I’m not sure! I haven’t seen any posting about this but I’m guessing it was a while ago

What i find most ironic is the seemingly pervasive idea that they could still win the war if the US just supported them. Which would have been proven true long ago if it were true at all.

Liberals on bluesky are having an absolute fucking meltdown right now, it’s incredible & annoying to watch

Agreed. Interestingly it seems to me that decolonial movements AND American imperialist pressure have cornered Europe into turning to green energy. I have found it incredibly ironic the past couple years that they’ve been celebrating reductions in emissions when it’s mostly a symptom of deindustrialization due to energy supplies being cut off.

Exactly. The US is shifting a lot right now, no wonder it’s so chaotic

I agree with your list. The sexual terms are so weird to me because the “sex positive” crowd uses it all the time & i thought sex positive meant sex was a good thing?

I fucking hate “based” as people use.it for the worst reasons & it means “i fully agree” at this point. I dont remember where based came from but “pilled” came directly from 4chan. To add, the template that looks like > statement > statement > statement is from 4chan too, & a lot of the (mostly ableist) meme templates that are poorly drawn stick figures are from 4chan. It’s honestly very disheartening to see how much of the internet absorbed 4chan culture considering how much of a cesspit it is.

The news argument terms, I feel like news publications picked them up from internet debate culture. YouTube annoys the shit out of me with their horrible thumbnails with caricatures expressions & then it feels like there always has to be a click baity title. I think this has a lot to do with the engagement algorithms unfortunately.

Thats a good point. Do you think the community organizing in & around Chicago has that sort of potential? Reading how they’ve reacted to the ICE raids, it seems like a drastic change.

Exactly. The juxtaposition between the NYC mayoral race & the establishment Dems acting on this just days after is pretty moving for popular discourse imo

Been saying this. The next shift that needs to happen as it pertains to consciousness in the US is the realization that the Dems don’t disagree with what he’s doing, they just think he’s taking it too far.

I think what’s most harmful in popular discourse currently is the assumption that the Dems are on the people’s side. It frames the conversation as Dems failing to react & “save” marginalized populations, not that they also represent the capitalist class & march to the same orders.

In my mind, accelerationism comes from the same thread of thought that adventurism comes from. It comes from an alienation from the masses & a certain amount of nihilism that leads us to believe the only way is for us to accelerate. Being isolated from people who think the way you do, especially about the way out, will also produce these feelings.

When I first understood communism as the solution, I tried to convince everyone around me. While I did convince people, it required a long & concerted effort over time. People in the US grew up their whole lives learning that communism was literally the fucking devil, even if logically it is the correct solution it is still going to be resisted. But when things get bad, those same people I tried to convince over time start to see it for themselves & they reach back out for answers. Your ability to convince people will not just be a quick conversation - establishing socialism in the US will be a generational project. The Soviet Union developed their project for arguably 20-30 years before the October revolution. China had a 30 year civil war before they won.

There is a fascist regime currently consolidating power wherever it can. There is more open defiance of the regime in power than we’ve ever seen before. There is plenty of energy to be redirected into organizing the masses & radicalizing people. This will continue - the degradation of material conditions will continue with or without you. The collapse will also come. But now is the time to put in the ground work so that people will look to you in the future.

Accelerationism increases the degradation of material conditions with no alternative. This simply leads to nihilism & creates a breeding ground for fascism. When the collapse comes, the means of production aka the way this society produces the things we need, will be degraded without an organized working force that can take control of it. These are the times when the masses can fight & take control, not react to & say “i told you so”. The qualitative change, aka the “collapse”, is the time for revolution - don’t you want to be ready?

Got it. Thank you

Is there any way to find out what policies they were protesting? I’ve only really heard Petro’s statements

I used to love Taylor Swift. She grew in popularity mostly during the 2010s, & in the early to mid 2010s was when I listened to her all the time. She had a general, ambient tone that was pretty & easy to listen to, paired with a nice voice & decent aesthetics. Most people could relate to her, & i was closeted at the time so I could “ironically” listen to her while fulfilling some need for femininity at the time.

Her generalized lyrics make it easy to project people’s own insecurities onto them & relate, especially with the deterioration of community in the US & elsewhere. A lot of people in the US coalesce around single artists & join their communities for support & friendship, & Taylor Swift fostered a parasocial relationship like that with her fans.

Taylor Swift is a pretty prototypical American white woman. She never really breaks the mold of the prototype, so she’s generally accepted among all sects of the population.

My problem with her is that as I grew, her lyrics didn’t seem to grow at all. She’s still writing for that lost teenage girl, even though she’s 35. She is less relevant culturally, imo, than she’s ever been. She gets more & more criticism with every album release because it’s not original (this new one’s cover is very much an attempt to be like Sabrina Carpenter). She’s lost & hasn’t been able to find any sort of new niche.

Agreed, I think bsky has been small enough to be able to play both sides without much criticism so far - on one hand, they can say the platform isn’t as toxic as the other (the other being owned by an actual nazi) & then on the other whenever there is legitimate criticism of their own moderation, they say they’re just system architects. One user said it’s like operating public transit & if a user criticizes, they replied with “well you can just get a car” & I tend to agree.

I think this is really just about the diminishing returns that we’re seeing from the reverberations of tech culture believing that they could build a piece of software that would fix the world’s problems. It doesn’t quite work that way, & the contradiction between the owners of these social networks & their content creators is quite sharp at this point. Once they create a solution that reproduces the same exact problems, they react with apathy & resentment as if they did their part & the users just can’t behave.

Ultimately for me it’s frustrating because while I learn most from lemmygrad about why the world is the way it is, I do enjoy being able to see the regular people on the internet, especially in the US. Seeing shit like this, even though it’s inevitable under a capitalist system, sucks.

This crashout has been really something. She posted again. She just can’t help herself

https://bsky.app/profile/jay.bsky.team/post/3m2c7ge42us2t

“Thus it comes about, to quote Marx, that machinery becomes the most powerful weapon in the war of capital against the working-class; that the instruments of labor constantly tear the means of subsistence out of the hands of the laborer; that the very product of the worker is turned into an instrument for his subjugation.”

“And to expect any other division of the products from the capitalist mode of production is the same as expecting the electrodes of a battery not to decompose acidulated water, not to liberate oxygen at the positive, hydrogen at the negative pole, so long as they are connected with the battery.”

“But,with the taking over by society of the productive forces, the social character of the means of production and of the products will be utilized by the producers with a perfect understanding of its nature, and instead of being a source of disturbance and periodical collapse, will become the most powerful lever of production itself.”

I read this not too long ago. Posting some highlights:

“Now, the owner of the instruments of labor always appropriated to himself the product, although it was no longer his product but exclusively the product of the labor of others. Thus, the products now produced socially were not appropriated by those who had actually set in motion the means of production and actually produced the commodities, but by the capitalists. The means of production, and production itself, had become in essence socialized. But they were subjected to a form of appropriation which presupposes the private production of individuals, under which, therefore, every one owns his own product and brings it to market. The mode of production is subjected to this form of appropriation, although it abolishes the conditions upon which the latter rests.”

“This contradiction, which gives to the new mode of production its capitalistic character, contains the germ of the whole of the social antagonisms of today. The greater the mastery obtained by the new mode of production over all important fields of production and in all manufacturing countries, the more it reduced individual production to an insignificant residuum, the more clearly was brought out the incompatibility of socialized production with capitalistic appropriation.”

“Are you scared?” Considering the fact that you hold the commonly held opinions of the western public I’ll just say that we’re used to the bullshit youre spewing. Why would we allow you to pollute our space too with your drivel when it can be seen on almost the entire internet, and in fact that same exact question has been asked here many times by similar people to yourself? Seems redundant if you ask me

Not only that, but he said that about his 10-year old daughter