FunkyStuff

Is there any danger of creating a badpost singularity?

My mental model is: The US dollar is the world reserve currency mainly because every country needs oil and they need dollars to buy it. The fact that the US dollar is so desired means the US can basically go into infinite debt and it's nbd because they can simply force everyone to keep giving up their resources and labor in exchange for oil via US dollars.

Is this model correct? If I'm wrong, what should I read to expand on this?

I was curious about a supposed leak that happened on 4chan's vg board today, so against my better judgement I went to check out if the leak could've been legitimate. I expected it to be rancid because it's 4chan, of course, but I was surprised to see that there's a relatively large Path of Exile community in that board.

That was perhaps more surprising than it ought to have been. POE is distinguished from its competitors for being the darker, grittier, more hardcore ARPG. If UlyssesT was still with us he'd probably have a lot to say about the grimdark garbage in the game (DAE have very very racist Aztec depiction!? ). But the fact is that this was a whole board with tons of lingo, their own breeds of brainworms, transvestigating conspiracy theories about certain community streamers, the works.

So it got me thinking, did this worm-riddled and detestable sewage monster of a community originate from gamergate or what? Why are there so many reactionaries that are heavily invested in this game? I can't really remember much about what was happening in 2016 for POE, but IIRC the game grew a good amount around then. Did it take a ton of gamergaters or something?

beanis

It appears to me that the complete deindustrialization of the imperial core is a historical arc that, since 1973, has been more or less unstoppable. The question is, if a socialist world revolution were to happen in the near future, and they basically established JDPON, how would it be possible to reindustrialize the former imperialist nations without relying on exploiting the former periphery countries? The actual productive capacity has been decimated.

I was watching this interview with Michael Hudson and Richard Wolff, and Hudson said something that I completely accepted at first, but mulling it over now it seems contradictory. He says that the IMF and World Bank, as neo-colonial powers, arrest the development of capitalism within the colonized countries, by enforcing austerity and making them privatize everything. He says that the purpose of doing this is to prevent the saturation that happens naturally as local finance capital develops and begins to deindustrialize the economy, which grinds industrial development to a halt as finance capitalists only exist as leeches that make their money by creating rents.

Now, where I take issue with this analysis, is that a great deal of what the IMF and World Bank do is steer countries into privatizing public healthcare, education, and other natural monopolies. When these services are public, they don't hold industry back from booming because they take care of a significant social cost, so if the state takes care of them the state is subsidizing industry to keep developing. Yet when they're private, they hold a monopoly position and exploit it to charge rent on everyone else because of the obvious necessity for these services. This keeps industry from developing.

If imperialists need the industrial capacity of the periphery, why kneecap it with privatization?

I can't do 4 more years of this. NOW you care about all the gory dead children and the daily massacres, burnt hospitals, poisoned water supplies? Not when you could've made as much noise as we have been trying to make to tell your candidate to stop supporting the atrocities?

Here's a little gaming effortpost for the treat piggies

Often, discussions of PoE's story remark on the themes of liberation and how surprisingly progressive it is, especially for a game with a hardcore gamer chud audience. The cast of exiles includes an indigenous slave who is exiled for killing his masters, a lesbian hunter exiled for shooting a noble who told her to stop hunting in his property, and a himbo duelist who also murders a noble in a duel for insulting him. However, the campaign's arc is much more reactionary than revolutionary or liberatory, and the game ultimately reinforces a Nietzschean 'ubermensch' archetype with the latter half of the narrative. Furthermore, I argue that the power fantasies of the ARPG genre are predisposed to bend in this direction.

Nietzsche is all over PoE. The historical empires of Wraeclast were all condemned by their search for immortality: the Primevals, the Vaal, and the Eternals, all doomed to fall because they wanted to last forever. The Templars are no exception. The exile's role in the Templars' fall is then to become the cataclysm, the punishment for their hubris. The repetition of the same history, eternal recurrence, and the failure of humans to surpass their vices is Nietzsche. These empires each became Nietzsche's 'last man,' haunted by greed and decadence.

Therefore, the liberatory arc of the exile who overcomes historical oppression, kills their master, and becomes free must be understood through the lens of will to power, in contradiction to a Marxist conception of class power. This is the story of an exceptional individual's triumph of will: the Marauder begins as a slave throwing off his shackles, but when does he liberate the rest of the Karui? By killing Kitava, overcoming the basebess, a moral victory, the Marauder is not liberating his people: he only liberates himself.

This general attitude is actually apparent all throughout the second part of the campaign. God is literally dead and we have killed him, now the conflict is against vices represented in the form of other gods.

Then we can generalize this criticism to the ARPG as a whole. The player slays masses of mindless enemies that do not put up a fight; they're morally inferior, aesthetically inferior, basically bugs. As much as Mao tells us that reactionaries are paper tigers, to depict some kind of revolutionary or liberatory struggle as Gigachads slaying the cringe bugs is ahistorical. That's just not how it works. The power fantasy, as an archetype, limits our understanding of class struggle and the mass movement.

Further reading: Actually Existing Fascism