• happybadger [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    Communism built a society in which an insufferable goober like that is able to spend all their time playing a little game while pretending it’s important. Those tAnKiE sCuM won WW2 so he could play with horsey pieces instead of working.

  • ShareThatBread [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    Kasparov’s grandfather was a staunch communist, but the young Kasparov gradually began to have doubts about the Soviet Union’s political system at age 13 when he travelled abroad for the first time in 1976 to Paris for a chess tournament.[198] In 1981, at age 18, he read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, a copy of which he bought while abroad.

    Goober

    • Alaskaball [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      he read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, a copy of which he bought while abroad.

      Well there’s your problem. You read a lying antisemitic, lying, trotskyite, saboteur, grifter, and CIA-payed fan-fiction writer’s shitty-ass book

    • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      My guess is this douchebag was young, easily impressionable, and absolutely desperate to fit in socially with the rest of the people in the sport.

      This is a bad recipe for socialists in sports, because sports people from capitalist countries are going to continue being the majority for a long time. They travel abroad, want to fit in and end up taking on the role of a pick-me. Everyone joining a new community is going to try to fit into that community and the advantage of capitalist hegemony is going to affect socialist sports people, especially because they’re young.

      • VILenin [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        Communist countries are deliberately isolated, and then western propaganda will go “see, they’re missing out on our 18 different flavors of delicious Chef Boyardee!” and to a dumb teenager during soviet stagnation it would be pretty easy to fall for it.

      • GarfieldYaoi [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        Yep, the elitism for sure. NGL, it’s embarrassing that it’s taken me this long to realize that a lot of reactionaries aren’t “dumb sheeple”, but complete asswipes that think they’re better than everyone else. With the “chess is for smart people” bullshit, no wonder a lot of the top chess players have politics that match their pompous attitudes.

        frothingfash: “I am better than everyone else and therefore people like me deserve special treatment to ensure no rube ‘steals’ power that I earned by birthright.”

        • SchillMenaker [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          A lot of chess players are stupid as hell, they’re just really good at chess. There’s a lot of reverence for the game but it’s basically a combination of high level trivia and poker.

          • TreadOnMe [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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            1 year ago

            I had a guy at work once tell me that chess players were the smartest people on the planet. I told him that if that was true, then they would be doing something other than play a board game. It’s like thinking that being good at StarCraft 2 makes you good at computer programming. Absolutely wild assumptions.

  • InevitableSwing [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    Elite chess players can be strange too. Kasparov popularized this wacky conspiracy theory.

    New chronology (Fomenko)

    The new chronology is a pseudohistorical conspiracy theory proposed by Anatoly Fomenko who argues that events of antiquity generally attributed to the ancient civilizations of Rome, Greece and Egypt actually occurred during the Middle Ages, more than a thousand years later.

    […]

    Fomenko’s historical ideas have been universally rejected by mainstream scientists, historians, and scholars, who brand them as pseudohistory, pseudoarchaeology, and pseudoscience, but were popularized by former world chess champion Garry Kasparov. Billington writes that the theory “might have quietly blown away in the wind tunnels of academia” if not for Kasparov’s writing in support of it in the magazine Ogoniok.

    Kasparov met Fomenko during the 1990s, and found that Fomenko’s conclusions concerning certain subjects were identical to his own regarding the popular view (which is not the view of academics) that art and culture died during the Dark Ages and were not revived until the Renaissance.

    Kasparov also felt it illogical that the Romans and the Greeks living under the banner of Byzantium could fail to use the mounds of scientific knowledge left them by Ancient Greece and Rome, especially when it was of urgent military use. Kasparov does not support the reconstruction part of the new chronology.

    • dannoffs [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      Remember when he got so pissy about not getting a say in where the world championship was going to be he started his own opposing chess organization? Lol

  • JamesGoblin [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    Kasparov was virtually created by Botvinnik - “a staunch communist” in K’s own words; K himself greatly benefitted from (and wouldn’t exist without) the “oppressive shithole”; K was a member of communist party for too long - IIRC he was one of the last liberals to leave it in early nineties(!) which, somehow, didn’t stop him to play the role of “freedom fighter”- the image western media exploited to 110% in late 80s.

  • Fishroot [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    never ask Kasparov on his position on Columbus or BLM movement

    or what Elisha , Pope Gregory VII, Saint Basil of Caesarea, Emperor Jingzong, Euclides, Bacchus and Dionysius all have in common

    • GreenTeaRedFlag [any]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      or what Elisha , Pope Gregory VII, Saint Basil of Caesarea, Emperor Jingzong, Euclides, Bacchus and Dionysius all have in common

      they all drank wine and received wheatcakes?

      • Fishroot [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_chronology_(Fomenko)

        Fomenko claims that the most probable prototype of the historical Jesus was Andronikos I Komnenos (allegedly AD 1152 to 1185), the emperor of Byzantium, known for his failed reforms, his traits and deeds reflected in ‘biographies’ of many real and imaginary persons.[18] The historical Jesus is a composite figure and reflection of the Old-Testament prophet Elisha (850–800 BC?), Pope Gregory VII (1020?–1085), Saint Basil of Caesarea (330–379), and even Li Yuanhao (also known as Emperor Jingzong or “Son of Heaven” – emperor of Western Xia, who reigned in 1032–1048), Euclides, Bacchus and Dionysius.[citation needed] Fomenko explains the seemingly vast differences in the biographies of these figures as resulting from difference in languages, points of view and time-frame of the authors of said accounts and biographies. He claims that the historical Jesus was born in Cape Fiolent, Crimea, on December 25, 1152 A.D. and was crucified on March 20, 1185 A.D., on Joshua’s Hill, overlooking the Bosphorus.[19]

        (…)

        Fomenko’s historical ideas have been universally rejected by mainstream scientists, historians, and scholars, who brand them as pseudohistory, pseudoarchaeology, and pseudoscience,[38] but were popularized by former world chess champion Garry Kasparov.[39][40][41] Billington writes that the theory “might have quietly blown away in the wind tunnels of academia” if not for Kasparov’s writing in support of it in the magazine Ogoniok.[42] Kasparov met Fomenko during the 1990s, and found that Fomenko’s conclusions concerning certain subjects were identical to his own regarding the popular view (which is not the view of academics) that art and culture died during the Dark Ages and were not revived until the Renaissance. Kasparov also felt it illogical that the Romans and the Greeks living under the banner of Byzantium could fail to use the mounds of scientific knowledge left them by Ancient Greece and Rome, especially when it was of urgent military use. Kasparov does not support the reconstruction part of the new chronology.[43]

          • Trudge [Comrade]@lemmygrad.ml
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            1 year ago

            He believes that thousands of years of history is a fabrication and we’re living around AD 1000, so yes. It kinda makes sense in his cosmology.

            All of this twisting is to put in time in history for a great Slavic empire spanning all of Eurasia, tragically forgotten. This is what terminal nationalism does to individuals.

  • 7bicycles [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    “Gratismut” is a german compound word made out of the two words “Gratis” (for free)" and “Mut” (courage) that describes the concept of taking a stand for or against something at a point in time when there’s literally no discernible consequences left for doing it

    • Ericthescruffy [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      Like all joking aside…that’s basically all they are, right? There’s a generation of movie and supervillain cliches building up this idea that being good at chess requires and/or unlocks some kind of deep mental super power but its all just pattern recognition and puzzle solving right? That’s obviously not nothing and requires a degree of mental acuity and discipline to become a master at but imagine seriously caring about what Daigo Umehara thinks about Israel/Palestine or something and you can quickly see how ridiculous it is.

      • TheDialectic [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        Less actually. The gimmick of chess is modeling and memorizing lots of plays. In fighting games you have to be humble and train to get stronger then be able to deeply understand your opponent to outplay them. Bonus because of historical accidents fighting games are heavily poc and working class. So you can get some terrible takes there but bet your average pro fgc probably has better politics than your average pro chess player.

        • Smeagolicious [they/them]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          Very fun to see the reactionary shitheads like LTG just get routinely clowned on over the years when they spout hateful shit. There’s a lot of problematic trends/culture in the FGC but you’re spot on about the make up & attitudes of the community. When one of the most popular players is a black nonbinary furry then there’s at least something good there