OBJECTION!

I brought in the new year playing Fire Emblem: Awakening (which I’ve been obsessed with after finally getting it working on an emulator). I’d been struggling with lunatic mode but I figured out I can just feed Robin because of the XP boost and then use her to carry the team. Changed her to Pegasus Knight and then Dark Flier and now I can just swoop in and one-shot any enemy and she’s over-levelled enough that the enemies won’t prioritize her, and if they do, she dodges everything and has enough HP to survive a bow to the face.

The early levels were very challenging and I had to heavily abuse save states but once I got rolling it’s been a lot smoother. The two cavaliers you start with literally can’t survive a single hit starting out. Since everyone’s so vulnerable, you just have to get one unit good asap to avoid relying on your Jagen.

Gender is definitionally cultural. A person’s sex is nature, but the bundle of signifiers that denote gender (as well as which categories exist at all) are largely arbitrary and divorced from that, and vary greatly across time and place. Women wearing pants was unheard of a century or so ago, and would 100% be perceived as queer, nowadays it’s completely normal. There were times when dueling was a virtually mandatory rite of passage to being considered a man. There are also historical cultures with more than two genders, and it’s not as if people in those cultures were biologically different from others.

There’s nothing “extraordinary” about this claim.

Residential streets aren’t generally intended for through traffic. They’re meant to provide access to the people who live there. These are areas where kids play and people go on walks and stuff, having a bunch of cars run through trying to get from point A to point B as fast as possible is not ideal. That’s why you get cul-de-sacs, intentionally designed with one way in or out, to prevent drivers from cutting through.

In the US, things have improved a lot and there are informed consent clinics where you can go to a clinic and sign a document saying you know what you’re doing and get a prescription for estradiol (not sure about T). Obviously things are very dicey politically, and some doctors are still shitty, but generally the medical/scientific consensus is on our side, and recognizes that it’s better for people to get meds through a legitimate doctor/pharmacy as opposed to more sketchy online stuff.

I only say this because I hesitated to look into it because I’d heard horror storirs about medical gatekeeping, but when I actually looked into it it was much easier than expected.

If you remove all the capitalists maintaining the system, communism will naturally win because it’s how humans naturally think.

So why then did that system not last forever? Why did capitalists emerge in the first place? Drag is treating them like some kind of external force, as if they were aliens dropped into societies across the globe.

The material conditions of what Marx called primitive communism naturally caused society to develop into the hierarchical structures of early civilization. The development of agriculture created incentives for the division of labor, for states with static borders and organized defenses, and for class structure and involuntary servitude. In a hunter-gatherer society, it’s far more efficient to treat everyone (mostly) equally, because either they’re going off on their own to hunt or forage or they’re coordinating with a group and need to be armed and trusted - but this is no longer the case with agriculture. The people who responded to these (unfortunate) incentives were able to become dominant.

It doesn’t actually matter that much how humans “naturally think.” If you put a bunch of robots or aliens or whatever into a situation where there’s an incentive to do something, then provided they have the ability to innovate, experiment, and try new things, someone will eventually discover the incentive and reap the benefits of it and others will follow, either because they see the benefits or because the benefits strengthen the beneficiaries to the point that they can force everyone else to go along with it.

This whole idea of, “Well Marx said indigenous people were communists so it’s trivial to just get rid of the capitalists and go back to that,” makes it very clear that Drag hasn’t actually read Marx and is just proof-texting, picking out random bits and pieces to support Drag’s pre-existing beliefs without actually understanding anything he said. A communist society in the modern day, with technology and capital, would look drastically different from hunter-gatherer societies. There are aspects of hunter-gatherer societies which we can point to as worthy of emulation, but we can’t return to a hunter-gatherer economic system (or lack thereof) without the mass starvation of the vast majority of humanity.

From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of steel. I aspired to the purity of the Blessed Machine. Your kind cling to your flesh, as though it will not decay and fail you. One day the crude biomass you call a temple will wither, and you will beg my kind to save you. But I am already saved, for the Machine is immortal. Even in death I serve the Omnissiah.

Chiang Kai-Shek was kidnapped by his own guards because he was too preoccupied on hunting down the communists to the ends of the earth to stop the Japanese from running rampant.

I’d love to hear your explanation of how 8000 people hiding in one of the most remote regions of China came to win the civil war, if not through widespread popular support.

I never said, “well that’s just your viewpoint,” or anything like that. Not sure where you’re getting that from.

I answered the question very clearly. Advocating for peace necessarily means rejecting the idea that a given war is necessary to confront foreign threats. Peace advocates in every conflict, by every side, are frequently labeled as traitors who support the worst offenses of the other side, “you’re either with us or with the terrorists,” as Bush said. The tankie label is simply another form of this. I don’t see what’s confusing about that.

I feel like I answered literally exactly this in my response.

What you’re saying is exactly what British social democrats would have said to people opposing the war, that Germany isn’t peaceful, dovish, or isolationist, that they know that, they don’t care, and are only ignoring imperialism when Germany does it, and it’s also what German social democrats would have said to people opposing the war, that Britain isn’t peaceful, dovish, or isolationist, that they know that, they don’t care, and are only ignoring imperialism when Britain does it, and so on.

I answered that. What I said is what I’m on about.

Maybe you can rephrase that to mean something clearer, if my answer isn’t what you’re looking for?

What question did I not answer?

I think you may have misunderstood me. I’m not saying that imperialism is justified because of the possibility of a vacuum, I’m saying that the possibility of a vacuum is an acceptable risk for the sake of opposing imperialism.

You asked what I’m on about and I told you what I’m on about. No question avoided.

And there you have it. If you advocate for peaceful, dovish, isolationist policies, you are a tankie because you’re letting other nations that aren’t those things win. The exact same logic that caused “leftists” to rally around their own imperialist governments in WWI. Germany wasn’t socialist, so why should the British socialists let them win? Britain wasn’t socialist, so why should the German socialists let them win?

The phrase-bandying Trotsky has completely lost his bearings on a simple issue. It seems to him that to desire Russia’s defeat means desiring the victory of Germany. (Bukvoyed and Semkovsky give more direct expression to the “thought”, or rather want of thought, which they share with Trotsky.) To help people that are unable to think for themselves, the Berne resolution made it clear, that in all imperialist countries the proletariat must now desire the defeat of its own government. Bukvoyed and Trotsky preferred to avoid this truth, while Semkovsky (an opportunist who is more useful to the working class than all the others, thanks to his naively frank reiteration of bourgeois wisdom) blurted out the following: “This is nonsense, because either Germany or Russia can win”

What is the substitute proposed for the defeat slogan? It is that of “neither victory nor defeat." This, however, is nothing but a paraphrase of the “defence of the fatherland” slogan. It means shifting the issue to the level of a war between governments (who, according to the content of this slogan, are to keep to their old stand, “retain their positions"), and not to the level of the struggle of the oppressed classes against their governments! It means justifying the chauvinism of all the imperialist nations, whose bourgeoisie are always ready to say—and do say to the people—that they are “only” fighting “against defeat”.

On closer examination, this slogan will be found to mean a “class truce”, the renunciation of the class struggle by the oppressed classes in all belligerent countries, since the class struggle is impossible without dealing blows at one’s “own” bourgeoisie, one’s “own” government, whereas dealing a blow at one’s own government in wartime is (for Bukvoyed’s information) high treason, means contributing to the defeat of one’s own country. Those who accept the “neither victory-nor-defeat” slogan can only be hypocritically in favour of the class struggle, of “disrupting the class truce”; in practice, such people are renouncing an independent proletarian policy because they subordinate the proletariat of all belligerent countries to the absolutely bourgeois task of safeguarding the imperialist governments against defeat. The only policy of actual, not verbal disruption of the “class truce”, of acceptance of the class struggle, is for the proletariat to take advantage of the difficulties experienced by its government and its bourgeoisie in order to overthrow them. This, however, cannot be achieved or striven for, without desiring the defeat of one’s own government and without contributing to that defeat.

When, before the war, the Italian Social-Democrats raised the question of a mass strike, the bourgeoisie replied, no doubt correctly from their own point of view, that this would be high treason, and that Social-Democrats would be dealt with as traitors. That is true, just as it is true that fraternisation in the trenches is high treason. Those who write against “high treason”, as Bukvoyed does, or against the “disintegration of Russia”, as Semkovsky does, are adopting the bourgeois, not the proletarian point of view. A proletarian cannot deal a class blow at his government or hold out (in fact) a hand to his brother, the proletarian of the “foreign” country which is at war with “our side”, without committing “high treason”, without contributing to the defeat, to the disintegration of his “own”, imperialist “Great” Power.

Whoever is in favour of the slogan of “neither victory nor defeat” is consciously or unconsciously a chauvinist; at best he is a conciliatory petty bourgeois but in any case he is an enemy to proletarian policy, a partisan of the existing governments, of the present-day ruling classes.

The Defeat of One’s Own Government in the Imperialist War, V.I. Lenin

As near as I can tell, advocating for peaceful, dovish, isolationist policies is enough for someone to be considered a tankie (ironically enough). WWI era socialists who did not fall in line behind their governments certainly faced similar accusations.

It’s kinda unavoidable that if one major power loses influence, another will benefit from the vacuum. You can’t really oppose your own country’s imperialism without making the case that other countries taking advantage is an acceptable risk.

This is more or less the story of WWI. With the increasing tensions and military buildup, socialists of countries across Europe formed the Second International and agreed in the Basel Declaration, which said that they would use the crisis to rise up simultaneously against every imperialist power and put an end to both the war and to capitalism:

If a war threatens to break out, it is the duty of the working classes and their parliamentary representatives in the countries involved supported by the coordinating activity of the International Socialist Bureau to exert every effort in order to prevent the outbreak of war by the means they consider most effective, which naturally vary according to the sharpening of the class struggle and the sharpening of the general political situation.

In case war should break out anyway it is their duty to intervene in favor of its speedy termination and with all their powers to utilize the economic and political crisis created by the war to arouse the people and thereby to hasten the downfall of capitalist class rule.

But once the war actually broke out, most of them found reasons to rally around their country’s flag. German socialists pointed to the conditions of serfdom under the Tsar and pointed to the massive colonial empires of Britain and France, while British and French socialists argued that Germany undemocratic under the Kaiser and had more responsibility for starting the war. They mostly agreed that both sides were bad, but they said they were only fighting to safeguard their countries “against defeat” rather than for victory, but regardless, for all intents and purposes it was the same thing. Of course, in all of these countries, there was considerable political pressure and propaganda pushing them to fall in line and to regard the enemy as worse, and many people did what was personally advantageous regardless of what they had said previously.

There was only one exception, where the socialists took advantage of the war to overthrow their government, without regard for the possibility that it could help the other side, and they did end up ceding a fair bit of land too, but they were able to put a stop that that theater of the meat grinder everyone was being fed into.

Antinatalism is reactionary and incorrect.