Just because you aren’t used to hearing about the vast reality beyond the propaganda bubble you’ve (knowingly or unknowingly) confined yourself to, that doesn’t mean that something you encounter outside of that bubble that contradicts it isn’t factually the truth. If anything, as a rule of thumb, it’s more likely to be closer to the truth if it contradicts whatever narrative nonsense you’ve been swallowing from any given large western media news outlet.
Bro, learn to read paragraphs. My comment above is literally made up of two of them of very normal and standard size. Have you ever read a book? Paragraphs written in places other than twitter or reddit tend not to be broken up arbitrarily every 2 sentences like it seems you wanted me to do.
The question is why won’t you condemn the aggressor and stop putting the onus of peace on the people who are being murdered by an aggressor?
The people being murdered… Oh, you mean the Russian-speaking population of Eastern Ukraine? The ones who the openly fascist banderite government (that coupe’d the democratically elected government in 2014) were trying to ethnically cleanse when Russia stepped in and prevented it? Yes, I do support those people of Donbas, and seeing as they support Russia, you should too if you care about innocent people getting murdered. Similarly, I condemn the aggressors, the aforementioned banderite Ukrainian fascists and their NATO backers.
I’m not the person you were asking, but yes, I also support the people of Western Ukraine, the vast majority of whom do not want to fight in this war but are being press ganged, literally kidnapped off the street by the Ukrainian government and shipped off to be cannon fodder and die on the front line. I fully support them and advocate for the immediate end of this war so that no more of them will die needlessly in this senseless meat grinder that NATO and the Ukrainian government insist on perpetuating despite their inevitable loss. If you care about human life and if you care about justice, then you would completely support Ukraine immediately accepting this peace offer. If you think human life is cheap (especially if it’s foreign to you) and that Ukrainian working class people are expendable and should go ahead and die for the sake of lines on a map that favor western countries, then yeah, that would be in line with cheerleading for the Ukrainian government and opposing the offer of peace.
Nah, there was never any point where Russia was going to lose this unless countries other than Ukraine joined in with more than just grift money and weapon donations but with actual troops on a large scale (beyond just small scale mercs that are easy to deny). And fortunately that wasn’t too likely to happen because even the most belligerent NATO warhawks knew it would be seriously risking global nuclear war. So many internet armchair generals, mostly NAFO dipshits but plenty of Russia-aligned SMO-watchers too, were (and are) way too focused on the lines on the map, the fine details of kettles and who held what small towns, etc, all without recognizing the bigger picture: long term attrition. In that sense, Russia has always had the upper hand by a large margin. That’s not going to change either. Russia is, as you say, “slowly getting the upper hand,” in the more obvious ways but this was always what was in the cards and it’s just going to continue in that same inevitable direction. The only way Russia will lose this war is if there is some major change in how things are set up on the global stage.
Also it’s not really true to say that Russia is asking for more than they hold because even if some areas are still contested, Ukraine has no chance of hanging on to them. As others have noted, this is a very generous offer and I expect it’s only being made because Russia is plainly aware that Ukraine will not accept it (in fact Ukraine cannot accept it because those who fund them, those who are using Ukraine as their proxy and who are ultimately responsible for all this, wouldn’t allow them to). That’s the only way in which this offer is “dishonest,” if you consider it dishonest for Russia to propose a plan they know full well that there isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of Ukraine accepting.
Yeah, something of that proportion could not be kept secret even if all NATO member states were all in total agreement and unity and even with the avowed silence of high officials. It also would at least partially defeat the purpose of NATO if a state joining it were to be kept secret.
That’s right! We have to make sure the very last Ukrainian dies in a meat grinder before we even think about agreeing to these completely reasonable, even generous peace terms. Wait, what’s that? Russia will have even better leverage and grounds to demand even more concessions the longer this conflict goes on and the further Ukraine gets beaten back? Damn, oh well who cares? As long as western arms manufacturers can keep their grift going a little longer and a few more Eastern Asiastics get taken out, it will be well worth it, right guys?
Lol. I wouldn’t have been surprised by this kind of blatant cope a year or two ago. Those cringe lies about Russians not knowing how to fight or having inferior tech were all the rage among the NAFO losers at the time. Of course it was all projection even then, but now that Russia is so obviously and thoroughly spanking Ukraine, it’s much harder to phrase the “Russian orcs are dumbdumbs who fight with shovels!” line without doing a massive self-own.
And speaking of self-owns, it’s pretty funny that you insist on bringing up a completely unrelated topic where you were totally not owned by people who schooled you in an attempt to disabuse you of your willful ignorance regarding Tienanmen Square. But it looks like you won’t even believe your vaunted western liberal sources when it comes to making sure you don’t have to take your head out of the sand.
edit: Looks like I was a little late to reply to this one. Does anyone know if a user still sees responses to their comment if the reply was made after the parent comment was removed?
While we’re at it… I know there can only be one clock as the site default, but I always thought it would be kind of cool to also have a Beijing clock and Havana clock. I’d say Pyongyang too, but it’s only one zone away from Beijing.
For what it’s worth, I agree with you on almost all of that. I think the main difference here is that I see the labor theory of value as being much more fundamental to Marxism than just, as you put it, one facet of it. It’s very difficult to keep Marxism as a whole if you toss out the LToV, since the whole structure would begin to crumble. It may be possible for similar models to be put in its place to prevent the crumble, but I think that those models would have to be close enough to the LToV that the distinctions wouldn’t really matter except to academics. (edit, fixed a word)
Yeah, any non native government is a fraud. Everything the US does, China and any other “super power” has committed as well.
Lifting over 800-million people out of abject poverty and all but eliminating homelessness is fraud?
I’m not anywhere near an expert on history,
That is very apparent.
but when one regime is held up higher than another regime,
Yes, all governments, no matter whether they’re fuedal monarchies, capitalist “democracies” that funnel all wealth directly to the bourgeosie while millions starve, or socialist revolutionaries employing the mass line consistently proving they are made up of and represent the working class with 95% approval of the population… all of those are “regimes” and everyone knows that “regimes” are equally bad.
we forget that they got there through blood and murder.
If a people rises up and kills the landlords brutally holding them in de facto slavery, then the blood and “murder” of those landlords is good actually, and so is the resulting government formed by those people. (And just so we’re clear, that is not sarcasm. My previous sentence about “regimes” was.)
Yes, I know the article was on infrastructure, but there is a whole intricate world where everything is connected in one way or another.
It’s almost as if you have to have an understanding of the material circumstances of a given country to have a fucking clue what you’re talking about regarding them!
Uyghurs are just one population that have existed on this planet.
You don’t say!
And yes, I’m sure there are some ethnic Uyghurs who are doing just fine.
Not just “some.” The Uigher population as a whole is thriving in China.
You can easily find a video where a north Korean defector is claiming how much better north Korea is compared to the US.
And they would be right. North Korea is substantially better than the US in almost every way.
Eh ltv isn’t really Marx’s and if it were it would be one of his many significant contributions to various fields.
Marx may not have been the first theorist to come up with it, but the LToV is still foundational to most of the economic theory that did have its origin in his work. Furthermore, Marx did make contributions to the LToV itself, and in that sense it is one of his significant contributions to various fields.
It’d still be reasonable to call yourself a Marxist if you ascribe to other parts of his framework, especially in specific academic contexts. And in revolutionary contexts I doubt most non-academic revolutionaries fully understand the mechanisms laid out in Capital, so it seems inconsequential really.
A person doesn’t need to fully understand evolution by natural selection to consider themselves a Darwinist (biologically speaking, obviously I’m not talking about social Darwinism here). But if they reject evolution by natural selection as the mechanism for the diversity of species, then they are not Darwinists. Similarly, you don’t have to be able to explain the LToV let alone its nitty-gritty details, but if you claim that the theory is false, you probably shouldn’t be calling yourself a Marxist revolutionary.
Class analysis doesn’t inherently require ltv either.
Class analysis requires a mechanism for how one class exploits another economically, a mechanism that the LToV provides.
I do think ltv makes more sense than modern models, but Marx was basically using bourgeois theory to critique itself,
And that critique is what extended it beyond being merely bourgeois theory.
and arguably the same can be done using the more abstract modern models.
Maybe so. But are those models refutations of the LToV or elaborations on it? In either case, do you have examples?
Fuck yes! 
but none of that is relevant to what OP asked
It’s relevant to what you were saying the problem was with OP’s predicament, which you were wrong about.
but that is not the case for basically every other person who takes up the sport.
It was for me. Doesn’t matter if it’s not the common rock-climbing experience (and I’d bet it’s more common than you realize). It still shows that your reasoning for why people tend to be alone is completely vapid. The fact remains, a person can take up rock climbing and have such a hobby that never alleviates their loneliness no matter how serious they get about that activity and no matter how self-actualized they become. Your original statements to that effect are nonsense and it’s unfortunate you can’t seem to just accept that and try to be better about it in the future.
It so happens that Alex Honnold now often climbs with friends and has many videos where he does so, but it’s because he addressed deeper issues, overcame systemic obtacles our capitalist society erects that especially impede neurodivergent people with social difficulties, and made efforts to put himself into social situations, not because he took up the hobby in the first place. His solitude was not because he was failing at “pursuing self-actualization by cultivating special interest or hobby skills” because he has been able to do that in a way to a greater degree than most humans ever will. He was also fortunate enough to eventually get so good and proficient at his solitary “hobby” as to be financially self sufficient and relatively well-off, things that make it infinitely easier to overcome the social alienation we all experience under capitalism but that hit people with social anxieties and certain personality disorders much harder (which is part of why what you said is in fact ableist). Like countless other people, he spent many years being deeply passionate about an activity, finding himself through it, but still lived an intensely solitary lifestyle. He was living out a van all by himself and without any other home, traveling to wherever he wanted to climb at that moment.
Whether that’s common or not, (and I’d argue it’s quite common to have many hobbies and interests but still struggle with isolation and loneliness) it puts the lie to what you said about the problem so many people have with meeting others, even having to ask how to do so or to interact in social settings, being due to their failure to self-actualize or develop interests or hobbies. It’s a sweeping ableist generalization based in ignorance. And then you doubled down on it in an even more derogatory way when muslimmarxist correctly called it out. Just… 
Article is paywalled by the way
Article now un-paywalled: https://archive.is/KxDP6 
More ‘interesting’ visual data there as well as some cringe comments!
If you are doing those you tend to encounter & attract kindred spirits fairly easily.
This is wrong and bordering on victim-blaming.
doing literally anything to make yourself not the most boring person imaginable
And now you’re not just bordering on it anymore. Muslimmarxist is right, this is Jordan Peterson level garbage. I have always had many hobbies and am interested in more things than I have time to even begin to explore with the kind of depth I’d like to (without cutting into the time I devote to other interests and passions). Even so, I have in the past and for extended periods had tremendous difficulty meeting people due to extreme social phobia.
Implying that people who suffer from loneliness aren’t pursuing self-actualization or aren’t cultivating their interests is a form of ableism. While it is possible that a lack of interests could be why someone is lonely, in most cases it has nothing to do with it. It’s like saying “the reason you don’t have a job is because you’re lazy.” Like, maybe? but just as likely not, and it serves as another thought-terminating cliche that people privileged enough to not suffer from that problem can tell themselves to avoid recognizing the deeper and more pernicious systemic issues. Just as a person can have no hobbies but still be very social and outgoing, a person can have numerous and profound passions but no friends.
In addition to that, many (even most?) hobbies can be done either socially or completely in solitary. Sometimes a hobby that a person is passionate about can even take up so much of their time and attention that they lose social skills and opportunities for social interactions. It’s a little ironic that you used rock climbing as an example because I was recently watching some Alex Honold (who is probably the world’s most famous rock climber at this point) interviews where he said that he developed his love of rock climbing because it was something solitary that he could go off and do on his own, being a friendless introvert who had trouble relating with people around him. Please don’t reinforce the potentially harmful misconception that lonely and isolated people are that way because they just don’t have enough interests, or even that developing more interests will somehow help alleviate that loneliness and isolation. Neither are remotely true.
Absolutely. Could not agree more.
But the US isn’t getting everything it wants and it is in decline. It’s flipping its shit as China continues to slowly eclipse it economically. Its loss of its proxy war in Ukraine (that it was so certain it was going to win) is imminent. Its iron-gripped stranglehold on South America is weakening while it’s having to cannibalize its vassals in Europe just to try to maintain falling rates of profit. All of this (and more) is a clear indication of the emergence of a multipolar world that the US thought it could prevent from ever happening. Israel also can’t survive without a strong US supporting it, and there is a real possibility this (inshallah!) could be its terminal crisis. These are conclusions that many communists analyzing the situation from a materialist framework have come to, and that doesn’t mean they’re trying to dismiss the west’s complicity. Pointing these things out doesn’t make the genocide that the US and Israel are perpetrating any less heinous or that that genocide will end up being any less thorough. It definitely doesn’t mean that any thinking, feeling person should not be doing everything in their power to stop the genocide.
Generally yes. It can vary depending on a person’s specific circumstances and what kind of health issues they have and what they’re trying to accomplish. But by and large, reasonable intermittent fasting (like OMAD) can be very healthy and helpful for people.
edit: I wrote quite a bit in this older thread defending it against a naysayer if you’re interested.
Alternatively, if you’re in California, you can commit a “crime” and get caught then thrown in prison for it. After which, if you qualify, you can fight fires and risk your life for literally pennies per hour ($2 - 5 per day) and a possible reduction to your sentence. However, if you do that, it may still be very difficult to get a regular job firefighting even once your sentence is complete:
California is Still Failing Thousands of Ex-Inmate Firefighters
What Does California Owe Its Incarcerated Firefighters? (archive of The Atlantic)
If you want to read further but past hexbear discussion on the topic of “Uncle Ted,” he was talked about quite a bit around here when he died a year ago. I remember a couple threads where people were debunking the mythology you’ll sometimes see portraying him as a kind of based anarchist. I can’t seem to find the exact one I was thinking of, but here is another with 100 comments.