and I think if housing wasn’t an investment vehicle the entire system would look so radically different people can’t imagine what a system without some landlords existing would look like.

Imagine everyone owned their house, it wasn’t expensive, selling one was like selling a car, but you could sell to the government if need be at no meaningful loss and the government sold them back to people like a service for just such a situation.

Idk man, it’s not that hard.

Imagine if owning a house was the same price as buying a car. That a loan was a 3 year ordeal not a 30.

60 years ago a janitor salary could buy a house in their 20s. Landlords only making house more expensive, not less - and exponentially so.

We need to ban (or tax out of existence) the concept of owning a house you don’t stay in. Landlords should be illegal, what value they provide to society is so marginal and so minimal that it would be an overwhelmingly net positive.

That tackles one of the largest worries against a universal income.

Again, you’re defending him under the notion that the ~3 political parties in this coalition couldn’t produce a single other valid candidate from among them. That’s unbelievable and if true should be punished by the voters. There’s just no way 3 massive political parties contain zero candidates as willing and as qualified as Merz (if not exceedingly more so) and if all of them can’t put the country first instead of their ambitions (which is arguably evident already) then we deserve chaos at the government level. And quite frankly I don’t know how much better we are with CDU in power vs no one in power. For most policies I’d argue the CDU in power means a decline in quality of life for Germans not an improvement.

The AFD grows not because of chaos at the federal level but because of the decline in quality of life for Germans. CDU is not fixing that they’re worsening it. I think there’s a solid basis to challenge the notion that a CDU government ran by Merz is better than any other candidate within those three parties and even a basis for argument on the notion that Merz over no one is better. I think the CDU actively harm this country based on their actions.

So no, I don’t think I’m misinterpreting what you’re saying - that only Merz exists as a viable option. And yes I do believe you’re defending him on the basis that it’s him or the AfD growing and I think that’s incorrect. The AfD will grow regardless because he won’t improve things and arguably faster because as corporate taxes go down and public services lose funding, quality of living goes down and more people become amendable to radical change which by their nature centralist parties don’t propose. I’m not seeing a left party capitalize on this in the same way the right is, probably because the funding for facism/racism is larger than for wealth equality but that’s off topic.

Well your original comment translates to defending Merz. To answer your follow up question, I don’t know the names of individual politicians in the CDU as I’m still new to German politics and learning as fast as I can. But I have no doubt the CDU has a handful of less ambitious people who could strive to produce some form of centralist policies. Will any of them be good in an absolute sense? No, if Merkel was the best they could do then no. But could someone be relatively better than Merz, who from what I can see would sell his mother down the river for more power and money, yes - most likely.

I’m looking at mailbox.org when mine ends.

Yes, really. My alternative would have been any progressive party and failing that any centralist party, and failing that the CDU with any centralist leader, but all of those failed and now we have Merz. He will damage the working class, exasperate the issues that promote the AFD, and he will normalize them. He is, and the CDU are, Republicans 20 years ago in the US. He will lead to Germany’s Trump and the decline of the standard of living for the common man.

Merz is bad for the working class and for Germany. Every day out of power is a good day for the world.