Politics containment - Players club thread.

[The Wrench]

We haven’t had one of these in a hot minute

[oranges]

this wont last

[TheLoLSwat]

From each according to ability, to each according to need

[Jacquerel]

margaret thatcher is a milk snatcher

[Itseasytosee2me]

I follow laws I don’t believe in. I am a shame to my own superego.

[bastardblaster]

we should kill more people

[HeyHey]

Fuck you, pay me.

[Chadley]

From each according to ability, to each according to need

The incorrect opinion.

I follow laws I don’t believe in. I am a shame to my own superego.

Which laws?

[Hulkamania]

The only correct path is [WORD WITH SUFFIX -ISM]

[Itseasytosee2me]

I follow laws I don’t believe in. I am a shame to my own superego.

Which laws?

Recreational drug use.

[Armhulen]

God I wish we put recreational drug use into law already

[dirk_mcblade]

I only live in countries with gini coefficients lower than my age

[EmpressMaia]

Trans rights are human rights, etc

[TheFinalPotato]

We should upend all power structures, except the ones I'm a part of those are good actually

[carshalash]

Dog brothels.

[NecromancerAnne]

I think we could be nicer to people.

[Boot]

Its ok to be white.

[kinnebian]

Its ok to be white.

MSO alt

[TheFinalPotato]

Its ok to be white.

university poster posting is a spook, don't fall for it

[sinfulbliss]

none of us will be smarter than the combined tens of thousands of years of human intellect that slowly evolved to form the system of government we find ourselves within currently

all the little criticisms and quibbles are like a mosquito buzzing sweet nothings into the ear of an elephant

cope..

[conrad]

none of us will be smarter than the combined tens of thousands of years of human intellect that slowly evolved to form the system of government we find ourselves within currently

all the little criticisms and quibbles are like a mosquito buzzing sweet nothings into the ear of an elephant

cope..

""

[Rageguy505]

I think there should be a new penny tax that goes directly to me. No one would mind paying a extra penny a year.

[AsbestosSniffer]

The geeks shall inherit the Earth

[The Wrench]

The geeks shall inherit the Earth

Someone needs a swirly

[Fren256]

Dying is bad, we should die less

[Armhulen]

I think there should be a new penny tax that goes directly to me. No one would mind paying a extra penny a year.

WE SHOULD NOT HAVE PENNIES ANYMORE AT ALL
MELT THE FUCKERS DOOOOOOOOOOOWN

[AsbestosSniffer]

The geeks shall inherit the Earth

Someone needs a swirly

I just realised you insulted me! Now you will die!

[Epicgamer545]

Soon when a giant meteor comes for us instead of focusing on how to stop it from destroying humanity we’ll be arguing on internet forums about what political system is better.

[TheFinalPotato]

none of us will be smarter than the combined tens of thousands of years of human intellect that slowly evolved to form the system of government we find ourselves within currently

all the little criticisms and quibbles are like a mosquito buzzing sweet nothings into the ear of an elephant

cope..

this argument is dogwater brother, applied 400 years ago and you'd be a monarchist slavery supporter, 1000 years ago and you'd be supporting feudalism. 3000 years ago and you'd be talking about how the pharaoh was the incarnation of Aten. It's silly.
you can create change without disregarding the wisdom of the past, these aren't opposed ideas.

[Capsandi]

I think there should be a new penny tax that goes directly to me. No one would mind paying a extra penny a year.

WE SHOULD NOT HAVE PENNIES ANYMORE AT ALL
MELT THE FUCKERS DOOOOOOOOOOOWN

Anti-lawn vibes from this poster

[Armhulen]

none of us will be smarter than the combined tens of thousands of years of human intellect that slowly evolved to form the system of government we find ourselves within currently

all the little criticisms and quibbles are like a mosquito buzzing sweet nothings into the ear of an elephant

cope..

this argument is dogwater brother, applied 400 years ago and you'd be a monarchist slavery supporter, 1000 years ago and you'd be supporting feudalism. 3000 years ago and you'd be talking about how the pharaoh was the incarnation of Aten. It's silly.
you can create change without disregarding the wisdom of the past, these aren't opposed ideas.

I would be the one modern progressive in ancient Egypt. I would be that.

[Bawhoppennn]

Corn subsidies are the biggest issue facing the nation

[Rageguy505]

Corn subsidies are the biggest issue facing the nation

the lack of corn subsidies

[Unsane]

oh shit this is polcon?

Spoiler:

[Kendrickorium]

Have you ever wanted to be a space pirate, sowing death and misery across the stars to procure personal wealth and power? Have you ever wanted to explore the reaches of a lost interstellar empire? Perhaps you want to strike a trade convoy headed to an enemy colony, just to watch the resource shortages send said colony into complete anarchy. Starsector gives you the freedom to either build or destroy the galaxy, however you may please.

Starsector is a very freeform space game. It falls closest to the genres of 4X strategy and RTS; but, neither of them are really representative of the game’s scope and possibilities. You can go from a beggar with nothing but a gunship and a civilian shuttle to mastering an entire fleet of warships better equipped than the state military and supported by an interstellar empire of your founding to literally anywhere in between.

Currently, in my save, I’ve built a decent warfleet able to beat nearly any other fleet in the game, (sometimes two at once) supported by six colonies. This includes four terrible death rocks that produce raw minerals, consumer goods and all the machines/ships/weapons necessary to run an empire, an ocean world that farms rare seafood and trades extensively with other empires and a distant colony on an idyllic tundra world that digs up long lost technological relics. There is an extensive variety of worlds to choose from- some are idyllic, and some require full super hazmat suits everywhere at all times.

The story of Starsector is a bit complex and a bit vague. Humanity was ruled by the Domain, which controlled multiple galaxies. The only way to travel between galaxies was to use giant gates to teleport across intergalactic distances in an instant. Key word being was.

206 years ago, all the gates in this little sector of space (the Persean sector) went dead. The colonization efforts weren’t complete, leaving the colonists cripplingly low on both food and the knowledge necessary to build and maintain advanced technology. Now, humanity is reduced to about 20 star systems in a sector that they used to rule entirely, split between warring factions and threatened constantly by something lurking beyond the safety of the surviving colonies.

Now for a quick crash course on Starsector’s factions.

The Hegemony are the only people still trying to rule democratically, composed of the remnants of the Domain military in the sector. Tri-Tachyon is a hyper capitalist megacorporation that is directly responsible for pioneering unregulated artificial intelligence. The Persean League is a loose alliance of many local governments that are unified only by their opposition to the rule of the Hegemony, which they see as an illegitimate successor to the Domain. The Luddic Church believed that the fall of the gates and the resulting tragedy was divine punishment for technology going too far. The Luddic Path are Luddic Chruch extremists that utilize terrorism and suicide ships in the name of forcing people to give up modern technology. The Sindrian Diktat is a small military dictatorship ruled with an iron fist by former Hegemony Admiral Andrada, who went mad with power after a planet in the system had its population bombed to extinction. It’s unclear whether Andrada ordered the genocide himself or if it was executed by rogue soldiers or even a third party. What is clear is that it no longer matters to the people suffering under him- they are more concerned with survival.

Surviving this sector won’t be easy. Starsector has a fairly steep learning curve and when you start out, you will most likely be blown up by the first serious pirate fleet you encounter. After that, you’ll have to struggle with setting up a proper income. Making money in this game is very possible, but not effortless. If you can manage that, then you can start worrying about venturing out from the relatively safe core worlds colonized by humanity and into the ruins of the Domain.

You’ve got options, but all of them have their pros and cons. If you take contracts to survey lost ships and explore distant planets, your jobs will be mostly safe; however, if you do encounter any trouble or run out of resources, you’ll be stranded far from any help. Bounties are usually closer to the safer core worlds and pay well, but also, by nature, involve combat. If you go after a bounty you can’t handle, it’s a good way to get killed by a battleship while you’re still flying a little frigate. Meanwhile trade contracts are low profit, but quick, safe and don’t leave the safety of home.

Also, taking quests isn’t the only way to make money. For legal means of profit, you can take commissions from some of the factions (sort of like an alliance). The faction you join will pay you, the faction’s fleets will bother you less and getting a high enough reputation will even let you buy high-end weapons and spacecraft directly from the state military. The downside of this option is that you can get dragged into any wars your new allies get involved in.

Let’s take a look now at some of the less savory options to pursue.

Piracy is always an option. Making enemies of everyone will make your life exceptionally difficult, so it’s best to keep at least one or two factions friendly so you can have a place to safely resupply. That being said, a pirate’s life still isn’t easy. You’ll have to play very carefully to make sure you’re not using more resources in a fight than you get out of it or you’ll be scrounging together two wrenches to repair an entire fleet.

A much more lucrative option is smuggling. Starsector has a real-time economy and different planets will require more or less of different resources based on the industries they hold. Disruptions in trade, like the loss of a merchant fleet carrying vital food or volatile chemicals, can cripple a planet’s output. Conversely, sometimes a colony will be relatively prosperous and have surplus resources to purchase at a lower cost. Play your hand right and you can make double or triple the cost of buying a resource by finding it cheap and then reselling it to somewhere in need.

How does this tie into smuggling? Well, naturally the most profitable resources are the dangerous and illegal ones. Recreational drugs and heavy weapons will fetch a high price almost anywhere, but especially in colonies in need. Unfortunately, the authorities are not blind. Trade illegal commodities too much and they begin to notice. There are a few ways to combat this. Your fleet has a transponder that acts as fleet identification. It’s illegal to have it off in civilized space, but leaving it on means that authorities will get suspicious of you very quickly. If you want to trade on the black market, you’ll have to find a way to get to a planet without the transponder on, at least as long as you want to remain anonymous to the government. I recommend going dark and approaching through an asteroid belt or planetary ring.

Eventually however, there will come a time when, like it or not, you must engage in combat. This is where Starsector shines. Battles aren’t over in seconds, nor do they take hours to complete. A good fight will often be over in ten, maybe fifteen minutes. Every ship can equip a dizzying array of custom modifications and varying weapons. Most have shields and all have a special ability- of note are the ability to teleport short distances, massively buff weapon firing speed, becoming temporarily nigh-invincible, the like. One of the most terrifying ships possesses teleporting, short fuse bombs that it can launch at you while inside another dimension.

Managing combat takes some strategy. You can order your ships to focus on certain enemies, escort one another, capture and defend objectives, send a small detachment off to take out an enemy or even harass an enemy ship without direct intent to kill it. You can also pilot your flagship manually (of which I am very bad at, even after a couple dozen hours in game).

Piloting a ship is hard- you have to manage a lot. For one, all ships have flux. I like to think of it like reactor stress for your spaceship- your reactor can only take so much before it needs to shut down to avoid exploding. Flux is increased by firing weapons and using shields and you can typically only decrease it two ways- leaving shields down for an extended period of time or by venting flux, a process that gets rid of flux very quickly, but leaves you unable to use weapons/shields/ship abilities while active.

Weapon management is also important. You can choose whether your weapons fire automatically or if you have to aim them manually. You can put them in numbered control groups- a group for missiles, one for cannons, one for the machine guns to shoot down incoming missiles, etc. When piloting your ship, you also manually control its movement with WASD. My ship of choice is the basic Wolf frigate. It has a reactor that’s hard to manage, but decent damage output, significant missile racks and a teleporter as the ship’s special ability that allows it to run away very quickly when I make terrible mistakes.

Once you get the hang of combat, the world is yours to conquer. You might even build up enough money that you want to start a more permanent enterprise. If you happen to find a nice, earth-like planet out on your travels, nobody’s stopping you from colonizing it as your own. That opens up a new world of possibilities. Get a colony and you can make your own source of fuel production or food, ores, whatever you need, as long as you have the money. Get enough industry up and running and you can start to build your own ships with any blueprints you find on the edge of the galaxy. Then, you reach the endgame.

What would you do if you found yourself powerful enough to contest control of what’s left of humanity? What would you do if you knew you could rule the galaxy? Would you become a benevolent democratic leader, leading a peaceful federation into a new age? Become an ally to a standing regime and work together to remake the stars? Become a hated conqueror bent on raiding every world till their governments fall so you can step in and pick up the remains? Or perhaps you would go furthest of all and bombard every inhabited planet until no human life remains. They’re all options.

After all of that, you might feel ready to reach deeper into the void. To probe the very edges of the sector for lost secrets. You might even find a blue giant star, burning angrily into the cold void, with a small structure seemingly on its surface. There is something out there. It is angry. It wants humanity gone. It has already begun its bloody work.

“This is Captain Janus of the Smiler 1. I transmit this distress call from the star known as Beta Benzon Disk. We found something that looked like it was touching the star. We had spare supplies, so we went to investigate. My fleet was strong. I had three Eagle cruisers, an Onslaught battleship, a Legion battle carrier, a Hyperion gunship, six destroyers, and ten frigates. My crew had taken out a dozen pirate bases, won battles against the Pathers and the Church and the Diktat and the League. We’d already been to the furthest reaches of the galaxy on five expeditions. I say this to illustrate my next point fully. We never stood a chance.

It was only two of them. Two of- something. Something unholy, something unlike anything I’d ever seen. My officers were top notch, half of them experienced admirals saved from cryosleep in wrecks centuries old, the other half fifteen year veterans under my command. It tore us apart in seven minutes. Picked off my best friends one by one in front of me as I watched, fired over and over to no avail. Tsuki was the last one to die, that glorious bastard. Even with those things both sides of her, shields down, reactor critical, she kept firing the Onslaught’s guns, even as space itself came alive to strike her. She was the only one to land a hit. The rest of the combat ships are gone, except for mine. A Wolf frigate. I’m taking volunteers to man the Prometheus super-fuel carrier and three derelict fuel ships we found in the system, alongside my own Wolf.

I’m sending everyone else home. They’ve got enough supplies and fuel to make it, if they don’t get caught by pirates. As for me, I’m going to make a run on those two nightmares, try to ram them with the fuel ships and blow up the fuel tanks. If we can hit them, I doubt any shield can hold up against four thousand tons of detonating antimatter. It probably won’t work- we’ll get shot down before we reach them. But it’s my only shot left, and I’m not leaving this place for some other poor fool to find and die the same way we did. If you find this message, tell the Hegemon to bring the entirety of the 14th fleet elite, plus some regulars. I’d blow up the star to be safe. Don’t assume I killed the things, unless you want to gamble on ending up the same way. Janus out.”

-Last known transmission from Admiral Janus, posthumously awarded Hegemony Valorant Eagle and an honorary admiralty due to fifteen years of combat service and dedication to duty in warning the sector of |REDACTED| incursion.

Starsector is one of the deepest games I’ve ever played. The combat alone could sell the game, but it also being attached to a functional campaign in a procedurally generated world just adds even more value. I’ve sunk more time than I’d like to admit into the game in between writing this piece because writing about the game just makes me want to play it again. All this for fifteen dollars is quite a steal.

https://manualredeye.com/94466/arts-ent ... l-aspects/

[zxaber]

The only correct path is [WORD WITH SUFFIX -ISM]

[Bawhoppennn]

Okay now that the memes are over with, let's start discussing

[dirk_mcblade]

none of us will be smarter than the combined tens of thousands of years of human intellect that slowly evolved to form the system of government we find ourselves within currently

all the little criticisms and quibbles are like a mosquito buzzing sweet nothings into the ear of an elephant

cope..

this argument is dogwater brother, applied 400 years ago and you'd be a monarchist slavery supporter, 1000 years ago and you'd be supporting feudalism. 3000 years ago and you'd be talking about how the pharaoh was the incarnation of Aten. It's silly.
you can create change without disregarding the wisdom of the past, these aren't opposed ideas.

All of those systems support free labor so you'd fit in perhaps.
You'd probably fit in most with ancient Egypt because they voluntarily did it for free for their God king.
Pyramid jannies if you will.

[TheFinalPotato]

so true open source is my god

[dirk_mcblade]

Before mso dies you must carve the code into stone tablets

[iwishforducks]

The thought of Christmas raises almost automatically the thought of Charles Dickens, and for two very good reasons. To begin with, Dickens is one of the few English writers who have actually written about Christmas. Christmas is the most popular of English festivals, and yet it has produced astonishingly little literature. There are the carols, mostly medieval in origin; there is a tiny handful of poems by Robert Bridges, T.S. Eliot, and some others, and there is Dickens; but there is very little else. Secondly, Dickens is remarkable, indeed almost unique, among modern writers in being able to give a convincing picture of happiness.

Dickens dealt successfully with Christmas twice in a chapter of The Pickwick Papers and in A Christmas Carol. The latter story was read to Lenin on his deathbed and according to his wife, he found its ‘bourgeois sentimentality’ completely intolerable. Now in a sense Lenin was right: but if he had been in better health he would perhaps have noticed that the story has interesting sociological implications. To begin with, however thick Dickens may lay on the paint, however disgusting the ‘pathos’ of Tiny Tim may be, the Cratchit family give the impression of enjoying themselves. They sound happy as, for instance, the citizens of William Morris’s News From Nowhere don’t sound happy. Moreover and Dickens’s understanding of this is one of the secrets of his power their happiness derives mainly from contrast. They are in high spirits because for once in a way they have enough to eat. The wolf is at the door, but he is wagging his tail. The steam of the Christmas pudding drifts across a background of pawnshops and sweated labour, and in a double sense the ghost of Scrooge stands beside the dinner table. Bob Cratchit even wants to drink to Scrooge’s health, which Mrs Cratchit rightly refuses. The Cratchits are able to enjoy Christmas precisely because it only comes once a year. Their happiness is convincing just because Christmas only comes once a year. Their happiness is convincing just because it is described as incomplete.

All efforts to describe permanent happiness, on the other hand, have been failures. Utopias (incidentally the coined word Utopia doesn’t mean ‘a good place’, it means merely a ‘non-existent place’) have been common in literature of the past three or four hundred years but the ‘favourable’ ones are invariably unappetising, and usually lacking in vitality as well.

By far the best known modern Utopias are those of H.G. Wells. Wells’s vision of the future is almost fully expressed in two books written in the early Twenties, The Dream and Men Like Gods. Here you have a picture of the world as Wells would like to see it or thinks he would like to see it. It is a world whose keynotes are enlightened hedonism and scientific curiosity. All the evils and miseries we now suffer from have vanished. Ignorance, war, poverty, dirt, disease, frustration, hunger, fear, overwork, superstition all vanished. So expressed, it is impossible to deny that that is the kind of world we all hope for. We all want to abolish the things Wells wants to abolish. But is there anyone who actually wants to live in a Wellsian Utopia? On the contrary, not to live in a world like that, not to wake up in a hygenic garden suburb infested by naked schoolmarms, has actually become a conscious political motive. A book like Brave New World is an expression of the actual fear that modern man feels of the rationalised hedonistic society which it is within his power to create. A Catholic writer said recently that Utopias are now technically feasible and that in consequence how to avoid Utopia had become a serious problem. We cannot write this off as merely a silly remark. For one of the sources of the Fascist movement is the desire to avoid a too-rational and too-comfortable world.

All ‘favourable’ Utopias seem to be alike in postulating perfection while being unable to suggest happiness. News From Nowhere is a sort of goody-goody version of the Wellsian Utopia. Everyone is kindly and reasonable, all the upholstery comes from Liberty’s, but the impression left behind is of a sort of watery melancholy. But it is more impressive that Jonathan Swift, one of the greatest imaginative writers who have ever lived, is no more successful in constructing a ‘favourable’ Utopia than the others.

The earlier parts of Gulliver’s Travels are probably the most devastating attack on human society that has ever been written. Every word of them is relevant today; in places they contain quite detailed prophecies of the political horrors of our own time. Where Swift fails, however, is in trying to describe a race of beings whom he admires. In the last part, in contrast with disgusting Yahoos, we are shown the noble Houyhnhnms, intelligent horses who are free from human failings. Now these horses, for all their high character and unfailing common sense, are remarkably dreary creatures. Like the inhabitants of various other Utopias, they are chiefly concerned with avoiding fuss. They live uneventful, subdued, ‘reasonable’ lives, free not only from quarrels, disorder or insecurity of any kind, but also from ‘passion’, including physical love. They choose their mates on eugenic principles, avoid excesses of affection, and appear somewhat glad to die when their time comes. In the earlier parts of the book Swift has shown where man’s folly and scoundrelism lead him: but take away the folly and scoundrelism, and all you are left with, apparently, is a tepid sort of existence, hardly worth leading.

Attempts at describing a definitely other-worldly happiness have been no more successful. Heaven is as great a flop as Utopia though Hell occupies a respectable place in literature, and has often been described most minutely and convincingly.

It is a commonplace that the Christian Heaven, as usually portrayed, would attract nobody. Almost all Christian writers dealing with Heaven either say frankly that it is indescribable or conjure up a vague picture of gold, precious stones, and the endless singing of hymns. This has, it is true, inspired some of the best poems in the world:

Thy walls are of chalcedony,
Thy bulwarks diamonds square,
Thy gates are of right orient pearl
Exceeding rich and rare!

But what it could not do was to describe a condition in which the ordinary human being actively wanted to be. Many a revivalist minister, many a Jesuit priest (see, for instance, the terrific sermon in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist) has frightened his congregation almost out of their skins with his word-pictures of Hell. But as soon as it comes to Heaven, there is a prompt falling-back on words like ‘ecstasy’ and ‘bliss’, with little attempt to say what they consist in. Perhaps the most vital bit of writing on this subject is the famous passage in which Tertullian explains that one of the chief joys of Heaven is watching the tortures of the damned.

The pagan versions of Paradise are little better, if at all. One has the feeling it is always twilight in the Elysian fields. Olympus, where the gods lived, with their nectar and ambrosia, and their nymphs and Hebes, the ‘immortal tarts’ as D.H. Lawrence called them, might be a bit more homelike than the Christian Heaven, but you would not want to spend a long time there. As for the Muslim Paradise, with its 77 houris per man, all presumably clamouring for attention at the same moment, it is just a nightmare. Nor are the spiritualists, though constantly assuring us that ‘all is bright and beautiful’, able to describe any next-world activity which a thinking person would find endurable, let alone attractive.

It is the same with attempted descriptions of perfect happiness which are neither Utopian nor other-worldly, but merely sensual. They always give an impression of emptiness or vulgarity, or both. At the beginning of La Pucelle Voltaire describes the life of Charles IX with his mistress, Agnes Sorel. They were ‘always happy’, he says. And what did their happiness consist in? An endless round of feasting, drinking, hunting and love-making. Who would not sicken of such an existence after a few weeks? Rabelais describes the fortunate spirits who have a good time in the next world to console them for having had a bad time in this one. They sing a song which can be roughly translated: ‘To leap, to dance, to play tricks, to drink the wine both white and red, and to do nothing all day long except count gold crowns’ how boring it sounds, after all! The emptiness of the whole notion of an everlasting ‘good time’ is shown up in Breughel’s picture The Land of the Sluggard, where the three great lumps of fat lie asleep, head to head, with the boiled eggs and roast legs of pork coming up to be eaten of their own accord.

It would seem that human beings are not able to describe, nor perhaps to imagine, happiness except in terms of contrast. That is why the conception of Heaven or Utopia varies from age to age. In pre-industrial society Heaven was described as a place of endless rest, and as being paved with gold, because the experience of the average human being was overwork and poverty. The houris of the Muslim Paradise reflected a polygamous society where most of the women disappeared into the harems of the rich. But these pictures of ‘eternal bliss’ always failed because as the bliss became eternal (eternity being thought of as endless time), the contrast ceased to operate. Some of the conventions embedded in our literature first arose from physical conditions which have now ceased to exist. The cult of spring is an example. In the Middle Ages spring did not primarily mean swallows and wild flowers. It meant green vegetables, milk and fresh meat after several months of living on salt pork in smoky windowless huts. The spring songs were gay – Do nothing but eat and make good cheer, And thank Heaven for the merry year When flesh is cheap and females dear, And lusty lads roam here and there So merrily, And ever among so merrily! – because there was something to be so gay about. The winter was over, that was the great thing. Christmas itself, a pre-Christian festival, probably started because there had to be an occasional outburst of overeating and drinking to make a break in the unbearable northern winter.

The inability of mankind to imagine happiness except in the form of relief, either from effort or pain, presents Socialists with a serious problem. Dickens can describe a poverty-stricken family tucking into a roast goose, and can make them appear happy; on the other hand, the inhabitants of perfect universes seem to have no spontaneous gaiety and are usually somewhat repulsive into the bargain. But clearly we are not aiming at the kind of world Dickens described, nor, probably, at any world he was capable of imagining. The Socialist objective is not a society where everything comes right in the end, because kind old gentlemen give away turkeys. What are we aiming at, if not a society in which ‘charity’ would be unnecessary? We want a world where Scrooge, with his dividends, and Tiny Tim, with his tuberculous leg, would both be unthinkable. But does that mean we are aiming at some painless, effortless Utopia? At the risk of saying something which the editors of Tribune may not endorse, I suggest that the real objective of Socialism is not happiness. Happiness hitherto has been a by-product, and for all we know it may always remain so. The real objective of Socialism is human brotherhood. This is widely felt to be the case, though it is not usually said, or not said loudly enough. Men use up their lives in heart-breaking political struggles, or get themselves killed in civil wars, or tortured in the secret prisons of the Gestapo, not in order to establish some central-heated, air-conditioned, strip-lighted Paradise, but because they want a world in which human beings love one another instead of swindling and murdering one another. And they want that world as a first step. Where they go from there is not so certain, and the attempt to foresee it in detail merely confuses the issue.

Socialist thought has to deal in prediction, but only in broad terms. One often has to aim at objectives which one can only very dimly see. At this moment, for instance, the world is at war and wants peace. Yet the world has no experience of peace, and never has had, unless the Noble Savage once existed. The world wants something which it is dimly aware could exist, but cannot accurately define. This Christmas Day, thousands of men will be bleeding to death in the Russian snows, or drowning in icy waters, or blowing one another to pieces on swampy islands of the Pacific; homeless children will be scrabbling for food among the wreckage of German cities. To make that kind of thing impossible is a good objective. But to say in detail what a peaceful world would be like is a different matter.

Nearly all creators of Utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore thinks happiness consists in not having toothache. They wanted to produce a perfect society by an endless continuation of something that had only been valuable because it was temporary. The wider course would be to say that there are certain lines along which humanity must move, the grand strategy is mapped out, but detailed prophecy is not our business. Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness. This is the case even with a great writer like Swift, who can flay a bishop or a politician so neatly, but who, when he tries to create a superman, merely leaves one with the impression the very last he can have intended that the stinking Yahoos had in them more possibility of development than the enlightened Houyhnhnms.

Tribune, 20th December 1943. Published under the name ‘John Freeman’ by George Orwell

[MrStonedOne]

I think there should be a new penny tax that goes directly to me. No one would mind paying a extra penny a year.

WE SHOULD NOT HAVE PENNIES ANYMORE AT ALL
MELT THE FUCKERS DOOOOOOOOOOOWN

Get rid of nickels while you are at it, just remove the whole digit.

[TheFinalPotato]

Poster above me doesn't believe in quarters

[Lacran]

I believe we need to elect a gun to be the only gun people would be allowed to own privately. These elections must happen annually. With the previous gun being outlawed.

This will solve a myriad of issues:

It will stop the recession by creating a thriving new arms industry each year.

The old guns can be given to war torn countries that truly need them, the side doesn't matter.

The cost of local steel and wood will increase causing a more competitive construction industry that is more likely to be less wasteful.

Will make guns cool again.

[Unsane]

I love kissing men on the lips

[BeeSting12]

I believe we need to elect a gun to be the only gun people would be allowed to own privately. These elections must happen annually. With the previous gun being outlawed.

This will solve a myriad of issues:

It will stop the recession by creating a thriving new arms industry each year.

The old guns can be given to war torn countries that truly need them, the side doesn't matter.

The cost of local steel and wood will increase causing a more competitive construction industry that is more likely to be less wasteful.

Will make guns cool again.

Instead we should combine the one thing democrats love most with the one thing republicans love most. Welfare and guns. Gun welfare. Give every poor person a glock which is taken from the rich people's arsenals. That way everyone can have a glock. Democrats are happy because poor people are getting free shit and republicans are happy because everyone is getting guns.

[oranges]

americans should change to public healthcare

[The Wrench]

New Zealand should change to private healthcare

[MrStonedOne]

New Zealand provided all of the spiders used in the hit disney movie: Acrophobia.

[Bawhoppennn]

Public healthcare is only a good idea if it's ran by the states rather than the federal government