Yeah, that was clearly just the group having fun, sounds like it might have been some kind of in-joke. Stuff like keygen music and adding extra fun stuff to your cracks has always been part of the culture. For the most part, while I’m not saying there is zero risk, but as long as it’s from verified groups with good reputation, your pirated software will be safe to use - also part of the culture.

Mayo + Ketchup combined, the classic “Rot-Weis”-combo in Germany.

That or, preferrably, mayo + a good chilli sauce

Basically this, but usually the best ideas come to me during smoke breaks instead. (Still trying to kick that addiction, don’t smoke, kids, I’ve managed to get rid of alcohol and other drugs I experimented with in the past, nicotine just won’t fucking stop with the fucking urges, even when you manage to “quit” for months at a time.)

Marx and Engels were very clear, that the transition from value-exchange, i.e. money, has to happen as soon as possible, because otherwise, the system will begin to reproduce capitalist dynamics. So, as shopping malls, yes, very much opposed. As distribution/leisure centers? Sure, whatever the dynamics of the new materialist situation will favour/need.

Current projections for the parliament:

Mélenchon seems to be aiming to be the head of a left minority government, the question would be, what can be done with a parliament split into thirds, but it is a good sign for the moment

Nice burn, even brought in the “libertarian”, at least be consistent, if I am a Zizekian heretic, I’m not an individualist libertarian who’s afraid of authority, I am of course a liberal anticommunist reactionary who won’t acknowledge the achievements of “really existing socialism”. You strike me as someone who would have written a hit piece on Marx for profiting from British imperialism and his capitalist buddy Engels, citing the letter and his drinking habits to make clear that he is an immature mind, then join some utopian socialist fringe group.

Yeah, look, I did read the article, and the article, unlike the person who might very well have done that in their work, did not do that. All I see is the same flipping of materialist analysis into an ideological dogma, that becomes ahistoric, trying to repeat instead of following material developments towards communism. From a quick look at your links, there’s even a lot I agree with, especially in criticising the French intellectuals. It still reads like a polemic removed from reality, that values its own farts more than understanding and working towards change, but it has value. And the article you linked in the beginning does nothing, but try to opportunistically recruit people away from one ideologue (which Zizek can definitiely be called) to another idealist “team” that tries to redirect proletarian material interests and analysis. You seem to think it’s a contest of who can quote “great people” the best and who can be the most orthodox, which treats it all like a religion instead of a material movement to change the world and mode of production.

In the end, I fear, we will be on other sides of the river, each seeing “their idealist perversions” across from “our materialist analysis”, but I at least won’t cross the river for your side any time soon.

If you think that sounds like “Žižekian nonsense”, then you obviously don’t understand what Žižek argues, because he clearly doesn’t say anything silly like “human ideology” (or “Žižekianism”, for that matter). The article you posted also does wonders completely breaking down Žižek as an abonimable human being - while not truly engaging with his ideas. It is pretty worthless, takes things deliberately out of context, and, after rigorously defining him as a persona non grata, invests no proper effort to do what actual communists like Marx and Lenin did - acknowledge that even enemies like that can give contributions to understanding, and things to learn from and work at doing so.

Does he sometimes spew bullshit? Absolutely. Does he believe in “human ideology” or spout anticommunism on a worse level than The Black Book of Communism, as the article wants to imply? Only if you deliberately misread and misinterpret him.

Let’s do an EU4 Dithmarschen world conquest run from here on out.

Yes, you raise a very important point that I completely glanced over with sleep-deprived tunnel vision brain. Young males are a group, where ideological factors are a lot more prevalent. A constant barrage of presenting the desirable thing to be succesful - everything from sexual gratification to security in life depends on it - is given to, well, actually everyone, but even today still predominately young males. In addition, the ideological explanation presents no proper “out” that has analytical value: If you don’t succeed, you are just some sort of beta cuck or whatever. How about you buy this course by this YouTube influencer, on how to get money and pussy by changing your own inadequacy, which of course in reality throws the vast majority of their fans into dependence and diminishes any resources they had.

This demand to be succesful, dominant, happy and stoic, weighing on the superego as basically an old dream of success that is becoming more and more unattainable but is still presented everywhere, is also in conflict with material reality. Being the breadwinner of a household where you have a wife that delivers reproductive labour and sexual gratification to you, while you earn the money and keep her dependent? Even with chauvinists that are deep into that ideological prison, households being able to earn enough money without both people working (often even more than two jobs) is not what we are seeing in the present and the future. So, this discrepancy has to be explained in a way, that is compatible with their ideology.

As a side note: parts of the liberal, more well-off “left” (a very relative term here) will basically just give them the answer “well, you are a stupid, low-IQ chud loser, so its your own fault” - basically reinforcing the very “sink or swim, be succesful, if you can’t be, it means something about you is wrong” ideology that creates this whole mess to begin with.

But of course, the answer many will then land on is a variant of my previous post: It worked in the past, right? An outside malevolent force must have corrupted this. It’s the feminists. It’s the Jews. It’s the insert enemy here. That is the core of it again - discrepancy between material reality and ideological demands and dreams within society. Concerning young men, the extreme right also has good illusionary ways to provide them with a sense of being powerful when they are in reality not, through violence that doesn’t threaten the upper classes, and relative privilege within their ideological stratified view of reality.

Ironically, that material reality of proletarisation can even fuel “tradwife” romanticism for some women - basically, the dream of being a loved and loving housewife, being submissive to and dependent on their husband and his income, anything, just to escape the dread of having to work under current conditions without any of the security of the past. (Note that actual submissive impulses that people potentially have as a fetish are a whole other thing in that discussion, but it is relevant, that for some submissive people at least, that can of course also add to the allure of that fantasy, just as the idea of being a breadwinner that has a dependent person giving them sexual gratification and admiration is alluring to people with dominant fetishisations)

So, I am heading to bed for the night, because I have been awake all night and day and the day before to catch the debate - but the short answer is: The decline of the middle class and the petite burgeoisie - which I in this case view not in the traditional definition, but also broader, as all the people owning a little bit of capital i.e. savings for old age in some fond or maybe a house of their own. Also the disappearance of job security and stable work relations.

With it, the conservative “lets keep things as they were” mindset of people who had a decent enough life, i.e. mostly boomers that lived through the economic growth phase of the post-war era, but also younger people dreaming of that time or having profited from it through their parents, comes into crisis. But as this mindset argues from its own experience, it dreams of the past (“Things worked back then, right?”), while missing, that the very same “working” system was what had within it, already the inherent nature that eventually led to it decaying around us. So they need to explain the decline as something caused by an outsider, a malevolent force.

At the same time, this decline of the middle class leads them to try and grasp to divisions that might “save” them from proletarisation - becoming properly dependend on paycheck to paycheck and owning nothing but their own labour power to sell on the market. So, racism for example - if you are white, you might just be spared from the above fate. And you can kick down, targeting all those brown people below instead of punching up - the latter is a lot more risky after all. And the people up above can’t be at fault, after all, you (or the people you heard about from the past) had a great life when those were around, right? It just have to be the “right” people, like you and the people of your nationality/race/religion/other ingroup - often depressingly arbitrary.

This is still a very reductive summary, a lot is missing, globalisation, how it relates to the net rate of profit, how consolidation happens, details about the ideology of our current times. But broken down to it’s basics it can be summarised as such. The middle class is disappearing as a consequence of capitalist development, which leads to them becoming panicky and diving headfirst into ideology.

Well, anyway, good night, hope it was possible to understand what I was trying to bring across in my rambling

Yeah, while the republicans have basically openly moved to reactionary and fascist politics, thus implicitly accepting the status quo is over, the influential parts of the Democrats seem to have been clinging completely to the idea that the status quo is what is to be preserved - even though material reality will not make that possible.

Right now, we seem to be in a historical moment, where old privileges are breaking away from a continuing crisis in capitalism that basically has been smouldering since the (late) 70s and kept stable through neoliberal policies thus far. Old privileges being lost results in a reactionary shift worldwide at the moment. It will be harrowing, but there is at least always the possibility of the pendulum swinging the other way - right now, in the coming years, organisation, connecting people, openly presenting radical alternatives to prepare for that moment seems to be the most important work to me.

You know, as much as one has to keep Machiavellian machinations and Realpolitik in mind… Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Biden did not do well. They report about it in a way that gives them clicks. There is no plan.

Played both Undertale and Deltarune on Deck, it works well with the controls. Enjoy! It’s a great experience, wish I could play it for the first time again.

The mining is also usually a really polluting affair for the region, much more than the what power generation might suggest. And overall, in many countries there is a lot of subsidies going on for hidden costs, especially relating to the waste and initial construction. So it is not as cheap as a first look might suggest.

I’m not against it per se, it is better than fossil fuels, which simply is the more urgent matter, but it’s never been the wonder technology it has been touted as ever since it first appeared.

I’ve done modding for Paradox games (never something for the public, but just for myself), and I’ve done game dev in Godot. I’d say modding of Paradox games like Stellaris is a lot more convenient. There are guides, too, and the lua scripts you will be working with are relatively intuitive in my opinion. Another advantage is, that you may have an easier time to gain an audience and feedback, as it already builds on something that has a lot of people playing it. But that is no guarantee, admittedly.

Yupp, that seems to be the case. Antideutsche are a very weird, very German phenomenon. I know one, and I would generally call him a friend, but we haven’t really talked since the latest happenings, and we had some rather heated debates in the past.

Now, on paper, what he (my friend, I don’t know much about Danger Dan) told me about what he believes to be the core of it all is, it wouldn’t sound that bad: A leftist group heavily and fundamentally dedicated to combating antisemitism within leftist circles through critique and provocation. I do think that some leftist groups do have the problem of teetering on the edge of antisemitism, it is very easy to fall off a superficial, reductive and uninformed critique of capitalism into antisemitism, and anti-Isreal sentiment can be antisemitic for sure, although usually when coming from leftists, it at least actively works not to be and tries to self-reflect. Some of his points and analysis I did agree with, too, like - one should be wary when groups specifically single out Israel and glance over other imperialist crimes.

But then… It goes so much further. They fervently belief in Zionism as the only way to permanently guarantee another Holocaust will never happen. I think not only is it a very poor solution to ensure the Jewish people will never again be treated as outsiders without a home, to give them what is essentially a colonial state that materially cannot function without imperialist and colonialist exploitation (a common half-joke in Germany is, that they should have just given them Bavaria instead), but it ironically is also a “final solution to the Jewish question” in a way, that some of the more moderate Nazis would have been okay with - as long as the “parasitic Jews” are given something outside of Europe and banished to there.

It also doesn’t guarantee safety in the way they think, I fear. Even now, debates happen which Jews are the proper Jews that are allowed to benefit from the “unconditional” protection of the Jewish people within the borders of their new nation state. And with a right-wing-extremist government, which itself arose from the material conditions of having a de-facto colonial state, this isn’t going away easily. Do you really think that if Jews were persecuted on Nazi levels again in Europe or the US, that leftist, anti-Zionist Jews would find a safe haven without discrimination in the state of Israel? It may be safer than in a state actively trying to exterminate them - if the fundamental legal guarantee that any Jew at any time can become a citizen held up in that potential future - but they would still be far from safe and accepted.

Lastly, what makes Antideutsche so “German” is something about a core part of traditional German ideology grown from its history. Germany in the 19th and 20th century built a huge myth around being the potentially powerful victims of the other powers in Europe, held back by being victimised. Not completely without any basis even, the 30 Years’ War for example did really have a traumatic effect, with some parts of Germany-to-be being practically cleansed of population, and it had political maneuvering that indeed was carried out to prevent any kind of unified German national identity arising. But it was a myth, nonetheless, one that led to the two most horrible wars of modernity. Because the German myth of victimhood was used to justify the imperialist expansion and horrible crimes of Germany in the modern era.

Now, a psychological analysis here, why I think Antideutsche have, very ironically to their name (Anti-Germans), a very German mindset: They tend to project the desire to be victims onto the same people Germany so horribly victimised. It is in a way perfect, the projection means that they can fully disavow being affected by the original German myth (not consciously, mind you), and the Jewish people definitely really were victims of the most horrible, shocking genocide of the 20th century, with people literally reduced to value to be extracted by extermination with industrial efficiency and a well-oiled bureaucratic apparatus. That reality of victimhood does not remove the pathological nature of the myth, unfortunately. As Lacan showed: A pathologically jealous husband has a pathological problem with jealousy, even if his partner is betraying him. And to protect the security of the victimised people at any cost and prevent them from being victimised again, they need their own nation, on the backs of the victimisers if necessary, and with the right to use any means necessary. Essentially, that is a variant of the German foundational myth, projected onto another people.

It leads to some very weird scenarios. There you have a guy like my friend, who I honestly value for being able to genuinely discuss Marxist minutae with me at times, so it’s not like he is stupid or just a leftist without any knowledge at all, and most of his leftist positions are genuine and if not good, at least valuable to be debated… But then he also is deeply caught up in the swamp of ideology, willing to literally defend or deny genocide because of some unfortunate mind virus and subculture he’s caught up in.

As I said, we haven’t talked since last year, and I dread what might happen between us if we did… Antideutsche are a weird phenomenon here in Germany…

Sorry for the rant, it’s just a topic close to my heart.

So, I’m sure you will get better recommendations, because I am actually not very good at researching the details of the artists I listen to, and they might actually not pass some of your requirements, but as you mentioned German might be an option: There’s a very good leftist niche within German rap. One problem I immediately know of about the scene is, that some of them are unfortunately Antideutsche so you get that dogmatic “Israel can’t do anything wrong”-BS, but even with that, there’s some good stuff there that might fit with your requirements. Some songs that I thought of after reading your post that might fit the bill:

Vandalismus - Maskulina
Zugezogen Maskulin - Alle gegen Alle
grim104 - 2. Mai
Danger Dan - Sand in die Augen - As far as I know, he’s part of the Antideutsche movement, at least the group he’s in released a really tone-death, facepalm-worthy, anger-inducing track recently about perceived antisemitism in wake of the Gaza genocide, but this track at least is a nice personal story about the struggle of a father of a daughter in a sexist world

As I said, there will (hopefully) be better recommendations, too, but maybe some of it might be likeable.

Ah, sad, thank you for researching! Here’s hoping it will come back in some form.

Oh, yeah, then what others have posted as well is the important thing: Yes, this game is massively about failure, determination through failure, and discovery of hope and perspectives within failure. Failure is baked into it on purpose.