I don’t know whom Llama is.

See, when I complained on Nightdive’s Discord server about map glitches that have not been rectified in twenty‐nine years, the excuse that somebody gave to me was that fixing those glitches would result in compatibility issues with other source ports (which would be especially noticeable if attempting multiplayer).

Here is what I wrote:

Is there something in the contract stating that the current designers aren’t allowed to fix old bugs that nobody—and I mean nobody—enjoys?

I mean, the wall running and the silent BFG trick, yeah, but… inaccessible secrets?

Here is the response that two official developers gave me:

So a chunk of the developers for this port are people who have been programming and modding Doom for 20+ years. As such, we tend to err on the side of caution on fixing specific behaviours because we know the knock on effects of trying to fix them, Technical debt is a problem we are trying to avoid, essentially.

If we change something, we have to maintain that change and all systems it affects.

and mod support is on the table, so anything we change has the potential to break 70000 mods[.] unfortunately Doom seems very much built on a table made out of very thin wafers

I replied that while I did not know if that was a sacrifice worth making, I could at least understand why they were making it. Somebody replied,

if it wasnt worth it, doom purists would just be playing (g)zdoom

Agreed. I know that the original poster isn’t siding with the Herzlians, but this is still in questionable taste.

It was meant to mock anticommunists who deny evidence that is right in front of them, but I guess that I should have dropped a clearer hint that I was kidding. Anyway, I feel kind of guilty about making this thread now. I’ll go eliminate it.

It has been a while since I watched anybody try the first Call of Duty, but there were several instances where the Soviets shot retreaters, and I vaguely remember the Soviet missions depicting the ‘human wave’ stereotype in a few scenes. I’d have to watch a longplay to be sure. The Soviet missions were not nearly as angsty as Company of Heroes 2, but there were some irksome moments.

I am ashamed to say it, but I primarily rely on Google Scholar, yes.

Oh man, it’s been so long and I tried so many that I can’t possibly offer a certain answer… but a good candidate is JumpStart Preschool, which I (barely) remember playing on a Windows computer. Otherwise, it could have been The Busy World of Richard Scarry Busytown, Richard Scarry’s How Things Work in Busytown, Gus Goes to Cyberopolis, Fisher-Price Ready for School: Kindergarten, Fisher-Price Learning in Toyland, Fisher Price Great Adventures: Pirate Ship, or Nick Jr Play Math!

There are many more that I could name, like Oddballz, Pajama Sam in No Need to Hide When it’s Dark Outside, Ozzie’s World, Sesame Street: Numbers, Mr. Potato Head Activity Pack, Play-Doh Creations, and Candy Land Adventure, but I am less sure of those. Finally, there are those titles that I simply can’t find again. There was a point‐and‐click program that mainly took place in a spaceship, and another one where a character said ‘I brush my teeth before I go to bed every night!’, but I’ll be damned if I can find videos of those.

I’m surprised that they made handhelds! I was always under the impression that Soviet video games were more like experimental curiosities than a visible industry. The situation was similar in the Anglosphere back in the 1950s and ’60s: there was not much of a market for them, so they were hard to find (unless you were a computer scientist).

If they won’t listen to reason, then it is probably for the best to shun or expel self‐identified socialists (e.g. Benito Mussolini) who persistently advocate adding another dictatorship of the bourgeoisie (e.g. the Kingdom of Italy) to a war, or who repeatedly defend (neo)imperialist aggressors such as the NATO or the so‐called ‘State of Israel’.

While the tendency seems to be somewhat commoner in those with a military background, it is, of course, by no means universal to them, and technically anybody can be prowar. As with a history under abusive parenters, a military background can be a cause for concern but certainly no guarantee that somebody is a potential neofascist.

So basically,

Is the take-away that we should be cautious of ex-military who remain pro-war?

We should be cautious of anybody who remains prowar, yes.

That’s a good question! Although the Fascists criticized both socialism and (liberal) capitalism, they did not spend their spare time waylaying capitalists, let alone as often as they harassed and massacred us. In fact, the Fascists received significant funding from various businessmen, who used the Fascists to exterminate around three thousand of us from 1920 to 1922.

Fascist ‘anticapitalism’ might not have been quite as shallow as it first appeared, but in any event it had little in common with our anticapitalism. Quoting Robert Paxton:

While they denounced speculative international finance (along with all other forms of internationalism, cosmopolitanism, or globalization—capitalist as well as socialist), they respected the property of national producers, who were to form the social base of the reinvigorated nation. When they denounced the bourgeoisie, it was for being too flabby and individualistic to make a nation strong, not for robbing workers of the value [that] they added. What they criticized in capitalism was not its exploitation but its materialism, its indifference to the nation, its inability to stir souls. More deeply, fascists rejected the notion that economic forces are the prime movers of history. For fascists, the dysfunctional capitalism of the interwar period did not need fundamental reordering; its ills could be cured simply by applying sufficient political will to the creation of full employment and productivity.

(Source.)

The petty bourgeoisie was the basis of Fascism, and the petty bourgeoisie was in a struggle against both the haute bourgeoisie and us (often the latter more than the former), hence Fascism’s philosophic incoherency. Since most or all of the petty bourgeoisie dreams of becoming ‘successful’, though, they cannot abolish the haute bourgeoisie, only criticize or possibly moderate it. This is why many ‘anticonsumerists’ recommend buying from small businesses as a supposed alternative to buying from big businesses.

Many Fascists also had a military background, and it was common for Fascists to have both military and petty bourgeois backgrounds together. Take Adolf Schicklgruber, for example. Of course there are also some antifascists who have military backgrounds, but they tend to be very antiwar and unhappy about their military history. Lower‐class socialists are overwhelmingly antiwar. Petty bourgeois ‘anticapitalists’, not so much.

If you find any self‐identified socialist promoting the retention of private property, capital, the law of value, generalized commodity production, wage labour, or businesses as long‐term strategies, you’ll have found a pseudosocialist. We can argue that these phenomena might have to be tolerated in the short‐term, but trying to preserve them for centuries is neither possible nor desirable.

I hope that this helps! Feel free to ask me more.

Tut‐tut, I see that Clinton’s electoral failure in spite of winning the popular vote hasn’t moved somebody’s faith in the pseudodemocracy. Let’s briefly review the circumstances, shall we?

Starting with the national elections of 2000:

• Democrats have received more popular votes in 4 out of the past 5 presidential elections, yet only gained office 2 times. Despite winning the popular vote only once in the past 5 elections, a Republican has taken office 3 times.
• Democrats have received 24 million more votes for Senate than Republicans, yet have held a majority in the Senate in only 3 out of the last 9 sessions, while Republicans have had a majority in 4 out of the past 9 sessions.
• Democrats have received over 500,000 more votes for seats in the House of Representatives, yet have held a majority in that body for only 3 out of the past 9 sessions, while Republicans have held a majority in 6 of those sessions.

(Source and more evidence here.)

Trust me, an overglorified public opinion poll isn’t going to stop neofascism should the ruling class deem its institutionalization necessary. The Fascists ascended to power in the Kingdom of Italy and the Weimar Republic in spite of their want of votes.

It was no doubt disgraceful that Soviet Russia should make any agreement with the leading Fascist state; but this reproach came ill from the statesmen who went to Munich. […] [The German–Soviet] pact contained none of the fulsome expressions of friendship which Chamberlain had put into the Anglo‐German declaration on the day after the Munich conference.

Indeed Stalin rejected any such expressions: “the Soviet Government could not suddenly present to the public German–Soviet assurances of friendship after they had been covered with buckets of filth by the [Fascist] Government for six years.” The pact was neither an alliance nor an agreement for the partition of Poland. Munich had been a true alliance for partition: the British and French dictated partition to the Czechs.

The Soviet government undertook no such action against the Poles. They merely promised to remain neutral, which is what the Poles had always asked them to do and which Western policy implied also. More than this, the agreement was in the last resort anti‐German: it limited the German advance eastwards in case of war, as Winston Churchill emphasized. […] [With the pact, the Soviets hoped to ward] off what they had most dreaded—a united capitalist attack on Soviet Russia. […] It is difficult to see what other course Soviet Russia could have followed.

— A.J.P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War, pg. 262

When [the Fascists] attacked Poland, the Soviets moved into Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, the Baltic territories that had been taken from them by Germany, Britain, and Poland in 1919. They overthrew the [anticommunist] dictatorships that the Western counterrevolutionaries had installed in the Baltic states and incorporated them as three republics into the USSR. The Soviets also took back Western Byelorussia, the Western Ukraine, and other areas seized from them and incorporated into the Polish [anticommunist] dictatorship in 1921 under the Treaty of Riga.

This has been portrayed as proof that they colluded with the [Fascists] to gobble up Poland, but the Soviets reoccupied only the area that had been taken from them twenty years before. History offers few if any examples of a nation refusing the opportunity to regain territory that had been seized from it. In any case, as Taylor notes, by reclaiming their old boundaries, the Soviets drew a line on the [Fascist] advance which was more than what Great Britain and France seemed willing to do.

— Michael Parenti, The Sword and the Dollar, pgs. 144–145

@freagle@lemmygrad.ml and others are ‘simping’ for the USSR because that is the price that you have to pay for capitalism’s structural defects: it leaves us, the lower classes, in such destitute positions that we have nothing to lose by seeking alternatives.

Washington’s intentional support for antisocialist autocracies isn’t something under dispute among professional historians. There is an abundance of evidence for this in works such as Killing Hope and Thank God They’re on Our Side: The United States and Right‐Wing Dictatorships (to name only a few). Here is a quote from Gian Giacomo Migone’s The United States and Fascist Italy, pages xxv–xxvi:

As Arnold Offner pointed out, the roots of appeasement were by no means confined to the European side of the Atlantic.¹⁵ David Schmitz, without taking the trouble to quote me or any other author or document in a language other than English, has confirmed my analysis in this regard and rightly linked the American attitude toward the Fascist dictatorship to a subsequent trend in the history of U.S. foreign policy.¹⁶

Even FDR would call a convenient dictator “an s.o.b., but our s.o.b.” And on at least one occasion he called Mussolini “that admirable Italian gentleman” but was otherwise far more receptive to any critical analysis of European dictatorships than were the professional diplomats in the State Department, before and during his administration. Unfortunately, there were never any Dodds or Messersmiths posted in Rome!¹⁷

Plenty of anticommunists already acknowledge Washington’s support for autocracies. They just shallowly brush off it by saying ‘at least they weren’t communist’.

For the record, I am guessing that you probably aren’t a neofascist, but I don’t need to accuse you of being one when carelessly overlooking the Ukrainian régime’s atrocities already makes you look awful.

Good luck convincing any anticommunist to read one of those links, let alone all of them.

Normally I try to limit myself to a maximum of three. Anything more than that and it’s a guaranteed ‘tl;dr’ from them.

It’s funny that you should mention that, because the main reason that I educated others on the subject was that I saw a Polish anticommunist trivializing the Fascist occupation just to make the Communists look worse.

https://lemmy.ml/post/14133689

I have never seen any outspoken anticommunists make an effort to properly educate others on the Fascist occupation. You just mention the ‘splitting of Poland’ over and over again like that’s good in its own right and we’ll automatically download all of the details from that fact alone. This isn’t how education works.

https://hexbear.net/post/2409833

Apart from driving over and crushing their victims, the practice that earned the Blackshirts notoriety in Italy during Mussolini’s rise to power in the early 1920s had been the killing of opponents by dragging them to their death. Given the numerous lorries available to them in Addis Ababa, both from the military and the [Fascist] government transport company, it was perhaps inevitable that they would use the same method during the massacre of Addis Ababa.

Kirubel Beshah, an Ethiopian witness who had been a student at the Teferi Mekonnin School and who after Liberation would teach mathematics there, reported, ‘Ethiopian blood flowed like water everywhere. Saddest of all was that at first they tied dead bodies to the back of their trucks, and pulled them along the road while shouting and singing, but later, they also started to tie the living to their trucks, so as not to waste bullets. It was very disturbing to see human bodies being torn to pieces alive, by stones and bushes.’²⁹

(Emphasis added. Source.)

Finland.

Finland.

In a statement to the JTA, the ADL said the Wikipedia decision was part of a “campaign to delegitimize the ADL.”

How amusing, as if there were some shadowy cabal masterminding a coordinated attempt to bring down their memetic organization.

The only ‘campaign to delegitimize the ADL’ is its own kamikaze mission to mindlessly recategorize all opposition to a crappy régime as antisemitism while leaving actual victims of white supremacy in the dust. I predict that the ADL is either going to fall into obscurity or outright vanish after the last apartheid régime collapses.