Welcome again to everybody. Make yourself at home. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is the weekly discussion thread.
☭ Matrix homeserver and space
☭ Theory reading group has moved to Lemmygrad - see the pinned posts
☭ Find theory on ProleWiki, marxists.org, Anna’s Archive, libgen
My HRT package was seized.
I’m trans and my anti-androgen ran out a week ago and today my new package arrived. But when I opened it it was empty and there was a note from border control. Fuck them for taking my essential life saving medicine. This has made me feel so bad and terrible, I don’t want to turn back into a man. I’ve been crying a lot. I thought it finally arrived but they only deceived me which made me feel even worse.
Luckily I’m still on estrogen as well, but it’s starting to run out as well. I really need to only use services from inside the EU but the one I usually use is out of stock. I found another one, but they only use credit cards which I don’t have. Hopefully I can convince my parents or some friends to pay it for me and me paying it back to them.
I’ve sent a DM…
I don’t know what to say.
What the fuck
This is horrible!
“Memes” aren’t a thing that exist anymore. People don’t get attached to some specific formulation of words because they are memorable/funny/interesting. These words are just repeated by content mills because recommendation systems have latched on to them as important keywords, and the cycle repeats itself. Nobody actually really cared about the fake “orange cat” concept, it was just perpetuated by a bunch of funny cat videos having the words “orange cat” in it and is now part of social media SEO. Now every post about some colour of cat has to include the words “orange cat”.
The internet is dead, and Mark Zuckerberg killed it.
I’ve always said that memes are overrated
Western leftist blog post -> We need Solidarity
The institution that brought down the Russian-backed regime in Poland wasn’t a campaigning group like the ones we have in the anglosphere (and I’m sorry, Marxist-Leninists, but most of what you do in the anglosphere falls into this category). It wasn’t a vanguard party, and it wasn’t a militant group. It was Solidarnośc, an independent trade union, and there are important structural reasons for why a union was able to do this when nobody else could.
Hmm interesting. Let me look up Solidarnosc. From Wikipedia of all sources:
[Solidarnosc] ”), is a Polish trade union founded in August 1980 at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk, Poland.[1] Subsequently, it was the first independent trade union in a Warsaw Pact country to be recognised by the state.
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) transferred around $2 million yearly in cash to Solidarity from 1982 onwards, for a total of $10 million over five years.
Like clockwork lmao
Sometimes Bad People™ (like Voldemort) do Good Things™ (like instituting long term broad-spectrum nationwide policies to raise the standard of living realtively equitably)
China is doing the long-con. They’re gonna help the whole world via global influence, only to turn around and help them transition from an exploitative system to a mutually beneficial, cooperative one. No wait, um. They’re going turn around and after helping over a billion people be more self-sustaining and collectively empowered, they’re gonna suddenly… start doing the opposite without changing anything about the existing power structure and the mechanisms in place that would make that next to impossible! turns out the lights Wooooo waves hands Chiiinaaa
things are more complicated than a children cartoon!
describes things as good vs evil
Gold medalist for Olympic mental gymnastics
Is this the Chat of Iran?
Err, I mean…
This is a Wendy’s
WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?!
There is no escaping the toxic behavior on Reddit. Not even on gardening subs
Or I am the toxicity.
You’re Guevara, kween
You slay.
Slay.
I think you’re right on the first part. Reddit long had problems, but pretty sure they got worse since the whole fiasco with sub shutdowns from mods organizing to protest API changes that would wreck third party apps and some mods got booted off subs by admins as a result of keeping their subs shut down for prolonged periods. There are probably subs that are significantly worse in how they’re run since then, cause of different people doing it and them presumably being more bootlicker mindset to be someone who’d take over in that situation. I don’t know the details of the damage done after the controversy died down, but in broad strokes, it can’t have been good.
Any social site that has wide main-stream appeal tends to be pretty awful.
Intrigued boy/girl
Content content content content content I swear to god if I hear that word one more time I’m going ballistic. 90% of the time, people use the word to mean “videos” or “posts.” Is “youtuber” a slur now? God I’d rather hear slurs than “content creator” another fucking time. Why tf does everyone talk like they’re suits in a stock meeting?
I loathe that term too. It makes no sense grammatically. “Content” of what? This is not a word that is supposed to be used on its own, it’s a word to specify that something is contained within something else. As in, the contents of a box, a bag, a letter, etc. The use of the term “content” as a standalone word is an awful corporate-speak neologism. It’s also way too broad in its current use, it can literally mean anything posted on the internet. It’s stupid and i hate it.
Yeah! I don’t know why the vaguest possible word caught on. Now it’s just a formal way of saying “things.” If you care so little about what you’re creating that you can’t even describe it, just call it what it is: slop. Ugh it’s so frustrating how the most disinterested business jargon imaginable is the new normal. It’s one thing for shareholders to describe their cash cows as “stuff makers” because of course they would. But why on earth are people choosing to call themselves that instead of, idk, photographers, video editors, writers, artists?
I don’t know if I can quite put my finger on it as a generalization, but there’s this way some people on the western internet talk about products, maybe more of a USian thing and extends to political thinking too, where it’s like they have no sense of bargaining or negotiating in them; they view it like you’re supposed to just take things as they are and deal with them without complaint. Maybe it’s a side effect of rugged individualism? And of having a business culture where prices are kind of just set by major corporations and you deal with it?
Like some of these people will go to great lengths to defend the corporate side of things and talk like you’re odd if you don’t immediately cave to the terms a corporation has set out for you. It’s so weird. I know there isn’t really a haggling culture in the US, like there is in some countries, but the degree some of these people go to in the opposite direction baffles me.
Do you think it relates to the western tendency to treat capitalism and “the economy” almost like deities? I find a lot of people who behave like you mentioned tend to treat it almost like these prices have been Divinely Ordained by the Holy Free Market or something.
That’s an interesting thought. Could be. I haven’t looked into it enough to be confident that’s what people are doing, but I could believe it.
I finally finished Invincible. I feel…empty, great comic though
Wolves have returned to The Netherlands (and Belgium) and it is a shitshow lol. People are panicking, farmers are angry. But dogs, for example, make far more victims in humans and cattle than wolves do. There hasn’t even been a wolven attack on a human yet but some parties want to kill them. There is absolutely no wilderness in this country at all because farmers took every single inch possible.
At least Belgium has some rooms with Wallonia existing.
That story is so depressing man. I want vengeance on humanity’s behalf. Every Israeli should do forced labor rebuilding Gaza post liberation. It’s the only fractional just punishment I can think of that wouldn’t turn me into a psychopathic zio myself.
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I am so fed up with some of our American peers trying to posture their ideology online by being uppity with Bernie and AOC’s work in the states.
They are actively engaging with large amounts of Americans all over inviting them to be more combative against billionaires, bloody American leftists should be utilising this moment to drive as many in those pockets even further left.
I am confident the supermajority of us completely disagree with most of Bernies foreign policies, from the illegal bombing of Yugoslavia to supporting the existence of Israel, we do not need to agree with them to utilise the moment they are creating to garner more support.
We are in unusual times and more people every day are beginning to realise the apparatus of their government is falsely presented as reliable, their checks and balances are clearly purchasable thanks to the way Elon has chosen to operate as of late. They also understand that their country, unless change comes around, is always 4 years away from being like this again, since the dems will. not. change. Most people know this new makeover the democrats are peddling around is just neoliberalism again.
Falling to puritan culture right now will get us nowhere and would be the ultimate shame, American leftists need to seriously begin siphoning off this movement Bernie and AOC are making to further left wing foundations because right now a healthy amount of people have finally realised that not just the fact that they cannot rely on the two party system, but that there are enough people discontent with both options to consent the existence of a third party.
This is a moment in history where the left need to grab hold of power and not let go, enough with this purity test garbage, there are bigger problems.
They’re sheepdogs. They could use their platforms to support revolutionary parties and figures. Instead they’ve individualized the US-Zionist sins to Trump/Netanyahu and offered Democratic politics as the only solution for naive young people once more. They had their uses years ago, but there current role is apparent. Fuck them and the immense damage they continue to do to the revolutionary left.
You are right, they’re conflating all the woes in the states to one man is like blaming Hitler singularly for the rise in fascism over in Germany, it goes against reality and if I’ve learned anything about Germany from the 50’s to now that means they are trying to sell me something I don’t want. Thank you for running it down to me.
I get that we gotta be tactful in the way we try to convince their sincerely-minded fans away from their grift, but at the end of the day in discussions among communists, they deserve nothing but venom.
This is wrong thinking. While American comrades should be willing to give critical support for policies that burnie and aoc have those few policies are practically non-existent and consistently sacrificed in exchange for personal political gains. Those ideas are not aoc or burnie’s ideas they just grabbed onto them. You can support the policy while disparaging people who claim to support them.
It is not a purity test. There is nothing there to purify. Lauding them for their “progressive” policy ideas (that don’t go anywhere) is picking corn kernels out of a pile of shit and presenting them as gold. They are not comrades. They are tools of the capitalists through and through.
It is better to engage with supporters of aoc and burnie and show them why the little they offer is a) not enough and b) a trap to keep people from seeing there is no voting their way out of capitalism. I am 99% sure that aoc is a fbi or cia operative instilled to lure younger progressive voters into voting democrat and I am almost as sure that burnie is the same.
The part that many leftists get wrong (myself included) is our attitude and tone when trying to communicate these ideas. We often come off as combative and talking down and that is unhelpful 99% of the time.
Thank you so much for breaking it down for me <3 your corn and shit analogy is 100% right and if anything it only shows how desperate I have got for positive change as of late. I’m glad I wrote my comment, thank you for slapping some sense into me. The final paragraph and sentence I agree with fully.
I guess it gets hard accepting the insistence of capitalism and more so how heartbreaking it is to see people’s discontent towards capitalism over there go towards individuals or worse to bring back “norms”
Bernie and AOC have demonstrated that they will compromise on their “principles” ( if you even consider them that) to fallback to the Democratic party line. Putting our support in them is not a way to move their supporters to the left, but for them to move leftists to the right.
I think AOC is just a careerist, and Bernie is genuine, but functionally they are the same. I think of it similar to the SPD in Germany during the late 1910s and how it compromised with the bourgeois which killed any real revolution from happening.
Bernie wants billionaires to “pay their fair share” and then what? Is that really the root of the problem? They start paying more taxes and everything becomes fine for us?
I think in order to move people further left, we have to break their trust in AOC in Bernie. They have to see that there is no politician out there that actually is fighting for their interests, and their salvation lies in their own hands and they must organize.
Edit: oops I meant to reply to your other comment
If I am a dipshit, someone tell me why because I literally cannot see why now is the time to not make use of what we can. Americans have had a planned economy before and had their knee on billionaires necks back last century clearly it’s possible for a transitional socialist America to exist. Why am I stupid? Why are some online leftists engaging with the public with such an uppity manor in regard to this moment?
Bernie is a zionist, he thinks the only issue is netanyahu…which is remotely not true. This is coming from someone who cast the only vote of his life for him and embarrassingly convinced others to do so to. Also gave money to him and now I want a refund. Bernie just gives up to the DNC at the slightest hint of adversity and he is an imperialist. That latter part is unforgivable. Being antiimperialist is a minimum requirement and I don’t care about the imperial core more each day. I don’t care if people backing a genocide get Healthcare. Sorry
I volunteered for his campaign and actually have a picture with the ghoul. I feel your pain.
Comrade Jones put it nicely into a metaphor
Lauding them for their “progressive” policy ideas (that don’t go anywhere) is picking corn kernels out of a pile of shit and presenting them as gold. They are not comrades. They are tools of the capitalists through and through.
You’re right, during this important moment they are sinisterly conflating all the sins of the apparatus towards singular individuals, they’re trying to pull the same “denazification” trick the Nazis did in Europe after the war to give itself a friendlier makeover. I mentioned it somewhere else, but truly I think I’ve just been getting in my own head, so thank you for also slapping some sense into me <3
Every word you said was true, thanks again <3
For sure, I like lemmygrad because it’s very open to learning and I have changed a lot of my opinions here too. Thanks for operating in good faith.
Finally found a movie theatre playing Nezha 2. It’s in the neighboring country but the drive isn’t too bad. So my wife and i have decided we are going to see it this week.
