Juvenile behaviour, probably from the US, a country without universal healthcare. Demsocs have been worthwhile tactical allies in many social reforms all over the world, even if our strategies don’t align. Mamdani is at best another example of this, and at worse another coopting of the movement name. He’s not even a big demsoc name, at least criticise (actual demsoc) Jeremy Corbyn or (socal-liberal fake) Bernie Sanders for good examples of modern demsoc failures.

Besides, factually, social-liberal theory is theory. It’s just incorrect theory, as evidenced by Allende’s charred corpse.

Show them reporting from Liberation News and Fight Back News, for a start. Also the Abby Martin documentaries, and Yellow Parenti. I think there’s a whole Parenti Lecture podcast made by an user from here. Those are all good for broader anti-imperialism.

For Marxism specifically, Engels already perfected the introduction with Principles of Communism. Vijay Prashad’s videos and interviews are fairly accessible to broad audiences. And if they get too curious, you can feed the Wage Labour and Capital, and Value, Price and Profit but at that point you’re better off just making a joint commitment to join some party together.

But most importantly, try to approach other active communists and socialists. If there are protests nearby, try to find out if the left acronyms (FRSO/PSL/CPUSA/DSA/etc/etc) are gonna be there and hang around together with them. It’s way easier when it’s humans talking to each other.

Insert here the joke about Communist Party of India (Marxist) vs Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist).

Not sure how much more work would be for @ksynwa@lemmygrad.ml to become moderator of the other three, but that could be an initial solution for lack of mods. I recall there was a post a while ago about a purge of dead comms, and I think it should apply for modless comms. Make them read only for a while and link the main one on the sidebar like for SRS-adjacent old comms.

Communal kitchen/popular restaurant and laundromat.

A huge amount of work is done inefficiently by “families” in their individual houseworks, usually as unpaid labour. A popular restaurant both makes food affordable for anyone, produces good employment and replaces the unpaid housework labour, and also produces a new third space for socialising. The same thing applies to the laundromat, to a lesser degree in labour but greater degree in water efficiency.

“Tyrants”. I suppose the rapist president Thomas Jefferson can’t be included because he was “democratically” elected.

The whole premise of this thing seems like it was cooked up by an intelligence agency after reading Edward Said’s “Orientalism”. Like those books by “journalists” claiming that Gaddafi had harems with thousands of women.

I got an impression he follows an MLM line. He’s fairly critical of anarchists and Trotskyists, but I haven’t seen him go after Stalin or Mao, only post-Deng China. Still find his work very useful, but it requires a lot of attention to separate the original text from his editorialising in some of his audiobooks.

Apparently it takes a whole separate high end GPU just to run this filter. The lipstick on the female character is the icing in the cake, it’s like the AI version of those “Alloy with Make Up” Horizon mods.

Lemmygrad as a whole is neither opposed to welfare systems nor against the lumpenproletariat. The first can sometimes be critiqued inside the imperial core, mostly due to being used as an escape valve for revolution, but that’s like saying one hates painkillers because they’d prefer surgery. The latter occupies a hyper-exploitable section of the population that – I say this without any moral judgement – makes them prime targets for recruitment into reactionary violent bourgeois forces (see Haiti’s Tonton Macoutes).

The lumpenproletariat (as a categorization) isn’t even that relevant in theoretical Marxist analysis nowadays due to the intensification of the international division of labour among other developments of global capitalism.

Nerds have no empathy with those they consider “uncivilized.” We cannot coexist.

MF on a fucking fediverse forum thinking they’re not a nerd too. Admit this is a bit, you nerd.

For Chinese, HelloChinese is pretty good.

Lev Bronstein is Trotsky’s birthname. I think they’re quite clearly a Trotskyist.

Yeah, the cookie. It has no milk or eggs and it’s a reasonably cheap snack for starter vegans still adapting their diet.

Do I keep eating soup broth or yogurt?

Probably, yeah. I think there are some light low-fat yogurts out there, but I personally don’t have any experience with that.

One of the most charming features of human communication is sometimes you get somebody saying “No. You’re wrong. Your question is wrong. [Insults]. Here’s 50 reasons why you’re wrong.” and you just have to live with that, read their reasons and dabble in the uncomfortable process of re-evaluating yourself and the other person’s arguments knowing full well they thought about it, probably even more than you. And they may even be in the wrong.

LLMs sadly have none of that. It’s not even just because of imperialist writing (though the training corpus is mostly English-language text scraped from the internet, with all its biases), it’s simply a byproduct of the interface: you ask, it replies. The incentive there is to maintain the interaction, not build towards some common goal. It’d be equivalent to trying to have deep conversations with an improv actor.

That’s an interesting question! The answer is: no. Talk to humans who are as curious as you about the subject.

Strongly disagree with both the sentiment and the effect of the post.

First off, the benefits for US citizens to go kill and die in foreign countries is marginal at best. They get to have a somewhat stable job for a couple years, get broken down and rebuilt by military ideology and then thrown back into civilian life, maybe with some missing limbs or psychological damage. After that they get healthcare sometimes and fake appreciation on the telly. The poster seems to have forgotten the second half of Parenti’s argument, “they’re sending our kids to die to line the pockets of the rich”. The rich don’t go to war, they send your unemployed son to war, and as reward he gets a cheap tin badge or an obituary, and you’ll be told that that’s good.

Secondly, whatever cruel behaviour exhibited by US soldiers is not simply a byproduct of inherent individual traits of the soldier, but are systemic. Every bit of kindness and sense needs to be systematically excised from the mind of the soldier as soon as he enters the training grounds because the US military in itself needs to be as cruel and bloodthirsty as possible. This does not absolve individual war criminals, but to understand it as part of a system of crime older than that soldier, that will outlive him long after he’s overextended his usefulness.

So as a sentiment, I think treating US soldiers as beneficiaries of war – rather than (lesser) victims of a broader economic system that treats the Reserve Army of Labour as just the Reserve Army – is misguided and inaccurate.

But with regards to effectiveness, one has to keep in mind that Parenti (et al) weren’t just saying things to seem morally correct and on the right side of history. They were actively engaging with the public opinion in order to fight back against those wars. There’s a tactic to the communication of showing that, not only the war is immoral and incorrect, but whatever benefits you think you’ll get from it are a lie. You will die, your son will die, and it’ll have been for nothing. Wars bring no benefit to the US working class. Without nuance, the counternarrative presented by the poster actually embelishes US wars and make them look justified from a selfish position. It’s incredibly counterproductive.

It takes an enormous amount of courage to actively resist drafts and the war effort from inside the war machine. You’ll be gaslit, slandered, attacked, arrested and maybe even murdered. And instead of joining you, some smartpants will just reproduce what amounts to war propaganda dressed in red/black and abstain from the struggle.

The vegan argument over eggs (and milk etc) is not over the egg’s rights (they’re usually unfertilized anyway), but over cruel conditions over the chicken producing that egg, or more radical positions over whether humans have the right to explore animals in general. I’m not vegan, and though I support vegans I strongly advise against going vegan while sick or mixing up your motivations for massive dietary changes. For instance, Oreo is technically vegan and a common dietary bridge for starting vegans, but your ulcer will get infinitely worse if you make that a usual snack in your life. Vodka is technically vegan…

Until you get better, focus on eating healthy food, not necessarily “moral” food. Its going to be a lot harder to become vegan if you end up needing to surgically remove a portion of your stomach walls.

I could go for fish meat, like shrimp.

Avoid crustaceans, but for entirely different reasons. They’re really dangerous for inflammations, including ulcers. When I say fish, I mean fish, either boiled in a stew or oven-cooked.

That’s not immoral, right?

Probably is immoral from a vegan perspective, but I’m not adivising you to go vegan, only to take care of your health. I think going completely vegan while sick would be a terrible idea, but you do you.

It’s a really bad look for folks still insisting that Ukraine is the correct side to associate defending it and criticising Russia with minimising this one. “What about the white people?” At least pretend to be consistent.

But here are some dead civilians in Ukraine to satisfy your urge to secure the future of white children or whatever: https://nexusnewsfeed.com/article/geopolitics/burned-alive-how-the-2014-odessa-massacre-became-a-turning-point-for-ukraine/

Some meats, like fish, are fairly low on fats, but you should avoid fatty foods in general. That includes peanut butter and the like, and fried stuff. Anything that’s heavy to digest. Also try to eat lots of fruit if you can (but remove the skin on apples and such), and fruit juices in bad days where your stomach can’t handle solid food.

Also, avoid milk and derivatives like the plague.

IIRC when Italy got hit pretty bad by Covid the Cuban doctors were absolutely essential to keep their healthcare system afloat.

The statement in itself or the organisations as a whole? Please link the statement next time.

https://www.cpusa.org/article/joint-statement-of-the-communist-parties-of-iran-tudeh-israel-cpi-and-the-u-s-cpusa/

IMO the statement in itself is fine for a domestic statement, but shouldn’t be made in collaboration with CPs of enemy states. Tudeh should be asking for their comrades abroad nothing short of the complete overthrow of their regimes. If Iranians are getting killed by your country, solidarity without risk of consequences is no solidarity at all.

I understand the gringo urge to be angry at communists abroad being critical of their reactionary but anti-hegemonic governments, but that’s just a byproduct of translation into English. If this little “strongly worded” text was only published in Persian it would be unobjectionable.

It’s really funny that “dark woke” Azov Something did a really thrash video giving horribly thrash dating advice while complaining that “the Left” failed “young men” (by not indulging their reactionary need to prove themselves as men through pick up artistry), when three years ago Shaun already did an actually quite good video giving advice for young men, including dating advice but also a lot of general self-growth advice. It’s like the embodiment of left-aesthetic reactionaries in video form, absolutely refusing to feel uncomfortable with their own internalised misogyny, pampering their male egos, and thinking they’re cured of all it just by declaring themselves “dark woke” or some other inane shit. He even opens the “advice” section pretending it isn’t solely dedicated to heterosexual men, like non-het non-male dynamics are just drop-in replacements. In Portuguese we even have a word for this kind of redwashed pick up artist, “Esquerdomacho” (lefto-male? “Sexism” in Portuguese is “machismo” so the word has that connotation too).

It’s gross, and the attached 91-page lefto-PUA manual is extra gross, but also funny in how bizarre it is. I feel every paragraph is huge screenshot-worthy “WTF”. Like “first dates only from Monday to Thursday”? My guy, what do you think is the point of weekends for employed people? Dreadful stuff.