Welcome again to everybody! Make yourself at home. Is anyone reading this? In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is our weekly discussion thread!
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In 1907, a peasant uprising erupted across Romania. […] The Conservative government was replaced by a Liberal one on 12 March, which declared a state of emergency. Concerned that infantry regiments might sympathize with the rebels, the Romanian Army primarily relied on cavalry and artillery regiments to fire on peasant crowds, leaving thousands dead and wounded.
[…]
Liberals courting peasant voters, who now made up most of the electorate, blamed social, economic, and political problems on Jews to divert anger away from the party’s failure to deliver on promises of a better life in Greater Romania. The reality that many Jews barely eked out a living in rural towns or working-class slums was irrelevant.
(Source.)
Why does North Korea is the target of bullshit Claims by radio free asia ? Why does North korea is being sanctioned by the Western regime ? Why is there so much Western regime ships entering north korean waters ? Why cant North koreans be potrayed as normal by the MSM ? Why cant North Korea has peace if these Western regimes had stopped interrupting The DPRK ?
Sigh
Why Cant they leave north korea alone peacefully ?
The genocide of Koreans is one of the U.S.'s greatest crimes and the imperial project could be put in peril if westerners understood this
Because they are a communist nation, at war with the ROK (and therefor the US), that has nukes.
i’m guessing because ever since the korean peninsula got split during the cold war (and before then), the dprk has always been portrayed as evil by the us (and the rok)
but yeah :( the dprk is consistently portrayed to be a totalitarian dystopia, even more so than other socialist states.
The Korean War never ended, literally. The US refuses to admit defeat which is why it has been denying peace talks again and again and again for the past seventy years.
Western media publishes bullshit in order to keep the bigotry alive. So that we feel justified for our inexcusable belligerence & accept the possibility of resuming the fighting.
It’s time for my seasonal allergies so I feel like breathing glass shards for a week or two
I love you, trees, but why you have to do me like this?
Time for air to become mustard gas, my eyes itch every second.
deleted by creator
Technically it’s not trees but your own body doing it, no?
why did a lot of socialists remove the bird on the flag (except for hoxha and bierut)
When they’re not working for the bourgeoisie, they’re smuggling illegal coconuts.
Not to mention the IPoAC standard. Who knows what kind of data they’re transporting.
🤣🤣
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Welp, it may not be my seasonal allergies 😭 multiple people at a party I attended Saturday have tested positive for covid. Going to do a test later today. If positive, it would be my first time in three years.
I did test positive eventually. Oh well.
Get plenty of rest and get well soon!
Will you have to go to work? It’s a bit death culty here, and people go to work with Covid 😒
Nope. If you’re feeling sick over here you have to get a doctor’s note (bit childish imo). But he gave me one for a week off and my place of work wouldn’t be able to do anything against it (not that they would, they are fine).
Better than nothing. Childish, I agree. Good that you have a reasonably supportive employer, too. There are too many petty tyrants who feel personally attacked when you can’t work due to illness:
“if you’re well enough to go to the doctor’s you’re well enough to go to work”
okay mate but this is contagious and fatal and have you heard of this technology called a telephone what means I didn’t have to physically visit a doctor to cough in her face about my contagious and fatal virus
There are a few managers at my place that think like that as well, but I just wave my Union card at them and that’s the end of it
Three years. Reading that gave me a heart attack. I hope you get to feeling better comrade.
I still haven’t had COVID. Luckily, my sister and I were able to convince my parents to agree to vaccinate us. It took several weeks of arguing.
I’m glad. I’m lucky to have been living alone when covid struck, so I got to make that choice instead of my batshit father. Still wound up getting it some months ago, though.
How do you download the book on z-lib?
Z-lib has a new way of accessing stuff after the old domain was seized. https://libreddit.garudalinux.org/r/zlibrary/comments/10w6kcq/mod_alert_message_from_the_team_zlibrary_is_back/
There’s also a shadow library search engine called Anna’s Archive that was created in response to the seizure. https://annas-archive.org/search
I’ve been thinking a bit about the next level of response to the climate crisis the last week. Popular protests haven’t been working up until now, so what will? Industrial sabotage?
Back where I’m from in the settler state known as Canada the government is constructing ever more pipelines with extreme and violent prejudice. I just read a post from a group of (I think they call themselves land defenders) who sabotaged some of the materials being used in the construction of a pipeline. Of course they run the risk of creating a environmental disaster, but they are also trying to stop an even bigger disaster in the most effective way they know how (after trying everything else and getting brutalized and tossed in jail for it).
Where I live now, in Germany, there have been multiple high profile protests over coal mines in the last decade, all to no avail. The public-private partnership of violence rushes in to make sure that the coal will be extracted and burned.
Even simple stunts like blocking traffic or splashing bank and oil company buildings with blood or red paint is met with a response I perceive to be counter-productive.
And yet we don’t have any time left. We have to stop burning fossil fuels yesterday. Extreme material conditions call for extreme responses, don’t they?
before getting rid of capitalism entirely, making capitalists suffer is likely the only way to make anything change, so I’d say industrial sabotage is justified in most cases
There have been industrial sabotage events in the UK over the last year or so which did seem to work. In the instances I remember the companies in question were arms manufacturers supplying Israel. Of course protests, calling your elected representative, etc (doing things The Right Way TM) doesn’t work, but sneaking into the factory overnight and busting their machines certainly puts an end to things. At least temporarily.
This is the famous pinata economy, beat rich people with sticks till money come out
Have you read any Andreas Malm? Good little book, Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency, is good. He has some short lectures on YouTube, too. He argues what you’re arguing.
I’ve heard the name. Will add to my reading list.
My life was doing relatively well until I remembered I have a 2nd grade aunt I never met that lives in the illegal settler state of occupied Palestine 💀
Accidentally revealed myself as a Marxist to a liberal colleague. Now he wants political discussions.
Discussions? Or does he want to tell you why you’re wrong?
Well he claims the former. We’ll see. I’m not really used to such things. I.e. the fellow asked for a “definition of liberalism as per Marxism”, after I said that “humanity above all” was not really what liberalism is about. And what am I supposed to do? Try to explain how liberalism is still capitalism and thus reactionary? It’s going to be difficult without the appropriate understanding of diamat
I see, I see. Not that you’re asking for advice but, while we’re here…
It’s an opportunity, at least. And if you’ve managed this long to stay friendly, if you continue with that, you can plant some seeds.
In this situation, when someone sees liberalism as progressive and as separate to capitalism, I go back to the classics. If you can prompt him to read the founding theorists in good faith, there’s no other conclusion.
The ‘classical liberals’, like the ‘whigs’, are often referred to as a kind of pure liberal who are not tainted by the failures of modern capitalism. This allows people to call themselves classical liberals and detach liberalism from the capitalism they have experienced and can see is problematic. But the neoliberals start with all the same premises. The neoliberals even call themselves classical liberals (or they used to, at least—I’m thinking of Hayek and Berlin).
I tend not to start with Marx. I insist on looking at their ideological roots (i.e. the liberal’s) and highlight the contradictions. Then I go to Marx and show that Marx(ists) begin with these contradictions and ask, ‘Now what?’ it doesn’t always go to plan; liberalism does not encourage self-reflection and the ideology simply apologises for all it’s bad features as if those things would happen whatever the political economy.
This could be a good starting point in your situation because Marxists don’t have their own definition of liberalism, they instead ask what liberals think liberalism is. I think don’t liberals have fully accepted the idea that Marxism is a utopian ideology that is entirely based in the ‘after capitalism’. Liberals need to be taught that Marxists are criticising the conditions of today (which becomes clearer by putting today in context by looking first at the past).
I’m not sure if this is helpful, but I hope so.
Thank you
My condolences. I got my midterm back yesterday where I basically wrote my own version of the communist manifesto and I’m terrified to look at the comments he wrote lol
I feel that!
The Italian Marxist internet archive puts Mao in the “non-Marxist reference archive” anyway, gotta love trots
It’s somehow snowing at my house in LA right now. The fact that climate change deniers still exist is appalling. They’re literally denying reality.
I read some comment today saying Twitter is effectively keeping down public outrage because people are now mean tweeling about stuff instead of going into the streets, and it has been stuck in my head ever since
Why join a political organization when you can just argue with someone on that organization’s reddit? Why go out and canvass if you can just make a change .org petition? Why learn valuable skills that are difficult when you don’t have to get up off your couch?
Doubled with the fact that the majority of people in the US work 50+ hours, have no sick time, vacations, and time off, and have no time to themselves to begin with to even deal with minor chores like doctors visits, bills, cleaning, and cooking. It is a very effective way to suppress the proletariat, exhaust them to the point of burnout and fatigue. Then give them an easy way out with social media.
This new Scott Adams drama is doing a great job of showing off just how easy racist white people have it now. Normally when someone gets “cancelled” for being a bigoted piece of shit, they just fall off the radar. Not Scott, suddenly Twitter is abuzz with “13/50” memes and plenty of “Oh woe is me, they treat us whites so bad” posting.
Then these same people will turn around and be shocked that minorities don’t trust them.
It’s like that time Gordon Brown, of all people, had to apologise for calling a bigot a bigot: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2010/apr/28/gordon-brown-bigoted-woman. The result is that he ended up appeasing the right and having to accept the framework that it’s okay to blame Eastern Europeans for British problems just so he didn’t seem rude to a Labour voter.
The media knows exactly what it’s fucking doing. It’s a well oiled machine for pushing the public rightwards and dismissing any ‘progressive’ thought as impolite. And the liberals fall for it like suckers, every single time.
The only question I have is why wasn’t Adams “canceled” ages ago.
Another day, another happy hour of needing to hear about how China bad.
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