Yes, Minors are robbed of autonomy by the patriarchal family. Yes, They should be afforded more freedom over themselves and their lives. This is no way justifies romantic or sexual relationships between an adult and a minor. Even within a society where a child and an adult are on completely equal grounds in terms of rights and power you still have the massive gap of years of knowledge, experience and both physical and mental growth the adult is going to have over the child. This makes abuse and coercion on the side of the adult extremely easy. This isn’t even covering the awful effects this type of relationship can have on a child’s mental health. The power imbalance is inherent.

To address the second comment. This is absolutely not the case. It’s often the very institutions and systems that oppress minors that lead to them being sexually abused. The whole “haha priest touch little boys” “”“” joke"“”" is literally born of the power adults have over children in institutions such as the nuclear family, churches, schools etc.

A point I bring up in these conversations is that a reason children are so commonly the target of sexual assault isn’t because paedophilia is rampant but because children are easy, accessible targets who are less likely to be taken seriously and have less direct power to fight back. The same reason why poor and/or disabled women, trans people and sex workers are common targets of sexual abuse while we have laundry lists of bourgeois, white cis men who got away with years if not decades of sexually abusing people. They exert material and therefore social power over these groups. It is in the material interests of those who wish to sexually abuse children to uphold this system. Actual paedophilic attraction or not.

Those with genuine paedophilic attraction NEED to have nonjudgmental mental health services available to them because there is simply no consensual way to fulfill their desires. A minor simply cannot be trusted to make a clear, uninfluenced decision that fully understands the implications, risks and possible harm in a situation where they are being asked by an adult who they are likely trying to appease. Will you have cases where they grow up and not regret or be hurt by it? Sure. But the majority ARE deeply hurt by these experiences and it was still built on imbalance and misuse of power regardless. Paedophiles are in no way evil for desiring something that’s unable to be practiced in a way that doesn’t unconsensual harm someone, but the issue there is stopping those wants becoming actions.

I had Stalin drop the tierlist.

Happy Birthday! I’m hoping you get that comically large spoon replica you’ve always wanted.

Have always loved handhelds and portable computers in general, something novel about them to me and they are super convenient. I got my LCD 512gb steam deck back in march of last year and it’s easily become my favourite handheld, dethroning my beloved PSP 3000. A couple reasons why I love it.

1. It plays all my games - This point is going to be hit or miss depending on what type of games you play and how much you are willing to tinker to make things work, but in my case the deck has been able to play every game i wanna play with acceptable performance.

95% of stuff works outta the box with the rest working with 1-5 minutes of tweaks from protondb. The “Unsupported” tag often just means “Needs some tweaks to work” or “you won’t be able to play online” in my experience. The only game I could not get working was deadly premonition 1, which is a notoriously shoddy pc port that struggles to run on modern windows systems anyways. Thanks to the deck being great with emulation however, I was able to play the switch version just fine.

Speaking of, absolutely stellar emulation handheld. Everything pre ps3 worked mostly flawlessly (the exception being saturn which needs some messing around to get some games working, just the nature of saturn emulation tho.) ps3 is hit or miss, some games run perfectly, others with frame dips, some unplayably slow and a handful just crash immediately. Switch emulation mostly works, but a handful of games have issues or unacceptable performance. let both ps3 and switch games compile shaders the first time you run them, performance gets better when you are a lil bit into a game.

3rd party pc games work well provided yer comfy with navigating desktop mode and the dolphin file browser. Was able to get my GOG library up and running with heroic games launcher. Itch.io and Archival Backup games I just added manually to steam via it’s add non steam game feature and enabled proton in that game’s steam settings. Lutris helped for some edge cases like silent hill 2’s enhanced edition fan mod.

Overall, i was able to play whatever i wanted on the thing. Which is great if you like going after and playing old or obscure games that haven’t seen releases on stuff like the switch.

2. Customisable with not a ton of hassle. Out of the box you have brilliant steam input support. The ui is presented in a way that makes it easy for tech newbies to bind a button or two for a game to the back buttons while still allowing maniacs like myself to create elaborate setups with gyro controls, touchpad menus, contextual inputs, automated actions etc. The ability to share layouts also means even if a game needs major mapping to play on the deck you can just download someone elses who has already done all the work for you if you don’t wanna.

For 3rd party customisations. Decky is easy to install and opens the flood gates with addons with custom ui’s, The ability to change your boot and sleep videos, Ability to change your system sound effects and add background music to the menus, custom loading icons, custom game art, easy music control, easy bluetooth device pairing, discord game status. You can pretty much redo the whole user experience in 20 minutes with minimal computer knowledge.

3. It’s an improvised computer in a pinch too. a cheap usb c dock, keyboard, mouse and display with desktop mode make the deck a pretty nice desktop if you need a semi portable pc solution or like to LAN with yer mates. You can totally live with the deck as your main pc if you are comfortable with KDE, Linux and getting strange looks when you take out your games console to give that PowerPoint/Impress presentation.

Desktop mode with no accessories is an okay experience provided you start steam in online mode while using the desktop, otherwise you won’t have your on screen keyboard for some reason, it’s not ideal but if you just need a desktop for one thing or just wanna watch something it’s completely serviceable.

I was really impressed by the deck, and if you play handhelds enough to justify spending €400+ on one the deck will probably be worth it for you.

It’s a Firefox/Chrome extension that allows users to mark sites and people as pro-trans or anti-trans. with pro-trans in green and anti-trans in red.

I generally dislike short form video and vastly prefer to curate my own feeds. It’s as simple as that for me. I’ll shit on a lot of tiktok users in joking but tbh I’m honestly pretty indifferent about the platform itself outside of some qualms with it’s moderation (which pretty much every major social media struggles with) and personally disliking the way it operates.

ballssquishy

I’m going with a Githyanki Melee focused Warlock build running pact of the blade with the plan being to use the lv 2 spell darkness with devil’s sight to fight enemies up close while having eldrich blast to fight at range and cover me when my darkness is down.

I’m downloading the game right now so it should be ready in a few hours. I’m pretty damn excited.

I mourn the fall of the USSR every single day because of shit like this.

A massive toss up between Axl and A.B.A. Love both of them on a gameplay, fashion and personality level.

“I wonder to which extent (the) CIA is responsible for the widespread of American-made cultural products, like pop music, rock and fast foods, and which artistic or cultural movements became influential through artificial means.”

I’m willing to wager they influence it far more than we think. Given military involvement in Hollywood and competitive FPS gaming it’s very much not out of the question for them to have influence in other forms of art and entertainment. Especially with china’s entertainment industry on the rise with tiktok blowing up and video games like genshin impact being immensely successful, we have been and will continue to see an increase in state interest and involvement in art and entertainment.

I was a “Free Market Libertarian” for most of my adolescence. Mainly because the selling point of individualism to a outcasted socially awkward autistic queer kid was a massive power fantasy. What happened was two things.

1. real life and experience with real people who didn’t hate my guts (no pun intended).
2. My vaguely socialist/social democratic irish republican father. I came from a pretty well off family of teachers and other academics so money wasn’t a major issue (until recently at least) and i was pretty sheltered as a result. Combine that with plagues like r/PCM and other internet personalities and you have a dumb kid who thinks he’s smart but unable to see through the bullshit because the height of her struggles was people at school thought they were weird and a couple of mental health incidents related to being outcasted or treated poorly. I had no real lived experience and as such just spouted bs because the internet forum guys made a half assed argument and i bought into it.

But then, real life happened. My friends start being directly affected by capitalism, as i got out more i started to directly see people struggling, as i got more involved with other queer youth and pride and the like it only became even more apparent and then, a mentor i looked up to and helped me so much through rekindling my love for reading and my love for the world takes her own life over the stress of keeping a stable living. That was the breaking point where i couldn’t lie to myself any longer. This is where my da comes in. I was ranting away about how abhorrent it was that a society could just let someone down that hard and how her death was completely avoidable and unnecessary it was. This lead to a long conversation of him telling stories of his involvement in left leaning movements and irish republican movements in his life. I was always pretty patriotic and that seed of an idea of “end all unnecessary suffering in Ireland” being a serious, attainable goal rather than just a naive fantasy really broke a lot of mental boundaries that liberal ideology had instilled within me. This lead to me to getting into different leftist spaces eventually reading lenin’s state and rev and joining r/genzedong.

I’ve come along way since then and I’d just like to thank you guys for being unfathomably based and stuff like book recommendations over the past 2 years of shitposting, it’s been a real inspiration to go out and make real change in the world.

Fuck Israel

It’s a great song but an awful message. like most of the beatles politics when brought up it’s literally just is “pacifism good” and nothing much beyond that. There’s a real sense of naivety to it, no John, everything isn’t “gonna be alright” if we just loved each other. Things actually have to be done about the awful living conditions people are forced into and pacifism is only going to get you so far when dealing with those who impose said conditions.

So, i did a lil bit of digging and found out this channel is linked to China Uncensored, which for those who don’t know is one of those “ebil seeseepee” “chyna collapse! 1!1” channels and Is linked to falun gong, those guys who were doing those ShenYun shows.

I think this is a good example of how they use several channels covering popular topics and media in order to spread their ideology to groups that have already been shown to be very susceptible to it (in this case, gamers, which as gamergate showed are the perfect group for instilling and spreading their reactionary views, being mostly younger men from 15 to 35 feeling alone and ostracized from others. With the youngest of the bunch being their big targets.).

This is all notes taken straight out of the classic Alt-Right playbook and has been the method these types have been employing to great success since the early 10’s and now we are fully seeing the scale of these efforts with the sheer amount of young, far right reactionaries we are beginning to see pop up and far-right grifters such as shapiro, peterson and tate being big celebrities. They have faced a level of sizable backlash from liberal progressive types but they still continue to influence countless young men into support absolutely awful things and enabling their horrible behaviour, which saddens me.

The takeaway really is always think through, challenge and research what you are being told, ESPECIALLY if it confirms what you already thought. It’s as simple as that yet a shocking amount of people i know don’t do this. It’s okay to be wrong, it’s not okay to be ignorant and all that lol.

For piracy downloading linux iso’s or if I’m on public wifi, but i usually turn it off it outside of those cases.

I mean… Lenin also WAS kinda pretty NGL.

Personally, nearly all my profile pictures are just fictional character i like + bi flag and/or hammer and sickle in the background so idk much in the way of “professional” pfp’s lol but in that scenario I’d probably go with some sort of historical photo of a leftist figure, preferably someone less recognizable to your average lib depending on how “professional” the environment is. As much as i love ol’ joe he was absolutely correct in saying a pile of rubbish would be heaped apon his grave. So pick someone deemed more “sensible”.

For comrades not in the know. Libgen.is and Libgen.rs which zlibrary mirrored (afaik) are both still around if anyone needs an alternative now.

I’m a lil late to the party on this post, but becoming a socialist really helped me curb my doomerism and allowed me to be way more optimistic than ever before. It’s just a liberating feeling being able to recognise and critique both capitalism and our selves and be able to improve and move foward.

AES is also massive hopium and seeing how far they’ve all come/came is evidence enough a better future is possible.

To be dramatic, frankly. It’s proof that we don’t have to give in and we absolutely don’t need to suffer alone and aimless. We can work things out together and make things better for everyone, one step at a time.

We don’t have to accept the homelessness, the hunger, the pain, the quiet desolation nor the crimes committed towards our fellow man in the name of capital.

god i sound cheesy. But then again, i mean it all wholeheartedly.

I wish all my comrades the best, keep fighting the good fight in your own little way.