FunkyStuff [he/him]

What other automation games are you into?

The latest one I tried out was Oddsparks which I think is fantastic but I bounced off it because the rail system is a bit underpowered compared to what I’m used to in Factorio and Satsfactory.

Dang, so you had run out of resources on your starting system? Or were you really counting on some rare resource from the system that the dark fog was orbiting?

The combat system in DSP is not as disruptive as the one in factorio, and it isn’t as “integral” to the game as the one in factorio either. Once you get rid of the darkfog bases in your planet they will mostly leave you alone unless you’re unlucky; if that minimal interaction sounds annoying, turning them off entirely has little consequence.

If you enjoy Dwarf Fortress it’s very similar, but instead of military dwarves just… training passively, the whole game is centered on progressing them little by little through a wide array of different mechanics that each have a lot of nuances. It’s even more of an ‘autism game’ because it has a lot of minmaxing and analysis/decision making. The only part of it that is ironically a bit unfriendly to my brain is how FOMO inducing the minmaxing mechanics are, because you always feel like you can make the numbers on your guys go even higher.

What if it was Chinese

(Amazing Cultivation Simulator)

Could you be thinking of Source Code with Jake Gyllenhaal?

It is a proxy for an empire with even bigger bloodstains on its hands than Nazi Germany. The fact that NATO, and the US particularly, supports Ukraine to the point of making this war continue at all, rather than ending the same year it started, is evidence that the long term goals of empire are served by meeting Russia in the front. You might think it’s not fair to judge Ukraine for the actions or intentions of their supporters, but ultimately I’m concerned with the end of imperialism and capitalism; to “support” Ukraine (which in practice means supporting the military industrial complex) just means supporting my own oppression as a subject of American empire.

The ones who did in Crimea by voting to join Russia weren’t recognized internationally. In general though, if you’re in the middle of Ukraine and your family has lived there for centuries, even when Western backed fascists take over the country and start shelling you in the civil war, would you easily make the decision to leave for Russia instead of staying, trying to survive however you can? I think if people legitimately were invested in preserving the Ukrainian state’s territorial integrity, the press gangs wouldn’t be abducting people with vans, and the militias for the LPR and DPR wouldn’t have been able to recruit much of anyone at all.

Okay so what? They’re getting javelin missile launchers, tanks, drones, and who knows what else. Do you think the Azov Battalion would otherwise have access to that level of weaponry?

I honestly believe that ethnic minorities in Eastern Ukraine are 100% better off under the current Russian military occupation than they were under the NATO backed fascist government that came to power via coup in 2014. I also honestly believe that just about everyone in Ukraine will undoubtedly be better off if Ukraine concedes that territory to Russia as soon as possible rather than continue to throw away lives into a meat grinder to stall an inevitable conclusion.

Ukraine loses the war within the next 24 months since it has outlived its usefulness, the US pivots to the Pacific, and Europe doesn’t have the capacity to support it. What do you think happens when these reasonable moderates wearing Black Suns and Tottenkopf patches, armed to the teeth by NATO with any kind of weapon you can think of, are no longer fighting Russia?

Ever hear of operation Cyclone?

Here’s a report from CNN showing what the Ukrainian government was doing to ethnic minorities in the east during the civil war, 6 years before Russia invaded.

Most westerners, even people who otherwise have good positions vis a vis Palestine and other foreign policy issues, have a very David vs Goliath view of politics where they reflexively support the small side against the big side. Russia is a big country invading Ukraine, a smaller country. Russia is more powerful than Ukraine. Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth (even when the meek in question are a US backed far right country that venerates its nazi heroes like Bandera). This is idealism, but it is widespread and organic. It’s only astroturfed in the way that support of capitalism is also astroturfed.

You realize these things are true in Ukraine, in some cases more than even in Russia? And Ukraine was doing ethnic cleansing in the civil war for 8 years before Russia invaded, too, so if you want to apply this childish “I support the enemies of countries that do evil things” view instead of materialism, you could just as easily land on the conclusion that supporting Russia against fascist (vibes based definition) Ukraine is correct.

If you did a materialist analysis and try to figure out what the forces at play are, which classes stand to gain from different outcomes, and why the ruling class interest of Western imperialist states are aligned the way they are, you’d probably arrive at a much better conclusion though.

Why are you convinced that your moral enemies are also your political enemies?

And why is it fascist?

First of all, you have no clue what you’re talking about if you think the “left” supports Ukraine. Bureaucratic neoliberal technocrats in the Democratic Party turning on the money printer for Zelensky are not the left. The left doesn’t exist in the US, at least not in a way that gives it agency about what foreign countries receive funding to do the US’ bidding. And if the PSL got in power just to give Nazis in Ukraines guns for them to do terrorism with for 20 years after this war ends and they think Europe betrayed them, the PSL would be doing a very silly thing (but it is in character for the Dems or Republicans to pursue this strategy, it’s just a repeat of operation Bloodstone, except this time they’re supporting the Nazis from day 1 instead of only after the war)

Secondly, you’re looking at statements by pundits and influencers to figure out what the strategy of your enemies is. That’s really not very smart. If you were analyzing the collapse of the American Empire 100 years from now looking back, would you look at what Tucker Carlson was saying about Putin to discern what the state was trying to accomplish with its foreign policy? No, that’s silly. You would look at what foreign policy papers from the Heritage Foundation, the Brookings Institute, the Strategic Studies Institute, and whatever other think tanks were putting out. You’d look at hearings with strategists from those think tanks, military command, and economists. And what they have to say right now is pretty clear: they want to squeeze Ukraine for all it’s worth against Russia. They have no love for Russia.

The posturing from right wing influencers that you’re talking about is essentially just culture war nonsense. They call the war in Ukraine a Democrat war as a culture war tactic, but that doesn’t actually reflect reality. I mean, FFS, John McCain was at Kyiv during Euromaidan shaking the hands of the nazi leader of the coup! To confuse the rhetoric of false promises to their base that they would stop funding Ukraine to put America first for anything other than a boldfaced lie, just like their lies about locking up Hillary or going after big tech, is a mistake that you make for thinking the spectacle is real.

Finally, that’s a funny MTG quote, it is pretty clearly something someone fed her and I agree that I don’t think she could keep the names of Hungary and Transcarparthia in her head for more than 15 minutes. Which actually makes it pretty easy to answer why she would say it: one of her nazi staffers was telling her to implement one of the line items from some report from the Heritage Foundation/some other RW think tank outlining concessions to extract from Ukraine in pursuit of a nebulous goal? I honestly don’t get what Russia would get out of it if Ukraine ethnically cleansed Hungarians and Transcarparthians, so I don’t know if you actually meant that Russia was getting her to say that.

What socialists are saying is that Russia and the US are actually what they say the are: in opposition to each other. Liberals are the weird conspiracy theorists who believe that the Republican party is full of secret Russian traitors. At best, one may say that the GOP is more hostile to Europe than the liberals, which inevitably leads to Russia being in a stronger position with Europe left to fend for themselves (which the GOP is only comfortable with insofar as they can get Russia to split from China), while the liberal strategy has been to isolate Russia and drive them closer to China but hope that Europe is a strong enough ally to beat both.

Do you think the Republican Party supports Russia? Do you really think the right wing of American Empire supports their own enemies?

If you don’t want to take me at my word, I can provide one (dumb) piece of evidence, then you can try to find some evidence to the contrary. Here’s a video where some Aussies go get a haircut in NK where they echo a lot of what I’m saying: people are just living their lives, they never interact with the government during their stay. If you have a source that says something different and isn’t from an enemy of NK then I’ll check it out.

I don’t think “government criticism should be placed where due - even if that’s everywhere” is a very useful outlook for the world. I think we should first try to understand why countries are the way they are, and give our criticisms to the system that made them that way when appropriate. Again, think about the example of Palestine. Do Palestinian groups do things I disagree with? Absolutely. Is the way to tackle that situation to criticize them? No, because they’re already facing a war of genocidal extermination, so if you want them to do better, you should first try to remove the aggravating factors that are impeding democratic forces within their camp from winning over the reactionaries. It’s the exact same situation with NK: you don’t think their government is sufficiently transparent, it’s overly punitive, not democratic enough, etc etc? They won’t change those things as long as they’re under a genocidal blockade and the whole world wants them dead.

You’re mixing up a lot of different concepts.

“NK is not a free country” is a meaningless sentence. What does a free country look like? Is it a country where people may achieve their highest level ambitions regardless of who they’re born to, their identity, or any immutable characteristic? Because it isn’t that, and that doesn’t exist anywhere. Is it a country where the state ?mostly stays out of people’s lives and people are generally free to do what they wanna do as long as they aren’t destabilizing things? I believe it actually is, and I know you don’t think any serious person could think that way, but I’d invite you to show me a source that offers compelling evidence that the above is not the case and isn’t from the US State Department or Radio Free Asia.

Nobody in NK is being killed or prosecuted just for their beliefs. They don’t have mind readers. I also guarantee they aren’t throwing people in jail for saying bad things to each other. Think about how ridiculous this would be to enforce, if you could claim someone you don’t like told you, in private, that they disliked the government you could get them arrested. That’s absurd.

They don’t have free speech, though, because they’re… currently still officially at war and effectively under siege by the most militarized country on earth, and its vassal state that’s armed to the teeth. If you lived in NK, would you feel comfortable with lax free speech laws and all the other “freedoms” that would allow for the enemy to more effectively destabilize and fracture the country? Because that’s been a standard imperialist tactic since the coup against Arbenz in Guatemala about a century ago.

Moreover, if I had to draw an easy conclusion from this: you’re probably a westerner, and you might even be from the US or another country that supported the imperialist and genocidal invasion of Korea. If you can understand why it would be really stupid for an Israeli, or even an Israeli leftist, to tell Palestinians what they are and aren’t allowed to do to resist Israeli aggression, what’s so hard to understand about the idea westerners whose governments are still laying siege to the DPRK being the last people who should be criticizing it? Do you think the North Korean people are just mindless drones waiting for their western saviors, who need the western left to pressure their governments to sanction and blockade the DPRK even more, to free them from the “Kim dynasty”?