Welcome again to everybody. Make yourself at home. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is the weekly discussion thread.
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A really weird thing about the US is that it is pretty much mandated to have your dogs neutered.
I just did the [rough] math that the current defense budget of the US is equivalent to giving every person in the US $2400 directly into their bank account a year [about $200 a month]. I know it’s no NYC appartment but still 😒
Also heartwarming news, a good 5-10% of comments [from my count, not an actual survey] on Jacob Gellers video about 1984 are “Orwell sucked actually”
Edit: There was one bit that spoke to me. The forward discussed at about 38 minutes into the video, about Orwell being afraid he’ll lose his political anger and turn into another apologist for “things as they are” is something ive felt a lot. Not because any logical conclusion or epiphany, but just because it’s happened to so many others. Even as i discuss the reasons why Abbie Hoffman or Angela Davis and such lose their political fire, i still find myself afraid that I’ll succumb to it too.
I hate the last portion of the semester where you’re tired and burnt out from all the exams but everything keeps moving At a normal pace before finals anyway.
Also i still hate my statistics class. I honestly wish Mao would’ve retaken Taiwan so my professor would’ve died in the army
I honestly wish Mao would’ve retaken Taiwan so my professor would’ve died in the army
Thanks. you were the first laugh of my day.
It’s my birthday!
Happy birthday Comrade!
Happy birthday! 🎉🎂
Happy Bday!!! w
do penguins have birthdays?
Happy birthday
Facebook stalking gets really hard when you start forgetting old friends names.
See a person you went to school with on face book. Send a friend request. Slip into their DMs. Tell them “Everything we were taught is a lie. The government works for the billionaires and workers like us are just cattle. The oil natural gas and fertilizers are being cut off on purpose. A greater depression is coming and the herd is about to be culled. The billionaires are telling the white workers to blame China, LGBTQ people, People of Color, and Muslims. Don’t let them fool you, You know that hard work never made anyone rich. The only way to be rich is to be descended from a long line of greedy murderous thieves. Its time we take back what is ours. Luigi was half way to the right mindset, Bushnell too. Read Marx, Lenin and Mao they’ll show you what those guys were missing.”
Saw this on twitter and it really pissed me off, western leftists seem to be constantly shitting on actual liberation movements and then turning around and praising socdems, i hate these kinds of “leftists” so much
“more pragmatic than socialist” is really telling on themselves - that they think socialism can function by ignoring what is practical
these are idealists posing themselves as socialists, neglecting the scientific part of it
See, I think there is a discussion to be had on whether Traore is a socialist or a bourgeois revolutionary and that can be interesting discussion to be had and that is ultimately relevant to the future of Burkina Faso and its people.
But Jacobin’s particular framing of socialism and pragmatism as being mutually exclusive very quickly highlights their idealism at play. As cfgaussian noted a socialist who isn’t pragmatic is either ineffective or dead. The socialism of Jacobin is inherently Owenist to the core. They aren’t Marxists nor do they conduct Marxist analysis; there is no dialectical materialism to be found in their articles. What we find instead are pieces like this which are critical of anti-imperialist struggles without justifying that critical position - and this is crucial because it is entirely possible to validly critique anti-imperialist struggles, this is why the “critical” in “critical support” exists after all. But Jacobin doesn’t do this. It offers the criticism without the support but that’s not how it works. If you’re going to criticize Traore then there are only two positions you can be in: support or opposition. You either criticize him because you oppose him or you criticize him despite supporting him; there is no middle ground. You are either on the side of the imperialists or the side of the anti-imperialists. Jacobin, it seems, isn’t interested in siding with the anti-imperialists and that means there is only one other side to take.
I can see why Chomsky loves these guys as they have a lot in common: criticism without the support; i.e. pro-imperialism.
Non-pragmatic socialists are either dead socialists or socialists still stuck handing out newspapers. Either way, they are not seizing and wielding power to build a better world.
Captain Traoré is building a better world for his people.
I thought it was common knowledge in socialist circles that Jacobin is part of the imperialism-compatible left? This isn’t the first time they smeared an anti-imperialist global south government.
I figured that out quickly but i hadn’t heard of them before, or at least i never payed enough attention to them to the point that i would know their name
They’re pretty well known and unfortunately seen as very reputable by the broader western left, especially socdems and “democratic socialists”.
I had this thought during the brief nuclear threat moment some time ago and I thought to myself that if nukes really fell I still was expected to work the next day and it made me angry lmao. We are a strange species.
Slight vent post (to be clear ahead of time, not a post about people here - in practice, it seems to be a thing that comes most out of western “free thinker” arrogant types): Some people have a tendency to obsess over phrasing semantics. This in itself does not bother me because I believe some people’s minds process differently than others and for some, precise phrasing means more to them. And in fact, when a person is mature about this, it can be an important correction and a tempered, reasonable discussion that can lead to more precise and thereby helpful use of language. Then on the other side of the coin, you have the person who thinks like this, is generally immature, with western arrogance, and makes it a key part of their identity to thoughtlessly correct everything they see that they think is out of place. These people can be supremely annoying because they don’t even understand the world very well to begin with and then on top of that, not only do they correct obsessively (sometimes inaccurately) over trivial things, they can’t handle it when it’s done to them. It would be one thing if they tended to correct and could take correction, but this type of person is the definition of “can dish it out but can’t take it” and it makes for an extremely annoying person to be around.
It’s sorta like if sealioning was a whole personality.
Valid vent.
Im thinking of joning a party here in italy but doing reasearch makes stuff so confusing, apparently there’s like 10 communist or leftwing parties here and i when i try to find out about them i keep finding leftist infighting and mudslinging, it’s been very troubling, ive also got the problem that i dont live near anywhere near a building of any of them
A good litmus test would be asking about Domenico Losurdo.
Are they all Maoist parties? The infighting over small issues is definitely a pattern from what little I have read on a few Maoist movements in other countries (I am joking about them being Maoist parties, because I doubt Italy has many Maoists).
I don’t know about maoist parties in italy but i know that a lot of italian leftists are trotskyists, unfortunately they’re also the major marxist publishers so i got some of my books from them; italy has a massive compatible left problem to the point that ordinary people are more marxist than them/hj
Start by eliminating any parties that support the war on Iran and then any with signs of homophobia or trasnsphobia, any that are Pro-rojave and then the pro ukraine ones. I’d be surprised if you have nay options left after that.
What is the political situation in Italy? I only know that there is a far-right candidate or something, but I know very little about Italian politics in general (because I hardly know much about anything in modern Italy).
Things are getting pushed more to the left, though a lot of people are stopping at liberalism I can definitely say that I’ve seen a lot more Italian leftists than say leftists in the U.S., recently the current party that had direct ties to fascism and an ex prime minister of Italy called Berlusconi (Italian Ronald Reagen, member of the Mafia, was a member of a openly fascist party) just lost a referendum that sought to weaken the justice system because they were getting caught and possibly charged for shit (some of it related to Epstein from what I know), which is the first time in a long time that the Italian right lost in votes, another thing that is pushing people left is the situation in Palestine, our current prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, is a trump and Israel bootlicker and she is wildly unpopular right now, so while things aren’t perfect for the left here at least we’re possibly getting rid of a fascist party being in power, though we’ll have to wait for the upcoming elections for that.
It’s also important to note Italy’s political history, the constitution was by a large part written by communists and had one of the largest communist parties in the world during the cold war though it distanced itself from the soviet union taking a more moderate route, during this time the right wing parties that held power collaborated with the CIA to get rid of communism in Italy by doing a number of terrors attacks and blaming it on the left, which for a while worked, but recently the sentiment amongst a lot of Italians is moving to the left, albeit a more moderate, words like communism and socialism are getting more normalised which is a good thing.
I made chemical weapons.
I can find legitimate civilian uses for them (like adding them to pickles) but their potential for violent application is too great to be ignored.White people’s worst nightmare
I remember when a chef in our canteen made ghost pepper jelly and liberally slathered it on our fries off the menu.
It was delicious.
Ive gotten an idea recently related to central planning, with modern computers we could use A.I. (not generative) that is directly handled by workers that helps plan the economy and the allocation of labour, maybe im too crazy tho
Finally swapped my desktop over to Linux! Found out Hyprland dev is shit, so trying to figure out if I want Sway, Niri, or just Plasma. CachyOS is cool but I also feel the pull of Arch… Decisions decisions decisions.
Mainly a gaming PC but I also want to use it for basic productivity, libreoffice and the like + relearning to program, primarily interested in Rust and Clojure based on the buzz I see around them. Not serious dev work, just messing around on the side.
Great, i personally run Sway because it’s really easy to configure and superbly stable. Other than the flashy animations Hyprland is not that good, i tried it for a while and went back to Sway even before all the light came out of the developer.
Gotcha, will keep that in mind! I like Niri so far, it seems very usable, but if I want to change to tiling I’ll put Sway on top.
Let me know if you need help with Sway, i am by no means a power user but i do have a somwhat developed config file.
Will do, I’ll keep you in mind! Thanks!
Ever since the municipal elections last month I haven’t been involved with my party, or with organizing or protesting as a whole. I was planning on leaving my party, but thought that it was hard to leave my comrades behind. Although I was not that close with them so it doesn’t matter and will probably leave the party in the coming weeks
