Communism & Gamer Achievements

[Phantomgrift]

Sure man, years of Stalinist Communism completely blinded people to the overwhelming genteel nature of Commie Communism.
It's all so clear now.

I should love my fellow man and embrace him and give him all the shit that I work for in the off-hand dream chance that he'll do the same for me.

And yeah Desp, there has totally been a complete movement by a shadowy cabal to remove certain words from the American lexicon.
Words like... like swell! AH HAH! And So's Your Old Man!

We have no idea, but we sure are glad that we have a fully educated, professionally learned induhvidual like yourself here to tell us what those words truly mean.

[Despanan]

[dexeron]

Don't got an answer, Dersp. Like I said: "It might be the fault of people who have intentionally co-opted language to undermine your cause." You ask the average person what anarchism actually is, or communism, or even socialism, and most folks' answer is going to be colored by the legacy of McCarthy and Reagan.

Hell, most people will insist that socialism and communism are just synonyms, and that Barack Obama is Marxist, rather than a center-right corporatist. (They also confuse Marx with Lenin and Stalin, but yea.) So how can you even start to have the conversation about modern anarchist or communist thought, which has about as much to do with Marx as the modern Republican party has to do with Lincoln? It would be like most Americans insisting that capitalism can never work as a system because of the slavery of the 1800s and the factory conditions of the early 1900s, and so the system itself is forever flawed and must always result in misery and oppression, and no one can ever learn from mistakes and work to reform capitalism and make it work better*. They treat any "communist" or even "mostly capitalist but with a tiny hint of socialism in it" system like that because of what happened in certain specific countries, even though what happened had more to do with the historical contexts and cultures of the peoples living there than it had to do with "communism" as a concept. There's no reason to say that "communism" must always turn into Stalinism any more than we should say that capitalism must always turn into Upton Sinclair**. Stalinism had more to do with Russian history and the Mongols than anything inate about "communism" or "human nature." Maoism owes itself to centuries of Confucius and the shattering of the collective illusion of Middle Kingdom supremacy and invincibility during the Opium Wars (with spillover into Japan causing its imperialism and then spilling BACK over into China.) It's kind of how people can ignore almost 1500 years of Islamic history because of the actions brought about mainly by 80 years of Arab Nationalism and the lingering effects of post-World War I colonialism.

But yea, blah blah overton blah blah discourse, I agree. I don't know what the solution is though. People think what they think, and I'm not sure what the best way to change minds is. Obviously SJ issues like race and feminism and all that, while sometimes using words in different ways than most people do, doesn't have the history of vilification (unfair, but understandable sometimes) that your movements have. I used it as an example, but it's probably easier for me to have a conversation about race and gender or whatever with people because the language itself hasn't been tainted by decades of propaganda against it. (Not to say there ISN'T propaganda against SJ stuff, but I concede your point: the program of targeted vilification against anything even remotely communist was much more active, mainly because it lined up very well with our own nationalistic tendencies.) The result has been the ongoing dismantling of the safety net, the gutting of unions, and the widening of the gap between the richest and the poorest, all while the very rich are screaming that is is "unAmerican" for them to be asked to pay even a fraction of a percent of what they used to pay back into society. And the average person has bought into that narrative, even if it's a poison pill.


*you see what I did there. ;)

**Be nice, Desp. :P

[Agent]

do you guys worry about smart words for the people who want to talk about stuff but the people who need the smart words cant use them so it is in ac ces sible

[dexeron]

(Socialism, Communism, Feminism, and Anarchy aren't accepted by the "up-goer" editor. I wonder what kind of textual contortions you'd have to make to dumb those words down enough.)

"Thing where people share all of their stuff and no one owns the land and places where you make stuff and all the people have enough stuff."

[dexeron]

Lol: Desp check it out:

https://scontent-b-ord.xx.fbcdn.net/hph ... 8881_n.png

[Phantomgrift]

Hey! Cuba is still technically proper Communist.
Quick, someone tell me how gloriously awesome things are for everyone currently living in Cuba proper!

[Agent]

[dexeron]

That picture is a Perfect Storm of douchebro-ery.

[Despanan]

The cane & fedora indicate an AnCap - though I can't see if he has a neck beard, so the jury is out on that one.