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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • For those wondering if Gygax grew beyond this kind of thinking, no, he didn’t. There’s an infamous forum post of his from 2005 where he calls himself a “biological determinist,” and says that “females” are generally incapable of enjoying RPGs as much as men “because of a difference in brain function.” Could it be that, for some reason, the women he played with just didn’t enjoy the games he ran? No! It must be that RPGs are simply beyond their female brains!

    Also, anyone have links to a copy of the issue of Europa cited in the article? I’d love a primary document to cite in the future.




  • And capitalist regimes. The Russian Federation was literally founded by a betrayal of a reformist movement in the USSR, and China consulted with Milton Goddamn Friedman on their economy, ending up with billionaires. I even saw .ml users crying about Russian *oligarchs" having their assets seized (“stolen,” as they said), and unironically citing Matt Taibbi. Not even “back in the day” Taibbi, but literally The Twitter Files. Using bought & paid for corporate propaganda to make their point.

    They’re just campists. I don’t want to run afoul of a “No True Scotsman” situation, but fuck, for people who seem to think they’re the Only True Socialists, they’re willing to drop socialism in an instant if it means they can be edgy dickheads on the internet.


  • Yeah. It can be simultaneously true that voting is a fundamentally broken system that will only allow for so much change, and that elections have life-or-death consequences. It can also be simultaneously true that both the parties are terrible, and that the Democrats are less bad.

    I would give them more credit if they ever did any organizing, or even talked about organizing, but it’s just crabs in a bucket.

    Oh, and in another thread, they were complaining about “theft.” It was the seizure of Russian assets to fund the defense of Ukraine. They were defending the foreign bank accounts of billionaires. Real clown shit.





  • Everyone. Everyone. The article is five SENTENCES long.

    Two climate activists on Tuesday targeted Botticelli’s masterpiece “The Birth of Venus” hanging at Florence’s Uffizi Gallery, attaching images of recent flood damage in the Tuscany region on the protective glass.

    (Emphasis mine. I also wanted to pause to mention that this is likely a sentence you wouldn’t have to click through to read, because it’s in the preview on Lemmy.)

    Authorities immediately cleared the room and the two protesters were brought by carabinieri for questioning. Under a new law, the protesters risk up to six months of jail time.

    The protest materials were easily removed from the glass without leaving a trace, and the room where the painting hangs was reopened within 15 minutes.

    The activists from the Last Generation climate movement said they were protesting the Italian government’s failure to address climate issues that result in more frequent floods and landslides, including severe flooding in Tuscany last year that left at least six people dead and caused widespread damage.

    I’m sorry, but complaints about any damage done by this protest aren’t exactly serious arguments.


  • A big part of the confusion comes from the fact that different people will use these terms differently.

    In a capitalist framework, there’s private property and public property. Either an individual (or or specific group) own something, anything, or it’s owned by the government.

    In a socialist framework, private property is distinguished from personal property. Personal property is your stuff that you use for yourself. Your coat, your car, your TV, etc. Private property is the means of production, or capital—things that increase a worker’s ability to do useful work. Think factories or companies, where ownership in and of itself, regardless of labor, would make the owner money. Socialists think that kind of private property shouldn’t exist, because it means wealthy people can just own stuff for a living, profiting off of the people who do the work.

    Housing can go either way. Owning a home for yourself and your family would be far closer to personal property, while owning an apartment building to collect rent would be far closer to private property.

    Socialism, for the most part and historically, is an umbrella term describing social rather than private ownership. That would include anarchism, which largely synonymous with “libertarian socialism.” Lenin, on the other hand, used it to more specifically refer to an intermediate stage between capitalism in communism, so you might see people using that more narrow definition to exclude anarchists, democratic socialists, etc.


  • Also, just to see if they have even the tiniest bit of plausible deniability, I checked out Midgard’s shop. There’s overtly white supremacist shit ALL OVER the place.

    It’s not like these people accidentally supported a band with reprehensible beliefs behind the scenes. It’s not like a totally normal music shop turned out to be a front for white supremacists. There’s note even any serious argument about “separating art from the artist.” The leak includes what people bought, and you can tell when someone bought overtly white supremacist music. And even if they didn’t, and the band or album name doesn’t give anything away, what’s it doing at the Nazi store? Why isn’t it streaming, or on Bandcamp, or self-distributed? These customers still had to know there’s an obscure Nazis music store, what it’s called and where to find it, confirm that it’s a Nazi store the moment they went there, and still give them money and their address to place a mail order. Oh, some of them aren’t native English speakers? Then that just makes it even more damning that they did all this with a language barrier in place!

    Plus, just look at the apologists in this thread. They’re fucking cowards. They can’t just come out with their beliefs, so they’re just asking questions, deflecting from the topic. One is concern trolling for the fundamental humanity of literal Nazis, despite the fact that the main fucking problem with Nazis is that they considered marginalized groups subhuman. Where’s the concern there? Why the focus on the people who oppose Nazis rather than the Nazis themselves? Another one could barely resist giving the game away by saying they’ve been called a Nazi before because of their anti-immigrant positions.

    The people defending this shop and its customers aren’t serious people. They’re dishonest, cowardly, and stupid.



  • Also, can we appreciate how desperate and nonsensical that entire argument was?

    Okay, lots of them are Japanese. So… what about the ones that aren’t? Why isn’t that person concerned about the one who absolutely understand what it means?

    And secondly… it’s still a huge red flag that Japanese customers were going so far out of their way to buy extremely obscure music from racist bands from an overtly Nazi music seller. If an American specifically imported music from a Japanese shop only racists know or care about, covered in Axis power imagery, that’d still point towards being a huge racist.

    That user is seriously turning themselves in knots to defend people who buy Nazi music from the Nazi store.