Yeah like, the dean and administration of my uni are zionist as hell, but that doesn’t mean that every single student agrees with them. Quite the contrary. That’s what I meant by separating the people responsible for the email from the rest of the people at uni.

Some of you will also be a bit proud of me as for this class I actually put up my hand and answered a question!

very nice!

I don’t know much about Robespierre so I can’t say whether thats true or not; maybe someone here can weigh in.

Robespierre was a very weird guy. His actions are like endlessly debated in french revolution studies, so its hard to say what he wanted for sure. He did prefer a dictatorship to preserve the revolutionary government, and also was promoting a new religion, so people said that he wanted to be god also.

Of course I was vague

Yeah for icebreakers if you say something too vague it will just prompt more questions. I usually just stick to something simple like: “i want to understand the world better” or something

My professor was right, I do believe the “world” is out to get me.

I think if I were you I would try to separate the email experience that you had from the uni as a whole. As bad as it was, it was still just a limited group of people + your professor. I am sure there are many people in your position (and I know there are because you have mentioned them) who are not completely in agreement with the uni administration on politics.

thats not what disco elysium says though.

some of my fav lighter movies (a lot of the best films are war movies but maybe thats a bit too stressful for language learning):

• July rain https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37LJpExHdLQ
• Courrier https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZslzk4GEPI

Also I don’t know how to use semicolons, which is hilarious.

i tried to learn how to use semicolons once, even wrote a paper with a bunch of them. completely forgot afterwards lol.

the assignments are weird. There are no quizzes and there doesn’t seem to be a research paper, instead we are graded on a detailed research proposal, and each step is graded as we improve on it.

it is more or less stadard from what ive seen for longer projects, such as research proposals. it is easier to grade a bunch of small things during the year than grading few very long assignments at the end of the semester.

That sucks. Hope you can get a new job soon. Also on hexbear there’s a mutual aid comm that might help if you need some expenses covered.

I love to play pinball at the arcades. I have a couple of tables Im pretty good at, but yeah I would never buy them for myself.

Immersion is quite good as an addition to usual language studies. Thankfully there is a ton of soviet movies on YouTube, quite a few with English subtitles. I can send you a proper list if you want.

yay looking forward to your posts (if you are going to do any)! and feel free to let me know if you need any help with russian

anything degrowth related or written by Jason Hickel

Red Plenty I would say, though it leans more historical fiction

Sure, but machines cannot do troubleshooting the way humans can. Yes you can have machines tell you what’s wrong, but they cannot reason why a problem exists and how to fix it. There are too many random elements to account for, things that are impossible to account for even. This is why you still have car mechanics, even considering all the fancy telemetry that exists. In the same way, a computer program cannot debug itself.

Machines cannot do maintenance on themselves.

AI does not exist though, it is science fiction.

i agree with everything you said. but i do think that for people who dont think about politics every hour of the day, it is pretty normal to have somewhat contradictory opinions.

every regular european ive talked to in real life is very chill about russia. most people dont consume lib propaganda on an hourly basis, and even those that do can see through the hypocrisy.

Yeah the russian + ussr part of the class is not great.

Homophobia was/is prevalent in the upper classes but in certain countries (the west), queer people became very convenient and was used against those they plundered.

this only became the norm post 2000s however. The USSR re-criminalized homosexuality more due to the fact that they wanted to promote a nuclear heterosexual family. Post revolutionary family reforms (no fault divorce etc.) were causing a lot of stress on the soviet social welfare system, such as an increasingly large amount of orphans for instance. So the government decided to scale back reforms to bring household labour back into the family. Definitely was a step back in terms of gender equality and socialism in general, but it was a decision motivated by material conditions.

how could I, an undergrad student, ever legitimately critique someone with a PhD

You should critique someone with a PhD. A PhD doesn’t suddenly make someone flawless or invincible (do you know how many racists and misogynists hold PhDs??). And fellow Marxists should be critiques especially, since this is what makes Marxism as a movement stronger. Again, remember Mao.

if there are any “revolutionary” historians

I mean, writing about history is one of the main Marxist things to do. W. E. B. Du Bois comes to mind.

I definitely share your frustration with Western Marxism. Lenin has definitely been coopted by it already (see the book with Zizek’s introduction, or actually don’t do it because it sucks). Western Marxists just pacify any theory by detaching it from praxis.

Yeah geographic determinism is bizarre. Still really popular in liberal circles.