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Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: July 12th, 2024

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  • You’re correct. I think the real obstacle PC gaming has to overcome for the average consumer is the basic knowledge requirement - I built the PC I currently use and game on and yet I find the numbering schemes for processors and graphics cards insanely confusing, have no idea what goes together and what doesn’t, what’s a good deal and what’s overpriced, etc. But while I was willing to put in the research when I built my current computer, I can totally understand someone else who wants something that they can just turn on and it works.

    Prebuilts don’t really solve this problem either. The average consumer will see something like the “MSI Glaive-Guisarm 2077 Fortnite Edition” and I have no idea if that’s better than or worse than or about the same as a PS5.


  • If you think about it from an evolutionary standpoint it’s perfectly logical.

    This hasn’t actually been borne out in science. As a general rule, less complex human societies tended to be more willing to cooperate with outsiders. They shared hunting grounds, traded clan members, came together for more complex endeavors, and so on. It isn’t until the advent of agriculture, when people became attached to plots of land and felt the need to defend them from others, that we see these default attitudes start to shift - and racism as we understand it today is a thoroughly modern phenomenon, with no antecedent prior to the 17th century.









  • The fact that they don’t tell you in the average anticommunist pop history youtube video is that China had been experiencing famines pretty much every single year for a thousand years by the time the Communists took over. The last famines occurred under Communist rule, but it is because of Communist policies that the cyclical famines stopped. This applies to the USSR as well.

    Yes we can look back and see that killing the sparrows was a bad idea, but on the whole collectivized farms produced more food per hectare than smallholder farms did, and the policies of the Communists are what brought in sufficient numbers of tractors and other farming equipment to modernize outdated practices in rural regions. Without the Communists the simple fact is that the famines would have happened anyway, they would have been worse, and there would have been more of them.

    This is the reason why, even when you include the famine deaths in your data, the average lifespan under Mao doubled from what it had been when the Republic of China controlled the mainland. The Communists won the war precisely because they treated peasants better than the then-central government did, and when they took power they enacted policies that massively improved the lives of everyone in China, and still continue to do so.


  • Tell me, how did Reconstruction go? Were the former slaves elevated to the status of citizens equal to their former masters?

    No. The great post-Civil War failure of America was its failure to defend the gains made by the freed slave population, allowing the previous ruling class to swoop back in and reassert their power in a nearly-identical form to how it had been before. Sharecropping instead of slavery. This failure demonstrates quite succinctly why any social or economic justice movement cannot simply win the war - it must also continue to defend itself after the war, and that defense will by necessity take the form of repressing those members of the former ruling class who cannot accept the new status quo.




  • All kulaks were assigned to one of three categories:[4]

    Source four on this wikipedia article is Robert Conquest, an antihistorical Cold Warrior if there ever was one - and most of the rest of that article doesn’t even do the courtesy of citing a hack. It’s just section after section of “this section has no sources”, who wrote this garbage?

    If someone shot your grandpa and your uncle

    Some brave Vietnamese soldier did exactly that, and my uncle frankly deserved it for signing up to go murder people on the other side of the world in the name of American Imperialism.

    I don’t understand your justification for what is ultimately pretty horrific treatment foisted on people ultimately just participating lawfully in society up until that point.

    Slaveowners were “just participating lawfully in society” too. Society sanctions a lot of incredibly damaging and amoral behavior, and when the repressed take power there is no reason why they should be expected to give their oppressors a pass just because it was legal at the time.