tbf, I absolutely can be difficult XD

I’d take this as an indication she is straight and doesn’t like using protection.

Nah, the discussion is in the context of her species choosing when to reproduce, but fucking any time they want.

Queer people OP, boypreggers nerf when???

You should definitely continue! But also don’t be afraid to turn down the difficulty or try different setups. Luckily, even companions can have their class changed. Monk in particularly is helpful if you’re finding combat difficult. And all the companion VAs have unique kiais, it’s great.

Alt highlights objects that can be interacted with - it greatly increases the resources at your disposal.

Learning the ins-and-outs of utility spells and splitting up the party to enter combat at JUST the right time are also helpful. A slipped enemy is a vulnerable one!

In general, one of the thing the game does poorly is balancing its main story with its mechanical progression. They tell you from the start “HOLY SHIT YOU’RE GOING TO TURN INTO AN ILLITHID MOVE MOVE MOVE”, but ultimately, in both story terms (“Oh haha whoops actually it’s nothing even vaguely so time-sensitive”) and gameplay terms, you’re better off relaxing, exploring every nook and cranny, choosing the wrong path in true video game fashion to avoid advancing until you’re satisfied that there’s no lingering bits that interest you outside of the next leg of the story.

Thank you for this. I think it is a good way of explaining it all. Anarchists tend to have very specific definitions for things (whether they are academically accurate or not certainly varies, we sometimes like to change the definitions of things lol) that tend not to be understood by everyone else. Issue is we don’t really have better ways of explaining things. Cause I do feel defining being anti-state as simply being anti-authoritarian does lose some of the nuance, but when people either don’t agree with or don’t understand our definition of a state that nuance was lost to begin with anyways.

Of course - it’s really just a starting point for people who can’t wrap their heads around it. I was in that position myself for years.

More realistically, and with more nuance, I would regard anarchists as generally being opposed to rigid and enduring institutions. For people like me who still believe in a traditional state, those institutions - even with all their potential for corruption, abuse, and hierarchy - are valuable stores of institutional and tribal knowledge which would be lost with a majority-ad hoc system of government reliant on direct democracy.

Not only that, but what anarchists would probably regard as my inner authoritarian coming out, people do sometimes need to be told what to do. Anarchism, in my view, scales until the unified group is no longer capable of exercising overwhelming authority (and I apologize for the term) over the un-unified. Cities and even regions can be integrated into an anarchist framework, but I’m of the opinion that it begins to fall apart beyond that, as people of different communities struggle to equate each other as exactly as important as themselves/their neighbors. The NIMBY problem on a large scale.

While I find the State useful in more situations than just this, it’s here where I find the traditional State truly necessary in cracking the whip on enforcement of regionally unpopular initiatives. People who find agreement on abstract principles can still become very ‘loose’ with those principles when it comes to being applied to them. I’m unconvinced that anarchist federative models have the same capacity to enforce static decision-making like that without coming to resemble a traditional state in basic form and function in the long-term.

That being said, I’d also be happy to be proven wrong - even if the theoretical display doesn’t impress me enough to prefer it over a traditional state, I’m happy to see other forms of power structure (that aren’t inherently ultra-shitty) remind the traditional state it’s not the only game in town.

Since coming over to the fediverse I have always considered you to be an honorary anarchist. Its rare to see non-anarchists defending and supporting anarchists lol

I consider that high praise! 🙏

While I definitely do have disagreements with even the basic end-goal of anarchists, I generally regard anarchism as both possible and desirable compared to present capitalist society; and that the anarchist undertaking of creating parallel systems of low-hierarchy power structures outside of the state to be both moral and necessary for a just, non-anarchist society. In my thinking, all power is based on implicit negotiation; having alternatives to state institutions for community services (including charity, regulation, security, etc) strengthens the negotiating position of the people relative to the state, which is almost always good.

We may disagree on whether to take Ol’ Yeller behind the shed and put the State down for good, but there’s a lot of room for cooperation leading up to that ‘end-decision’ - starting with restraining the ill-trained dog so he can’t savage anyone he damn well pleases.

Pretty close to it, yeah.

I disengaged largely because I felt you weren’t fast enough to acknowledge that the Palestinian people were being subjected not just to an atrocity, but, specifically, to genocide. Later, as the behavior of Israel became even more atrocious and blatant, you would acknowledge that the behavior of the government of Israel was genocidal, but by then I was already feeling the distance between us on the matter, and not interested in rejoining moderation in a comm where I could not guarantee what I regarded as a ‘baseline’ of decency/genocide acknowledgement.

However, due to Lemmy’s code, I couldn’t leave the mod position myself, and I thought I was being re-added every time I tried to leave since there’s a few hours’ delay, so I just stopped moderating for a while.

When you became less active, I returned to moderating, primarily by banning tankie fuckwits who came in and spread their vile shite. Eventually, you returned to activity and told me to give them a warning first, and I told you to just remove me from moderation, because I had no patience for those games.

You know, I’ve been political, and political about the fringes, for a very long time. I remember arguing with anarchists in high school. Ah, nostalgia! And for years and years I argued with anarchists, and I was always frustrated that they seemed to have the core of something good, but kept asserting the strangest things in support of it.

You know what helped me legitimately understand their views?

“Libertarian socialism” is, historically, a synonym for “anarchism”.

Replace that mentally every time you see “anarchism”, and “state” with “authoritarians” whenever anarchists speak, and the whole thing makes much more sense.

I’ve spent literal dozens of hours of my life over the years arguing with anarchists over the singular issue of “How is a state defined”, and got nowhere. I still think they’re wrong, but I accept that most aren’t going to change their views on how to define a state from an internet quarrel.

But if you get around to the fact that, to the eyes of people like us, what they’re advocating for is a much more democratic, much less hierarchical state, which is what their policy proposals for their theoretical community amount to, it shakes out to a much more sustainable model. When I’m sitting here defining state as “Decision-making bodies’ monopoly on communal coercion” and they’re sitting there defining it as “Unjustified hierarchy”, their argument of “Get rid of the state” is going to sound insane to my ears, but ‘translated’, so to speak, is less objectionable.

Now, one of the core issues that I still have is that I’m uncertain about the long-term viability of highly-mobile military conflict with a powerful organized state, but that has much more to do with questions of scale and OODA loops than an inability to effectively respond to violence conceptually. As far as internal stability or fending off groups of similar size (or even somewhat larger size, considering that modern warfare in particular privileges the defender), I think the historical performance of libertarian socialist militias shows that it’s far from an insurmountable task.

One of several reasons why I left moderation on MoG is because Goat is serious about letting tankies air their views, whereas my reaction was always “Ban, no appeal, fuck off Nazi with red paint”

Lord.

Most are neither well-read nor ‘strongly informed’, unless coprophagic transmission of fascist propaganda is what you count as ‘strongly informed’.

From “We don’t have a tankie problem” to “Wow, all these people we’ve been asspatting are fucking tankies”

But don’t worry, the groupthink will set in and they’ll go back to “Saying that MLs aren’t red fascists is totally not tankie”

tbf, some of it is just venting. I’ve certainly had my fair-share of guillotine-posting and molotov-posting even though I don’t believe it’s realistic; the sensation of powerlessness lends a certain appeal to power fantasies, if you will.

But yes, I agree - a general strike is both more viable and less likely to have… unintended consequences.

!plt@sh.itjust.works might interest you conceptually, though it’s not very active at the moment.

Wage labor, usually.

Despite the widespread use of slave labor in Roman society, unskilled slaves were overwhelmingly used for tasks that were either considered ‘demeaning’ (like domestic servants), did not require any real precision (like mill grinding and monocrop farm labor) or needed a constant application of labor (like mines). The Romans recognized that people work better when offered carrots rather than sticks - some slave who only barely cares if he lives or dies isn’t going to put much effort into aligning the brick with the mortar properly unless you watch him like a hawk - which is more labor you have to put in. Manual labor for construction is not a task that requires a doctorate, but it is a task where you have to do it right the first time, or you waste everyone’s labor and effort.

Construction, furthermore, is only intermittent work in most places. If you own a bunch of slaves, you don’t stop paying for their food and shelter when they aren’t working - if you want them to be profitable, you’ll have to find other work for them to do the rest of the year. And at that point, it’s probably not less profitable to just have them do that year-round instead. You could, potentially, have your slaves as a traveling construction crew, but travel is not only uncertain and expensive, but offers opportunities for unmotivated workers (like slaves) to simply… slip away, and choose to no longer be one of your workers. Even if you try to hunt them down. Even just transporting building materials from Point A to Point B includes a lot of very dangerous unsupervised time - perhaps something you’d trust a household slave with, but not one of the faceless slave numbers on your business ledger!

Funny enough, it would be more likely, if anyone was a slave on the job, that it would be potentially a few of the skilled positions. Skilled slaves were often given more trust and responsibilities precisely because they were offered more ‘carrot’ than ‘stick’ - payment, privileges, and the possibility of freedom for a decade or two of labor were on the table. Skilled slaves were thus less likely to run away - and unlike free wage laborers, especially skilled ones, wouldn’t (or rather, couldn’t) demand more pay at the prospect of being dragged from one of the empire to another - very handy if you’re a small construction firm going from place to place, and hiring local labor for most tasks!

Interestingly enough, construction wasn’t a usual avenue for applying slave labor in Ancient Rome.

That’s fvcked up, man

https://www.cesatiecesati.com/un-raro-picchiotto-ispanico/

🇨🇿🇨🇿🇨🇿🇨🇿🇨🇿🇨🇿

I’ve pretty much only seen the phrase used by anti-Palestinian genocide supporters and only deemed anti-semetic by Israel and those who kowtow to Israel.

Unfortunately, it’s also associated with a form of the one-state solution that involves throwing the Jews “back to the sea”, as many ‘leftists’ and some self-professed anarchists here will simp for.

Whether it’s been reclaimed by Fatah’s moderation in the 90s for a more inclusive one-state solution, and Hamas’s subsequent conciliatory position in the late 2010s, is certainly a matter of personal opinion. I wouldn’t regard it as antisemitic, but I do understand that it gets hackles up for reasons that are more complex than just “They obviously support the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people by Israel”

PugJesus is the master projector. He has alts that are on instance chats for when they talk about him.

Aw, you still talk about me? How sweet! What is it, six months now without a presence on your instance, and I’m still the talk of the town!