Realistically I’ll have to look into this before trusting a random comment and I probably wont because it’s half the world away from me and he’s dead anyway.

I am sure there is some subtly in personal culpability though because between Mao and peasants killing birds was a whole bureaucracy that evidentally thought it was worth doing (and idk how much is slavish obedience/fear).

Temujin personally killed a lot of people. Like personally ordered the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and his overall campaign was ~10% of human population at the time an estimated 40 million, which seems to be comparable to famine figures even if we personally blame both of them. Dude was a certified maniac and I think that especially given the overall lower population at the time and deliberate murderous intentions stands as histories greatest monster and most murderous person.

Like personally? I often feel like attributing famines solely to one person is a bit messed up, although there are cases like Bengal where specific government individuals were enthusiastic .

The party later distanced themselves from him somewhat, so presumably they thought his ideas could be improved on but I had thought a lot of china and USSR famines rested on really dumb ideas about industrial agriculture that were popular in many places + officials hiding bad numbers + desperate need to show immediate superiority of alledgedly better numbers + upheavals of massive civil was and ww2.

temujin? who claims he’s leftist?

Gimble vice and a fleshlight?

Ah, I use arch btw.

?

That sign has a story about it. Legit though can you get in the mood at work? That’s baffling to me.

She makes a handful of digital toys free. Slurs hurt real people. Keep this in context

for 45k I’ll subcontract out photoshopping you next to her. Hell I’ll throw in hiring a religious figure of your nominated faith to chant “by the power of money, you are absolved of wrongdoing”.

You should probably know that historically societies collapsing has typically resulted in improved health of the lower classes as judged by skeletons in the archeological record.

We should not really understand societies collapsing as a violent or spectacular thing. It’s usually just growth slowing, people move away, the ability of states to enforce taxes and provide services weakens and people work out their own stuff.

I’m not saying society is collapsing, just that if it does it’ll probably look more like declining birthrates and movement away from cities and advanced manufacturing to more agrarian lifestyle. Also that for the poor and downtrodden this will probably, on average, be an improvement.

I dunno. Pillars of eternity and tyranny have some pretty interesting stuff in them. They’re modern right?

Tyranny was particularly amazing, there are a lot of very mixed choices to make and you can legalese your way out of a shitload of accountability. In fact

It’s undeniable that the internet is rife with bots, astroturfing, and psyops. It’s also deeply, bitterly ironic that while it’s generally been capitalists that enabled/prosecute this and undermine trust in communication. Accusations of this behaviour are most frequently levelled to defend capitalism.

Liberals love to be like “unlike those other people, I am enlightened and immune to politically motivated dismissal of other views”. Then do that thing just like everyone else does but in an insufferably smug way.

That got a chuckle, but they’re not that powerful. It’s like some mashup of capitalist realism, fukyama end-of-history nonsense, and internalising the sheer misanthropy of English economists. Heavily watered with an endless stream of rhetoric piss by neoliberal intellectual like pinker et al.

Nobody knows anyone who they think would go mad max if the boot stayed off but everyone is fucking certain they’re out there and shouldn’t we just jealously protect what little we’re allowed?

I don’t want to hijack but literally half the political discussions I have with mainstream Aussies go something like “Well at least we have X unlike the usa”.

It hurts, like who stole your dreams mate? We can have better things than a broken state where mass murder of children is common. Neck so bowed by the collar that looking at someone’s ankles seems radical.

Yeah absolutely. CDF will just say “Oh reasonable doubt in terrorist group”.

Also like idk how membership in whatever makes extralegal killing less wrong but fuck me.

Taking bets on how much actually gets paid out?

Still, better than a kick in the teeth I guess. Dark piece of Australian history this is, add it to the pile.

the CIA has brain worms so assume they have jumped on the hype.

How long does it take to FOI or whatever it is over there?

I look forward to dumps of “As an ai language model I cannot provide information on how to trick the government into funding dolphin sexperiments.”

Political violence is when you do violence to the political people and the more political the more violence it is. Other violence is never political, especially when it’s done by political institutions. The more political the person doing the violence, the less political and violence it is.

Tbh I think person focused soc med just tends to be a shit fest in the public sphere. It works fine if we go old school FB or MySpace, where you just follow people you actually know and that’s all you see. Once it becomes public though it seems like it’s favoured by people with nasty intentions or orients itself around cults of personality.

I think topic focused is better for public interaction personally. It’s still awful but at least it’s less dominated by whatever bullying is currently popular. Also it’s easier to filter out the complete brain-rot of amplification of dumb hateful stuff (“look at this terrible take” stuff that just spreads the name of horrible people/movements).

Anyway, irc was our Eden and every day we stray further from god.

I’ve been on mastodon for years and I don’t recommend it.

It’s dominated by usaians to the point where it’s basically impossible to find anything interesting. Even instances explicitly based around other countries tend to get dominated by usaians unless they moderate them away which sucks.

There have been recent advances in discoverability but generally finding stuff via trying hashtags or third channels is still required.

Due to harassment many people post follower only and require followers to be approved which further harms discoverability.

Finally, it’s so excessively cliquey. Like lemmy has the divide between the commies and the fashies with the broader lib audience falling between the two large blobs of aligned instances somewhere. Masto has sooooo many tiny little instances and their highly curated fed list. All helped along but peak tumbler-twitter lib style ‘discourse’ where some week someone says something moderately abrasive and suddenly admins are choosing sides on whether lift buttons are uninclusive of one-armed bonobos which moments ago nobody had ever thought about.

Don’t get me wrong, stuff needs discussing often, but the way twitter style posting works imho tends to lead to unconstructive and reactionary takes.