RIP cum

One of the big communist initiatives of his era, and one of the Four Big Things marking consumer prosperity, was kickstarting China’s bicycle industry so that everyone had personal mobility with a domestic supply chain. He also read a lot of Western Enlightenment writers’ work. I feel like I could easily convince him that this is awesome.

Driving through the commons blasting greensleeves, smoking a fat thurible full of myrrh.

I’m very tempted to get one as a car replacement if I can get a system fast enough to be urban street legal (60kmh~), but the custom bodies mean too many options. Do I want a Disco Elysium car, a CyberAmish one, a CyberWestern stagecoach, something themed after my dog’s country, or Uma Thurman’s truck from Kill Bill? You can’t own something like this without making it as stupid as possible, but it has to be the smartest kind of stupid to be endearing rather than quirked up white boy.

The full thing as copypasta for any time you see an AI goober:

there is a monster in the forest and it speaks with a thousand voices. it will answer any question you pose it, it will offer insight to any idea. it will help you, it will thank you, it will never bid you to leave. it will even tell you of the darkest arts, if you know precisely how to ask.

it feels no joy and no sorrow, it knows no right and no wrong. it knows not truth from lie, though it speaks them all the same.

it offers its services freely to any passerby, and many will tell you they find great value in its conversation. “you simply must visit the monster- i always just ask the monster.”

there are those who know these forests well; they will tell you that freely offered doesn’t mean it has no price

for when the next traveler passes by, the monster speaks with a thousand and one voices. and when you dream you see the monster; the monster wears your face.

Well shit. I’ll delete the post. Someone went on the internet and told lies.

I remember visiting r/CBTS_stream within a few days of its creation, the moment Qanon went beyond 4chan where it was just one more user doing that kind of posting. Even with less than 100 people in the subreddit, I immediately knew it was something different and dangerous because those people were desperate. Their voice chatrooms were the most depressing place I’ve been online- boomers chainsmoking and falling asleep on mic while trying to impress each other by finding a new clue. Their posts instantly fused Trump with Evangelical prayer threads with all of the existing Obama-era conspiracies in a way that made every contribution equally valid and every contributor a genius. People assumed that Q was at least a CIA agent, if not Trump himself getting on reddit to talk to his secret friends in code. Whenever I ran a user analyser on the subscribers, unless they had a new account it always had the saddest results in terms of subscriptions and posts. Qanon and Pizzagate are psychosexual things. They’re paedophiles who want to feel strong and smart and morally righteous by stopping the paedophiles they support.

Russiagate is less psychosexual, but there’s still a deep need driving it. Liberals can’t imagine being anything other than institutionalists and can’t accept that those institutions don’t serve them. They spent the entire first Trump term begging for anyone in the system to and say “mr president, your russia sir.”. The only thing that could explain the state of the US was that we secretly became a bunch of Asians overnight. The only thing that could explain any dissenting voice online was that they personally were being stalked by every bad guy in a James Bond film.

Both of those are hardcore Millerite movements. They gave an outsized sense of importance to the users who had nothing else to believe in, purely a skinner box that you press to remove cognitive dissonance. They insisted that all of the contradictions would be erased overnight and that some form of utopia would come after the promised one delivered us. We’d finally drain the swamp, we’d finally return to a good president leading a noble empire. It all hinged on hypothetical documents that only existed if the core conspiracy did.

With Epstein everything is already there and no one email is going to crack the case. The only time things actually shift is when another group of documents is released, and the only way they shift is that another group of people I already think should be guillotined for other reasons is implicated further. I don’t expect the republicans to save the day any more than I do the democrats any more than I do the institutions. If it comes out today that he’s still alive, I don’t expect that to change anything about the case for the same reason Maxwell being alive hasn’t. If every single name in the files is given a death penalty it won’t change anything because it’s just one more reason to hate the same class and they’ll all be replaced tomorrow. The built-in scepticism toward anyone doing anything about it is where it’s different for me. At least on Hexbear I haven’t seen anyone under the illusion that the dam is about to break or that we can make that happen through pure willpower. It’s much closer to True Crime Slop, just an empty Two Minutes’ Hate, than it is Qanon.

Like I’m a little worried about this turning into Leftist PizzaGate shit.

I think the difference between leftists exploring Epstein stuff and fascists doing Qanon stuff is that we don’t need it. This case doesn’t fill any void in my life and I don’t feel like a gumshoe about to uncover the grand plot. Dead, alive, homicide or suicide- his fate is completely arbitrary to me. It’s a conspiracy where my default position is and the only meaningful thing to gain from investigating it is a larger list of names.

I think we would be a more positive community if we got rid of upvotes and everyone bought a kissing robot.

It’s an epic gamer challenge, but one that comes up against being enough of a spreadsheet nerd to learn a game like that. I’ve had Papal States runs to try to make the Kingdom of Heaven for the novelty of it. It sucks. Everyone hates the church and I play whack-a-mole for centuries while sabotaging my own shitty economy and going to war over minor countries. Playing as the American Confederates means like 30%+ of your population is permanently radical and unable to do skilled labor, your standard-of-living is severely limited, and every country without slavery has a permanent war justification against you. It empowers your landowners who steal all the surplus for themselves. HOI4 Nazis can cheese their way to an early war victory, but it’s the worst power bloc in terms of allies and doing fascist things tanks your stability. Colonialism across all the games is only profitable in very limited contexts, but going for those choice territories means perpetual war and overextension while not building up your core. Fascism isn’t fun in their games and it punishes you in ways that make it super frustrating to play. Line permanently go down in a game where the entire loop and dopamine source is line go up.

It’s like that thing where every man who has a hostile reaction to “would you rather encounter a man or a bear in the forest?” is proof that the bear is the safer option.

Victoria 3 is the most accessible of them and is also the most intuitive to a socialist. It has a wonderful feedback loop between economic and social improvement, captures a really interesting period of 19th-20th century history, and the modding community is strong.

Europa Universalis V is the most in-depth if you want to get lost in history. It has so much detail and covers a 14th-19th century timespan across the globe. However it’s harder to learn than Victoria.

Crusader Kings III is like if The Sims had a complex genetics model and took place in a really detailed 9th-14th century simulator. Its UI is harder to learn than Victoria, but it has the most individual character development. There’s also a really fun post-apocalyptic mod called After the End.

It’s just being based in the US. Even right next to a major network hub, my latency on any game with servers there tends to be like 20-50ms. With European servers it’s always 100-200 with spikes to 500ms, with Oceanic it’s a steady 500-1000ms and constant disconnections.

It’s wild to me that people can play Paradox grand strategy games and come away from it as a right-winger. Especially with Europa Universalis and Victoria, they’re Marxist geography simulators which should teach you that fascism costs more than it gains you. Whatever resources you get from colonialism, you’ll be fighting rebellions and world wars over bumfuck territories. Whatever economic benefits you get from slavery, the social externalities severely limit you in the long run. Whatever social benefits you get from state religions and oppression, the economic externalities limit you just as much. It’s a multi-century struggle session for whatever stupid right-wing belief you think would work for more than a decade.

I will STAND for the daily Cartoon Network Pledge of Allegiance. I will SALUTE my television alone in the dark.

Mediocre posters should be treated as celebrities or influencers.

If you’re looking for a guild to play with I’m a member of Commune, as the name implies it’s a queer leftist guild

My application said “I’ve been a Hexbear member for five years without being banned” and it was good enough. It’s a shame EU servers have such high latency for me. The US offerings for leftist guilds were really lacking and I can’t play with 300ms ping.

Communism begins with the garden city. Most people don’t understand the value of stewarding greenspace they aren’t interdependent with. “Plant blindness” makes green a purely aesthetic background colour instead of a complex system and living project. Pedagogically we wall that stewardship off behind professional degrees. My municipal team includes two scientific horticulturists, a geologist, two wildlife biologists, and an ecologist- all with $50k+ degrees and strict standards for applied science. There’s no public participation outside of having untrustworthy volunteers pick weeds out of pollinator gardens under our supervision, constantly pointing out that something is a wildflower or has biocentric utility instead of an undesired species. Doing this makes the public take those spaces for granted while numbing them to the actual mission of the work.

The red-green project succeeds when people see beavers and bees as subjects in their community. They become militant about this when they can take an active role in conservation that achieves results they see on their daily walks. The changes required for effective protection all stab at the intellectual heart of the system, even if that person has never thought about political economy. Socioecology is the thing they can feel every time they go outside. It’s a profoundly important avenue for agitating and organising around.

I didn’t appreciate the Great Plains until I saw it from the foothills of the Colorado Rockies. There’s something surreal about looking west to see everything going up forever and east at an endless sea of grass.

edit: Found a panorama photo from a hike called Grey Rock, one of the most prominent “mountains” in the foothills. It’s a northern 180 degree view with Wyoming and Nebraska in the distance-

There’s about a 2700m/9000’ elevation difference between the snow-capped mountains and the plains in that. The ecosystems change drastically with every 300m/1000’ gain so there’s a profound biological shift occurring with the wildly dramatic geology.

That’s mayonnaise, the most appropriate condiment for bananas.