Juice

Yeah right, the gloves fit about as well as cohesive plot points in a JFrakes episode of Disco

Ukrainian children yearn for the mines

Its so crazy, fuck me for having opinions!

I haven't seen TNG or First Contact since it was on the air. I remember FC being good, and the Frakes episodes of ds9 are good. We were watching Disco, and in that case, his episodes are just bizarre.

His episodes make no sense at all in Disco, which is saying something for a show that makes no sense at all, but his ds9 EPs are pretty good.

I can't stand it when I make a product that doesn't make my customers lives significantly worse. It makes me feel like a failure

And it is objectively 1000% better, notepad is trash, i use notepad++ every day

I just watched this series in the last year and I remember scoffing when I heard that, lol I had no idea what was coming.

Also being kinda new to Star Trek, is there a joke about Frakes? My wife and I always joke that when an episode makes no fucking sense, it was directed by JFrakes, and I wonder if its something like a joke among trek fans

Republican understanding of elections

Fascism shouldn't be thought of as a static "thing" or an object of ideology. Peoples beliefs come from their environment. We are so individualized as a society that often we as progressives take "personal responsibility" too far, we buy the premise implicitly without realizing there are flaws with thinking in this way. Every logical system has flaws and contradictions, its proven mathematically though I think some systems are more rigorous and based on evidence.

GWF Hegel's philosophy of Right was written in 1820, and influenced political thought ever since. Liberalism was still in it's revolutionary phase and theories about it were still fairly new, the Wealth of Nations was written just 50 years before, and Karl Marx was like two when it was released, although it would serve as the basis for much of his work analyzing the hidden relationships of Capital, and ethical political philosophy on the whole.

The book is the closest I think someone can honestly get to an actual "horseshoe theory" because not only did it influence the left but it also influenced the far right. Hegel, using the works of other great liberal philosophers such as Locke and Kant, who Hegel was always working to surpass, applied his dialectical philosophical methods to the writings of liberalism.

What he discovered was a natural tendency toward what we would calll fascism. Like he prefigured fascism by 100 years. He wasn't a fascist, there was no such thing. He was just exploring the ideas of this revolutionary philosophy, one that purported to liberate the mind, body and spirit, and discovered the oppressive seeds which might grow into something quite different.

This isn't to call liberals fascists, I'm a communist and 20th century communism had a lot of problems, to put it mildly. I would say confidently that progressive liberals are not crypto fash, in fact the term "progressive" is a typically left-Hegelian ideal, in that it describes human progress and development as the subject of history. Instead it challenges the idea of the liberatory nature of private property, a key component of liberal thought. Of course this is all depending how you look at it, right-Hegelians see this same formulation as proof of the inevitability of their ideas and justification for their actions.

You're getting a lot of different opinions about this stuff so I'm trying to make sort of a different point about philosophy, history and action. Other reading for a deep dive on fascism is the essay Ur Fascism by Umberto Eco (great empirical analysis, but the least scientific IMO), Trotsky's pamphlet Fascism: What it is and How to Fight It, and HA Roy's Fasism, Its Philosophy, Professions and Practice.

In a way, fascism has always been there below the surface, informally shifting the sands of history until it was formalized in the early 20th century. I don't think you can have a society based on private property without some elements of fascism somewhere. Mostly "western democracies" will outsource their extreme cruelty to other countries where it doesn't affect their citizens.

But in summary, Fascism is the realization of the contradictions inherent in liberal ideology, its liberalism turned inside-out, with all its appearances of justice and freedom cut away, leaving only the logic of expansion and domination that most liberal democracies do their best to hide. This is how fascists are able to hide in our society, their individual beliefs are not completely unpalatable to centrists and conservatives who have also started to dispense with justice and freedom in the interest of national greatness. Its what makes their beliefs so malleable, and its also why liberals have such a hard time defining it. But fascism isn't an individual's beliefs, if it was it would be just regular bog-standard chauvinism. Fascism is a mass movement which will use charismatic leaders amenable to their politics to rally the masses.

In our society, the middle classes are the "battery" for fascism. Middle classes are constantly under attack under capitalism and the individuals often feel this and become paranoid (doomsday prepping, etc.,) and this paranoia and real social pressure to produce or be wiped out, the fear from the constant threat of precarity and uncertainty fits hand in glove with the aims and means of fascists.

Sometimes the solution to all our problems is a 10" 440A steel knife modeled after the one used by the sadistic villain in the 1986 action thriller "Cobra" starring Sylvester Stallone at his Stalloniest

The love comes from the fact that it is a masterpiece. I have no idea where the hate comes from.

You're entitled to your opinion of course, but the game you describe in your next comment is not the Bloodborne I have spent an ungodly amount of time playing and helping others to get through.

I've had difficulty getting started with Souls games before, Sekiro took me like 5 or 6 years to git gud after starting and quitting in frustration half a dozen times. Bloodborne failed to hook me the first couple times, but once I got it I was completely hooked.

But weapon design, drip, environment, story, all these things are practically unrivalled by any game. Gameplay is maybe second to Sekiro and Elden ring, and Bloodborne being locked at 30 fps is pure pain. There is nothing like the trick weapon system that makes each weapon practically a completely unique gaming experience, with almost all weapons being both viable and fun to play with. Elden ring and ds3 for example just have buckets of garbage weapons. Bloodborne has like maybe 1 objectively bad weapon, and a couple that are strong but kinda boring, and maybe a few that are fun but underpowered in higher ng+ cycles.

Still bust this out around Halloween and help new players through the game for a few weeks every year.

My favorite song by the Dead Kennedys is "Nazi Punks Will Go Away on Their Own So Don't Make a Big Deal About It"