Yes, those tankies are twisted, bring unable to support communism without making excuses for a brutal dictator.

So surely you must appreciate someone capable of criticizing that brutal dictator without smearing communism in the process, right?

Why would you see a conversation about a brutal dictator and jump in to talk about how he was a communist? Don’t you think it might be people like you that encourage tankies to reflexively disagree with any criticism of Stalin?

If you can’t have a conversation about Stalin’s crimes without someone erroneously bringing communism into it maybe that’s why frustrated communists often defend the indefensible.

Well, have a nice day then. I genuinely hope you find something you do care about today.

And yet, here this person is, not incorrectly using Stalin to say communism is bad. He is criticizing Stalin on his merits, or lack thereof, and not using one person to disparage communism.

You are one tying Stalin’s crimes to communism.

Then why bring communism into a critique of a dictator concerning his methods of control?

Just because you didn’t do the persuading doesn’t mean that no one did. Somehow they got together and decided to kick the fuckers out.

If you think I’m creating a false dichotomy, please enlighten me how.

I’m saying either everyone gets an equal say or…

No matter what you put after the “or”, you’re creating a hierarchy with a class that gets to impose their will until stopped with force. As an anarchist, you should understand that.

No one is asking you to trust it, just to choose it.

Strip away all the labels and theory and you’re left with two basic choices. One where the method of change is persuasion, and one where the method of change is bloody revolution, over and over and over without end.

As much as it might rankle you, and me, to accept having to convince a majority to allow us to live our lives as we damn well please, if I was given the opportunity to appoint a dictator, or dictatorial class, that would remake society exactly as I wanted, I wouldn’t do it. Because who would succeed them, and once you have given that power to a class of people, deposing them is a lot harder, and bloodier, than persuading a few percent of your neighbors.

It sounds like you would reject a system where one unelected, unaccountable person or class of people ruling through force could decide on a whim to take away the rights of LGBT+ people, or any other minority, and instead prefer a system where all people have an equal voice and a method for that voice to be heard and counted.

How would you determine what the individuals collectively decide?

But he wasn’t criticizing communism, or advocating for capitalism. He was criticizing a dictator and saying he prefers democracy.

Unless you think communism can’t exist outside of a brutal dictatorship.

I thought the series (of books) was great. The only complaint I had at the time was I thought 2-3 books around the start of the second half should have been condensed into one. But if I was reading it now with them all out it might not bother me. At the time I would be pretty annoyed that the main plot didn’t move much and now I had to wait for the next one.

Yeah the whole old empire thing was basically a giant socialism strawman (including equal distribution of sex from pretty women, lol) that he totally destroys by showing everyone by example how to pick yourself up by your bootstraps. And his author blurb says he a member of the Ayn Rand society or something like that. That shit didn’t start creeping in in a big way until the later books though (correction: it started early, I didn’t know he wrote 26 of the things). It was enough to put me off his follow-up series.

Edit: Shit, apparently he wrote 15 more after I stopped with book eleven, which really felt like a complete end to me, I was surprised way back then that there were any more. I don’t know how he managed to milk it that much.

You just made me see the cap on the pole for the first time.

It’s real. If I remember correctly, there was a problem with the sound and he filled the time pretending to suck a dick with the microphone. Why? Who the fuck knows.

I’ve got a lot of play in my life and the woman almost always made the first move. Because I don’t want to be a creep giving unwanted attention and I’m the kind of idiot where a woman can come sit in my lap and stroke my inner thigh and I’ll think “hmmm, I wonder if she might be interested in me.”

If a woman has never hit on you, I’ve got bad news for you dawg (assuming you want a woman to hit on you).

Edit: Lemmy, help me settle an argument. The night my wife and I got together, she sat in my lap, leaned back and into me, tilted her head back, put her arm around my head and pulled it down, and placed her mouth millimeters from mine. But I moved the last two fucking millimeters so she insists that I kissed her. Who kissed who first?

One of the Epstein emails talks about pics of Trump blowing Bubba and the speculation is that Clinton is Bubba.

I’d spend about $3k on something unreasonable like a bottle of scotch. Or maybe several $500-750 bottles I will actually drink soonish so I don’t end up never opening the $3k bottle always waiting for the right time. I’d also get my wife a nice bag in a price range she would rarely get for herself, so another $2-3k. The rest would go in my brokerage.

The use of the definite article “the” is important.

He didn’t ask if Putin “has photos” like you and I might if we were joking about some hypothetical blackmail material we don’t actually know exists, he asked if Putin “has the photos.”

uBlock Origin for Firefox?

I think he’s saying add him to the list for directing it, not let the eight off the hook because they didn’t act independently.

Idea for a new job:

Become an expert consultant on having just the right amount of AI bullshit in your ads to generate a ton of free engagement (like this thread) without taking away from the effect in people casually watching it who hopefully won’t notice.

Seriously, discussion over this, here and elsewhere, has forced more Coca-Cola branding into my brain than I think I’ve seen in the past year.