No. Atheists being skeptical of the baseless claim that God exists makes perfect sense, the gnostic claim that God at least provides a hypothesis is perfectly baseless.

One of the most unjustified review bombings in recent years, IMO. The game is very much a standard Bethesda game, and is fine. Mods and DLCs are what people buy Bethesda games for, anyways.

Don’t get me wrong, Bethesda themselves are very mediocre game devs, but their specific style of game lends itself well to modding.

Starfield is just as mediocre as Skyrim and Fallout 4, everyone who made Morrowind great is gone, Bethesda games ride on the success of their modding communities.

Christo-fascists openly revealing that they are genuinely terrible people held together with duct tape and faith in a genocidal God will never cease to be both hilarious and terrifying.

Depends on the country, honestly. In America, I’m more inclined to believe Syndicalism would work, reform won’t meaningfully happen from within.

In general, I’m anti-tendency and believe that the material conditions of each space need to be analyzed independently.

Full agreement, way ahead of you. Instead of having a robust, publicly funded infrastructure-based necessity (internet service), it gets chopped up and sold piece-by-piece with price-gouging and local monopolies like warlords.

Just finished Signalis, got the “Promise” ending. Feel pretty empty after that, it’s such a good game and is further proof that games don’t have to have incredible graphical fidelity or huge teams to be fantastic and look great.

Co-ops are cool, but markets in general have far too many disadvantages for me to advocate for market-based Socialism over a non-market solution.

Markets are extremely bad when it comes to proper allocation of essentials. Infrastructure in general should be nationalized at minimum, and heavily invested in.

Nationalize internet.

Not just mods, but the entire Capitalistic model.

Yep, for these people Capitalism is the only thing that has ever existed and is the only thing that will ever exist, so there’s no point in advocating for better, as it can’t be better. Real “end of history” neoliberal bullshit.

Yep, fucking terrifying.

Hyperloop should be halted and replaced with high speed rail, and starlink should be nationalized. Musk keeps rinsing and repeating his grand privatized infrastructure projects where he essentially embezzles public funds.

I’m pretty sure they just operate on reflex. I say I think democratization of production is a good thing, they say that I’m suddenly a hardcore USSR Stan and want to Purge everyone who disagrees with a Supreme leader. I truly don’t think someone thinking coherently and logically can make these leaps, they must be purely operating on anti-socialist reflex.

They wouldn’t even answer straight when I asked which is better, a factory that is democratically controlled, or a factory that is owned solely by a Capitalist, then said I’m as dangerous as a fascist.

I certainly believe it! Colonization and Imperialism in particular have an absolutely brutal history. Japanese soldiers occupying China and Korea used to catch babies on bayonets, and had quotas for how many ears they cut off. Dutch occupiers of the Congo would cut off the hands of underperforming workers, including children, and give the hands to their parents.

The thing is, generally, humans are guided and shaped by material conditions, and material conditions improve with democratization and industrialization.

Yes, I agree with that crux, never disagreed with it. I still think it was functionally democratic, it’s not like the top controlled every aspect of society. Often times the elections with the most impact on your personal lives are the local elections, and that’s where Workers did in fact have control.

Again, though, I’ve never argued for repeating the USSR. I just think that we can learn from what worked and what didn’t to create a better system of leftist organization, and the fact that so much went right and so much went wrong is exceptionally useful data. We know what not to replicate democratically, and we know that guaranteeing Healthcare and education, and investing heavily in building residential plots and urbanization at the public level, does tremendous work in reducing poverty and homelessness.

At the end of the day, I’m NOT an ML, nor am I a USSR Stan. I’m a leftist, and more importantly I’m anti-tendency, and think each country will have a different path to worker liberation. As such, we should learn as much as possible from previous Socialist attempts and structures to create a better future.

Do you disagree with that notion?

Yep, I have found that just accepting one person’s words alone, especially in a field as politically charged as economics, is a terrible way to gain knowledge and understanding, just more misunderstanding. Pinker does a great job of being technically correct, but like the other commenters have pointed out, he is very careful of showing only some numbers and ignoring others, in order to massage a narrative that the status quo is flawed but ultimately not to be challenged.

There’s little that’s legitimately out of your control. Of course, I don’t mean 1 person can topple Capitalism or anything, but 1 person can set up a union, join a protest, or set up a co-operative farm, educate others, or make meaningful grassroots change.

1 person can make a big difference in the lives of the people around them.

That’s the biggest thing for me. If I can get a similar phone to work in the US with no stability or functional compromises, I’m happy.

Economic systems absolutely affect development, but again, you’re comparing a country that was a backwater nation completely undeveloped come the start of the 20th century with a country that has always been at or near the top of the list of industrialized nations. The starting points aren’t even in the slightest.

Secondly, the banning of alternative political parties was indeed antidemocratic, but the party didn’t select who you could vote for. Factions were banned by Lenin, supposed to be temporary, but this continued until 1989.

Historical accounts actually disagree with you saying candidates were preselected. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_democracy Pat Sloan in particular mentions that anyone could be elected, at the local level. Perhaps what you’re referring to is that those above the local Soviets were made up of those elected at local Soviets, and thus people couldn’t directly run for higher Soviets? Either way, definitely flawed, but not the same as what you’re saying.

Democracy is a sliding scale, I would say the Soviet Democratic model was still democratic, but less than many other countries. The US is technically more democratic, but many absolute positions cannot be voted on, such as the Supreme Court. There isn’t a currently existing country with fantastic democracy, unfortunately.