I think an exercise set to smoothen the learning curve is sorely needed. Apart from finding contradictions like the examples you gave, I think it would be useful to also know how to identify the forces themselves in a given snapshot of a given system.

This is just my perspective, but since everything is interconnected, it feels difficult to know where to delimit what constitutes a force whose contradictions you want to analyze with other forces. A force is a system in itself, with its own contradictions. How far do we zoom in or out? Maybe the answer is to just pick whatever suits your current needs, but it was confusing for me when seeing examples like plus/minus and water/steam. I thought “ok, so does this framework only apply to certain categories of forces, and if so, what criteria define these forces? Why water/steam, why not a contradiction between water at 40°C and water at 90°C? If there are no criteria, can I apply this to literally anything in the universe as a sort of master framework for understanding the world? Should math and natural sciences be restructured around contradictions?”.

I think we need to develop a sense for spotting contradictions that are useful to analyze for whatever problem we have at hand, and an exercise set could help build that. Or some heuristics for it, to make it even more explicit.

Yeah, something felt off throughout the whole video, even though the summary of Furr’s work seems decent. In the ending especially he says (paraphrasing): “maybe we should question the narrative we’ve been told about Nazi Germany and the USSR as these two evil totalitarian twins”

Yeah, so he shows some arguments debunking the mainstream view of Stalin, because there are facts to support this debunking, then he leaves the door open for his audience to… do the same about the nazis. Except you can’t do that, because the nazis really were that terrible. But it’s still going to embolden a lot of people to think the nazis were actually not that bad

I wouldn’t be surprised if this guy does a reverse double genocide theory

I can relate to that, most of my working life has been burnout after burnout. You ignore the signs for too long, then finally take a break when it’s too much, and then it all comes crashing down worse than you thought it would.

I hope you’re able to prolong your break somehow, I’ve found these things need a long time to go away. Although I know it’s rare privilege to be able to do that.

You can more or less extend that to Global South diaspora in the Global North

I don’t see this being any different from their past attitude, except they’re even more delusional now. They’ve basically compiled all the “China bad” disinformation tropes they’ve concocted over the years, and now they’re acting as if it’s a given they’ll outlast the PRC and they’re imagining how they’ll carve it up, when in reality this is already unlikely and, so far, only getting less probable over time.

The bar is so low I’m letting that one slide. They’re surely doing it on purpose anyway

Yup, that’s how they wrote it. It just makes it even harder to take the piece seriously

Yeah, if these turn out to be feasible and healthy, we could potentially produce at least an order of magnitude more food with a fraction of the climate impact. Mycoproteins are already quite widely available as meat substitutes and are cultivated in vats. I don’t know what’s the consensus on health impact though, presumably it can’t be too bad

This is an amazing achievement. It would be interesting to see if this yeast protein can be used to feed humans directly as well, that would be even better

I work an office job in what I’d say is an indefensible industry and I fucking hate it and my ghoulish coworkers. No chance organizing this workplace, class consciousness is completely absent and people are too busy enjoying their treats to care about anything else or see society collapsing around them. Even if they were to organize, they’d do it to gain a bigger share of the imperial pie, not due to any sort of activism.

More than working in a deeply unethical job, I think the reason to avoid these jobs is because you can’t effect any positive change here, there’s too much resistance, these will likely be the last holdouts of capitalism when the tide finally turns left in the West. Go somewhere else where you can organize a workplace and find people who are more receptive to Marxist thought.

I’m so surrounded by treatlerites that I’ve come to sound like an accelerationist. They’re all labor aristocrats and petty-bourgeois wannabes, so they’re not representative of the average person, but they’re so full of themselves and callous towards people having it worse than them, either at home or abroad in imperialized countries, that I just can’t fathom any other way for them to open up to left-wing ideas without their imperial treats being cut off first (although I’m sure the vast majority of them will end up going mask-off, as usual, and publicly embracing islamophobic/xenophobic/queerphobic discourse)

I wasn’t serious, although I expect many of those ghouls enjoy the coincidence. There are other more likely reasons they did it today - the 2 that come to mind being that stock markets are closed and this comes after the 2 weeks BS deadline from Trump. As for the time, I would guess they think it’s better to catch the defenders off guard, in both situations

Anyway, this line really doesn’t need to be entertained

I see Amerikkka likes picking auspicious dates

Christian white American capitalist

Even though his content is good, he’s always kinda given me bad vibes. I guess that explains it

That’s amazing! I remember being like that when I first became a leftist, the liberal/mainstream way of thinking was still fairly fresh in my mind, so it was easier to take these people’s concerns seriously because I guess I was more in touch with where they were coming from

If this one doesn’t self-censor on political topics, they should call it MiniMarx

Yet they’re probably the most anti-communist/anti-Soviet/anti-Russian countries in Europe. This is what the Soviet “occupation”, “colonization” or “genocide” looked like - privileged economic development. Are we supposed to believe they had it as bad as the average former colony of a European empire?

Of course, if you point the disparity in living standards with the rest of the USSR, they’ll just spit out some racist bullshit about how they’re superior and that’s how they achieved it, otherwise they’d have to admit their narrative is fiction. And if you ask them why their countries went to shit so bad after the fall of the USSR that so many of them emigrated, they’ll find a way to blame the Russians/USSR/communism. Eastern Europeans in general will probably blame the 50 or so years of socialism their countries had for all the problems they’ll be having for the next 100 years, just as they’re doing for the past 35.

I’ve never once met a Baltic person that didn’t give off reactionary or straight-up Hitler-loving vibes. And online they didn’t earn their “Reddit belt” moniker for nothing.

Imperialism really is the primary contradiction, isn’t it?

It seems to me these days many westerners admit that capitalism is the problem, yet they are completely fine with imperialism and hold chauvinistic views towards the Global South - even self-professed leftists. They’ve dissociated the two based on how they affect their material conditions: capitalism at home is a problem because their job sucks, they can’t afford housing, healthcare, brunch, etc., but capitalism abroad is fine because they’re in the imperial core and receive shiny treats for bargain prices.

As long as the West benefits from imperialism, the most a left movement can do here is force a more even distribution of the imperial spoils, which isn’t achieving much. Maybe I’m too jaded because of the circles I’m in, but I find it hard to convince enough people to go against their material interests so much that they’ll advocate for dismantling imperialism, unless they realize the subtler ways capitalism affects them negatively.

This was a long tangent to say that you did well and it’s just the nature of the topic (and I’m assuming the time of the year close to summer break) that caused your audience to act the way they did. Maybe you did plant a seed of doubt in some of your audience regarding the imperial narrative, but they didn’t engage for various reasons; the same way debunking right-wingers’ crap on social media might seem like a futile effort, but you’re probably making lurkers change their minds and move further left, and in time they may become comrades. Unfortunately these worldview changes take a long time.

Anyways, well done to you! You definitely picked a hard topic.

What I also find funny, besides China pulling the wool on the West like this, is that Vietnam seems to be doing the exact same thing (they now seem to be where China was maybe 20 years ago), and the West is falling for it again

It’s like they were asking for that essay