Thats kind of the point, they’re so (deliberately) underfunded they have to farm out jobs to subcontractors which boil down to “vigilante goes to place, murders a bunch of people”.

No details but

However it does genuinely have one of my favorite moments in the entire game.

It isn’t that nuanced in its portrayal of fascism (or for that matter hustlegrind Ultra mindset or pretentious ironic detachment cynicism for that matter) but in my personal subjective opinion that’s fairly accurate because those lines of thinking don’t require much thinking to maintain and analysis of those beliefs threatens them fundamentally, so it’s rarely done.

If you pursue the fascist path in dedicated fashion it actually does get quite nuanced. I won’t elaborate more on what I mean by any of that.

As far as I know though Ultraliberal is only ever a caricature because that’s exactly what it is and what it deserves.

You mean the police procedural, right?

Because classic mystery stories focus way more on what actually solves murders - detective grunt work like alibis, motives, timelines, etc

Literally no one here is arguing that Ukraine is good, but the actual leftists (as opposed to national chauvinists) here are arguing that this is unmistakably an inter-imperialist war and not some convoluted “the invasion of Ukraine is anti-imperialist because Russia is on the imperial periphery of a super-imperialist bloc” bullshit argument.

I’m someone who can absolutely advance arguments that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was caused by outside imperialist circumstances. But now that it has happened, and is actual fact? There is zero “critical support” of Russian aggression here. The only legitimate communist position in this scenario is for Ukrainian and Russian soldiers alike to turn their guns on their own generals. Will that happen? No. But that’s the fucking position the Bolsheviks themselves took from the start, not some ridiculous stance about how actually the Kaiser was right to resist all along and criticizing the German war effort is bad.

Anyone on this site who genuinely believes Vladimir Putin does “anti-imperialism” out of any motive other than supremely cynical, convenient, competing imperialist interest seriously needs to re-evaluate their stances and sources. Or, otherwise, go join the fucking Maupinite/Hazite clowns who are basically doing the most cringe reactionary shit imaginable, because they are your people.

I say this as someone who has for a while tried to stay out of the dogmatic factionalist bullshit in favor of just shitposting when it comes to this site. If you’ve been suckered into believing a siloviki-dominated hyper-capitalist kleptocracy like Russia is a genuine force for “anti-imperialism”, you’ve been fucking had in the worst way possible. Even the most mindless simping for modern Dengist China has a more rational basis.

“Turn your actual prayers to a deity that may not exist into commodities to buy and sell.”

:jesus-cleanse:

And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the money changers, and the seats of them that sold doves, And said unto them, It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves. — Matthew 21:12–13

He might do extensive research for each season of the podcast but in this one there is very much a gaping hole that could have been filled by reading Red Petrograd.

He at least did a good job of emphasizing how every non-Bolshevik faction completely fucked up their position in between February and October 1917, thus throwing support to the Bolsheviks. But he pretty firmly turned against the Bolsheviks in his narrative after October in a very Orlando Figes kind of way. Thankfully he is covering how the Whites continue to be so incompetent and reactionary that everyone else has no choice but to support the Bolsheviks as the lesser evil. But a major tell is that he puts a lot of emphasis on the Bolsheviks dissolving the Constituent Assembly, ignoring how if the Constituent Assembly was even remotely relevant to the interests of the masses it would not have been so trivial to dissolve it.

I’m a dude playing another dude disguised as another dude

And of course his daughters friend is fucking dead. Why? Because she’s a whore. She’s not as pure as his daughter. She deserved it. I mean it’s sickening. The whole narration, it’s psycho-sexual undertones. His daughter is alive because she’s precious on the human trafficking market, because she’s a virgin. There are no virgins in Europe you know, only God blessed Americans are pure.

Taken literally uses staple tropes ripped straight from 80s slasher films. The virginal Final Girl survived because she started following her dad’s rules.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOO YOU CAN’T JUST ENACT STRICT QUARANTINE AND PREVENT THE RAPID MASS SPREADING OF PLAGUE NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

These public trials and executions were held to the overwhelming approval of the public, pretty much for the purpose of mollifying widespread popular fury toward former Batistiano thugs and terrorists who had made the masses suffer and killed their relatives for years. Historians believe they most likely prevented a bloodbath of mob justice that would have killed hundreds more indiscriminately, and the trials were the method by which the revolutionaries established their authority and re-established some semblance of rule of law.

If you were tried and executed because of these trials, it’s because you were a close collaborator with the murderous Batista regime. “Police chief of Santa Clara”, yeah, I fucking bet he was.

Literally became a socialist because of Kaiserreich

Maybe thats embarrassing idc

What “plan” they had was the fantasy that those sympathetic politicians would unilaterally abolish elections, which they don’t have the power to do either individually or as a group, and would not do even if they could. Only the military can do that, so they would have had better prospects targeting the Pentagon. So essentially no plan, they were trying to alter reality by willing it into existence.

Matt makes explicitly Marxist arguments that to the uninitiated libs are literally alien. This person certainly has no idea what fascism means or “the left” really wants, so they interpret materialist analysis that these CHUDs had no plan and thus could never have accomplished anything meaningful as “agreeing with fash”. This then gets spread around their lame Twitter circle like a game of telephone.

Again, what would the CHUDs have accomplished if they had simply occupied the Capitol for a prolonged period? The answer is nothing. Merely occupying one building will not magically force the entire apparatus of state to capitulate to your outlandish demands. The only way they could have actually done a coup is if the military then threw in with them, in which case you have much bigger problems than CHUDs in the capital; regardless, there was zero chance of this happening. Meanwhile these same libs were probably falling over themselves to exalt the generals who came out to condemn Trump the other day, zero cognitive dissonance involved.

And they basically didn’t. They went the fuck back home because they’re cowards who don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.

All the cringe ass takes calling this a coup have no response to this. And all the people saying eye-rolling shit like “the pod said these guys wouldn’t do anything im so fucking cool and contrarian”

Yeah okay what if they occupied the Capitol building. Okay now fucking what? I guess the government has to surrender lol

They are - and I cannot emphasize this enough - stupendously dull

Okay I need to be blunt

“Woodrow Wilson was the first fascist president” is literally an argument by the reactionary crank Jonah Goldberg in his book Liberal Fascism. It is not true.

HOWEVER

Woodrow Wilson being aligned with the capital-P Progressive movement, there are superficial similarities. Chief among being two central aspects of the Progressive Movement - an obsession with eugenics and social engineering, and explicit class-collaborationism. He is also associated with expansion of government to act as economic planner and mediator-manager of capital and labor in a wartime situation. These are aspects superficially in common with fascisms, but there the similarities really end.

Probably the most obvious rebuttal to this thesis is that Wilson was arguably the first liberal internationalist, very ahead of his time. He was the foremost advocate of building a managed, institutional world order along liberal lines. This is vehemently at odds with historical fascisms, which are intensely anti-internationalist and tend to be intensely hostile even to each other because their irredentist aims and drive to self-annihilation drive a wedge between them.