Many years ago, I used to work in infosec. One of my employer’s clients was a big and famous brand well-established in the luxury sector. One day, a colleague of mine was sent to test their POS. Inside one, he found a single transaction for around 6M € from a credit card swipe. It wasn’t a payment made from a bank transfer or a check, just a single credit card swipe! At the time, I couldn’t even dream a card with such a credit allowance would exist. I had a pretty good living then, with money for the rent, daily expenses, and even some savings. Still, for an instant, I remember feeling like a poor child living in a house made of mud.
Here’s a comment thread where a Hexbear user said “I hope to kill people like you” because I simply said I supported democratic socialism.
Going on any Hexbear instance people froth over telling anyone right of Karl Marx to “get up against the wall”. You guys are, and will always be, a joke.
She’s not here, do you want me to pop into that thread and chastise her for you?
My mind just boggles at the fact that anyone is taking this two bit reddit clone seriously enough to carry a grudge longer that the lifespan of a single thread.
IDK what country you’re from, but in America at least, a democratic socialist has about as much likelihood of being elected to any given office as a communist does, so if you’re looking for “realistic” policies you should look elsewhere.
The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. Entryism always ends up changing the entrant instead of the system. We are revolutionary socialists.
It’s clear you never studied US politics if you think that is remotely true. The Gilded Age and the Great Depression briefly pushed America away from corporate interests towards policy that benefited the working class. We averted overt fascism a la the Business Plot and the ratfucking that Smedley Butler disclosed while being the most badass anti-capitalist ever.
You’re not a revolutionary socialist, you’re a larper who won’t do anything to better the world other than wait for this revolution like it’s the second coming of Christ.
You’re describing one group of bourgeoisie resisting a takeover by a different group of bourgeoisie. This is not a meaningful resistance to capitalism, this is the maintenance of a capitalist state.
Who are you talking about? AOC? If your definition of a democratic socialist is a left-leaning Democrat then it is thoroughly incompatible with mine, because I would require at a minimum that anybody classified as any kind of “socialist” be staunchly opposed to Capital.
I’m not sure if you are aware of this, but the Allende thing is more a US intervention problem that a democratic socialism problem. Certainly Mohammad Mosaddegh would agree.
Wow, you mean the US will just destroy you no matter how much you play by their rules, and that all that handwringing about evil communism is just bad-faith obfuscation from the world-eating vampire class to mislead their billions of victims? Wild.
Extreme violence is still violence. Industrial violence on a massive scale is still violence. You are advocating for violence, terrible violence, and then getting upset someone else advocated for comparatively mild violence.
I prefer public trackers and torrents just because I don’t like gatekeeping piracy. I want those bits to be distributed as far and wide as possible. So anything I get and/or seed will be public.
Even if there are bad peers that don’t give back (which there are many), plenty enough times it’s just people with shitty under served Internet connections. I’m fortunate enough to have a good enough connection where that doesn’t bother me.
I hate the whole meta of private trackers. When I’ve joined a few in the past the whole focus on needing to keep up your ratio has been a larger barrier to downloading than leechers ever were on public trackers.
You can’t seed because several users have seedboxes with perfect connections and already have a billion-to-one ratio. I ‘theoretically’ have access to all this content, but I’m downloading ‘80’s workout video volume 7’ in the hopes that I can actually seed it for someone to get enough ratio to actually download something I wanted to watch.
I was on what.cd back when that was still a thing, I poorly chose my first few downloads and then never had enough ratio to download anything else ever again until I was finally kicked for inactivity.
Instead of actually fostering a working seed economy, most seem to just replicate a capitalist dystopia where a handful of users hog all the seed slots, earning more ratio credits than they could ever use while everyone else desperately tries to scrape together enough ratio to get something of value.
I've been a newbie on a bunch of private trackers, and there's almost always some way to get ratio, you just need to figure out that site's method, and be patient in not-downloading-everything until you can afford it.
For example, like many sites, what.cd generally had freeleeches around the site birthday and the winter holidays: nothing you downloaded counted against you, and whatever you uploaded got added to your account. They also often had artist freeleeches when an artist died; if What was around today, the site would be going wild with Jimmy Buffett traffic. Other sites have bonus points, where you get points for seeding even if no one downloads from you; and then you turn in your points for upload credit. Still other places, you can cross-seed content to get past the newbie ratio restrictions, then move on from there.
It is incredibly frustrating to be new on a site that has a whole bunch of content that you want, but if you're patient or you figure out how the site does things, you can get a lot out of them.
So by chance I was in university and invited into what by my roommate. I literally bought more internet bandwidth from my uni to handle an early freeleech event where I got to mega game the system (By accident! I didn’t really know what I was doing. And good thing it was a private tracker because I was on a bare connection. I didn’t know what A VPN was at that time, much less how to hide my identity online).
I thought my ratio was totally unfair so I never really abused it, but that’s kinda the problem. Only by chance I had like a 500 ratio, whereas someone like you had no chance ever to catch up to the earlier established players. Even though I wasn’t a victim of the ratio, the concept of your story is just another reason why I dislike private trackers.
That said, the best thing about what.cd was just how well organized and categorized it was. Library of Alexandria style shit, now lost to us. Plus the forums with some real music-heads were great, too, and you could really expand your music horizons by talking with those people. I liked that it was NOT a Reddit-style forum, so when something new dropped everyone had a say. Upvotes didn’t influence that kind of conversation. At any rate, I stopped pirating music so much maybe beginning in 2013 or 2014, but every time I look now the uploads are either 320kbps (overkill bitrate, garbage ancient codec) or FLAC (nice for archiving, but not what I want). So I end up DLing FLACs and then converting them into 128kbps Opus. It works, but my music horizons aren’t broadened without that what community. I guess all I mean is I don’t miss the private nature of what, but I do miss the community.
Currently. Of course in the past it was exploding heads for being Nazis, Lemmygrad for being insufferable tankies, then Burggit for lolicon, now hexbear for being insufferable tankies.
I somehow entirely missed the hype around this game and came across it again only accidentally on early release day when looking at some other sale on Steam. Been playing it and it seems fine to me in a vague Skyrim-in-space sort of way, which is all what I was expecting from a Bethesda RPG.
The world seems alive enough and there are plenty of side-quests and amusing / interesting things to discover. Now suddenly I have been coming across a bunch of posts everywhere where the game is supposed to be terrible or something. Still seems fine to me, but maybe I have lower standards after decades of gaming. shrug.
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