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Federation has been great for me developing better internet habits. Since every other post is directly or indirectly about federation, I spend less time scrolling though this site. Which is good, I’m still here quite a bit I really needed to cut back.
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I think you’re overthinking this. Literally just say “I’m a communist”, that’s gonna weed out pretty much everyone you wouldn’t want to get with anyway.
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(Just a clarification comrade - and I could be wrong, I’m doing this from memory - but I think the 100 million number is genocide across all of the western hemisphere from 1492. The figure I’ve seen for just what was contained the present USA is around 10 million. Doesn’t make it any less evil of course, death to America, but just wanted to clarify that for posterity)
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Exactly. We should not take this at face value.
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I attended a Christian university in the early 00s. Obviously not a representative sample size but guys around me used the f-word slur like it was going out of style. And while a bunch of white Christian college guys are gonna use that word a lot more, it’s use was still fairly common among other people I knew.
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If you are actually interested in learning about the event and you are skeptical if this book, then you should look at Qiao Collective’s reading list: https://www.qiaocollective.com/education/tiananmenreadinglist
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One more, because I don’t think anyone else posted it, is Qiao Collective’s reading list on the e event. It’s a lot of reading but the sources are pretty good: https://www.qiaocollective.com/education/tiananmenreadinglist
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His interview with Steve Grumbine on the Macro & Cheese podcast is excellent. I think his own podcast is unfocused and meandering as other people have said but I do think he understands theory pretty well. I think he would do a lot better with a different format i.e. a podcast with 1 or 2 other hosts he has good chemistry with.
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Mostly correct but I want to point that China does depend on the US for food. I mean I’m sure it’s something the CPC thinks about a lot and I assume they have a plan to reduce dependency but at the moment they import quite a bit of food from the US.
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I’m not used to the federation thing yet, I saw this comment and assumed sarcasm, forgot there were dipshits out there that actually think this and that Adrian Zenz is a “reliable source”.
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I am on a quest to find the best Marx biography myself. Haven’t found it yet, seems like there isn’t one definitive one out there. Michael Heinrich has apparently written a great one but he’s only done one of three volumes (or the others haven’t been translated into English yet, I don’t remember).
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As an aside, I’m sitting with my dad right now. He has CNBC on and they’re talking about the new unemployment numbers and their expectations for the economy. I have a background in finance so I understand what they’re talking about. But since I’m a Marxist, it’s a bit like being an atheist and walking into a Pentecostal Sunday service where they’re talking about some literal interpretation of the Book of Revelation and then they start speaking in tongues. It’s all just so ridiculous.
I mean, I’m vegan, I don’t *want* her to eat fish tacos. But she was telling me the other day that her friend ordered some and she thought for a moment about trying it, but in the end she was afraid they would be too spicy. I told her they’re not, but she has it in her head that fish tacos are some strange foreign food that will fuck up her taste buds or something. A grown ass adult afraid to try *fish tacos*. Then you have my dad. He is surprisingly cool with me being vegan, doesn’t really care. He’s never criticized or made fun. But he will never eat any vegan meal I prepare. Why? Because he won’t eat any entree that doesn’t have meat in it. He just refuses. Like an adult baby. My mom has asked him to just try eating a salad but he won’t. Absolutely zero interest in trying anything new that he thinks he won’t like. Old white people are weird.
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Glad you’re here! And fuck those sinophobic reddit nerds.
Building off some good discussion in the other thread today. I’m thinking about how can white Hexbear users can be better here, and in leftist spaces, AND when we engage with the broader BIPOC communities? What are we doing wrong, and what can we do that’s better? And I 100% get that’s it’s not on marginalized folks to explain it to us. I do. It’s just, at this moment I’m trying not to get overwhelmed with feeling like it’s just not possible to make the world better. Not even get us to socialism, just *getting things to be a tiny bit better*. I don’t know what else to do. So I’m reaching out to my BIPOC comrades with an open hand. If you feel like sharing, please do. For the white folks, we *need* to be better. We do. It may not be comfortable to hear, but we do. Maybe we’re not as bad as the libs and the chuds on this but that’s not a valid measuring stick. Come on.
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This is tough to hear, but fair.
I feel like I’ve read plenty about the historical materialist understanding about how the US constitution was formed and its class characteristics, but a lot less about the actual act of declaring independence. I do know how a bunch of the founding fathers made fortunes from land speculation via genocide and stealing indigenous land; and how the Brits wouldn’t let the yanks do that because they didn’t want to start another incredibly expensive war with the native peoples. I’ve also read of Gerald Horne’s thesis about how the founding fathers were worried that GB would totally outlaw slavery. I have a lot respect for Horne, he’s great but frankly I think that theory has little to no concrete evidence supporting it. But those two are the only materialist analyses of independence that I’ve seen so far.
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I don’t get why everyone here’s shitting on Apple specifically. When’s the last time a major Android phone company made replaceable batteries? A decade?
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Marx never sat in a self-driving car
Marx, like every other person alive when he was, probably never thought about a self-driving car because regular-ass cars hadn’t been invented yet.
But you know what Marx thought (and wrote) about a lot? Technology. In the first volume of Capital, he outlines how the very technologies we develop are part of the superstructure and reflect the needs of the current mode of production. In his excellent podcast series Reading Capital With Comrades, Derek Ford uses the white noise machine as an example. The capitalist economy doesn’t really care about noise pollution any more than it cares about air and water pollution so workers are forced to just deal with it. We also have a premium on sleep because we all get worked to death and capitalism loves to take ever increasing amounts of our waking hours. So along comes the white noise machine. Something that, instead of solving the problems of noise and letting workers get more sleep, just allows them to cope with the situation and get to work.
So in that sense, the self-driving car is absolutely an innovation of capitalism. It doesn’t solve the problem of us destroying ever more land so everyone above a certain income level can have a quarter-acre of land and a “house” made of particle board and oil-based products. It doesn’t put automation to uses that allow for more productivity in the service of human flourishing. Nope. In fact, I guarantee you once self-driving cars become ubiquitous white collar workers will be expected to work the same number of hours in the office AND in the car to and from the office on top of that; and blue collar workers will have to watch ads or something. They’re not actually going to improve the quality of life, they will actually make things worse but more profitable for capital as they will be able to take over even more of our waking hours.
Marx saw that under socialism (and only under socialism), technology and automation could be unleashed to enhance our lives by making us more productive and thus allowing us to work less. Hell, even Keynes figured we’d have 20 hour work weeks by now. But what Keynes didn’t understand and Marx did is that only if the workers control the advancement of tech, can it be used to make our lives better.
If you gave people the choice of either working 5 hours and taking a bus, or working 10 hours but getting a heckin’ cool Muskmobile death trap, who would choose the latter other than the most bazinga-brained labor aristocrats who would rather die than sit next to a worker on public transportation?
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I’m vegan, and things are still a million times better here (and in IRL leftist space) than it is in the real world.
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I think another factor is these people have spent most of their leftist lives mostly isolated from actual “real world” leftists. If you’re a Marxist professor or writer in the 70s, who are you gonna be interacting with other than maybe other Marxist academics. When you let your views percolate in your brain (or only interacting with other egghead leftists), you end up being unable to grow and change.
Like, I really don’t think myself or most leftists who grow up in the internet will get like this when we’re in our 80s. We joke about touching grass, but the truth is being able to interact with other regular leftists from across the world on a place like Hexbear really does keep the brain worms in check, I believe.
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It’s like if Tom Bombadil had a pegging fetish.
That has to be a new sentence that no one has ever typed before.
I just got into Major League Soccer this year. I've been loving it, I feel like I've missed out not having soccer in my life all these years. Obviously the sport isn't complicated per se - just put the ball in the goal. But I'd like to know more about the basics. Like, I don't even really know all the positions or what these formations are. Or like, how to tell if a team is doing good/bad when they aren't scoring at rhat moment. Any videos or whatever is appreciated.
news.stlpublicradio.org
>Under the regulations, which a department spokeswoman said are still being finalized, health workers will need to: >•Disclose to patients that the use of puberty-blocker drugs or hormones to treat gender identity disorder or gender dysphoria is "experimental and is not approved by the Food and Drug Administration." Inform patients that the FDA has warned that puberty blockers can lead to brain swelling and blindness. >•Ensure that patients have received full psychological or psychiatric assessments of at least 15 separate hourly sessions over at least 18 months, and that such conditions have been treated and resolved. >•Adopt and follow procedures to track for 15 years any adverse effects of gender transition for all patients. >The emergency rules also require providers to screen for autism before providing treatment. In the discussion of this on Reddit, people are pointing out that while the AG's verbal comments talk about these regulations being about trans youth, **nothing in the text of the regulations specify that they are only for trans youth**. So while trans youth aren't safe in Missouri (there's already an anti-GAC for youth bill approved by the Senate and will almost certainly be signed by the hillbilly GOP governor), it's very possible that Missouri is no longer safe for trans adults, either. Not to mention the insidious stuff about mental health, basically (here's the CW for ableism - sorry it appears the "spoiler" thing isn't working): If you are diagnosed with autism, you could be denied treatment. If you are diagnosed with *any* mental illnesses, you could be denied treatment. If you don't have at least 15 counseling sessions in 18 months (so puberty might have already have really kicked in) you can be denied treatment.
I have 2. *The People's Republic of Walmart* is one. Maybe I feel this way because I work in the industry and I'm a little familiar with central planning techniques... but I just thought it was all fluff with little substance. I felt like more than one chapter was just "Walmart and Amazon do central planning so it's possible" without getting into a lot of the details. Very little about the nuts and bolts of central planning. Throw in a good dose of anti-Stalinism when the man oversaw successful central planning... I just didn't get anything out of it. Might be OK if you want a real basic introduction behind the ideas of planning but honestly I bet like 95% of you already know more about it than you realize. And I love Graeber but jeez, I couldn't even finish *Bullshit Jobs*. It felt like a good article that was blown out into a book. Maybe my expectations were too high but I felt like he spent way too many pages getting into minutiae about what is/isn't a bullshit job without actually making a broader point.
Of course the US Senate is incredibly undemocratic and was set up to cement the power of the wealthy against people wanting to do stuff. It sucks. But at least I can understand the rationale given by people who would defend it. The 13 colonies were distinct entities, and the Senate was structured (on paper) to represent the interests of these distinct entities. But every single state other than Nebraska has a "House" and a "Senate". And as far as I can tell, the Senate district boundaries are completely arbitrary. So what's the point?! No state other than maybe ones like CA or TX could have distinct subdivisions. It's either pointlessly redundant with the state House or broken up by a weird map that only serves to gum up the works (though I guess that's the point). There in no excuse in 2023 for a form of government other than everyone's vote counting equally (with a possible exception for overweighting the votes of marginalized peoples, but that's such a far out possibility there's not much point in bringing it up). I can explain in detail how the Cuban electoral system is way more democratic than the US to an American, and they will just shut down and insist our system is more democratic regardless.