this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2025
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The struggle of the oppressed and marginalized is my struggle. That this person you speak of exists is why I am the way I am. They're everywhere. They're your colleagues, your parents, your comrades. As a pretty smart guy once said, "the ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class." Last I checked, Stalin is still dead, and the USSR—the greatest accomplishment of humanity—is gone. We now live in such a rotten time, without a shred of remorse, and without any end in sight. The periodic glimmers of light that peek through the hegemonic forces which shape everyone to be Little Hitlers are not enough to brighten nor warm my cold and hardened heart to them. Maybe someday.
Interesting angle. I would've thought if anything that misanthropes would love capitalism and fascism since if you hate humans and think they deserve to suffer, you can't inflict it much more effectively than those systems do.
I'm sorry that this might seem childish but how do you feel about Disco Elysium?
It is one of my favorite video games. I think it is a masterpiece. I'm glad it was made before COVID.
spoiler
You are a violent and irrepressible miracle. The vacuum of cosmos and the stars burning in it are afraid of you. Given enough time you would wipe us all out and replace us with nothing -- just by accident.I exist.
Yeah I was asking mostly to get your thoughts on
. I don't know if it's a wrong to say that the game is kinda made (among other themes aimed at other audiences) to comfort leftists who feel like the Deserter and help them climb out of that feeling, so it's a bit weird to me to relate to the Deserter without also seeing that the game is asking for us to not be that way? Obviously you can't help how you feel, and it's 100% justified to feel rage at all of humanity for getting to this point. But it's also apparently Not Good to languish in that feeling for all your life, thinking that the world's only shot at communism was blown and it's all doomed now.
I don't know, I'm sorry if this comment comes across like how people abuse the term "media literacy" to talk down to others who don't interpret things the same way. I'm trying to figure out how you engage with the story too, not just pontificating about what I think the intended message is (not that the message being intentional even makes it correct or more valuable).
You're totally fine. I think that is the correct reading, for the record. Which is why I say that I am glad it was made before COVID, when that reading would have resonated with me, and I can re-contextualize it for the time period it was written. It would not (does not) resonate today. Today, if I were to meet Steban and Ulixes, the representatives of that hope for and resilience of the future present in a war-torn world facing encroaching oblivion, they would tell me that asking their demonstrations to require masking is too alienating to the proletariat, and they won't be doing that, actually. Precious lines about stars going out in the darkness notwithstanding.
In the real world, COVID was the trial run for how, during a genuine Earth-shattering crisis, a global movement in the modern age materializes, and nowhere in the world was able to meet that very important bar*—how can I believe that we will Do Climate Action, another practically Olympian feat and one just as if not more threatening, let alone Do Communism, a relative pipe dream, in this light? I can't. I can't ignore what's happening in front of me every day, and what's happening is the era of blackest reaction, gleefully. Remember how a strain of the flu went extinct in the US when only half the population (a generous estimate, even in the early years) were wearing unfit cloth masks—not even proper respirators! Remember when the viral memes all over social media were about nature healing and returning to us when we stopped it all for just a few months? Everyone said no, to that, after a while. Overwhelmingly, and around the globe. Look at what we accomplished when we were merely half-assing it, and we refuse!
The future is unknown, and nothing is forever. I'll do what I always do: what I can. Fighting is in my blood. I couldn't stop if I wanted to. In spite of that, I do not have hope, and no one will be able to convince me to hope in this world, with the people that made and continue to make this. We aren't totally helpless lemmings at the whims of our overlords, not completely, not everywhere; we're all complicit in this as far as I'm concerned. We've by and large abandoned each other, and especially the most vulnerable among us. It's not just leadership. China's Zero COVID was supremely unpopular, and what eventually led to its retraction. Try asking your next PSL chapter meeting to mask up. They won't. This is what's necessary, and even those without the genocidal, fascistic tendencies of the worst of us won't abide. How could I not loathe this outcome and everyone who perpetuate it?
*That said, credit must be given to the few countries that stuck it out for years despite global pressures. China and I believe Taiwan, too? New Zealand. There were others, as well, but those are the ones that come to mind right away.