Manifest Destiny is the more accurate starting point here. Neither Nazi Germany nor Israel copied Jim Crow laws.

You’re citing my text but cutting off just before the point I was trying to make.

Yes, because my point is that your point doesn’t make sense.

I think be would still side with the people who claim to follow his ideology

Why…? That’s not how leftwing politics worked, ever, and it’s not like there has ever been a shortage of leftwing criticism of Leninism and Stalinism.

r in Marx’s case admitting that his ideas didn’t work or the fact that they didn’t work as intended cost the lives of millions.

Yeah that’s my point: They’re not his ideas; they’re their ideas. Lenin for example, aside from being an authoritarian dickhead, was an intellectual juggernaut and a lot of his ideas would be baked into the foundation of the Soviet Union. What you’re presenting here is a false dichotomy.

It’s important to understand that 20th century communist states weren’t just “communist” (there’s no such ideology as communism); they were Marxist-Leninist, which despite the name is a rebranding of Bolshevism by Stalin. “Socialist” and “communist” are incredibly broad terms, and the idea that communist = implementing Marx’s ideas is so reductive as to be just wrong. Now Marx’s opinion would likely vary depending on time and place, but at least he’d probably condemn Stalin’s USSR as an authoritarian hellhole. Beyond that I have no idea, but many Marxists who were contemporary to the things you describe condemned them and many others supported them, so we can’t make a realistic guess without projecting our own values on him. Basically what you’re asking is analogous to “what would Adam Smith think about the current state of the US;” it’s something we can speculate about but generally isn’t as salient a point as seem to you think it is.

PS: I suspect you don’t know much about Marx’s ideas, so you should start from there. First, the dictatorship of the proletariat isn’t necessarily an actual dictatorship (that’s not how the term is used by Marx).

I think if he were honest with himself he would see that what he got wasn’t what he had envisioned in any of the countries that claimed to be communist/socialist.

I mean… obviously? Bolshevik theory (which is what all future socialist/“socialist” states would adopt) was their own take on Marxism with a lot of original thought. That’s where the authoritarianism comes from, and it’s not like the Bolsheviks were trying to hide it. Odds are Marx would denounce the Bolsheviks as heretics.

The armed uprising by the Syrian population was the 2011 insurgency, which ended in massacres of civilians. Following that, part of the Syrian army defected and formed the FSA.

It didn’t “end;” the FSA formed against the backdrop of increasingly militant anti-government resistance. Hell, the first defections from the Syrian army predate the formation of the FSA by months.

The civil war was an army vs army proper war, not a popular insurgency, there were no “civilians with guns” fighting, only trained military.

I mean, yes, because “civilians with guns” is what a failed uprising looks like. If the government doesn’t fold, a popular uprising’s main immediate goal is to become a proper army. The Syrian civil war is what it looks like when a (particularly gruesome) uprising gets off the ground.

The Houthis are a very well organized movement with a lot of external funding and backing, it’s much more than a popular uprising

Definitely, but again the organization and external funding and backing came during the years of insurgency and civil war. It’s not like they spawned in 2004 with 300k armed men.

It’s really a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Yes, but it didn’t start as a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Anyway my point here is: A sustainable armed uprising will very quickly stop looking like an armed uprising. Of course it’ll seem like popular uprisings don’t work if when a popular uprising works you retroactively classify it as something else. I know that the Syrian or Yemeni civil wars don’t boil down to “government vs people,” but that’s (sort of, with a hundred footnotes) how they started.

No no you see it’s only Science TM if they can use it to shit on Christians.

It took days for the Syrian military to flatten armed protesters and the entire urban areas in which they attempted their revolution.

Yeah it was a bloody mess, but after hundreds of thousands of dead and eleven years of war Bashar isn’t running Syria anymore. A modern military, when it doesn’t care about civilian casualties, can utterly destroy an urban uprising, but that’s terrible PR and is likely to embolden the revolutionaries at hand. The Houthis also seized control of most of Yemen (by population) through an armed uprising, so there are examples of “successful” 21st century armed insurrections.

What? Conservatives in Lincoln’s day were pro-slavery. Republicans were the progressive party when Lincoln was around.

Yeah that’s the thing: They (usually) do. It’s weird and irrational, but people are weird and irrational.

Outside romantic relationships, the vast majority of people don’t have to deal with false declarations of love, so there’s no general method here. If you want to ask about your specific case you’ll need to provide more information.

TIL about Arab migration to the Maghreb. That does seem like it warrants some decolonization, at least to my uninformed eyes. I’m more familiar with Egypt and the Levant, which were a lot less affected by such actions, hence my response.

True enough, but even with that context the parent comment doesn’t make sense. Which Arabs are they calling for to be expelled from Africa?

Yeah, man, those Egyptians who lived in the Nile Valley for millennia should fuck off. Imagine speaking Arabic amirite? Or Sudanese, I’m sure all those black Africans are actually from the Arabian Peninsula.

PS: Please learn history before you say dumb shit.

this is why i hate when people throw the “colonizer” insult around like a frisbee….

Do you have an example of this?

This is 2025 America, not Nazi Germany

I… um… have some news for OP.

Saddam did not like that. Or did he???

I mean, GDR is one tiny country but that goes for both sides of the equation. China would be able to surveil mail with the full resources of the Chinese government.

Then they label the intended difficulty with “recommended” and say that will give the best experience and that if you choose a difficulty higher or lower you might impede the intention of it.

You’re missing the point, which is weird because I explicitly stated it. To repeat, an artist might not want to create an inferior version of their art, irrespective of the utility of doing so. Art is an egotistical affair.

I really don’t see the problem with having options.

Options can make sense in some games but not in others; a developer deciding not to include them has likely either figured they wouldn’t work with the game’s structure, wouldn’t be a good use of their time or both. Difficulty options are simply not a one size fits all solution, for the same reason it wouldn’t make sense to demand all painters make colorblind-friendly versions of their paintings.

Random Silksong shill here (all hail Bilewater), what are you struggling with in act 3?

I meant that the story/easy mode wouldn’t conform with their vision. To expand on my example, if your game is portraying a grueling trek through a swamp where enemies abound and rest is scarce, the struggle would be an inalienable part of the experience; removing the struggle would fundamentally alter the story being told through the game. It’s not about their vision being intact or not; it’s about not wanting to intentionally make an inferior version of their art.