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Cake day: January 4th, 2024

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  • There was actually an early sect of Christians called the Gnostics. That was sort of their whole thing.

    A core belief was that everyone was the child of God, and thus, was God.

    They also believed that Jesus asked Judas to go to the Romans.

    The early church wiped them out to the last, and we only know what we do thanks to some sparse records and modern archeology.


  • I’m still hung up on you “economically viable”…

    So, because no one would be allowed to exploit the people for profit, it’s not worth making the world a better place?

    Even in the current capitalist society we have, a co-op can make money, (which is then shared equally with workers).

    If every company and business were, by law, a co-op, without changing any other factor of society, you’d see all of that excess wealth that’s normally hoarded by the few reinvested into making the economy stronger.

    Because right now, under capitalism, we’re always on the brink of a massive recession/depression. This is by design. See, the super rich can’t buy up everything on the cheap, if they don’t crash the economy every few years.

    And that’s your economically viable. Working more hours for less pay so that a rich asshole can buy yet another vacation home.


  • I don’t particularly care if one employee doesn’t work as hard as the others, as long as they do their job. Co-opts have already figured out how to fire people for non-performance. It’s a real job, with real responsibilities.

    There’s also more than enough abundance produced worldwide, to where everyone could have a comfortable life, regardless of how hard they work. And with more and more automation, work itself need not ever apply again.

    As to how broken governments are, the reason why is right wingers working for the last half century in a coordinated manner to actively break government. They call it “starving the beast” when “the beast” was just making sure roads were built and rivers didn’t randomly catch fire.


  • Ah yes, the lie of “you don’t own things under communism”

    I mean, come on, that’s fucking stupid.

    No, the only people who would have any property seized are the super rich, and most of them are lucky if they don’t get the guillotine for their crimes.

    You cannot have gross excess under communism, because you’ll never be able to exploit your fellows in order to steal what should be shared.

    The workers seize the means of production, and then produce. Then the factory shares the wealth created by the factory. You know, like a co-op.

    That’s small scale communism. Everyone chips in to work, and everyone gets a piece of the profit because everyone owns a slice of the company.

    Anyway Marx and Engels thought that after reaching that point, the government would sort of wither away and everyone would live in fantasy land utopia.

    The other way seems better, a one world government where every single person on earth has a vote, because there are some issues where everyone on earth should have a voice.

    But that would require a massive change to, well, human nature to start. Making people less tribal or giving the vast majority of the population the ability to sit and consider what’s good for the Earth, five, ten, or even a hundred years in the future, is a bit beyond me. Not something I’m every going to be capable of doing.






  • I’m not denying that Finn and Poe had an interesting chemistry, I just think that Poe should have stayed dead.

    The lingering question of what could have been would have been a way to deepen Finn’s character.

    And if you want to keep the actor, well. When Poe comes in to land after rescuing Finn and the group, his first words to Poe are “why are you wearing my brother’s coat?”

    And now you have another interesting character dynamic to explore.


  • Let’s break down your idea of the “right” because it does need to be analyzed.

    You say “more freedom”, but you never actually specify who gets more freedom except in a backhanded way of contrasting your idea of the left, who limit the freedoms of companies.

    This is an important point. The Right gives companies and the rich, more freedoms, which in historical context has always meant more freedoms to exploit, or even kill their workers in the name of profit. This conversely means less freedoms for actual people who don’t want to die or be poisoned by some rich asshole who wants to make a buck.

    You also say Traditional culture, which has always meant more rights to rich white men and fewer rights to minorities and women. Or maybe you want to couch it by saying a push for more religion, which then means less protections for the people who practice the wrong religion.

    But you see how every single point goes back to more power for some people at the expense of everyone else.

    This is not a bug, this is a feature. Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre both wrote about how this was the desired outcome, and how democracy was a threat to “traditional values” and how the idea of equality was, in their words, repugnant.

    There is a direct through-line from those two bastards to every single conservative thought leader of today, and many of them use the exact same talking points.


  • You’re completely ignoring the fact that the British followed through on their promises of Zionism.

    Or deflecting from it.

    As soon as the British took over, in the first two years, more Jewish settlers arrived in Palestine than had in the previous two decades. And those two years were instantly eclipsed by the next two.

    This was a deliberate colonization effort, complete with laws that blatantly favored Jewish settlers over the Palestinian natives.

    A Jewish settlers could go to the British and simply say that they wanted Palestinian land, and the British would help evict the natives. (Okay, they had to be slightly more creative than that, usually lying about land deals, but everyone knew there was no deal or real land dispute)

    Is it any wonder that the Palestinians started fighting back?



  • There are 4 books, and yeah, they’re good. A bit darker than the show, but still comedy.

    It starts with Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers, which is Episodes one and two? Of the show… maybe some more thrown in… It actually starts with Lister on Earth and tells how he ended up on the Dwarf. He got drunk and doesn’t quite remember signing on.

    Better than Life and Backwards were both single episodes… But of course expanded for book form.

    I don’t remember reading The Last Human…

    Anyway, they’re a bit hard to find, and certainly not in ebook format.

    Fun fact, the full crew got together last year to film another three episode special. No idea when it will air


  • There are actually a few books based on the series, written by by the series show runners.

    Lister does end up as a human puddle for a time. Which is why Holly brings Rimmer back as a hologram. The one person who can drive Lister insane enough to keep going.

    The show sort of touches on this, but the books make it quite clear that Holly could have brought anyone back, and specifically chose Rimmer.


  • Every time I try to come up with a different metric, it usually boils down to, “where does the ultimate power lie”.

    In an ideal democracy, that power comes from the consent of the governed, i.e. the people and their direct vote. But that’s usually untenable on larger scales, so thus power is concentrated. The how of that concentration can lead to all sorts of axis on a chart, but in the end, the other side of the chart is usually some form of direct democracy, i.e. returning power to the people.


  • The point I’m making is that the trough line has always been, Right-wing concentrated power, Left-wing distributed power.

    The fact that certain dictators have pretended to be left-wing, and right-wing jackasses have gone along with it, is where the deliberate confusion was introduced.

    Communism as proposed by Marx is a true leftwing ideology, the Totalitarian dictatorship created by Lenin was communist in name only, it had more in common with Feudalism than communism. Mao was just as bad. An out of touch dictator who told farmers to plant their seeds several feet underground, and when that obviously failed, feasted while they starved.

    That doesn’t seem anything like what Marx wrote about, or rather it was disturbingly similar to what Marx wrote about capitalism.

    But again, right-wingers love to confuse the issue, because it turns out kings are not popular, so you have to lie to get people to bow before one.