Welcome back comrade, glad you’re here.

While I do understand that private businesses are inherently exploitative and as a communist I seek to abolish such structures in favor of communal structures, am I wrong or misled to see companies like Valve Software as a major step up in comparison to others like Microsoft, Apple and the like?

Not entirely wrong. For sake of argument I won’t address the actual shortcomings of Valve in practice as others already have here. I’ll take it that for some reason Valve is actually a great company, Gabe is some great man with a progressive vision, etc, etc for the sake of argument.

There have always been within capitalism elements, even capitalists who have done progressive things or gone against the worst impulses of capitalism in their time for various reasons including genuine personal belief and conviction as well as marketing and carving out a niche. The problem is such sentiment is never widespread, often has some sort of contradiction or caveat to it (something bad they do despite overall being so much better than anyone around them by contrast), and rarely lasts much beyond the lifetime and/or control of the particular people pushing it (Gabe and others at Valve who work there but have significant control of what they and the company do).

So to be even a liberal capitalist who thinks that the Gabe/Valve way is the way to some form of ethical capitalism is to ignore history. It is to wishfully say well we just need more ethical, progressive people leading companies when the system itself disincentivizes this at any scale and indeed when it is as hardened and calcified as capitalism with as many old money types who have so much capital and so much push in the system of capitalism that while you can stand out of their way and do your thing up to a certain size you can’t push them around, dislodge them, or dislodge how they’re engineering the overall structure and you remain a fluke.

Capitalism is the way it is for a reason. It inevitably moves in this given direction and you can’t stop it. It is its nature.

You mention China. China is different because they control the larger apparatus, they have a dictatorship over the capitalists and can use coercion and violence against them (and understand violence here doesn’t just mean beating them with a truncheon it also means the violence of the state, they can harass them legally, intimidate them, make their lives uncomfortable and unpleasant in ways that involve no physical blows) if they step too far out of line and the capitalists know and are constrained by this though some still push (Jack Ma) and have to be checked and put back in their place.

In addition to trying to eliminate sources you could see about trying to flush your sinuses.

There are two basic ways to approach this:

1. Sinus/nasal rinse or irrigation. You have to be careful here as using straight tap water can kill you due to pathogens and amoeba and such present that when inhaled deep into your nose can go straight to the brain. Either use the spray bottle nasal rinses from the store (tend to be best as they have some saline so don’t dry things out or sting much) or at least distilled water or water brought to a rolling boil for 5 solid minutes then cooled to room temperature and used same day to avoid giving time for anything to grow that might occur if you store it for days. But the idea is you flush/rinse your sinus cavities by forcing clean, sterile water up into them and getting the gunk out which can relieve pressure. Nettipots are one way of doing this but they have store sold spray bottles as well. In either case you put it in one nostril, concentrate, inhale and push the water up in there.

2. Spicy foods. You may have noticed in the past a time where you ate something so spicy that you got a nasal drip. Well it’s possible to eat quite spicy foods in reasonable quantities and cause your sinuses to clear a bit. If you like spicy foods this may be an additional option. You’ll be teary-eyed and miserable for some minutes but it can work. It isn’t just spicy foods, some intense mustards, horseradish, wasabi, etc can have similar sinus opening effects on many people if of the right potency.

And of course if you can see a doctor about this you can ask them. Steroidal nasal sprays often work, Flonase is the brand name but you can get it prescription generic for $5 usually which is cheaper than OTC.

Stop using Microshit products China. Anything critical, really anything, but especially anything government or military related should be run on hardened systems. Anything public-facing like email servers that unlike say a Windows 10 desktop cannot be really locked down or secured via other systems should be something other than Microsoft. I really hope China still extensively keeps secrets exclusively on paper as that’s the only way to stay safe at the level of exposure they have to western tech from the empire of hackers that is the west.

This is why Chinese software and hardware is a threat to western national security. If they can’t learn of and make use of vulnerabilities before they’re patched how can this evil empire of hackers and criminals continue to dominate?

I mean this isn’t the right way to frame things. The right way is this is a distraction from the actual problem which is child sexual grooming on roblox being an epidemic. This or making a child kill themselves “for satan”, either way the pretext is just a sensational distraction from the actual problem.

The child grooming potential from roblox despite their moderation and heavy censorship systems is due to capitalism. It is due to capitalism because it is a monetized game. The monetization provides an incentive to lure children to predators who are willing to pay for game-bucks for them and encourages the children to meet them, to talk to them, to stick around and be groomed by them, to do sexual things for money for them, and to enable the children to be potentially blackmailed by those acts if that wasn’t enough into further acts.

Roblox itself is the disease with its disgusting monetization system which creates this world where any child predator with a few hundred or thousand dollars to blow can get children who just want some shiny game things their minds have been groomed by corporations to crave even at the expense of their safety to cooperate with, even seek out predators.

Frankly, ban children from playing games with monetization systems like that and lootboxes. Or ban the games from using them if they target or are found to have a large population of under 18 players they can’t get rid of. Roblox is a pedophile corporation. One of many. It grooms children, it exploits children, it opens them up to further predation and profits off it.

Following up some comments given it’s been said I’m pessimistic.

I tend to see it as realism checking run-away revolutionary optimism which I think is necessary as if you keep telling yourself you’ll get a pony year after year and year after year it doesn’t happen you risk losing any hope at all and just checking out of that idea entirely which is something that does happen. I live in the imperial core. I’d love to see the revolution, I’d love to see it next year but I have to be realistic and hope I can temper the expectations and thinking of comrades to see the world not as they wish it to be steadily rushing towards revolution but a more complex situation. The hope burns eternal in us but we have a duty to our comrades to while being rosy also be pragmatic and honest about the world in our analysis and not get too far ahead of ourselves in rosy predictions, to temper them with not so rosy possibilities and keep an open mind about how things are unfolding and what it means.

Also in getting back to the original post there is media through the years that’s less fascist and openly reactionary. Take Star Trek up through The Next Generation (I’d start there in fact, 60s show is weird about women and a few other things) at least which can be read as a hopeful post scarcity communist civilization. Even things like DS9 and Voyager aren’t totally bad though they started the shows decline into capitalist realism with the gambling and fiat currency being commonly used. Lower Decks (despite having some love letters to stuff I consider capitalist degeneration series after the 90s) is fairly upbeat and watchable. They even had an episode fighting some capitalists on a new post-scarcity planet (though it was of course liberal coded with the resolution). Things like Andor despite being on the surface Star Wars slop have a solid story of resistance against a strong, reactionary empire. There are many movies that can be read positively as well even if many of them are engaging in recouperation.

I think the point is not to consume it uncritically. To avoid the worst of it that’s just pure cop apologia or fascist love letters type of thing.

And to not of course become too enamored with it to the point of not understanding it’s function as propaganda and the need to enjoy more than just that in life.

Fact is there is not going to be a cultural revolution in the west anytime soon. Acting like this person acts is a prescription for despair and being seen as weird by the masses for most people. Part of me of course says good on her and people like her might be of great use in an eventual revolutionary situation and might be leadership material. But right now there is a need to engage with the masses where they are and being able to shoot the shit about a few popular shows isn’t a bad thing.

It’s IMO much more useful to be able to talk to your average person about specific problems that are big propaganda in a given show than just go around screaming how it’s all bourgeois propaganda. One presents an in for class awareness education. The other makes people roll their eyes.

The revolutionary moment is I’m sorry to say probably decades away in the imperial core. Most people would burn out after years or decades of this.

And how convenient, on lib lemmy I just saw a post in the news sub from Human Rights Watch (a division of the CIA-State Dept conglomerate) that was accusing them of human rights violations. Right on cue.