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Good to hear that your prof is supportive. That's not the case everywhere.
Depends where you do a PhD. In the US, things can be more structured with compulsory courses than elsewhere. Otherwise, you may get the opportunity to enrol on a methods-type courses, etc. It may depend on what was covered on your Masters. It may also be a funding requirement, usually as part of a 1+3 deal, where the first year is something like an MSc or MA in methods and research. Wherever you are, your school/department/faculty will likely invite you to bespoke training sessions run by the academic staff. You'll probably have to show engagement with CPD to 'upgrade' and/or complete, depending on the institution, for which you can attend a mixture of the above, plus conference attendance.
You'd always have your PhD research to blog about. You'll want to think carefully about that. Some people make a kind of research repository out of a blog. Given how much you write online, you could get some benefit from that (it can look good as a kind of publication if it's consistent enough). That might need to be attributed to your real name (to include it on your CV/public profile), for which you may not want to associate it to Lemmygrad or your SpaceDogs account. If it's just for you and us, you can keep doing what you're doing, taking care not to say too much about your project – you'll be the only one answering your question, so it would be easier to dox yourself.
I wonder if there's a way to re-frame what feedback is and how to approach it. Would be good to start looking at it in detail. Not all feedback is good but good feedback could really help. You might be making the same mistake between papers, which could be easily addressed and lift your grade.
There's maybe a trick in knowing that just because someone writing feedback says XYZ, doesn't mean they're right. It gets easier to think, 'you're confident in telling me why I'm wrong but luckily I disagree'. At the same time, nothing is ever finished. There will always be room to find something to improve; and every person has their own perspective, so there will always be room to say that you 'missed' XYZ (whatever is of interest to them). In this sense, some feedback is written just because the marker/reviewer needs to say something.
Apparently, Marx couldn't leave something for a month without thinking on his own that the whole thing needed revising. It can sometimes help to leave that time-distance so that the text no longer feels as if it's 'yours'. Then the criticism doesn't cut so sharply (and speaking from experience, the tendency to immediately (sometimes too hastily) reject the feedback fades away).
redtea Now • 100%
Thanks for this write up. It was useful and helped me think through some theoretical problems that I couldn't get my head around.
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Glad you found the discussion helpful.
I realise this was a month ago now. Can't believe I've not posted for that long!
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Selling bits of rope and clothing taken off his victims as good luck charms.
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Forcing yourself to do classical liberalism to own the commies.
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Great comment. That final paragraph headed me off asking what to say about Marxism being founded on faulty premises in a reductio ad absurdum kind of way.
Could you give us some examples of the following, please, particularly of the first kind?
of things that exist squarely within the domains of hard science [but] are not falsifiable themselves and plenty of things that are a part of science happened outside of the scientific method.
redtea Now • 100%
Not sure what to think about Benz. He seems to go against the grain but almost everything he says or writes or summaries of his arguments can be read as coded support for US imperialism. It's unclear who his messages are for. While they might lend support to anti-imperialists, there is enough in there for just a different kind of imperialist.
The US and its CIA-controlled “soft power” arm utilized the encrypted social media app Telegram to foment riots and protest movements against foreign governments it deems undesirable …
And:
… “26 US-government-funded NGOs” condemned Russia for attempting to ban Telegram in 2018 [because] “the US State Department was …” utilizing its encryption and local popularity “to foment protests and riots within Russia – just as they did in Belarus, Iran, Hong Kong, and attempted to do in China,” …
Is this an exposé on the US/CIA? Maybe. What critic doesn't already suspect such behaviour? The claim can be read as an attempt to persuade users and potential users that TG is so secure even the CIA uses it.
Combine this with the following:
The US has championed free speech globally for decades …. Durov’s end-to-end encrypted social media app Telegram has been instrumental in this effort …
Is this a double-bluff attempt to get anti-imperialists to reject TG because it has been used to undermine their governments? The claims appear to say something but the intent is unclear.
Finally:
The app’s encryption is a powerful means of evading state control over media and allowing “US-funded political groups or dissidents to garner tens of thousands of supporters with relative impunity,” …
Another not-so-subtle hint that TG is secure enough to use for all of your anti-imperialist organising.
The alternative is that RT is picking this story up in this way to settle US nerves. Maybe Russia already has access to encrypted TG messages/metadata and has used it to root out US spies/saboteurs.
It's a strange one but I don't think Benz can be read as just stating 'facts'. The other irony is that he is a free speech activist. Does he agree with the US pushing free speech, despite the CIA angle? Or does he think speech should be censored where it is used to undermine other/any government(s)?
redtea Now • 100%
"dialectics? Not a clue."
Chomsky
redtea Now • 100%
Thanks
{|Genious} ^where^ ^does^ ^it^ sit next ~to~ ~other~ ~text?~
redtea Now • 100%
Thanks for this, I'll read through it later.
In the meantime, I've had a quick look at the author. What I will say is that successful career academics like Brodie are good for one thing in particular: they tend to represent the orthodox state of affairs even if they create their own brand around the edges. This means you can read a few of their articles, maybe a book (skimming the waffle sections) for a snapshot of the mainstream, 'critical' but uncontentious thought.
When you write for an academic audience that has been trained to think in a certain way, you're at disadvantage as a Marxist. You know they'll reject you if you push the Marxism too fast or too hard before you have demonstrated your intellectual credentials.
Opening an essay with close, analytical, and critical engagement with writers like Brodie let's you show your reader (examiner) that you know what you're supposed to know. This can also help to lure the reader in to accept your challenges, left with the question, 'okay, so now what?'
And that's when you can hit them with the Marxism, with or without directly referencing (well known) Marxists (including Marx). For example, you can present evidence of what's been said elsewhere in this thread about the uselessness of lower, middle, upper class by asking what's similar about an senior engineer at Tesla ('upper class') and the owner, Musk. This lets you question the orthodoxy in a way that leads back to Marxism without letting the reader know until it's too late for them to reject your argument on it's face for being Marxist.
This approach doesn't always work and it's not a fixed blueprint (a lot also depends on the learning outcomes and the marking criteria, etc) but maybe it'll help you power through when you're given other anti-Marxist readings.
Tagging @SpaceDogs@lemmygrad.ml as you might be interested in this thread if you haven't seen it.
redtea Now • 100%
This is exactly why I stopped using YT.
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Even painters were able to paint over people in their paintings to make it look like they weren't really there.
redtea Now • 100%
That quote also telescopes hundreds of years of development through a bourgeois lens, no less. One only need read the three paragraphs in the Manifesto before M&E say that capitalism has simplified classes to see the echo of a subtler conception of class than is presented in Brodie's work. That is, even Brodie's limited actual engagement seems to take ideas/quotes out of context and uses them as gotchas.
I wouldn't say the quote necessarily attributes to Marx the belief that 'democracy was achieved by bourgeois revolution'. There's a way of reading that claim as Brodie's garbled understanding of bourgeois revolution followed by a claim about Marx's class analysis. But here we see an alternative problem beneath the text.
If we read Brodie instead as saying that Marx only called the 'new class—the commercial and industrial capitalists … the bourgeoisie', the question is, does Brodie agree? Is Brodie sceptical that a bourgeois class exists at all? Is the bourgeoisie only the bourgeoisie according to Marx?
It wouldn't be the first time a bourgeois writer has rejected the notion of a bourgeois revolution (the underlying topic, here). But that rejection usually starts by claiming that humans have always lived under or driven (teleologically) towards capitalism; i.e. there is no 'new' class of bourgeois because the bourgeois always existed (just don't look too closely at feudal lords, etc). It doesn't usually reject the existence of a bourgeoisie, although that term is usually replaced with the friendlier-because-more-obscure 'capitalists'.
That's a problem with the writing, rather than your interpretation. It's making me squint, too, and it's hard to know who is supposed to be saying what without any real engagement with what Marx (or specific Marxists) have said.
Fair enough if Brodie has unknowingly read a summary of a summary of e.g. GA Cohen but that needs to be made clear. The problem is that academics can write shit like this but they must uphold the pretense that it's rigorous. So they can't start admitting what or who they have actually read or to what extent.
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I need help putting words to my issues with it.
I read the first screenshot and was going to ask: how do you deal with nonsense like this? Looking forward to hear other people's answers.
I just can't get my head around where to start with rubbish like this. How do you even broach the subject when the subject is: 'you published an academic article criticising Marxism on the basis of whatever you thought it was in a dream because you clearly haven't read any Marx except maybe you misunderstood the Manifesto on the bus to college as a hungover undergrad because the editors and reviewers were equally illeducated; luckily for you, you are repeating the same thing that everyone else who hasn't read Marx also believes so you are likely in for a lucrative career'.
redtea Now • 100%
Now I really feel called out.
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Oh yeah.
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Jfc. Unfortunately, I'm not surprised. But I am horrified yet again by the depravity.
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{This is a test|Biggie Smalls passing any test}
{The test works|Edit}
redtea Now • 100%
That's the one. And that's a good video. Scary. I wonder if they've had any follow ups since.
redtea Now • 100%
Hope you got home okay. Public transport is so mismanaged it's criminal.
Compared to Orwell and Kafka on Wikipedia but he seems to be of a different type. What are your thoughts on him and his work?
monthlyreview.org
>Marx seems to have developed an early interest in Spanish in the 1840s, but it was only in the early ’50s that he systematically devoted himself to it. In 1853, he mentioned that he borrowed a concise Spanish grammar book from a friend. In 1854, he reported to Engels on his readings in Spanish and Italian: >>At odd moments I am going in for Spanish. Have begun with Calderón.… I am reading in Spanish what I’d found impossible in French, Chateaubriand’s Atala and René, and some stuff by Bernardin de St-Pierre. Am now in the middle of Don Quixote. I find that a dictionary is more necessary in Spanish than in Italian at the start. By chance I have got hold of the Archivio triennale delle cose d’ltalia dall’avvenimento di Pio IX all’abbandono di Venezia [Three-year archive of Italian affairs from the time of Pius IX to the abandonment of Venice] etc. It’s the best thing about the Italian revolutionary party that I have read. >Marx’s immersion in Spanish helped him exploit original sources on Spain’s recent political past. Focusing on the first half of the nineteenth century, he was making preparations to write a series of articles for the New York Tribune. Looking back at his preoccupation with Spanish in previous months, he wrote that “I made a timely start with Don Quixote.… At least it may be counted a step forward that at this moment one’s studies are paid for.” One such payoff was that, in the Spanish sources, he could find ample evidence for a republican conspiracy in the French army when Napoleon was in command in Spain during the Franco-Spanish War. Much later, Spanish was going to be helpful in his studies of the colonial history of the Americas. … >As Engels wrote much later, even “Italian is much better suited than French to the dialectical mode of presentation.” This impression was originally addressed to Pasquale Martignetti, who reached out to Engels in 1883, sending him his Italian translation of Engels’s Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. Not fluent in German, Martignetti translated Engels’s text from Lafargue’s French version. Writing back to Martignetti in Italian, Engels suggested making significant changes of the Italian text, though he admitted that he was not able to render the whole piece in Italian himself, for “my Italian is imperfect and that I am out of practice.” Martignetti also asked Engels to recommend him language resources to improve his German. Given Engels’s response, Martignetti seems to be familiar with Johann Franz Ahn’s German textbook, which gave special weight to bidirectional translation (between original and target languages) of short passages rather than memorizing vocabulary. Engels responded that he was not familiar with Ahn’s book but shared his own method of learning any language from scratch: >>In order to learn a language the method I have always followed is this: I do not bother with grammar (except for declensions and conjugations, and pronouns) and I read, with a dictionary, the most difficult classical author I can find. Thus I began Italian with Dante, Petrarch and Ariosto, Spanish with Cervantes and Calderon, Russian with Pushkin. Then I read newspapers, etc. For German, I think the first part of Goethe’s Faust might be suitable; it is written, for the most part, in a popular style, and the things which would seem difficult to you would also be difficult, without a commentary, for a German reader. … >It was in the context of political struggles against antisemitism that Engels considered Jewish voices particularly important: >>anti-Semitism is merely the reaction of declining medieval social strata against a modern society consisting essentially of capitalists and wage-laborers, so that all it serves are reactionary ends under a purportedly socialist cloak; it is a degenerate form of feudal socialism and we can have nothing to do with that.… Thanks to anti-Semitism in eastern Europe, and to the Spanish Inquisition in Turkey, there are here in England and in America thousands upon thousands of Jewish proletarians; and it is precisely, these Jewish workers who are the worst exploited and the most poverty-stricken. In England during the past twelve months we have had three strikes by Jewish workers. Are we then expected to engage in anti-Semitism in our struggle against capital? >It is unknown to what extent Engels was fluent in Hebrew or Yiddish, but in his very late life, he continued pursuing still other languages, even learning new ones. As he wrote to Laura Lafargue in 1894, he was reading German, English, and Italian daily newspapers and was following various weeklies: “I receive 2 from Germany, 7 Austria, 1 France, 3 America (2 English, 1 German), 2 Italian, and 1 each in Polish, Bulgarian, Spanish and Bohemian, three of which in languages I am still gradually acquiring.” >In his reminiscences of Engels, Lafargue writes that shortly after the fall of the Paris Commune, he had visited the National Councils of the International in Spain and Portugal where he was told that a certain “Angel” (Engels) “wrote perfect Castilian” and “impeccable Portuguese”—”a fine achievement when one thinks of the similarities and small differences the two languages have with one another and with Italian, in which he was equally proficient.” >Edward Aveling recollected that Engels’s home was frequently visited by a large number of socialists from many countries: “Engels could converse with all of them in their own language. Like [Karl] Marx, he spoke and wrote German, French, and English perfectly; nearly as perfectly in Italian, Spanish, Danish, and also read, and could get along with Russian, Polish, and Romanian, not to mention such trivialities as Latin and Greek.” >For Marx and Engels, fluency in reading, writing, listening, or speaking seems to have never been a goal for its own sake. Keen interest in various languages, yes, but always as part of a scientific purpose and political commitment. Socialist internationalism required, and, to some extent, still requires polyglottery.
www.youtube.com
Short video about current floods in Libya and how they are so much worse due to the deliberate sabotage of the NATO campaign. Just came across this channel. Looks like one to keep an eye on for African news.
This site has a few Castro speeches and a letter (to Chávez). If you look through the site there are many other speeches, too (menu > proyectos > discursos). Could be a good way of getting some Spanish input. (I can't guarantee the speeches are real ones!)
They insist on controlling the media, the publishing, the schools, the teachers, the curriculum, the judiciary, the museums, and the curators. But they only use their power for good. They hold themselves to the highest standards in the search of the truth and the presentation of the truth. Honest! Their independent watchdogs confirmed it. And why would they lie, anyway?
Looking back through my cursive handwritten notes, I noticed my past self was very concerned with hummus society. What could this mean?
www.bookscrolling.com
It's not a Marxist list but that's perhaps to be expected from a list curated from other lists across the internet. I thought it was useful, still, as there are 200 entries, including lots of fiction, which could be a good way to engage with the topic or for recommendations to people who don't/won't read theory.
Here's a playlist on YouTube that includes ['game movies'](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWxBoZFZCce1LUbtciI2xzDvcXiI8WXH5). Someone has taken all the story parts of games and edited them together into movies. The whole list is in Spanish but note that some only have Spanish subtitles whereas others have Spanish subtitles and Spanish audio. Invidious link: https://yewtu.be/search?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fplaylist%3Flist%3DPLWxBoZFZCce1LUbtciI2xzDvcXiI8WXH5
Anki is spaced-repetition software. It works on the basis of the 'forgetting curve'. The idea is that new information is soon forgotten but if you remind yourself an hour later, you'll remember till the next day; and if you remind yourself the next day, you'll remember till next week; and if you remind yourself next week, you'll remember for a month, etc. I've heard that one of the better ways to use Anki is creating your own decks. Personally, I find this to be a lot of effort. Too much for me to bother making individual cards. I am experimenting with new ways to make cards. I'm no expert but here's what I have found. The first way is to use Google sheets. In column 1, include a native language word or phrase. There's a formula to translate each of these into your target language using country codes. For English to Spanish, click cell B1 and enter `=GOOGLETRANSLATE(A1,"en","es")`. Tap enter. Now click cell B1 then click and hold the 'drag button' in the bottom right of the cell and drag this down column B to the end of the list in column A. This should translate everything. English column A, Spanish column B. Save the document as a csv file with text separated by tabs or semicolons. Open the Anki app, create a new deck, and import. Find the csv file, play with the settings. Voila. One way of making lists of useful (to you) words is through Calibre. Put an ebook that you want to read into calibre. Find it in the list, right-click and press 'Edit book'. When the new window opens, click Tools > Reports > Words. Sort by 'Times used'. This arranges all the words in the book by frequency. You can copy this list into Google sheets, as above. If you're new to the language, sort by most frequent as you'll get a better payoff for the effort. (Be warned that a lot of high frequency words are functional and/or have many, many meanings. If e.g. Spanish is a new language, one or two *key* definitions is fine to start with. You can add nuance later. You can also delete the proper nouns: e.g. you don't need a translation of 'Marx' if it's the same in both languages.) If you have a better vocabulary, scroll down and grab the words that are used only e.g. 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3 times in the book. Getting Anki lists like this, you can front-load the vocabulary for a book that you want to read and memorise the relevant vocab on the bus or the toilet. (What does Lenin's *Imperialismo: fase superior del capitalismo* look like word frequency-wise? The top 12 words are de, la, en, el, los, y, que, del, a, las, se, por. The most frequent substantive word, at number 13, used 369 times, is 'desconocido'. Later comes 'Capital' m, used 207 times. 'Imperialismo' 183. 'Bancos' 170. 'Millones' 155. 'Capitalismo' 131. …) If you read the book at the same time, you'll recognise the vocab as you read. (It might take a long time to come across the less frequent words—one that's only used once might be on the last page.) Another way of creating lists is using your favourite song lyrics. Get these from a search engine, search for 'song name+letra' then search for the 'song name+lyrics English' to see if there's a translation. If not you can decide how fun it will be for you to translate it yourself or you could use the Google sheets method. Then put one language in one column and the other in the next column. If you have a translation, you can probably use any spreadsheet software. But the cvs file needs to be in UTF-8, I believe. Another method involves reading books on Kindle. Every time you don't know a word or sentence, click it and get the translation. Then either highlight that word or the whole sentence (for context). Once finished with the book (because it's too hard, boring, or you get to the end) the highlights ('notes') can be exported. (If you read through your notes to recap all the words/sentences that you struggled with, and do it again a week later, it's spaced repetition.) There's also a way to transfer these notes into Anki cards. There are some scripts/programs in GitHub that could be useful for this. I've not played with it yet but [VocabSieve](https://GitHub.com/FreeLanguageTools/vocabsieve) should allow you to import Kindle lookups, translate them, and export this data as a file that can be imported to Anki. With all these methods, you kind of have to trust the translation software. I've found it to be good enough for English to Spanish. The odd translation is obviously wrong but otherwise, it's fine. Hopefully these help someone else to avoid the tedium of making Anki decks but in a way that ensures the vocab in your decks is relevant to you. You can, of course, do things the not-so-old fashioned way. Rather than importing your vocab to Anki, use your spreadsheet. You'll just have to work out the timings for yourself. Then you could hide the first column, and type the translation of the word in the second column into the third column. The next day, hide the first two columns and type the translation of the words in the third column into the fourth column. You can change the colour of rows of words that become too easy and create a colour-coded system for reviewing these monthly, yearly, etc.
Hola amigos, Hay muchos videojuegos divertidos. Muchos menos con audio o subtítulos españoles. Pero hay algunos. Skyrim y Fallout 4 continenen muchísimos textos y audios. También Batman: Arkham Knight, Dying Light, Civilisation VI y Dragon Age: Inquisition. Quizás Spiderman. Last of Us, Unchartered, tienen audios y textos pero no tanto cómo estos otros. Pienso FIFA también. (Ten cuidado con Batman y Spiderman porque es fácil que utilizo dinero real en los menus cuando el idioma está menos familiares. No caes en esa trampa.) Divinity: Original Sin y Red Dead Redemption (y otros juegos rockstargames) tienen textos españoles al menos. Pensé que Divinity tiene audios pero parece que no. Esto es un listo mas largo de [R****t](https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg_gamers/comments/wmv0jc/what_good_rpgs_have_a_spanish_audio_track/): >- Bethesda stuff (Elder Scrolls, Fallout) >- Blizzard stuff (Diablo, WoW) >- Cyberpunk >- Monster Hunter World >- Witcher 1 [Witcher 3 has Spanish menus, subtitles, etc, but not audio] >- Lost Ark >- Battle Chasers: Nightwar >- Bloodborne/Demon's Souls (maybe not enough voice acting) >- Fable series >- Neverwinter Nights 2 >- Lord of the Rings: War in the North >- Sudeki… >- Playstation Studios stuff (God of War, Horizon, Ghost of Tsushima, Last of Us, Uncharted, Spiderman, etc.) >- Assassin's Creed series >- Destiny games >- Borderlands series >- Darksiders series (Genesis is an ARPG) >- XCOM series (also Gears Tactics) >- Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor/War >- Bioshock series >- Guardians of the Galaxy >- Sekiro >- Death Stranding >- The newer Deus Ex games >- Ghostwire Tokyo >- Jedi Fallen Order >- Beyond Good and Evil >- Breath of the Wild (minimal voice acting) >- Child of Light (minimal voice acting?) I'm unsure if all these have audio but they should have the text language in Spanish. Sometimes, on a console, you'll have to download a language pack. With some games the language can be changed at any time: it's either set by your console language or in the game settings. With e.g. [Assassin's Creed], I believe you get one chance to set the language at the start of the save file. [@rjs001@lemmygrad.ml](https://lemmygrad.ml/u/rjs001) I found four text based games: - Ord – this is very fun, very straightforward. Play it with a DeepL or Google translate window/app open on another device to look up words quickly. - Darkside Detective (there's a sequel, too) - A Place for the Unwilling (this is English-only audio but it looks mainly text-based so it might be possible to just mute the audio and play it as if it's solely text-based) - Grim Fandango There is also this list, but I am unsure how safe it is to buy from itch.io or to play the free games in your browser: https://itch.io/games/lang-es/tag-text-based (will you let me know if you have any luck/fun with any of these?) Edit: forgot to add an example.
I like RPGs. Final Fantasy, Witcher 3, Fallout 3 and 4, Skyrim, Morrowind, Oblivion, etc. Will I enjoy Monster Hunter: World? Is it good? Does it have a good story? Or is it (too) fetch-questy? I'm looking at this one because it's available with Spanish audio and text whereas other Monster World games only have Spanish text, if that. So the others aren't an option, but feel free to compare this one to the others.
>In 2018, Delta airlines unveiled new uniforms made of a synthetic-blend fabric. Soon after, flight attendants began to get sick. Alden Wicker explains how toxic chemicals get in clothes in To Dye For. Employers caring more about image that health. Iconic duo.
Hello Comrades, Thanks for all your advice about setting up Linux. It was a success. The problem is that I’m now I’m intrigued and I’d like to play around a bit more. I’m thinking of building a cheap-ish computer but I have a few questions. I’ll split them into separate posts to make things easier. Note: I won’t be installing anything that I can’t get to work on Linux. Do I need a dedicated graphics card? I'd like to run an HD display as a minimum. (I don't have a 4k monitor at but I wouldn't mind upgrading later if I can save up for one.) Mostly, I'll be streaming or playing videos. I wouldn't mind playing some games but is a dedicated GPU needed? If I should look into a GPU (I can always add it in later), what should I look for? (I'm not really interested in the latest AAA games). I wouldn't mind playing HOI4 or Victoria 3 as I hear so much about them. What are your thoughts on second-hand GPUs? This will obviously cut costs but is there anything to watch out for?
Hello Comrades, Thanks for all your advice about setting up Linux. It was a success. The problem is that I’m now I’m intrigued and I’d like to play around a bit more. I’m thinking of building a cheap-ish computer but I have a few questions. I’ll split them into separate posts to make things easier. Note: I won’t be installing anything that I can’t get to work on Linux. Should I prioritise RAM or the processor? My budget is limited so I will have to make a choice between RAM and the processor. Would it be better to go for e.g. 32GB RAM and a slower processor, or 8GB RAM and a faster processor? Or is balance better? Say, 16GB RAM and a 'medium' processor (that's 'medium' between the 'slower' and the 'faster' option within my budget, not 'medium' for the market). Intel or AMD?
Hello Comrades, Thanks for all your advice about setting up Linux. It was a success. The problem is that I'm now I'm intrigued and I'd like to play around a bit more. I'm thinking of building a cheap-ish computer but I have a few questions. I'll split them into separate posts to make things easier. Note: I won't be installing anything that I can't get to work on Linux. Question about storage and swap memory. I plan to install an SSD of maybe 128–256GB for the system files and a larger HDD for storage. I would partition the SSD so that I could install a few different distros without losing any installation. This way I can commit to some longer experiments before deciding which distro to use. The question is: should I have the swap partition on the SSD (with the OS partition) or (separately) on the HDD? And if I install multiple distros, do I need a different swap partition for each one? For example, if I install 16GB RAM, do I need a 16GB partition for, say, Mint, Debian, and Ubuntu? Or can I let them 'share' the swap partition? Are there any additional security/privacy risks of installing more than one distro on the same SSD card?
This is a challenge to an argument that increasing taxes on landowners and property speculators would lower business costs, allowing wage increases. ::: spoiler (drop down) There are some good arguments for a wealth tax. - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9l7AYl0jUE (and see his other videos) - Gary Stevenson’s website: https://www.wealtheconomics.org - https://patrioticmillionaires.org - https://patrioticmillionaires.uk/the-problem This is a promising idea, tried before e.g. under the label ‘Keynesianism’, after [John Maynard Keynes](https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/keynes/index.htm). Ultimately, it will fail. ::: # Class composition ‘Business owners’, ‘land owners’, and ‘land speculators’ must be put into the broader political economic context. Each group is a different segment of capital. The idea of taxing rentiers to encourage business to pay better wages assumes there is a real struggle between ‘business owners’, ‘land owners’, and ‘land speculators’. This assumption forgets monopoly finance capital – imperialists – which subjugates other capital. There are further strata within the bourgeoisie. Within each segment, there are two *main* strata: the haute (big) bourgeoisie and the petite/petty (small) bourgeoisie. E.g. there are corporate landlords with thousands of properties and individual landlords with one or two rental properties. There are struggles between the big and small bourgeois and between finance capital and the other segments of capital. Overwhelmingly, though, all are subordinated to haute bourgeois monopoly finance capital. This is *imperialism*. As Marx and Engels wrote in the [*Manifesto of the Communist Party*](https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:Manifesto_of_the_Communist_Party#Bourgeois_and_proletarians[1]): >Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie … has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other — Bourgeoisie and Proletariat. Conflicts between finance capital and industrial capital, agricultural capital, etc, can result in international war, where imperialists meet the resistance of other states that are e.g. industrial capitalist. Lenin explains in [‘The three sources and three component parts of Marxism’](https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:The_three_sources_and_three_component_parts_of_Marxism): >By destroying small-scale production, capital leads to an increase in productivity of labor and to the creation of a monopoly position for the associations of big capitalists. Production itself becomes more and more social—hundreds of thousands and millions of workers become bound together in a regular economic organism—but the product of this collective labor is appropriated by a handful of capitalists. Anarchy of production, crises, the furious chase after markets and the insecurity of existence of the mass of the population are intensified. Within the imperial core (mostly the Anglo-European states and Japan) and its peripheries (almost everywhere else), almost all capital is controlled by imperialists. These capitalists [may go to war against each other, as in WWI](https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:Imperialism,_the_highest_stage_of_capitalism) and WWII, but they do not fight themselves. **Imperialist control** I’m not talking about inter-imperialist rivalry in this latter claim. What do I mean? As [Lenin explains](https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:Imperialism,_the_highest_stage_of_capitalism#Concentration_of_production_and_monopolies), imperialists use their finance to bankroll other ventures. This is the system of stocks and shares. With (at most) 50.1% of the shares in a company, the shareholder controls the company. The imperialist buys half the share capital of a farm, a factory, a mine, etc. They buy a controlling share of a land and consumer-facing corporations. With that controlling share, they hike rent on land and force the business to suppress wages. This increases income and decreases outgoings. The landowner, speculator, and business owner are only competing on the surface. Behind the scenes, they are all on the same team, different capitals, bought by finance capital. # What about the small businesses? One might contend, ‘But you’re only talking about the big chains and big speculators; most employers are small business owners.’ The small business owners and the landlords with a handful of properties get investment capital, loans, etc, from the banks – i.e. imperialists. Landowners are required to raise rents and business owners are required to keep wages low because they are controlled by imperialists. This is true of the petit and the haute bourgeois. The petit bourgeois have much less choice in the matter; the haute bourgeois are complicit. Lenin wrote about this problem, too: ::: spoiler (drop down) *Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism* [Chapter 1](https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/ch01.htm) (bold and numbers in square brackets added for emphasis and clarity): >Less than one-hundredth [1%] of the total number of enterprises utilise more than three-fourths [3/4] of the total amount of steam and electric power! Two million nine hundred and seventy thousand [2,970,000] small enterprises (employing up to five workers), constituting 91 per cent of the total, utilise only 7 per cent of the total amount of steam and electric power! **Tens of thousands of huge enterprises are everything; millions of small ones are nothing.** >…As we shall see, money capital and the banks make this superiority of a handful of the largest enterprises still more overwhelming, in the most literal sense of the word, i.e., **millions of small, medium and even some big “proprietors” are in fact in complete subjection to some hundreds of millionaire financiers.** >In another advanced country of modern capitalism, the United States of America, the growth of the concentration of production is still greater. … Almost half the total production of all the enterprises of the country was carried on by one-hundredth part [1%] of these enterprises! These 3,000 giant enterprises embrace 258 branches of industry. From this it can be seen that at a certain stage of its development concentration itself, as it were, leads straight to monopoly, for a score [i.e. 20] or so of giant enterprises can easily arrive at an agreement, and on the other hand, the hindrance to competition, the tendency towards monopoly, arises from the huge size of the enterprises. **This transformation of competition into monopoly is one of the most important—if not the most important—phenomena of modern capitalist economy**, and we must deal with it in greater detail. … ::: # Breaking monopolies? You might then retort, ‘Break the monopolies; reintroduce competition’. Except it’s been tried before and failed every time. Without abolishing capitalist social relations, we end up back where we started. Lenin: ::: spoiler (drop down) ‘The critique of imperialism’ [Source](https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Library:Imperialism,_the_highest_stage_of_capitalism#The_critique_of_imperialism) >The questions as to whether it is possible to reform the basis of imperialism, whether to go forward to the further intensification and deepening of the antagonisms which it engenders, or backward, towards allaying these antagonisms, are fundamental questions in the critique of imperialism. Since the specific political features of imperialism are reaction everywhere and increased national oppression due to the oppression of the financial oligarchy and the elimination of free competition, a petty-bourgeois-democratic opposition to imperialism arose at the beginning of the twentieth century in nearly all imperialist countries. … >In the United States, the imperialist war waged against Spain in 1898 stirred up the opposition of the “anti-imperialists,” … But as long as all this criticism shrank from recognising the inseverable bond between imperialism and the trusts, and, therefore, between imperialism and the foundations of capitalism, while it shrank from joining the forces engendered by large-scale capitalism and its development, it remained a “pious wish”. >…The petty-bourgeois point of view in the critique of imperialism, the omnipotence of the banks, the financial oligarchy, etc., is adopted by [several] authors[,] … who make no claim to be Marxists, contrast imperialism with free competition and democracy … which is leading to conflicts and war, utter “pious wishes” for peace, etc. … >“It is not the business of the proletariat,” writes Hilferding “to contrast the more progressive capitalist policy with that of the now bygone era of free trade and of hostility towards the state. The reply of the proletariat to the economic policy of finance capital, to imperialism, cannot be free trade, but socialism. The aim of proletarian policy cannot today be the ideal of restoring free competition—which has now become a reactionary ideal—but the complete elimination of competition by the abolition of capitalism.” >…And monopolies have already arisen—precisely out of free competition! ::: # Conclusion Businesses, large and small, do not keep wages low because rents are too high. Rather, they do so partly because they are controlled by imperialists who insist that landowners increase rents and that employers keep wages as low as possible. If rents *are* ever capped or lowered, employers keep the extra as profit; they rarely pass it on (without a union fight). This is how imperialists control every facet of the consumer process to reap maximum profits.
You may have noticed that I don't post pictures. If not, now you know. One of the reasons is that I'm worried about sharing meta data. Does anyone know: 1) Does the Lemmy software strip / hide meta data from photos when they're uploaded? 2) Is there a way of stripping meta data from photos? 3) Does downloading an image from the internet and uploading it from my hard drive add any meta data? 4) If I create a digital image, does it have meta data that could reveal my location, etc? (And then questions 1 and 2 for this option.) 5) How should/could I keep my data/location safe if I choose to post either my photos, my scans, or pictures (either created by me or downloaded from the internet)?
Hello Comrades, Where do you think is the best place to post educational/theory posts? I've been writing some longer posts lately and posting them too [!genzhou@lemmygrad.ml](https://lemmygrad.ml/c/genzhou) because the sidebar calls it, 'GenZedong’s educational hub'. Shall I keep doing that or is there a better community? e.g.: - https://lemmygrad.ml/post/1022436 and - https://lemmygrad.ml/post/1007901 I was going to use [!communism@lemmygrad.ml](https://lemmygrad.ml/c/communism) but as I'm linking to my posts in the wider Lemmyverse, I didn't want libs coming over to an explicitly Marxists-only community. One of the reasons for these longer posts is to provide an opportunity for us to talk about some issues and to answer questions that others ask in the wider Lemmyverse without (a) coming off as hostile/confrontational or (b) wasting hours writing things that people might not read or appreciate. (No obligation for us to talk through my posts! But at least there's always a possibility of a constructive and critical discussion, which doesn't exist elsewhere.) Edit: These aren't necessarily 101 questions, either, but I suppose they could go in [!communism101@lemmygrad.ml](https://lemmygrad.ml/c/communism101), depending on what you all think.
www.theguardian.com
I won't hold my breath for more but it's good to see Marxist ideas appearing in the mainstream press: >Liberal antiracists have succeeded over the last half-century in reducing racial prejudices in interpersonal relationships. And they have transformed popular culture: people of colour are now represented in Hollywood movies at levels proportionate to their presence in the US population. But advances in reducing prejudice and improving representation have not lessened the racism that exists in law, policy and broader economic and institutional practices. >Take, for instance, the expulsion of more than a million, mainly Mexican, people from the US in 2021. This policy behind this is driven by the need to maintain a worldwide racial division of labour. It makes no difference if the immigration officer who carries it out and the employer who profits from it have worked really hard at their diversity awareness training. And it is at the structural level where, since the 1970s, racism has reproduced itself, as ruling classes in the US and Europe mobilised a neoliberal conception of market forces to defeat mass movements for the redistribution of wealth. With those defeats, new ways of dominating Black people and the global south became possible. >It was not simply that racism became more subtle or unconscious after its overt forms had been defeated. It was more that there was no longer a need to routinely make explicit assertions of racial superiority. Racial inequalities were reproduced through market systems, alongside newly intensifying infrastructures of governmental violence, carried out in the name of seemingly race-neutral concerns about crime, migration and terrorism. … >The many millions of people around the world judged surplus to the requirements of neoliberal capitalism, and framed as bearers of cultural values antagonistic to market systems, are the targets of this form of violence. … >Liberal antiracists are powerless against this new structural racism. They demand we use the correct racial vocabulary, shaming Conservative MPs or sports commentators when they use derogatory terms; but abolishing a word does not abolish the social forces it expresses. They implement diversity training programmes, but these fail, owing to the mistaken premise that racism now resides primarily in the unconscious mind. … By relocating racism to the unconscious mind, to the use of inappropriate words and to the extremist fringes, liberal antiracists end up absolving the institutions most responsible for racist practices. They are effective at getting more people of colour into senior jobs in police forces, border agencies and the military, but unable to get fewer people of colour killed by those same agencies. >For these reasons, to look to liberal antiracism as the solution – with whatever good intentions – is to help sustain structural racism. White liberals can heroically confront their own unconscious biases all they want, yet these structures will remain. To be antiracist today means working collectively with organisations to dismantle racist border, policing, carceral and military infrastructures. It means organising in the community to get the police out of our schools; taking direct action against deportations; and confronting corporations that trade in violence. It means understanding that the poor of the global south are as equally entitled to the world’s resources as the wealthy residents of the north. In the end, it requires us to build an economy of care, not killing – uplifting all working classes of whatever colour. The radical tradition, with its anticapitalist impetus, might once have seemed impractical. Now it is the only viable antiracist politics.
