🏳️🌈 hi there, i’m blake! i’m a silly gay bear 🌀
Does “don’t punch left” mean you can punch anyone slightly to your right?
It means that the focus of our criticism should be against the right, rather than those on the left.
“HOW DARE U CRITICIZE RIGHT WING DEMOCRATS”
Let’s get you to bed, grandpa.
A good game with predatory monetization can still be enjoyable. Bad, boring uninspired game cant’t.
Sure, but I’d say that predatory monetization does a lot more harm than a boring game does. A boring game is just “wow, this kinda sucks, guess I’ll refund it” or maybe at worst you lose the purchase price of the game, but games with predatory monetization can cause serious financial harm to people who struggle to control their spending habits, it’s a bit like gambling.
They also implemented LGBT themes in a way thats actually enjoyable for normal player.
Yeah, this was one of the reasons I asked about it - I think it’s a demonstration of how fun and enjoyable games with lots of diversity can be, and I was curious how you felt about it. Glad to hear you enjoyed it!
I think its different phrasing of the same issue. Instead of pushing the boundaries, these companies produce stuff that won’t cause any controversy, no risk taking, just one established scheme over and over again as long as revenue exeeds the costs.
Yes, exactly! But my point is that I don’t see the root of that problem as political correctness, the root of the problem is greed, and they’re just making a game that tries to appeal (or panders to) modern gaming audiences, who are more and more diverse themselves by the day. They just do a really shitty job of it.
Do you have insight of why UK left the EU?
I sure do. Scotland is very pro-EU, and we had an independence referendum shortly before the Brexit vote (i.e. a vote to decide if Scotland should become independent of the UK or not) and one of the major points the anti-independence people kept making was that an independent Scotland would be kicked out of the EU and have to re-apply to join. It was probably a big reason why the independence referendum failed. Then we were dragged out of the EU a short time later by England anyways. It was a very frustrating time.
As to why the UK voted for Brexit, there are a few reasons, but the central one is basically the same old story - cost of living increasing out of pace with wages, public services under a lot of strain and failing, etc. These things were basically caused by the combined effects of businesses maximizing profits, and austerity implemented by the Conservative party in response to the 2008 global financial crisis, but to avoid criticism, the wealthy who owned the media directed blame towards immigrants rather than the truly responsible party - corporate greed, the ultra wealthy, and the government.
Another major component was the media, who constantly spammed pro-Brexit messaging. There was some other stuff mixed in there too - ideas of “sovereignty” - i.e. British chauvinism (“no damn frenchie is gonna tell me what to do! what if i want a flammable pillow!!”), and to some extent, racism also played a role, but in all honesty, if it wasn’t for austerity, I think we would still be in the EU. I really hope we can rejoin soon.
I trade cryptocurrencies. Won’t say any more due to privacy reasons.
Thanks for sharing that - I’m a software engineer.
Shit happens, if things go bad, I’ll be there to support him.
Good for you <3
To be honest when I socialize, I don’t care about financial status.
Sure, I get that, but what I’m trying to get at, is that you might not be aware of the issues that affect people who aren’t as well off as you are if you don’t talk to them about it, right? Like, I can speak from experience that there are lots of government programs in my own country which exist to provide support to people, but in practice, actually accessing those programs is very, very difficult. I’m disabled, spent my years 18+ in a wheelchair, and applying for disability benefits was/is a complete nightmare. My first request for it, which provided like 300+ pages of evidence, doctors notes, etc. was rejected, and from what I hear basically everyone is rejected on the first try. After appealing, it was accepted - but then, a few years later, they just arbitrarily decided that I must have gotten better, so I had to re-apply and go through an appeals process which is still ongoing over a year later, and I’m just having to scrape by without that much needed money. I’m really lucky that I’m able to work part-time and that I have a supportive partner, because if I had lived alone and was unable to work, I’d be homeless by now. My story is hardly a rare exception, either - I’m a volunteer at a local advocacy & support group for disabled people, and I hear stories like this from almost everyone.
noone ever talks about actual money. People are quite privacy oriented around that subject. Is Scotland different in that regard?
It varies a lot - in my experience, older people tend to be a lot more private, but younger people are more open. It benefits people to talk about things like this, especially at work, so that they can learn that they are being underpaid or paid fairly for their job. There’s nothing that motivates you to ask for a pay raise quite like hearing that someone in the office who does a worse job than you do gets paid more!
I honestly dont know. I have suspicion that’s result of women doing careers all the way to their 30s spending most of their fertile part of life on working rather than building a family, but thats just my hypothesis
I’ve heard this hypothesis before - I guess my first question is, if women have to spend their lives working, isn’t that just a second-order effect of financial reasons? It used to be that a single working man could make enough money to afford to pay for a whole family, but that is no longer true. Women need to take on a career so that they can afford to live.
What do you mean? By “mainstream Democrats” we mean people like Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, they’re more unpopular than ever with their own base, and they very clearly put the interests of the ruling class before the needs of the working class. They are right wingers who support Israel’s genocide, they’re not anti-war, they don’t support Medicare-for-All. They’ve got to go, 100%.
Just to clarify, I meant it’s easier to make money as a teen hacker nowadays than it was back in my day thanks to crypto. I edited my original comment to clarify that
Like her husband, she was a communist activist, which she remained after the war.
No one kills nazis quite like communists do!
I can only assume you haven’t tried LSD
This is hardly a new phenomenon at all. I used to be a teen hacker myself. Many security experts and ethical hackers start out as skript kiddies playing around with Kali Linux.
If anything, it’s easier to make money as a teen hacker nowadays than it was back in my day thanks to crypto. Used to mostly be for prestige and for that sense of testing yourself, though people still definitely got paid, perhaps not at the same scale.
Thanks again for your continued honest and good natured responses, I really appreciate it.
The most? The twisted idea of political correctness.
Does political correctness in video games bother you more than predatory monetisation practices (lootboxes, microtransactions, increasing prices relative to content, and so on)? How about live service games becoming unavailable after servers are shut down, i.e the issue addressed by the “Stop Killing Games” movement?
Witcher 3… Expedition 33… Black Myth Wukong
Those are some great games! I’ve not gotten around to Black Myth Wukong yet, but I preordered both of the other two. Been a Witcher fan for a while, even listened to the audiobooks and enjoyed them too.
Have you played Baldur’s Gate 3? If so, what did you think of it?
Every game made by well established corporation is bland.
I totally agree with you on that - though I would identify the issue as being caused by video games more and more becoming products intended to maximize profit, rather than works of art. I believe the best games are those which are daring, and try something new, rather than aimed at mass-market appeal. Making a game appealing to as many people as leads to bland, derivative design driven by focus groups and design committees, rather than artists with a compelling vision.
Yeah, I’m from Poland
Nice! I have never visited Poland, but I’d love to go, I definitely will some day. I’m from Scotland.
I make above average, so I’m not that hard impacted
Can I ask what you do for work? Of course, don’t dox yourself or anything, just a broad idea.
I’m really sorry to hear about your cousin. I hope things improve for him soon.
Population growth is horribly nagative - people often say its due to financial reasons, but I don’t believe this to be main factor
What do you think is causing it?
the poorest people have plenty of subsidies
Is this based on your personal interactions with them? I wonder to what extent you socialise with poorer people and hear from them directly about their experiences of this?
It means that the focus of our criticism should be against the right, rather than those on the left.
It is an encouragement for those on the left to put aside our disagreements about how we can reach the better future we are all fighting for, and instead fight those who want to silence and oppress us, and those who put the interests of the ruling class before the needs of the working class.
The thing is, billionaires are a symptom of a larger problem. Of course, to alleviate our suffering, the treatment of symptoms is necessary, but we also need to address the root cause of the problem: unjustified hierarchies, the centralization of power, and capitalism itself.
Our leaders are so completely compromised by the ruling class. We have got so much work to do to tackle this issue. The New Deal didn’t go far enough, someone more radical than FDR is needed. I have my doubts that electoralism will be sufficient.
Organize, protest and elect. Emphasis on organize and protest.
There’s definitely a point where you can’t. The analysis I’ve read was that if Orban won this election, it would have been the last election.
Now, there’s still hope for the USA, and of course we should hope for the best, but it would be irresponsible to not prepare for the worst.
Thanks very much for the honest reply :)
He’s just funny.
That’s fair, how long have you been watching him for?
I don’t like modern trends in modern gaming and shows
Which trends bother you the most?
for someone who grew up in powerty in broken post communist economy, his pro communist stance is just pure cringe to me.
I totally get that. I’m guessing you’re from an ex-USSR republic in Eastern Europe, or somewhere around there, right? My partner is Estonian, so I have a lot of understanding and sympathy with this.
I’m glad you have someone you enjoy and identify with.
I’m also wondering a little about how you feel about things like the cost of living crisis - do you feel impacted by that? Not sure where you’re from or what you do for work etc. but have you experienced issues with public services getting worse, prices going up faster than wages, struggling to buy a home, things like that?
Will do! Thanks <3
Haha, sorry you feel that way! I’m just doing everything I can to fight for the working class, and working class solidarity is important to me. Much love, solidarity forever!
I don’t remember, I just remember your username
I don’t hitch my opinions to streamers in any way.
Neither do I - actually, kind of the opposite! Hasan represents a voice which spreads many of my my long-held beliefs to millions of people. I only started watching him pretty recently, after hearing a bunch of criticism and deciding to check him out myself and being pleasantly surprised, but I’ve been far-left since I was a teenager. I disagree with him on many issues, and I’ve even argued with him on his stream. I’ve seen him actually get closer to my beliefs over time, which is very nice to see.
I don’t remember you but I bet you were saying dumb shit
I was saying what I always say - that capitalism inevitably leads to fascism and that liberalism is a shield to capitalism.
Basically, the issue with capitalism is that the more wealth you have, the easier it is for you to make more money. And since money can be used to buy goods, services and influence, there is always a way to use money to gain more political and social power. With that political and social power, you can push society and the legal system in the direction you want to go. So you can use your wealth to gain power, and then you can use your power to change laws and society so that you can make even more wealth and power. It’s a positive feedback loop.
Obviously, though, if the billionaires and ruling class are accumulating more and more of our society’s wealth, that inevitably means that there’s less for everyone else to go around - therefore, working class people feel poorer and poorer. Meanwhile, the economy is going absolutely great for rich people, so inflation continues to go up - everything gets more expensive, but wages don’t increase. The wealthy just keep more and more of the wealth for themselves. To accumulate more and more wealth, they change the laws so that they can avoid paying taxes, so public services collapse. Politicians are lobbied to ensure that public funds are diverted away from where it is most needed - housing, healthcare, transportation, infrastructure - and instead into industries where their class interests most benefit from it, such as weapons manufacturing and extractive industries such as fossil fuels and mining.
The working class are bound to notice that their lives are getting shittier and shittier, and if that situation is left unchecked, the working class would realize that the ruling class are fucking them over, rise up, and overthrow their rulers. Obviously, the ruling class need to do something about this, but there’s no solution that the ruling class can offer. They’re causing all of the problems, to fix them they’d have to give up some of their wealth and power - and that’s not something they’re going to do. So they need to find someone else to blame the problems we have in society on. Unfortunately, though, no matter who they blame the problems on, and no matter what they do to “fix” it, the issue will continue to persist, because the material conditions underlying the issues are, very intentionally, never addressed.
So, the conundrum returns: The ruling class said that minority A caused all of the problems, minority A is persecuted and oppressed, but society doesn’t actually get any better. Either the problem wasn’t minority A, or minority A just hasn’t been oppressed enough yet. So the ruling class can either escalate the oppression, or they can shift the focus to another minority group. The division continues to escalate in terms of how vitriolic and extreme it is, and it also continues to divide the working class into smaller and smaller groups.
To get the working class to buy into this hateful message, they need to take advantage of our worst instincts, and one of those instincts is the in-group bias. The majority are manipulated into being suspicious, then intolerant, then hateful, then violent, then genocidal, towards whatever the targeted minority of the day is. Anything that can be used to divide the working class - sexuality, nationality, immigration status, ethnicity, religion, sex, gender identity, age, all of these will be used as wedges to keep the working class split apart and not working together, because they know that if the working class actually unite against them, they are completely and truly fucked.
That’s exactly how fascism manifests. It’s because it’s possible for people to accumulate power through wealth. This is why capitalism must be abolished. If we do not abolish capitalism, fascism will always return. It’s just a matter of time.
While, of course, some laws to reform capitalism can be passed, and would definitely alleviate the worst harm caused, over the long term, capitalism cannot be reformed.
Any attempts to reform, democratize or socialize capitalism may yield short term improvements to quality of life of the working class, but if capitalism is not abolished, it will always reassert itself, and capitalism inevitably leads towards fascism.
The New Deal prevented the US from sliding into fascism in the 20th century, so that’s ultimately a good thing, but it did not go far enough, and that’s why we have the resurgence of fascism in the 21st century America.
Yeah, the soviet union had a lot of problems, Stalin was a psycho. Let’s not do that, but we can do socialism using a bottom-up, direct democratic, consensus based decision making approach, rather than a top-down, centralized state. We can learn from the mistakes of the past.
I’d encourage you to check out an anarchist FAQ to learn more - If you haven’t heard much about anarchism before, you probably have some misconceptions about it, so I encourage you to watch the Q&Anarchy video series by Thought Slime or have a look through an Anarchist FAQ, because it’s almost definitely nothing like what you think.
I personally believe that it’s the most coherent philosophy which adequately explains and addresses all of the problems which plague our society, and which holds the most promise for a path out of the inevitable cycle of the continuous rise and fall of fascism that capitalism makes inevitable.
Thanks for responding and for your honesty. I’m really curious about a few things, I hope you don’t mind if I ask you some questions and maybe we can chat a little? I’m not interested in judging you or shaming you or anything like that, but I would love to understand you.
You cannot imagine how little people cared about the things you care about in US (Ie. Israel/Gaza)
Well, to begin with, Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people was just one issue I mentioned among half a dozen, but I think you’d actually be surprised:
Top Democratic officials who worked on the party’s still-secret autopsy of the 2024 election concluded that Kamala Harris lost significant support because of the Biden administration’s approach to the war in Gaza
If you’re making the point that Israel’s genocide wasn’t the biggest contributor to Kamala’s loss, I would agree. Polling has shown that voters care about medicare for all and the cost of living crisis far more, but the DNC completely refuse to address those issues in any meaningful way either. The fact is, they put the interests of the wealthy before the interests of the working class, because of wealthy and corporate donors, and PACs. With that said, Israel’s genocide absolutely was quite a significant issue, and acting like it wasn’t just because you feel like it wasn’t, is ignorant denialism.
If you genuinely thought Harris would support Israel more than Trump, I have few bridges to sell you.
Do you not recognize that I am presenting a nuanced position? I’m not saying that Harris was worse than Trump, I’m saying that she did not significantly differentiate herself from Trump because she held positions that were close to the Republican party and she refused to yield to the left/progressive flank of the Democratic party, and that is why the Democratic party lost.
You really should come to terms with the fact that the Trump presidency is now in power because the DNC refused to give working class voters what they want, because the DNC is more responsive to their wealthy donors than they are to the needs of the working class. Both mainstream parties are completely beholden to the interests of the ruling class.
Tripping on acid and eating honey mustard. This post now makes a lot more sense! Upvoted <3