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Cake day: July 13th, 2023

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  • What happened in the Soviet Union is more complex than that. I want to emphasize that I don’t support the majority of actions of the Soviet government and virtually none of the Stalin government in particular, but it is important to understand how society got where they were.

    First and foremost, it is wrong to think that absolute power in a few people is absolutely necessary in this system to work. The reason that the Soviet Union fell into an authoritarian dictatorship is a result of their attempt at rectifying the old system. A strong believe specifically in Marxist-Leninism is that the only way society can move onto true and free socialism is if first, the bourgeoisie is completely and utterly removed from existence. They believe that if anyone still has a semblance of capital based superiority, that capitalism will always have a ground on which it will rise again, no matter how good their society might become. This lead to the believe that, “for now”, society needs to be led with an iron fist by idealists who know what’s good for it. This obviously fails once anyone with the will to abuse this system gets into a position of such power. There was no plan to get rid of them, no clear mechanism that would enforce their path towards the dissolution of this authoritarian state as was promised and finally no way out of it.

    Socialism doesn’t need to mean that an authoritarian government owns everything forever. If that were the case, you’d effectively be no better than under capitalism, as all that has happened is that an elite above the worker class has taken control and the worker class is forced to accept it’s role in their plan. Even in the Soviet Union, one of the most famous planned economies in history, it was meant to be a temporary state just to set up a stable system and then transfer it into local worker ownership.

    What has been shown to work well is at the very least the concept of a cooperative ownership where the workers own companies collectively and benefit from the profits together. While they aren’t incredibly widespread, they exist even in countries like the US. Most of them are found in the agricultural sector, but you even have examples of more widespread application of the concept in companies like Mondragon in the Basque region of Spain.

    The specifics of where these should ultimately go would completely blow up this conversation and there are better people you can talk about it with than me (just don’t try it on hexbear), but the point, in short, is that no, Socialism doesn’t imply any of those points you mentioned, but yes, attempts and supposed attempts to instate it have ended in system supporting these things. That doesn’t mean that they are intrinsic to Socialism though. There are many factors that play into why it has historically failed and it serves to note that a major part that has made the development of a socialist society near-impossible, even in a good willed system, is the extreme pushback this has received from countries that were capitalist and where the elite was afraid of losing their advantage.


  • I think the problem just comes from dissatisfaction with the government. If I lived in the US, I’d have my own gripes with paying taxes to be honest. Where I live I’m still not 100% satisfied with it, but not because I don’t want to pay them, but because I feel like they could be used better.

    The difference to me being that I feel like it’s something that can be reasonably fixed here whereas people struggle with believing the same in the US. Then again, there’s people who don’t want to pay taxes even here, so I guess there’s just a general phenomenon going on.

    Part of it seems to also just be a lack of social cohesion. People feel so incredibly negative to the thought of their money going to someone they don’t know personally because they don’t imagine them as people to be empathetic for. I’ve got the advantage, if you want to call it that, to have lived in poverty, to have had health emergencies and to have required government assistance to help me achieve my goals. I’ve seen first hand why these systems are critical. It makes it a lot easier to feel like these taxes are going somewhere good.


  • Literally none of these are an implication of socialism.

    Some of these, like taking away all food, are explicitly anti-socialist. Just because states that acted under the name of a socialist government did many of these things, that doesn’t mean that they have anything to do with socialism. That’s like acting as if the current Chinese government were actually socialist instead of being a capitalist oligarchy, or like the Soviet Union under Stalin was anything but a hyper-authoritarian quasi-fascist military regime.

    Socialism is expressed in socialist policies in states in Europe too and while it certain somewhat increases the tax burden on society, it alleviates the grueling effects of wage slavery and lack of access to food, as well as in especially well developed cases, allowing for greater personal expression than can be true otherwise in capitalist settings.

    Claiming that having to move only happens under authoritarian regimes, completely besides the point of whether or not that is relevant to socialism in general, is in complete disregard to the constant forces exhibited by uncontrolled capitalism, forcing people to move, eat whatever cheap crap they can get and, believe it or not, experiencing how loved ones and acquaintances disappear, not due to the government taking them, but due to the for-profit society grinding them down into addiction, depression and death.

    Note that in no way I wish to support any military regime or other undemocratic government. But socialism is the policy of putting the government to work to support society, by having everyone partaking in society assist in supporting those that need it. What you listed is not representative of that ideal and only serves to show the degeneracy of the governments that did so in the name of socialism.


  • Well, much of the world does live in areas where 34 degrees Celsius are genuinely problematic and where homes are not suited to providing decent living conditions.

    The fact that you don’t immediately consider that temperature a problem given your personal circumstances doesn’t mean that you should assume that it’s not a problem for them. Your comment made it seem like you were trying to make light of it.

    Where I live, 34 degrees is well past the point where we’d get major national emergency warnings from the government warning of the danger that the current heat poses. I’m curious how people in your area deal with 41 degrees though, that sounds brutal to me personally. I assume it’d at least be a low humidity heat?


  • Normality in some countries means little when it happens somewhere it’s unexpected and people aren’t used to it. Not only is acclimatization a thing, meaning that people who genuinely aren’t used to these temperatures suffer more from them, it’s also relevant how the local culture handles high temperatures.

    Where it’s normally very hot or very cold, infrastructure, daily routine and other culturally influenced elements provide for relief in some form. Texas suffered immensely under a cold period that other places in the world would consider utterly unremarkable, simply because it is utterly beyond what had been anticipated.

    Telling people in those situations that something isn’t that hot/cold is a bit callous.


  • Most games don’t even try to be reasonable about stuff like that, so it’s not really your fault. BG3 often enough fails that itself, but it clearly does it’s best to consider stuff like that.

    Hope you have fun with the rest of the game, it’s amazing fun. And trying to really roleplay a bit and get into the character interactions is rewarded a lot both throughout the game and at the end, so keep at it.


  • From the perspective of a DM in a real DnD game, the enemy would simply not have an incentive to follow you. It wants to guard the forge, not kill you at any cost.

    If you really wanted to, I’d have let you go that way, but I wouldn’t just let the creature run into suicide or abandon it’s only task for no reason, so I think BG3 does this fight really well. Especially because this is actually a fight where using the environment can make the fight much much easier and there are environmental clues before the fight that hint towards a weakness in the boss.


  • You make the claim that a will relies on some idea of chaos, which definitely requires some actual explanation.

    The amount of choices one has is irrelevant in the comparison to random chance. If the person uses reason to decide for one of several options, they, in the most common sense, clearly have acted out of free will. Assuming that a free will exists in a physical universe, but we’re in metaphysics anyways.

    I am not sure what it even means to create choices where there were none. If you end up making a decision, then it clearly was an option to begin with, by the definition of what that word means.

    What pointing out the paradox here entails is that amongst the presumptions we made, at least one of them must be false. The argument used in the OP does not disprove the existence of some divine being at all and it’s not trying to. It’s trying to disprove the concept of a deity that has the three attributes of being all-powerful, all-loving and all-knowing. In the argument given, it is shown that at least one of these attributes is not present, given the observation of evil in the world.

    Your comparison to light being described as a particle and a wave is to your own detriment. The topic of this duality arose in the first place from the fact that our classical particle based models of the universe began to become insufficient to correctly predict behaviours that had been newly observed. A new model was created that can handle the problem. The reason this is a weak argument here is that no physicist would ever claim that the models describe the world precisely. Physical models are analogies that attempt to explain the world around us in terms humans can understand.

    In your last question, you make the mistake of misunderstanding the argument once again. You grant the person omnipotence and leave it at that. The argument is arguing about the combination of omnipotence, omniscience and all-lovingness. The last of these deals with your question directly, explaining the drive to make the changes in question. The other two grant the ability to do so without limitation.

    This chart isn’t reducing that much at all. It’s explaining a precise chain of reasoning. It may or may not be missing some options, but you haven’t named any so far that weren’t fallacies.



  • Shops closing on Sundays in Germany is no workers rights issue. No one is asking workers to work 7 days a week.

    Germany as plenty of students, for example, who’d love to have a job on the weekend because they have the freedom to choose a bit better when they work and when not.

    The reason Sunday to this day is still a day when almost all shops have to close is mostly religious. There are restaurants and some other shops that are allowed to stay open and most of them choose either a different rest day or make sure that they have someone on any of those days. One workday on a Sunday is plenty to fill out a typical untaxed low payment job that are very useful to students and others looking to just get a bit of an income.

    Actual workers rights aren’t telling people that they can never work on Sundays, they’re guaranteeing people that they will never need to work too much.







  • You seem to be implying that fusion is a gimmick of an idea by comparing it to Hyperloop which was nothing but that.

    Fusion is a mechanism which has been providing humanity with energy from the first moments in the form of the sun. It’s a well known functional form of energy generation. The struggle isn’t whether or not it could possibly work, but just to make it practical enough to make it work.

    This isn’t even necessarily about a single company promising that they have an idea that may work, this is an example of it functioning in some capacity.

    Your comparison is simply arbitrary.



  • Taiwan isn’t exactly a rogue province. It’s the holdover of the prior government of China that lost the revolutionary war and retreated there.

    It doesn’t entirely invalidate the point, but it has to be said that the situation is markedly different from the one with Texas.

    It’s more like if Texas overthrew the US government in a violent rebellion and the UK worked to support the holdover of the old US government that retreated to Puerto Rico.

    Nothing that happened since has invalidated truly the right of Taiwan to remain a sovereign state. It’s in no sense a rogue province.