Late Stage Capitalism AgreeableLandscape • Now • 94%

The Indignity of Grocery Shopping

www.theatlantic.com

https://web.archive.org/web/20230624214638/https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2023/05/look-at-the-lights-my-love-annie-ernaux-book-review/674235/

US News AgreeableLandscape • Now • 100%

When Pregnancy Is the Crime: An exit interview with Lynn Paltrow, who has spent decades representing women jailed for miscarriages and stillbirths.

nymag.com

https://web.archive.org/web/20230624214433/https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/lynn-paltrow-pregnancy-justice-interview.html

nymag.com

https://web.archive.org/web/20230624214433/https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/lynn-paltrow-pregnancy-justice-interview.html

GenZedong AgreeableLandscape • Now • 100%

Do you think Jim Jones was an anticommunist plot by the CIA?

Probably a conspiracy theory, but it's so, SO on the nose. Some raging idiot pretending to be communist, talking not like Marx or Lenin but rambling like a stereotypical evil commie movie villain, buying a huge plot of land and starting a commune that had none of the actual characteristics of Marxist or Leninist communism, before killing everyone in a massive, extremely publicized group suicide. This was still in the red scare era too. Not saying he was a CIA agent or anything, but I'm thinking the feds saw what he was doing and were wilfully negligent in protecting people from him or potentially even egged him on because they saw this as an opportunity to instill fear about socialism and communism in the general public. That whole compound seemed extremely out of place for something that happened in the US, and we know that the feds have silenced real communists for much less, so it's really weird that they let it go on for that long if it wasn't intentional.

GenZedong AgreeableLandscape • Now • 100%

On civil disobedience, protest, strike, revolution, and "violating the social contract."

The definition of a contract is that it is a bilateral agreement. If one side fails to keep their obligations, the other side is no longer required to honour the contract either. So, even assuming that the "social contract" is a real thing, if the ruling class decides to intrude on the rights of the working class, the working class is no longer bound to it. They can and should be stirring up some shit in response.

GenZedong AgreeableLandscape • Now • 100%

Newspeak rant

Anyone who's studied the George Orwell novel 1984 want to explain to me what the fucking point of "newspeak" is and why it's not a strawman "we're gonna make the commies seem like supervillains and do random stupid shit for no reason" type trope? Because when has any prominent figure in socialism or communism ever suggested dumbing down language? Give me an example of a commie language reinvention please, 1984 is supposed to be the definitive manual on what happened under communism isn't it? Also detecting a hint of racism in that plotpoint because there really are real languages that evolved naturally where the positive and negative expressions are indeed structured as good, not good, very good, very not good, etc. Is it trying to say that people speaking those languages are bad at expressing their thoughts because it's not how English does it? Actually, Chinese is kind of like this with its use of pre/suffixes. Chinese is also one of the best languages for poetry and literature. Source: Native Mandarin speaker. [Crossposted from my Mastodon](https://mastodon.social/@AgreeableLandscape/110215804231968508)

Late Stage Capitalism AgreeableLandscape • Now • 100%

South Korean government proposes increase in work week to 69 hours from the previous 52

www.businesslive.co.za

And this is *rolled back* from their initial proposal of 80 hours.

Leftsthetics - Leftist Aesthetics AgreeableLandscape • Now • 100%

Bay Area Jews redecorate JewBelong's racist billboards targeting UC Berkeley law students

todon.eu

  

GenZhou AgreeableLandscape • Now • 100%

Thoughts on the notion of "no advancement without conflict?"

Every time someone brings up any sort of even half utopian vision (read: a world where people aren't actively trying to kill each other), communism for example, people are sure to bring up "but how will technological/societal/human progress be driven without conflict? Wouldn't humanity stagnate like the fatasses aboard the space ship in WALL-E?" I've never agreed with this, and though I'm obviously not a sociopolitical theorist, I have some vague justifications of my stance: First of all, human curiosity and desire to create are intrinsic to our species and does not require conflict. There are enough makers slapping together half baked DIY projects in their garage that do a whole lot of nothing aside from being fun to prove that, with many enjoying the process of making the thing more than the thing itself, but sometimes those pet projects do turn into real products that solve real problems. As are the scientists that research the weirdest things just for the hell of it, and surprise surprise decades later it turns out to actually be useful. Astronomers studying exoplanets and cosmic gas clouds are another example, they're never going to visit those things, certainly won't be colonizing them anytime in their or our lifetime, and it's not like there's an obvious path from that to any sort of weapon. Are they doing it specifically because there might be a war soon? When Galileo fought tooth and nail for his heliocentric theory, he never expected it to physically affect existence on Earth, nor could he have conceived any way of using said theory in battle, but he still advocated it simply because he believed it was the truth about the nature of our universe. Also, things like radar, nuclear fission, or any of the things commonly associated with war were not initially discovered because of war. The mechanisms of action were discovered by physicists probing and trying to understand the universe, simple as that. The Chinese developed the first forms of gunpowder, and they used it for fireworks at first, guns came much later with the European colonization of East Asia. Also also, in times of peace, art flourishes. Any period known as the golden age of a given culture or society are almost always in times of relative peace. Can't do much art if you're being raided from the neighbouring empire can you? Another thing, just because there are no longer external geopolitical conflict doesn't mean there are no conflicts period. Illness, mortality, minor inconvenience, hell even being bored are all conflicts that people have worked very hard to defeat. And there are sci-fi sounding things that can be explored even after all of that is solved. Transhumanism, transphysics, mind uploading, telepathy, faster than light travel, time travel, seeing into or visiting other universes or higher dimensions, do other universes or higher dimensions even exist? We genuinely do not know if these things are possible or what they can do for us, so do they not warrant exploration? Or, instead of exploring outer space, how about exploring inner space? The nature of life and consciousness, emotion, love, and attachment, higher and higher orders of mathematics and logic, do living things truly have spirits or life force within or are we just complicated, mostly self contained chemical reactions? Plenty to chew on in a post conflict world, no? Finally, one must consider, is no change or advancement really stagnation? Why do we *need* infinite advancement? Why can't we just focus on being human, living, and enjoying what we have now? This reminds me of the excuses European colonists made for the forced assimilation of Indigenous peoples, that, "well they aren't actively trying to build empires or advance themselves, we're doing them a favour by bring them our way of life because they were never going to achieve anything their way" meanwhile many Indigenous people believed that simply living life has intrinsic value, that being human and enjoying all the things that come with that is enough. IDK, what do you think of all this?

Linux for Leftists AgreeableLandscape • Now • 100%

What’s a good tablet and touch screen oriented Linux distro or desktop environment? Can any of them compete with something like Android?

I'm looking to get a straight tablet (not a 360-hinge laptop with a keyboard) that will mostly be used for mobile centric applications like when I'm out and about or when I want to binge shows in bed. Ideally it will be a device that I can exclusive use the touchscreen with for when I'm either too lazy or can't practically prop it up and use it as a proper laptop. I want to keep at least the software as open source as possible, so my options are either an Android tablet that I can sideload an AOSP de-googled ROM like Lineage OS, or a Windows tablet with an x86 CPU that I'll install a Linux distro on (inb4 "Android is technically Linux"). I currently use KDE Plasma which is my favourite environment when I'm on my desktop, and I quickly found through testing on my touchscreen laptop that it's practically unusable without a mouse and keyboard. Here are some things that I found KDE lacking that I need: * Integrated onscreen keyboard that automatically pops up when you're in a text field, and/or can easily be brought in and out of frame when needed. * Smooth swipe-based scrolling. I find that swiping up on many KDE apps just selects text or drags an element, or does nothing, and you have to drag the tiny scroll bar to scroll. * Pinch to zoom * A terminal that works well with touch screen, namely one that makes it easy to use special characters and control keys with an onscreen keyboard. Termux on Android is what I consider one of the best implementations of this. * Active stylus support with palm rejection is a plus, like the Surface when running Windows or the iPad Pro. I consider myself very knowledgeable with Linux, and I do tinker with my computers a lot, but for this one, I do simply want something that "just works", because I'll either be using it at school/work and can't afford to start diving into conf files and searching up cryptic error messages because something broke, or I'll be in bed just wanting to relax before going to sleep. Finally, is this futile? If we're considering stock Android as a benchmark for a decent user experience on a tablet, can anything on the non-Android Linux side even compare?