Whom Miss Piggy consistently suspects is actually 007, refuses to accept any proof to the contrary, and makes increasingly amorous overtures to vow to keep his secret safe? These, naturally, only end up confounding the investigation’s progress rather quickly, all the way up to her faking her own death (to “flush out the real killer”), and Benoit breaks the 4th wall when he realizes he’s now trapped in a series of movies with the lot of them.
Tankies, and those they convince of their selfish narcissistic political insanity (and antisemtism) are the bane of the Fediverse. You're not going insane.
The second poster’s story so clearly shows why a man’s partner being their only emotional support is devastating to both people in the relationship, yet this idea is still so insidiously pervasive in our society. No one wins.
I am mid thirties male and getting divorced. Making friends as an adult is so hard. Even going to things I like, doesn’t guarantee I’ll click with anyone there really.
especially if your taste is a little off the beaten path. I really like a ton of music that most would consider “weird” or “an acquired taste,” which means other fans tend to be condescending and douchey (I may be pretentious, but I try to draw the line at condescending). Add to that the fact that I live in a tiny town and that many of my other hobbies attract either edge-lords (i.e. TTRPGs) or bros (i.e. snowboarding and baseball), and it can feel like it’s not even worth trying to get to know people with shared interests.
Luckily I work in a job where I can have meaningful relationships with several of my coworkers even if we have very little in common beyond the work (and my extroverted wife and kids mean I get about all the interactions my introverted self can handle).
edit: Almost forgot to offer you some support! Keep trying OP, there are people worth knowing out there, and you may already know some of them. I’ve had really good luck getting in touch with some college friends and doing discord or zoom game nights where we chat and play online card games or TTRPG’s once a month.
Hey Thanks I appreciate it! I am in a really good headspace for the first time in months so things are going well :) I also work with a Therapist and Psychiatrist so I have support there as well
Have you gotten the advice to make friends with other divorced dads yet? 🥲/s
Jokes aside, I’m sorry for your circumstances. I’m in my 20s and it’s already hard to make friends now, I can’t imagine how it’ll be in the future. Ironically enough, I have met and made friends with quite a few 30-40 year old divorced dad’s through local ttRPG groups and FFXIV.
If it’s any encouragement, most of them say they have bounced back after the roughest period of their lives in getting divorced, and are happier now than pre-divorce. I can’t really say if what they’re saying is truth or a lie, but I wish you all the best, from one internet rando to another!
I am doing pretty good honestly, I am shy and have social anxiety so it has always been hard to make friends and trust people, but I am on good terms with my ex and I go to a Board Game group weekly so eventually ill find some friends there :) I also still talk to friends made starting in HS and College so I may move back to the PNW at some point.
I moved here to be by Family which is nice, but I kind of hate the south.
Writing and playing tabletop RPG horror one gets a real sense of what horror is just a little too personal to be fun. There’s a whole lot of safety tools the community has developed (actually crossing over a bit with the BDSM community’s tools for safe consent when acting out a fiction). It’s really common to survey all players with an exhaustive list of all the potential horrors one could potentially bring to a table. The top five that are people’s no gos are sexual violence, harm to animals, reproductive horror, harm to children and body horror.
A lot of horror movie fans are not prepared for how you having agency in the situation of tabletop storytelling can make something you can easily handle watching suddenly effect you even when it’s just being described and can misjudge their level of chill and need to tap out mid game. Typical advice on reproductive horror a’la Alien is don’t even bother writing a reproductive horror that directly effects a player character. Damn near every table taps out for that, if not the player targeted then someone else at the table.
Alien de-gendering that horror was definitely a masterstroke. There’s good reason the chestburster reached cultural saturation.
Why does anyone need to survey players on their tolerance for sexual violence in the first place? Like are there that many DM’s trying to put that in their actual campaigns?
Fiction is a really good way to “safely” explore horrific things.
However, it’s easy to accidentally overlook how important the “distance” between the storyteller and the person reading/viewing/experiencing it is. When you move from writing a story in text and putting it in a book to verbally narrating something to people in person, a storyteller can stumble if they didn’t take into consideration how in-person context might make change power dynamics enough that something okay in other contexts can suddenly become bad.
Let me give you an example. Bestselling romance writer writes a best-selling novel about Hunky McShirt’sOff that all the fans adore. It subverts tropes, it turns ideas on their head, it uplifts men and women alike. Anyone who wants to read it can buy it off the shelf or gets it from the library. This is cool, because the one reading it has agency about being exposed to it. They choose to leave their home and use their time or money to go find it and bring it into their life. Because they have agency, they can engage, or stop engaging, with the content as they wish.
Now imagine the same writer cornering their teen son in their bedroom and breathlessly narrating their bestselling romance book to him, in a situation where he is physically prevented from leaving, and the person narrating has full control over his food, shelter, education, access to travel, etc.
Same story, same book. And, funnily enough, it’s not actually the book that is wrong. It’s the power dynamics between people that take the situation from fine into abusive. The second example is a case where the teenage son has things that affect his well-being in a pragmatic way potentially imperiled if he doesn’t sit there and listen to his parent tell him a sexual story, because the balance of power is in the adult’s favor, because of the parent relationship and the dynamics between them that puts the storyteller in direct control of the listener’s basic survival needs.
That’s a VERY different situation than a book sitting on a shelf in a bookstore where every reader is free to pick it up or put it down with no real consequences for choosing either way.
Tabletop RPG stuff is also in person, and that changes the storytelling dynamics to some extent. Most people are socially-aware enough to realize you aren’t going to do a horror or erotic tabletop RPG role-play with your parents or your kids or siblings. But when you’re among peers, it can get trickier to navigate what’s okay and what’s not, and what the dynamics are.
Directly surveying players on what they can handle in a really up-front way is a way of giving people agency to tap out of something. It restores agency, which makes it safer for everyone.
Sexual violence in storytelling is a tricky thing. But it’s important to realize fiction is not reality. It can be influenced by real things, but the character on the page is not a real person and never will be. Nor will the reader magically transform into the characters on the page–even if they might see aspects of themselves reflected in them.
People distill discourse about these things into black and white terms where somehow a story involving a difficult topic is suddenly 100% equivalent to the thing in real life…but it’s NOT. In reality, a reader/viewer’s interaction with dark topics is much more complicated and nuanced, and there’s just as much a spot for healing to come from telling stories that are dark as there is for anything else.
One of my favorite authors is Anne Bishop. Her breakout series was the Black Jewels Trilogy. Practically every character in the series, though, is a survivor of sexual abuse, and a bunch of that is described vividly on the page.
Despite that, the series overall is sort of a “cozy dark fantasy”, if I had to give someone an idea of how it “feels”.
Why?
Well, because the theme of the whole series is kind of unflinching acceptance that people live through HORRIFIC things…but can still obtain found family and peace afterwards.
Honestly, I’ve never quite found another series like it, that combines unflinching renditions of horrific violence, then turns around and gives a big chunk of those characters warm loving families with unicorns and loving spouses and dogs and kittens running about. Most cozy fantasy seems to think you only deserve cozy if nothing all that bad has happened to you. As if “survivor of terrible shit” is incompatible with “happy ending”.
Anne Bishop is the only author I’ve read serving up stories that say, “Yeah, what you lived through is royally fucked up and we’re going to look right at it and not gloss it over–but also, have some puppies and a unicorn, you’ve earned it.” And being able to see those horrible things spelled out hits differently.
But the folks who have decided that “violence and sex in stories is always bad because–” seem to have missed the memo that storytelling is how REAL HUMAN BEINGS process and come to terms with fears and trauma. And conflate storytelling with the actual act, and conflate story characters who are given stories full of pain with real people who have actually been through pain. (Which I personally think is some mental scarring from the religions that tell you if you even THINK something you’re going straight to hell and will burn forever.)
Anyway. My point is that when it comes to storytelling with dark elements, the actual in-person power dynamics between storyteller and reader/listener matter MUCH more than the content of the story. One’s agency to partake or not partake in fiction has a bigger impact than the content of the story–especially since dark stories can help us kick around ideas and figure out how one wants to respond to them.
(Plenty of people read a story they don’t like and say “Fuck that shit!” in the end…reading something doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll slavishly accept it without thinking. The point of reading and storytelling is to think about things, and you won’t always agree with the author!)
Yeah it’s not that I find the idea of surveying player sensitivities a problem, so much as it’s difficult for me to wrap my mind around the desire to inflict something like that on a player’s character in a roleplaying game that’s supposed to be for entertainment at the end of the day. I think of myself as an open minded person and I’m trying not to judge here, I’m just having a bit of trouble with this concept. In the context of an inherently erotic roleplaying game it doesn’t really bother me as I respect other people’s kinks as long as everyone is consenting and comfortable, even if it’s something I’m personally uncomfortable with, because you’re walking into something where you as a player know the subject of kinks and sexuality is inherently part of the game. But the idea of using it as a device in a roleplaying game simply for inflicting horror on a player through their character is a struggle for me to understand
Horror play is a different beast than your run of the mill ttrpg crowd. You are trying to ride a line where you get under someone’s skin but not enough to actually cause them to tap out. Flirting with the darkness is the point. Sometimes themes of sexualized violence find their way into horror, particularly if you are aping off of old school horror tropes. It is a gold standard rule to never impose sexual violence on a player character generally and it is safer over all to just exclude it entirely from games that are not an excersise in giving you the actual chills.
Most gothic horror stuff D&D modules pass for horror is actually pretty calculated. It still follows the curve of a power fantasy but with a Halloween haunted house-y coat of paint. Curse of Straud for instance will give you all manner of tropes you would find from R. L Stien novels from Goosebumps to the stuff targeted towards young adults but it’s still designed to be overcome. You gain more powers as you go and become more capable and expect to have a fair shot of surviving because you are heroes.
The hard core horror players look for a different curve. You are never more capable than you will be at the start of the story. Some things are designed to give you odds of survival where the question is not if someone will die but when. You might be fortunate to lose half the party… It is sort of a trust exercise. Going into a table that seeks to spook you properly you let people know your weaknesses because your DM is trying to hit you in a way that is disturbing but tolerable. Coming away from that kind of experience actually can make for pretty solid friendships because sharing a faux traumatic event allows circumstances for you all to be vulnerable together provided it is done in a space where everyone knows they are safe.
While I still find it odd, I suppose I was thinking of it more in the sense of a traditional D&D campaign than a horror driven one despite the original comment saying such. I still feel like even in most horror video games the threat of your player character actually being raped or sexually assaulted is extremely uncommon as opposed to a movie or book because you are playing the role of the character, and so even in the context of a horror rpg the idea of putting that into a campaign just seems strange to me. I’m not judging people who play that way as long as everyone consents and knows what they’re getting into… I suppose I just don’t understand the desire to do so
D&D is very poorly weighted for hardcore horror. I don’t think I mentioned D&D in my original comment but I could be wrong. Other ttrpgs are way better. Shadows of Esterun, Call of Cthulhu, SLA Industries and Dread would be better options if you want to dip your toes in.
It’s way more common for aspects of sexual violence to be sort of more alluded to in the past tense and almost NEVER happen to a PC unless the player themselves makes it an aspect of their character that happened in the past. It’s damn near never something graphically described at the table in real time.
Inclusion realistically often looks like small references made by the NPC living victims of serial killers being held captive who speak a little about the horrors they’ve experienced but trail off before they get graphic… A bit of somebody’s backstory or allusions to the weird monster that kidnaps and beheads it’s victims is doing it because it of weird reproductive purpose… but it is a rare table that actually will not call a FULL stop to play if someone starts full on beat for beat trying to describe a detailed rape scene in progress or a monster basically doing weird reproductive stuff to an NPC in present tense much less a player.
Most of the time with something like that you employ “veils” where something as an idea is introduced as a factor to make something more horrible but you don’t really describe it in detail. You let the abstraction make it tolerable.
I personally might consider use of extremely mild themes of reproductive horror in a game but I personally draw the line at targeted sexual assault being any part of that. I neither want to risk triggering somebody’s PTSD or anybody’s weird anime porn related kink by accident so it’s not something I would personally run. I am not personally triggered by their inclusion but with straight up rape it’s easy for the way things play out to be in poor taste and only a few GMs I have played with actually used the themes for anything that felt thematically poignant and not just trashy. Most of the time the risks just outweigh the rewards by magnitudes and in a safety focused culture that shit flies like a chunk of lead.
Mind you old school tables were pretty brutal, even your average D and ;D campaign not billing itself as a horror might have had a rape situation thrown in as window dressing for a sacked town or female prisoners in a camp. I remember a couple of DMs I used to play with really thought nothing about chucking it in just to make stuff feel gritty and “realistic”. The culture of tabletop has moved into a much kinder place in the past decade for which I am personally quite grateful. What was once the domain of horror gaming safety techniques have been adopted by regular players now.
Yes I misunderstood, I thought the commenter was referring to an “unveiled” scenario that could play out against player characters themselves and was disturbed. Admittedly the concept of a Xenomorph reproduction cycle or something similar doesn’t really bother me so much as live people being literally raped and being forcibly impregnated by innsmouth fish folk or goblins like Lovecraft inspired stuff or Berserk. If it’s referred to in past tense or alluded to like in Shadow Over Innsmouth I can move past it usually, but if it’s straight up depicted like in Berserk or Necronomicon by Alan Moore then that’s just way too far for me personally, but I still enjoy other aspects of those universes and try not to make any judgements on the authors or people who aren’t bothered by those things.
I… am the original commenter? Good gods I hope that was not the general takeaway of my original post. I have heard far too many horror stories of GMs using sexual violence on PCs and it is just…
I know rape fantasies are a thing some people are into but I feel like bringing that wholesale in to a TTRPG setting is more the domain of like the extreme edge of BDSM culture.
This is a valid question, which could also be asked of Alien. It’s as simple as some people like to be scared, whether to explore personal feelings on a specific type of fear or purely to be scared. For some players, that a game addresses a fear they rarely explore is an enormous bonus.
Your confusion is understandable. Games that directly address the same themes of sexual violence as Alien are a minuscule niche inside an already small niche. But I can tell you as a horror GM that even a whiff of an exotic, earnestly held fear, as long as the player is willing to engage, cuts deeper than hours of classic slasher horror. It doesn’t have to go as far as even Alien, just a little taboo horror as seasoning, but even that needs consent.
I love Alien and it doesn’t bother me personally though I can understand and respect why some would not feel comfortable about it. I meant specifically in a game or roleplaying scenario and honestly misunderstood the comment to mean a DM inserting literal rape or sexual assault into their campaign as something that could actually play out against player characters and that’s my bad
I don’t often get a chance to talk about it, but Lover in the Ice is a fascinating, well regarded module that dives directly into the sort of sexual horror you’ve correctly pointed out as way off all but the most extreme table.
I’m certain, to my bones, that I could run a life changing version of Lover in the Ice. It will never happen. Even my few players who have given me the green light on that sort of content would I suspect tap out pretty fast, and I don’t blame them. I don’t think most people who just play realize how far TTRPGs can go.
I’m okay with never running that story. I get a lot reading modules like that for perspective; when GMs recoil at the thought of running that content it shows them how much more vulnerable they, and their players, are to that sort of horror relative to a shoggoth in the basement. That should prompt them toward creativity in looking for or writing other scenarios.
I do wonder what proportion of people who buy modules like that play them.
I am usually just kind of unphased by the idea of reproductive or sexual horror when it’s not directed at my PC’s personally but being ace and with no history of sexual assault I find it doesn’t affect me any different than any other kind of horror? Like I have read my share of true crime and awful shit and I can see how it just segments into something just genuinely horrific but my brain just treats it as a straight up no different than a torture theme. I can find other people’s reactions to it waaay more unsettling though so I could never run it myself and I know a number of people in my cohort who have been in domestic violence and sexual assault scenarios irl and it would break my heart if any of them were triggered at a table I was at.
I’ve definitely been at tables which used sexual horror themes in lazy, trashy ways that made me think poorly of the GM but I have seen it used thematically well twice and only once where it didn’t cause an X card tap out by someone who honestly thought they would be okay.
High risk TTRPGs can be ridiculously rewarding and some of the best games I’ve played were ones that danced really close to the wire of being not okay.
Let’s not forget that no one on-screen in that specific scene other than the host (John Hurt) was aware that the character was swapped for a neck-down prosthetic, so every single reaction by each actor was genuinely horrific in that they each “saw” a prop explode out of a human body. IIRC, the director went on to pay for counseling for most (all?) of said actors after the fact.
Did not know this. That makes it way wilder, and also a much better movie. I do feel bad for the actors in this situation, but also no better method acting than watching your costar literally explode next to you as a chestburster comes out with zero knowledge that it was carefully planned by the special effects team. Also, big gamble. If someone broke character, they would have to redo the whole thing. Shock value is gone, all the special effects prep work has to be redone, everybody already wants to vomit, etc
While this is true, I want you to go back and rewatch that scene with special attention to Parker (Yaphet Kotto, also the first black Bond villain!) and tell me that guy didn’t catch some serious trauma from that “gamble”. 🥹
They’ll keep going till it’s like the old days where a father owned his daughters and decided who they married.
Everyone gets that.
This slow walking isn’t to trick people into supporting the current step, it’s because they know if they jump to the final step, nonvoters will vote and stop it.
Religious extremism only works when a large amount of people don’t vote
Back when Roe v. Wade was overturned, the SC announced that other judgements are to be reconsidered. Among them is the one that allowed interracial marriages.
This is the only answer and you figure it out quick if you're a light sleeper. If I get a call in the middle of the night, I know that it's important, full stop. The rest can burn.
I'm also active on WhatsApp though - the only way I could get that bastard to honour DnD was to turn off all its notifications, and use Alertify to play a sound for certain silent notifications.
Basically people that complain about getting calls late at night are admitting they aren’t very savvy with their phone. DND call settings are a life saver.
@LimitedWard@B4tid0 Ive worked in IT for decades. DND after 10p CST is the only way I get sleep and if they are dying, there sure af nothing I could do about it, naked at 2:30am and just woken up.
Oof are you effectively always on call until 10pm every day? I have on call rotations with week long 24 hour shifts, but luckily I only have to deal with it every 2 months. Having daily late night calls just sounds dreadful.
There is also an exception for if the same number calls you twice within 15 minutes. That way if a loved one is calling from a different number it will still get through.
The reality is people posting this copium are just upset at the prospect of having to return to opposing the state. Having Biden in power meant you didn’t have to give a shit who lived and who died because “Trump could be worse”. The idea that you’d “hold him to account” was an objective lie and has allowed you all to sleepwalk into an inevitable victory for someone way more evil than the guy who spent his younger years advocating for killing women and children in Beirut.
If Biden wins, someone like Trump is inevitable in 4 years’ time. Either way you’re in the weimar republic now.
Having Biden in power meant you didn’t have to give a shit who lived and who died because “Trump could be worse”.
I do have to give a shit, but that’s because I’m in a red state.
As a Texas resident, I get to see a new draconian set of fascist laws constrict around Harris County with every State Congressional cycle.
The Biden DOJ doesn’t intervene. The local Democrats (John Whitmire, our Houston Mayor, is a prime example) just roll over in the face of it. And folks who protest to loud or too long routinely find themselves dead in the state prison system (the one with cells that go up to 100 degrees in the summer).
“Oh but look at what Biden has done for California and Minnesota and Delaware, tho!”
Yeah, thanks. I don’t live there.
Folks in Texas and Florida and South Carolina and the Dakotas are getting thrown to the fucking wolves.
But Biden ended up building the border wall? Also pushing loan forgiveness is neutralized by the fact that he restarted loan payments.
I can list dozens of other trump-era bullshit Biden maintained, but it’s tiring.
I feel like I’ve been having this same conversation for a decade, after watching Obama demotivate the base by maintaining/expanding Bush’s policies, while republicans and democrats insist that he actually implemented socialism.
But neglecting why that money went towards a wall is pretty important. He is status quo enough that he didn’t want to hand an impeachment to the republicans.
The administration said that it was bound to build this section of new wall because Congress already appropriated the funding to do so in 2019. It had been unsuccessful in convincing Congress to rescind the funding
so… the wall had already been ordered and paid by congress under the Tramp administration, so the Biden administration followed the law?
Basically yes that’s my understanding. When Congress appropriates money for something, the Executive Branch is obligated by law to spend that money on what Congress appropriated it for.
As much as I hate the whole border wall thing if Biden just said “Fuck Congress, we’re not doing that” it almost certainly would lead to a world where the next Republican president uses that same idea to essentially end things like Medicaid or SNAP.
Yea… the objective isn’t to take everything you don’t like to SCOTUS or to fight it tooth and nail. It’s a waste of time and resources. That was just Trump’s objective because he’s a piece of shit.
Taking the funding of those sections of border wall to SCOTUS would have wasted the Republicans time and resources… How exactly? It would be Biden’s DOJ that would have to prepare some kind of legal rationale to challenge the wall funding. Then even if they came up with a perfect ironclad reasoning SCOTUS isn’t even required to grant it cert to even hear the case.
I utterly fail to see any version of this where it wastes more Republican resources than Democrat ones.
If Biden just does it and waits to get sued rather than going to SCOTUS himself to get them to rule that he can divert the funds it opens up a bunch of problems for everyone. Not only does it still not save Biden and the dems time and resources as they still have to argue the case at every level it goes to and still have to be the ones to appeal it higher if any of the lower courts rule against them. But if they win it could arguably be even worse. Sure we stop the border wall, but what is there to stop a future Republican president from saying “I think Medicaid, SNAP, Medicare, Social Security, Welfare, Section 8, or other federal social program they don’t like are illegal actually and I’m not releasing the funds for them” and us then needing to sue him into complying?
To my knowledge the only sections of wall he’s built were funded by Trump’s Congress before he left office. Meaning he had little choice but to spend the money on what Congress appropriated it for.
I don’t know about you, but I’d rather not live in a world where someone like Trump can just decide he doesn’t want to spend portions of the money Congress appropriated. He could just suddenly decide that the federal government isn’t going to pay like Medicaid or SNAP.
this is basically what he tried to do with money for ukraine. refusing to give it till he got tit for tat. Its funny that alciholicorn is continuing the exact crazy type of arguments that the screenshot highlights.
Generally true, yes. In most cases, the leftists using that sort of terminology are tankies, meaning they are explicitly pro-authoritarian. They just want the dictators to be communists (or claimed communists) rather than capitalists (despite said dictatorial communism usually being about seizing all the money for themselves anyways and often results in full on capitalism regardless, China is a great example).
So you don't even need the word replacement thought experiment. Tankies are openly authoritarian.
People really don’t want to acknowledge that politics is more than one axis.
Like communism is the opposite of capitalism, not democracy. The opposite of democracy is a dictatorship.
And when a dictator calls their government Communist, it’s pretty much a guarantee it’s not even a communist economy anymore than when North Korea or Russia claim to be democracies.
Very true. Reading a lot of Socialist lit has made me very critical about the regular framework I see regularly posited as Socialism being a direct opposite of capitalism and being some kind of inevitable slippery slope toward Communism.
Like as a system it is very distinct from Communist ideologically speaking and represents a sliding scale of public ownership versus private ownership but never fully occludes private ownership, currency or the very basics of capitalism systemically and any one person’s veiw of where that balance should rest is itself an end point and fully formed political belief. You can believe a mix of liberal / capitalist and socialist things that are not strictly contradictory. Capitalism is a sliding scale we are just currently dealing with it’s deep unstable and predatory end. Admitting some capitalism is okay and can be made more ethical doesn’t disqualify you from the left nor does it nessisarily make you “centrist”. It also doesn’t make you automatically a fan of everything capitalist or the status quo.
The number of “That’s not Socialism! Socialism means only (posit one potential facet out of the massive cloud of policies/stances of the ideology) or " That is only the secret aim of Communists to tip the teeter-totter towards our/their goals!” is a very paternalistic view. Socialism is DEEP and diverse. There’s not a central author or even a neat handful of authors one can point to. The more you read the more internal variations you find.
People generally seem to just want an enemy to point and hiss at, they don’t want to look at things as a potential series of sliding scales or people of mixed ideological stances as valid in their own right.
Socialism requires that the workers own the means of production. So no it’s not on a sliding scale with capitalism. Those are called hybrid economies and are a concept in their own right. In fact basically all modern economies are hybrid economies.
Socialism does include many systems, but none of them are capitalist, they are mutually exclusive. They can have markets, currency, and other things, or they might not. Communism is just a subcategory of socialist society. The reason people think socialism leads to communism is because of the marxists who use one as a platform to achieve the other.
Socialism requires no such thing - most of the rhetoric which treats worker owned production as the only definition of Socialism stems from Marxist frameworks and leaves any writing done on the subject since which has fleshed out the philosophic roots untouched. There has been a lot of writing on the subject in the 200 years since . Ownership of the means of production is by no means the only form of public or social property.
Dismissing mixed and hybrid economic theory as “not Socialist enough” is more or less what I am talking about with the nature of false dichotomies. So often socialists are dismissed on this platform directly because they don’t buy into every binary maxim of all Socialism through the lens of Communist philosophy. Socialism works in mixed systems because it is kind of the political overlap of a lot of things. Where it can and does integrate into “hybrid” economies because it is not fully “anti capitalist”. It is it’s own sphere of political thought and buying in to one specific “hybrid” branch still makes one socialist. While Socialism certainly isn’t capitalist in itself and does curtail capitalism somewhat by existing in the same space it’s no more “anti” than two roomates sharing an apartment and divvying up responsibilities and resources mutually would be considered “anti-roommate”.
I am quite frankly tired of Marxists or even other Socialists trying to impose their own overly narrow definition to what amounts to a range of different socialism factions or treating hybrid socialist ideologies like liberal socialism or ethical socialism like they aren’t socialism.
Communism is also not strictly socialism. The two ideologies may be related but the definition of Communism leaves no real space for hybrid systems hence the ideological distain for “hybrids” ane why calling Communism “just a subsection” of Socialism is misguided. Marx may have coined and popularized the term but early writers who adopted the label socialist very quickly became something unique and the term essentially became the safe space of at least partial criticism of Marxist/Leninist revolutionary anti-capitalist ideology. The difference between the two that eventually emerged as literally one having a tolerance for mixed systems and one not. Only one of them is strictly anti-capitalist.
Anarchists are anti-capitalist and have little to do with Marx.
Why would you want any form of a destructive and exploitative system like capitalism to remain? I think you just aren’t happy people are calling out your pro-capitalist and reformist bullshit.
Capitalism isn’t always a destructive system, we are just living the deep end of unfettered capitalism which is. At its absolute basic having a business owner who forks over the initial investment and pays for both materials and labourers while profiting a modest amount isn’t automatically exploitation. Investment capital isn’t just big hedgefunds and megacorps. It’s literally just having any form of private ownership of a business regardless of size.
What makes capitalism exploitative and terrible is not combatting its worst aspects. Things like people being incentivized or at very least not being punished for allowing profit to be king instead of looking at business success as a many spoked wheel including a duty to worker welfare, a responsibility to the community, ethical sourcing and so on. When you have a culture of milking everything dry to appease shareholders being normalized and routine grabbing of public resources for pennies considered legitimate then yes Capitalism is exploitative but there’s plenty that can be done to literally disincentivize that system. The way the stock market works is not on its own an integral part of capitalism. It’s an option. Laws and oversight can do a lot to bring the system of exploitation into check. Inventivizing co-op and worker owned labor is great but so is expanding tax structures, government public services and safety nets and strengthening environment protections or increasing indigenous repatriation and sovereignty. A lot of that is making Government more airtight against private sector tampering.
End of the day if a business is playing by the rules and doing their bit to what they owe society then who owns it becomes much less relevant.
People love to talk about protections and safety nets enforced by governments and committees but you find in most countries with capitalism the government is corrupt including in the US and UK. They essentially do what businesses tell them to do because they spend money on lobbying and line politicians pockets. There isn’t really a way to fix this under capitalism to my knowledge.
The media too is bought and paid for by the big business players. That’s the nature of capitalism as a system. It corrupts everything.
There are ways to combat it we just aren’t doing it. First past the post voting systems are in both currently used in the US and the UK and those are systems that both benefit high capitalist control over democratic governance.
Media protection and legislation has also been eroded so it is understandable that you cannot conceive of a non-corrupt media but again those are options. Anti-trust legislation, federal communication standards, standards regarding ethical reporting and consumer protections are all individual steps which have existed in the past and could be updated.
Also currently speaking there isn’t really a lot of options for countries that have zero capitalism. By that metric we start talking about places where it’s illegal to have a strictly private business. Iceland for instance still is a capitalist country even as it is a highly socialist country. Highly socialist countries aren’t capital free. They still have private business.
If You are looking at this issue in black and white terms where only exploitative capitalism counts as capitalism then of course “capitalism bad” is your easy take away. Things exist by degrees and shades of grey and the system of token trading has both benefits and drawbacks. But again I don’t need communists telling me that I am socialist-ing wrong. You can either appreciate the things we agree on or have this discussion in terms of individual policy changes and acts or we can disagree and move on.
There are ways to combat it we just aren’t doing it. First past the post voting systems are in both currently used in the US and the UK and those are systems that both benefit high capitalist control over democratic governance.
Media protection and legislation has also been eroded so it is understandable that you cannot conceive of a non-corrupt media but again those are options. Anti-trust legislation, federal communication standards, standards regarding ethical reporting and consumer protections are all individual steps which have existed in the past and could be updated.
Yes there are. Doing any of those requires a non-corrupt government, an informed public or both. All of the forces in modern society are against that. It’s a chicken and egg problem. How can you overcome that problem without resorting to a revolution or other form of regime change?
Also currently speaking there isn’t really a lot of options for countries that have zero capitalism. By that metric we start talking about places where it’s illegal to have a strictly private business. Iceland for instance still is a capitalist country even as it is a highly socialist country. Highly socialist countries aren’t capital free. They still have private business.
So why don’t we build some? There are many socialist (as in the original definition, the one I use) systems ready to be tried. Many have never been tried before.
Things exist by degrees and shades of grey and the system of token trading has both benefits and drawbacks.
Not everything that uses token trading is capitalism. You realize feudalism and slave societies also have currency, right? It’s a much older concept than capitalism.
As I said you can have markets under socialism, and even businesses provided they are owned by the workers or by the state. You can also earn money and so on. Lookup things like socialist market economy or Anarcho-syndicalism. You don’t have to be a communist to meet the criteria that the working class own the means of production. Worker co-ops are not a communist concept and even exist in modern society.
I am not sure you actually know what capitalism even is or why it leads to exploitation.
I acknowledge those shades of gray. They are called hybrid economies. What you are doing is pointing at gray and calling it black.
But again I don’t need communists telling me that I am socialist-ing wrong.
I am not even really a communist. I probably support socialist market economy as much as I do Anarcho-communism, and leninists can frankly suck my dick.
What would you even call someone who believes in “working class owns the means of production” if not a socialist? Not everyone who believes that is a communist as I have demonstrated. In fact that cannot be in a communist society as there are no classes (unless you say everyone is working class?). What would you even call someone like me?
I would call someone like you kind of a jackass. I am not a fan of this peicemeal quote back and rebuttal style of discourse. I think it’s quite frankly disrespectful and lazy.
I am not really interested in dealing with you particularly because you seem rather hostile and more like the type of person I stated at the outset that I am tired of dealing with.
You wrote 4 whole paragraphs. How did you want me to discuss that without getting lost as to what I am referring to? It’s not lazy at all, it’s more work to copy stuff back and forth but it’s the easiest way to make it clear what I am referring to. Virtually all essays use quotes as well.
Calling someone a jack ass is disrespectful. Calling someone hostile for not agreeing with you is disrespectful. I find it disrespectful that you think anyone who supports “the working class own the means of production” is a communist. It shows you lack understanding of political beliefs that aren’t liberal hybrid economies despite claiming to be a socialist.
I am not calling you a jackass for disagreeing with me. I am calling you one because you have repeatedly come in hot trying to paint me as some kind of villian because I have said that my stance is that I find some capitalism okay. Go look at my original post. I specifically said that I find people who describe socialism by only one small facet of the total ideology or people who do not claim to be socialists attacking people for “not being socialist enough”. Then you come at me and do EXACTLY THAT trying to force your narrow definition down my throat. I am tired of people’s tiktok pop culture narrow short quippy and wrong statements. Yes “workers having control over the means of production” is one FACET of socialism. Happy? Fuck off! I said I am specifically tired of communists and OTHER SOCIALISTS trying to force some kind of fictional pure strain socialism down my throat then what I think constitutes a society we can actually get to because I said their fucking trigger word.
Get a fucking clue and go harrass some neo-liberals.
It’s not a narrow definition - it’s the definition. The original from the times of Marx and Bakunin. The version you are talking about was created by reformists after the fact. I don’t believe in revisionism or reformism. Therefore I don’t use that definition, and I don’t support anyone who does.
People make fun of those in the USA for claiming that socialism is whenever the government does stuff and use that as a reason not to have things like universal healthcare or benefits. That’s exactly what you are doing here, claiming that socialism is when the government does stuff to help the people. Yet you would probably call out these people and ridicule them.
Also you are a liberal lmao. Someone who believes in capitalism with government protections and safety nets is by definition a liberal. This isn’t hard.
Libralism’s main tenants are generally speaking tied up in the idea of freedom of style of life (ie profession, religion, choosing where you live free of persecution and so forth) but it’s particular idea of private property only recognizing private ownership as legitimate and it’s resistance to personal accrewed wealth being beyond government reach isn’t what I believe.
Taken on economic grounds I am not a liberal though I do believe in a great deal of individual freedoms in other sectors. In the case of governance I am generally upset at the lack of representative voting systems and ideally believe we should adopt at least a partial democratic lottery system as I find elections in a general sense tend to select for the ability to play to a crowd rather than aptitude and is very weak towards issues of populism and conflicts of interest. I believe in very robust social safety nets that increase equality including basic income, housing as a basic human right (not simply a perscriptive shelter system) a sharp increase in public transit as an issue of equity for non-drivers (as a discriminated category) , third spaces and think suburbs an ecological hell. I disagree strongly with the ideas of “parental rights” which treat children as owned property. I believe in a right to participate in society which is not adequately offered to all people at present. I believe that anyone who treats anybody as worthy of consideration and comfort based on their abilities, earning potential or mental health is despicable. I am a Non-binary trans person from an area with high levels of acceptance who knows that a low forced gender compliance society is possible and nessisary. I am anti colonization on board to recognize that generational wealth is not legitimate if it was stolen and that repatriation is desperately nessisary and participate in the culture of land acknowledgement, restorative justice and fight inside my Union to implement the 94 articles of reconciliation where we can apply them.
Saying I don’t mind some capitalism doesn’t mean I approve of a lot of it. Stocks and public trading is out of control, speculation markets that infringe on human rights need to be throughly dismantled. Environmental damages need to be punished through personal criminal liability and the personhood of corporations needs to be repealed. Do I think everything needs to be a co-op? No. Do I think unions and collective action are vitality important to us having a future that does not devolve into dystopia? Yes. Do I mind a system where individuals can own a business and hire labour hence “owning the means of production”? No. Do I think unchecked acrual of wealth is a massive problem and individuals should not be able to pocket massive profits as an exploitative incentive to cut corners and undercut labour and consumers? Yes.
I think your catchphrase socialism is reductionist. Your desire to reduce my beliefs to a single word you can point and hiss at a precursor to mob mentality. If you want to think I am a liberal then I am going to think of you as an empty headed communist because you are being trained to not think for yourself.
First I would like to address the term reductionist. Science and medicine and considered reductionist by many. The people who use terms like reductionist as a criticism have in my experience been people who believe in conspiracy theories and “alternative medicine”. It seems to me that being reductionist is a good thing and suggests you actually have reasoning, facts, and evidence on your side. To be called reductionist is therefore an honor I am glad to accept even if I am not sure I am worthy of such a title.
There is actually a lot here I agree with. For example I think the idea of a less gendered society is something we need, although I don’t know if my reasoning there is similar to yours and I am sure it could be an interesting conversation in it’s own right. I also agree with you that children need more rights, especially when it comes to caregivers. I am not sure I even believe in the concept of having only one set of parents, and that maybe communal systems of raising children is a superior approach as seen in places like the Kibbutzim in Isreal. As someone who doesn’t drive I also agree in increasing public transport.
You say you don’t agree with the liberal principle of private property. I would ask in which circumstances you disagree with this? Things like capitalism are based on private property, and you have said you support some level of capitalism. I would say as well that things such as strong regulation and taxes for the rich don’t necessarily disagree with the concepts of liberalism. You also say you don’t believe the liberal principle that personal wealth should be beyond the reach of government. I would question if liberals believe that to the extent you say they do, as they do believe in things such as fines and taxes. Likewise I don’t think you have suggested a mechanism that would limit this outside of fines, taxes, and punitive justice even if you have taken them to an extreme further than more popular interpretations of liberalism.
You’re actually not the first person to suggest the idea of having a lottery system for leaders, though you would be only the second I have met. You are the only one to take it seriously I don’t think you could select randomly as not everyone has the will or the ability to lead a society (I suspect most don’t). If you have a solution to this problem I would like to here it. I myself could probably come up with something, such as choosing a random volunteer, or selecting a random group sample and choosing from them. How practical these concepts would be I am not sure. The issue of leadership is a tough one though and I don’t necessarily have easy answers here. I don’t think most political groups have a good answer to this. Probably the best answer is to limit the power that an individual can have, such as the systems anarchists propose and to a lesser extent the separation of powers that exist in most modern societies.
I only really threw around that word because it seemed to fit at the time, and you were being both rude and obstinate. Though I think it does fit your beliefs to a fairly large extent even if you don’t want to admit it. I don’t see anything here that disagrees with the basic principles of liberalism as by nature liberalism is a somewhat broad category of political beliefs. I would also consider that things such as libertarian socialism including most or all true forms of anarchism exist and also meet many requirements of liberalism particularly regarding democracy and personal freedoms. Many right wing ideas are compatible with liberalism and libertarian-ism too. It covers a broad swath of ideas just like socialism or capitalism covers a range of different ideas and implementations. I am not saying that all of what you believe could be covered by a single word, anymore than I am saying socialist sums up everything any given anarchist or marxist or accelerationist might believe.
Even if the terms are broad they still have certain criteria that must be met, and I think “workers owning the means of production” is a fairly basic standard to meet to be considered a socialist. There are many definitions that are more restrictive than this in fact. If we look at the merrium webster definition for example that can be found here: www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/socialism
The definition 1 specifically uses the word egalitarian. The concept of “workers owning the means of production” is actually less restrictive than this, as one worker if allowed to earn more than the other provided they have earned it through work. It further goes on to talk about collective ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution; this is a concept prevelant in even more restrictive communist systems. Definition 2a is about disallowing private property. 2b is about state ownership of the means of production. 3 refers to marxism specifically and their belief in socialism as a transition stage between capitalism and communism. As you can see these are all more restrictive than the criteria I gave. The beliefs you talk about here wouldn’t meet any of these definitions either. You could even say that that catchphrase about the means of production is very charitable and has more leeway than most fleshed out definitions
You seem to be mistaken. I don’t want to have a discussion with you.
I put up with a lot of pedantry and perscriptivist bullshit and you ignoring my boundries as you came at me like you were on some kind of witchhunt before I snapped. You want to prove I am some sort of pure strain socialist on the word of a guy who idolized Henri de Saint-Simon and Robert Owens then expanded his take into more extreme violent simplistic work that got popular with angry disenfranchised people. Now we have idiots listening to nothing but readers digest condensed YouTube summaries and screaming at each other like fucking howler monkeys fighting for territory and masterbating over over split hairs rather than discussing actual politics and action while the world burns and I’m fucking done.
You treat libralism as a dirty word with hard boundries… and it’s not relevant. I am not interested because it doesn’t DO anything. You just want to feel righteous by holding my feet to the fire and really - fucking shame on you. I don’t care if you agree. We don’t have to. I do not need your validation O mighty gatekeeper of all things political philosophy! I don’t care about your take. If you are incapable of giving benefit of the doubt and being civil to people who ARE liberals then you are not fit to have these discussions. Civility in debate and consideration of the other are paramount to actually having peaceful changes to the world instead of stoking the fires of one more violent revolution that puts some new authoritarian in charge. You burnt this bridge and I am walking away.
I don’t think liberalism is a word with hard boundaries. In fact I spent some time covering the fact that you are more-or-less a radical liberal and not a socialist.
You can’t accept that a word has a real definition that doesn’t suit your agenda. You want to say incorrect, misleading things without getting called out and can’t handle a discussion. You talk about civility in debate while doing the exact opposite. Shame on you.
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