User:RD/9k/Soviet Union as challenge run (Q53,73)

Main entry

Soviet Union as challenge run / Soviet Union as glitched speedrun -> while people are very misinformed on almost everything in the current century, I think that one type of metaphor that has a lot of promise for getting people to think correctly again is card games and video games. when people say that Communism "doesn't work", what they mean is that Liberal-republicanism is easier to do. it's easy to get it started, it doesn't take extra effort. but things being easy doesn't make them impressive. it's more impressive to beat a civilization game on high difficulty than to pick the game's easiest difficulty and then say you have the best civilization.
god, you know what's frustrating? like. most video games are based on simulating the concept of effort. even when people break the normal mechanisms of games, speedruns and challenge runs still simulate the concept of effort. this is so utterly intuitive to people that The Speedrun Guy who doesn't understand games clumsily tried to argue that speedruns were bad because they were jumping over effort and skipping to the end (which is factually untrue if you've ever seen anyone design a speedrun). and then, you manage to get people like The Speedrun Guy who don't understand the simple concept that challenges are hard and that makes them challenges. ??? why. how do we live in an era where "you can't just skip to the end" is such a big huge talking point for everyone — you can blame "AI" for that spiking more than ever all of a sudden — but like, we don't understand which things are actually hard or impressive.

The speedrun guy

speedrun / speedrunning -> (please note: numbered Lexemes have been replaced with the Term namespace)
lateral thinking / thinking with portals -> I think it's so stupid how every guide to jobs and business is like, lateral thinking! lateral thinking! but if you really truly have lateral thinking you turn the entire thing sideways and see the inherent contradictions and paradoxes of capitalism that make it eat itself, and once you've thought so laterally you turn against capitalism they really don't like that. then they're like, no, don't you go thinking laterally, there's only one way to do things. this seems to be the heart of that one reactionary video I saw where the guy I can't remember was really mad about the concept of speedrunning. he was like, I hate that people are spending their time speedrunning, it's definitely a synonym of a crumbling civilization when people are going around the real way to do things and looking for shortcuts. and I thought it was unbelievably stupid, because the point of speedruns is basically to learn about the physics of the particular game engine and do science experiments to see if there are different ways those artificial physics could be applied technologically. speedrunning is basically a fictional process of research and development. you're shooting your civilization in the foot by getting rid of all the scientists and inventors. and why would you do it? because you think pure numerical ranking and graph placement produces stuff rather than labor and creativity. you're King Vegeta. but he can't build a ~~pronounced censored~~ scouter and has to buy it from another country. all because he doesn't like speedrunning, but speedrunning is lateral thinking.
Speedrunning is for cheaters
Addiction results when we misplace the journey and skip to the end / Addiction results when we skip over discovering the correct path through something and skip to the end -> this is probably what the speedrunning guy actually meant. but it was still a really stupid way to apply it. the speedrunning guy seems to believe that only chunk competition and slaughtering other groups of people is the natural way of life that can make us happy, and walking away from that imperative makes us addicted. this is why I don't like Freudian models. because whatever theory of society you have in terms of a Social-Philosophical Bauplan, you're likely to believe your ideology is the only correct way and having any other heretical ideology results in maladaptive escapism or addiction. even Communists fall into this fallacy and don't realize they need to think harder than this. if Trotsky can go around saying Stalin is ignoring the truth just because Stalin's government made his people unhappy, we need to think harder about how anybody actually looks outside any particular Marxism and actually discovers what's true.

Products-existing as ideology

why would I go to the effort to become good at something over a long period of time when I already have access to a product that was made by someone else? / why would I go to the effort to become good at something over a long period of time when I already have access to a simulation such as ChatGPT or a game or a recorded broadcast? [1] ->
because if you do the same thing as other people capitalism punishes you and calls you Evil for taking away other people's "right" to section up society and administer every action and behavior that happens in that section. it's not about "simulations" whatsoever. it's about actual security guys with clubs or guns and copyright lawyers and bourgeois republics (sometimes including Deng Xiaoping states) telling you the government is fine and nobody is allowed to build another republic over the top of them. it's about all the people that called the security forces getting together and saying they have formed the only possible form of modern society.

Dugin

Is it hard to smash a TV? / Is it easier to smash a television set, or to know all its components? -> a question to throw at the claim described by Mr. Jiang that Russia is creating stronger people by having a war. I'd contend that killing people in the middle of a group of other people armed with weapons is one of the easiest things for anyone to do, not one of the hardest, and you're actually creating weaker people by constantly sending them to war.

Contentment and achievement

Anything which brings psychological contentment requires effort -> this isn't actually true because sitting on your hands and ignoring other people's suffering can bring psychological contentment. that way of thinking is quite pervasive; the therapist I went to even accidentally told me to do it every other time I tried to talk about the concept that real threats to everyone were happening and we needed to respond to them instead of just cope with them. that's part of why the arguments about 'our society is going downhill because we skip to the end, damn AI anyhow' just never fully work and never truly make sense. analyzing society through individual psychology is a really terrible way to analyze society or even make good individual decisions that don't harm society. the entire concepts of psychoanalysis and psychology really quickly end you up at chaos magic and the concept that as long as you believe everything is fine you don't even have to do anything.
like, think about it. if you could shut off the news and every terrible post on Twitter and press a button to lose yourself in another world and think everything is okay, and you would have happiness, would you really be able to stop yourself? this really messes with me. because sometimes I just realize that if I'm making art then I'm not thinking about practical ways to get out of my own personal suffering nor to get involved in movements and help anybody. and I'm like, is it bad to make art? I can't even move. I have these horrific complicated surgery wounds that leak every hour because my colon exploded once and my body is bad at healing. but I feel bad for just sitting back and doing philosophy or art and not actually being able to help in changing society, even though I'm physically disabled. I don't want to be that person who says it's everybody's right to regenerate the bourgeoisie even though everything has been stacked against me, and my country doesn't want to create workplaces or ways for people not to fight each other over every action and material object and I can't move.
Promising freedom implies happiness / Freedom is promised as a way toward psychological contentment / Freedom is promised to people as a way of achieving psychological contentment -> I mean, I don't think people are promised freedom because it's painful or bad.
It is unethical to rescue someone from harm under claims they will find what brings them psychological contentment and then completely ignore and deny what their inner psychological needs actually are -> seems straightforward. then results in surprising conclusions when you apply it to the conflict between the Soviet Union and Trotsky.
Freedom is promised to people as a way toward psychological contentment + ?? = this.

Going beyond

Historical materialism is the opposite of addiction / If addiction results from skipping over boundaries to get to the end, then historical materialism is the opposite of addiction -> the perfect corollary to "surplus jouissance" that no Lacanian would ever think of. if we make ourselves unhappy by convincing ourselves it's easy to be happy by skipping to the reward and not considering the proper way to get there... is it not also true that the proper way to get anywhere is dictated by physics and the repeated behaviors of the world, and we can only do things the correct way by understanding the way the world works? if we don't understand how the world really works, then we'll never actually know the correct way to get through boundaries or go through a journey and not merely skip to the end. if we never actually learn the correct way, then getting stuck in addicting patterns or escapism isn't actually anyone's fault, it's just the inevitable outcome. we can't exert our will to do something we don't even know. yet Existentialism also wants to tell us the road ahead is impossible to know. if that's true most of us are slated to be addicts. the great majority of all the content on social platforms about "how society keeps us lazy or distracted" is totally and utterly wrong.
Difficulty is the lack of outsourcing (removal of; meta-Marxism onto Lacanianism) / Difficulty is the lack of being able to pay for something to be done by someone else -> one definition of difficulty which properly explains why using "AI" is not difficult.
also half explains why it's okay to counter peasants being bigoted: farming animals in particular can be a way of shifting difficult tasks onto someone else, which is a major connection between "peasants" and "the bourgeoisie". when humans actually have to be out there in the field doing a considerable amount of the work for someone else they are removed from the "corruption" of easily getting stuff for no work and a bit of money. capitalism is the act of farming people. Animal Farm is backhandedly true.
Much of the "hard work" people do is actually the easy way out -> every time reactionaries talk of "hard work"... isn't there always something missing there? there'd seem to be a difference between Constructive Hard Work and Destructive Hard Work, where most "hard work" is actually the latter one. people working hard for almost literally no reason but to destroy someone else's hard work while doing the same work over again. I wonder what the world would be like if we literally stopped calling Destructive Hard Work "hard work", and told people, no, all of you are doing busywork, that stuff is already done, you're not doing the actual hard work any more.
Much of the "hard work" people do is actually the easy way out / Most hard work people do is for literally no reason but to destroy someone else's hard work -> ...that's an orange statement. that's a statement about businesses being a class because they're businesses but only in capitalism.

Ideology codes

MX
MX / existential materialism
MX / meta-ontology
MX onto ML
MX onto Aa

Subpages

hard-way-531 - thought on 'buying products' as 'the easy way' and being a Communist theorist as 'the hard way'. add the entries on The Capitalist Unconscious to this page? that book is bad but I might need to read it at least quickly or partially to see how much it matches this