Ruth First - New General Megathread for the 17th of August 2023
Heloise Ruth First (4 May 1925 – 17 August 1982) was a South African anti-apartheid activist and scholar. She was assassinated in Mozambique, where she was working in exile, by a parcel bomb built by South African police.
Journalist, academic and political activist, Ruth Heloise First was born on 4 May 1925. She was the daughter of Jewish immigrants Julius and Matilda (neé Levetan) First. Julius, a furniture manufacturer, was born in Latvia and came to South Africa in 1906 at the age of 10. Matilda came to South Africa from Lithuania when she was four years old. They were founder members of the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA, later South African Communist Party [SACP]) in 1921. Ruth and her brother Ronald grew up in a household, in which intense political debate between people of all races and classes often took place.
After matriculating from Jeppe High School for Girls, First studied at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, from 1942 to 1946. She graduated with a BA (Social Studies), receiving firsts in sociology, anthropology, economic history and native administration. Her fellow students included Nelson Mandela, Eduardo Mondlane (Mozambican freedom fighter and the first leader of FRELIMO), Joe Slovo, JN Singh (executive member of both the Natal and South African Indian Congress), and Ismail Meer (a former secretary-general of the South African Indian Congress). First helped found the Federation of Progressive Students and served as secretary to the Young Communist League, and was active in the Progressive Youth Council and, for a short while, the Johannesburg branch of the CPSA.
In 1947 First worked, briefly, for the Johannesburg City Council, but left because she disagreed with the actions of the council. She then became the Johannesburg editor of a left-wing weekly newspaper. As a journalist she specialised in investigative reporting and her incisive articles about slave-like conditions on Bethal potato farms, the women's anti-pass campaign, migrant labour, bus boycotts and slum conditions remain among the finest pieces of social and labour journalism of the 1950s.
Having grown up in a politically conscious home, First's political involvement never abated. Apart from the activities already mentioned, she did support work for the 1946 mineworkers' strike, the Indian Passive Resistance campaign and protests surrounding the outlawing of communism in 1950. First was a Marxist with a wide internationalist perspective. She travelled to China, the Union Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR) and countries in Africa, experiences that she documented and analysed. She was central to debates within the Johannesburg Discussion Club, which led to the formation of the underground SACP (of which First was a member) and to closer links between the SACP and the African National Congress (ANC).
In 1949, First married Joe Slovo, a lawyer and labour organiser and, like her, a communist. Throughout the 1950s their home in Roosevelt Park was an important centre for multiracial political gatherings.
Despite her public profile and wide contacts, First remained a private person. She had a brilliant intellect and did not suffer fools gladly. Her sharp criticism and her impatience with bluster earned her enemies and she was often feared in political debate.
In 1953, First helped found the South African Congress of Democrats (COD), the White wing of the Congress Alliance, and she took over as editor of Fighting Talk, a journal supporting the alliance. In 1956, both First and Slovo were arrested and charged in the Treason Trial. The trial lasted four years, after which, all 156 accused were acquitted on 29 March 1961.
First considered herself to be primarily a labour reporter, and during the 1950s she was producing up to 15 stories a week. Despite this high work rate, her writing remained vivid, accurate and often controversial. Her investigative journalism was the basis of her longer pamphlets and, later, her books. The transition to more complex writing came easily.
During the state of emergency following the Sharpeville shootings of March 1960, First fled to Swaziland with her children, returning after the emergency was lifted, six months later, to continue as Johannesburg editor of New Age (successor to The Guardian).
On 9 August 1963, First was detained at the Wits University library. This took place following the arrests of members of the underground ANC, the SACP and Umkhonto we Sizwe in Rivonia on 11 July. In the trial which followed, political leaders such as Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and Govan Mbeki were sentenced to life imprisonment. However, First was not among the accused.
After 90 days First was released but immediately re-arrested on the pavement outside the police station. She was held for a further 27 days, during which she attempted suicide. During this time her father fled South Africa. Soon after her release First left with her children to join her husband, Joe Slovo, who had already fled the country to Britain.
The family settled in North London and First threw herself into anti-apartheid politics, joining the Anti-Apartheid Movement, holding talks, seminars and public discussions in support of the ANC and SACP.
During the 1960s, First researched and edited Mandela's No Easy Walk to Freedom (1967), Govan Mbeki's The Peasant's Revolt (1967) and Oginda Odinga's Not yet Uhuru (for which she was deported to Kenya).
Following a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) conference at the centre on 17 August 1982, First was killed by a letter bomb, widely believed to have been the work of security agencies within South Africa. Until her death, she remained a ‘listed’ communist and could not be quoted in South Africa.
i've had a really wonderful time with you all, i've learned a lot discussing and debating about different things, I was never expecting I'd be treated this well in such a place, so I really appreciate it
sadly today I feel really depressed and lonely so I probably wont reply to anything I've been sent, still I appreciate it and I'll try to look at it when i feel a little better
Remember nerds just like in the old site, no current struggle session discussion here on the new general megathread, i will ban you from the comm and remove your comment, have a good day/night :meow-coffee:
Checked out the defederation megathread on lemm.ee and we're so getting pruned. "No Kremlin propagana" being one of the author mod's biggest bugaboos. Apparently there were some people on here they easily found that were talking about Estonians being subhuman?? And the admins here agreed in conversation to censor aforementioned 'Kremlin propaganda'??
Whole thing reads as being very reasonable with islands of absolute
We had an icebreaker question at a meeting at work today. The question was 'where would you like to go'. Someone answered The Great Wall of China, but then said they wouldn't want to stay there because of all the political unrest in China.
I like this person so I don't want to bash them, but it's just sad that everyone is fed this stuff here. There's massive political unrest in the US!
Kremlin propaganda has no place on lemm.ee. Any dehumanizing talking points of the Kremlin on lemm.ee are treated as any other bigotry, and if communist symbolism is used in context of Kremlin propaganda (that is the context in which I have been exposed to it throughout my whole life), then it will still be removed.
Feeling slightly deranged after reading a verbatim "check your privilege" over a suggestion that legitimate physical therapy is preferable to a chiropractor that has a very real chance of just internally decapitating you and giving you a massive stroke.
Yeah the chiropractor is more affordable in both time and money spent, thats for a very specific and very negative reason. Drinking snake oil is probably way cheaper than real medicine and it promises to work a lot faster too.
dipping back into against my better judgment after having spent a long time logged off from social media and it really is absurd how deep the hatred for asians runs within the westoid brain. you get completely fetishized and infantilized if you're from one of the "cool" countries (ie. Japan or South Korea), wherein these people continually fawn over you for your superior, single-ethnicity, non-political land. any indication that these are living people with varied beliefs and lives as complex and storied as anyone else's must be completely buried by dipshits who insist that your entire culture labors under an idealized child-like innocence where nobody has ever had a Political thought, ever. these redditors believe that everyone slots neatly into a cartoon character trope at their most diverse because their entire engagement with the world is through consumption of exported entertainment
and god help you if you're from one of the "acceptable target" countries like China, or India, or Thailand. people will flood the comments of literally any post if they catch so much as a passing suggestion that it might have something to do with one of the Bad Countries. "jokes" about filthy wet markets and people shitting in the streets, "jokes" about shoddy construction killing people, "jokes" about traveling abroad in search of finding new sexual conquests, "jokes" about how the asian skull simply doesn't have enough divots in it to allow their brains to experience foreign concepts like love or family or responsibility. the shit these people say is vile. i don't understand how you can type this shit out and not feel your stomach churn with the primal knowledge that you're being a fucking monster
it's complete dehumanization. you either get it from people whose only conception of you is that you're a very pretty doll to be dressed up and discarded, or you're a fanged, disgusting beast who needs to be put down
i'm certain it's no shock to any of us here that angloid westerners are overwhelmingly the most racist pieces of shit imaginable, but it really does seem like it's becoming more and more acceptable to be dropping shit like this in "polite company". the libs have been scratched for a long, long time, and i think the thick ichor blood of the fascist is starting to ooze from their wounds at a rate i'm not ready for
Just had to say goodbye to my 18 year old kitty, I know it was for the best but god it's so hard. I hope she felt all the love in the world because she was a perfect cat
big pog! not to jinx it (touch wood) but the bastard landlord thats been screwing me around has responded and it looks like we're going to get this apartment!
so glad i get to give a fucking exorbitant amount of money to some parasite in order to not be homeless
Today I had a good faith discussion with an actual communist. I am shocked and appalled, it should have been a shouting match about who is the real liberal :stalin-bummed:
I'm been sucking dick in New York for 8 years and I've finally saved up enough money to move.
Not only do New Yorkers eat too much pizza, but they won't even put pineapple on the pizza because they're elitists. I'm taking my dick sucking and moving to the place where they invented pineapple. Sure, pineapple on pizza is an affront to god but so is their taste after eating nothing but pizza for an entire week.
Western music: If it approaches politics in its lyrics and it dunks on government policies, capitalism, war etc. even explicitly, the message gets ignored and even enjoyed by people it's supposed to criticise. For example, Reagan using Born in the USA for his 1984 election campaign, in spite of the lyrics being about war crimes in the Vietnam War.
Socialist country music: "If you look at the lyrics in this love song, you will find a metaphor about how communism is bad and how much they hate it! My heart aches for you, I want to reach you but you're not there [Not a real song, I made them up] See? the song is about the deep desire of the Author to escape the prison that's their countries but being unable to - how else can you interpret this?" - Libs both foreign and domestic. Based on a review of a Polish album I saw on rateyourmusic, but something that keeps popping up again and again whenever there's discourse on socialist era media.
Something something Michael Parenti and hostile evidence.
sometimes when I'm aimlessly internet browsing I'll check out the modlog, and for one, I think there should be a way to filter it by instance, and two: what the fuck is going on on other instances? @robinn2@hexbear.net what did you say lol
i just investigated further and no one uses that community on that instance anyway. Which is even more bizarre of a ban.
Dear Chinese Wumaos(from the China CCP), if the Tiananmen Square Massacre didn't happen, how did people write fictional novels about what it was like being massacred?
Why do any of us give a shit what "anti-tankie" spaces think about us? If they defed, good riddance. I don't see why we should appease anti-communists in any way.
My girlfriend works as a delivery driver for Pizza Hut, and her store just implemented an AI dispatch system that winds up sending a sizeable number of the store's orders to DoorDash. This of course screws her and the other drivers out of tips.
I offer this information both as a concrete example of how AI under capitalism harms workers, but also to express how upset I am at how I'm unable to help her. I've brought up the subject of unionizing, but I don't know that it'd help, or if she or her coworkers would even go for it. I've been trying to get her to jump ship for Domino's, but apparently they have a similar system in their stores, though I don't know if any of the locals have implemented it yet.
I understand why she doesn't quit mind, she's been doing it five years and it can be lucrative when business is up. But the shithead that run the company keep price gouging, and business has slowed down considerably as a result. That combined with this AI nonsense is a good argument for me pressing the issue again.
I (unfortunately) live in a suburb and I fucking LOATHE lawn culture. From April - October, I hear fucking lawn mowers going nonstop. These people don't even have gardens or nice flowers, just Kentucky bluegrass that they mow three times a week.
I love the one landlord arguing in the lemm.ee meta thread like yeah dawg you are a parasite on society we are trying to explain it to you in the most cordial way possible
things are not going great folks... in fact some people, not me but some people who i've heard say that maybe perhaps things are going quite bad, not good! at all actually.
Ran in to actual non-Laruchite non-Patsoc socialists who insisted that you're only a member of the working class if you are currently receiving a paycheck as an industrial or service worker. Apparently they really do exist, and all the other kinds of workers plus the entire reserve army of labor and anyone whose source of income they think is icky is not working class and should be written off.
Didn't know that still existed, but one of them is a TERF so I'm not surprised they ahve a lot of other bizarre shitty ideas.
Like come on, man, the 20th century conclusively demonstrated that ag workers and peasants are important in any kind of revolutionary leftist operation, Something Marx mostly did not anticipate, and you're still working on a definition of working class that was reductive even before 1918? Jfc.
Hobbies aren't giving me pleasure lately. Well, that's not entirely true - journaling, very slowly starting to try to creative write again, and music are OK. Movies, TV, vidya, reading all suck ass right now though and aren't at all enjoyable - it's like I'm engaging the media with numbing gel on my brain or something. I think with my recent mini-divorce I crave togetherness with others at the moment more than self-directed activities. Which then ofc circles back to how fucking atomized we are. Friends are great but they're not reliable. The workplace and bars are two of the only spaces of collective anything, and both are super obviously problematic. Parks are nice but people mostly go there to do their own thing.
Idk, comrades. This spiritual emptiness shit bites.
literally calling fascist pol pot a tankie and then posting "-*ard" slurs and attacking even like China and Cuba. As a this is what Fanon called "getting it beat into your head every single day of your life in every facet of society that you're less than".
completely dont need this shit and absolutely will not be polite to these people on this website.
Was just told by a teacher I know that they are now legally required to call kids by their legal name. If the kid wants to be called anything else, this has to be reported to their parents first. God I hate this place.
Normalize 👏 coloring 👏 your 👏 balls.
I want multicolored balls. Plaid balls. Those frilly flower and droplet designs like on paper towels. On your balls. I'm painting a houndstooth pattern on mine right now. Balls. Paint em.
If one wants to be a stand-up comic nowadays, do they first have to be funny for a while or can they just skip straight to the part where they just say things the audience agrees with in an angry tone?
clicked on the wrong reddit post and was reminded that, in the year of our lord 2023, there still exists a subreddit called "PCMASTERRACE", and there are people who still post on it what are we doing guys.
Considering many on the 3rd world had been embracing MLM thought, do you suppose there’s a racism angle to call out Libs from and make them do mental backflips over?
I mean, policing how these people go about their struggle for independence? Not a good look fam
Playing through Bethesda games but taking the main plots seriously completely changes the flow of the games. Right now I’m replaying FNV and actually pursuing Benny like he shot me in the head. I made it to Novac and just said fuck it I know he’s going to the strip, I’m not wasting time with these ghouls in the repconn facility. Going to be interesting seeing how the dialogue shifts when I go back through these earlier level areas after completing much of the main quest
It doesn’t even matter that I was burning 3000-5000 calories per day because I was living off pan au chocolat and gigantic three-course dinners. It was mostly fresh food and not processed junk but calories are calories. I stopped caring about three days in. It was worth it. The Camino mattered more, plus I was told over and over again that I’m the fittest looking person out there. My arms look REALLY toned in photographs!
I’ve still got a chubby stomach from my pre-transition days though so just a BIT more work between now and then end of the year. It shouldn’t take much. I’m in a really good mood about this and everything else.
You know they say that all men are created equal, but you look at me and you look at Samoa Joe and you can see that statement is not true.
See, normally if you go one on one with another wrestler, you got a 50/50 chance of winning. But I'm a genetic freak and I'm not normal! So you got a 25%, AT BEST, at beat me. Then you add Kurt Angle to the mix, your chances of winning drastic go down.
See the 3 way at Sacrifice, you got a 33 1/3 chance of winning, but I, I got a 66 and 2/3 chance of winning, because Kurt Angle KNOWS he can't beat me and he's not even gonna try!
So Samoa Joe, you take your 33 1/3 chance, minus my 25% chance and you got an 8 1/3 chance of winning at Sacrifice.
But then you take my 75% chance of winning, if we was to go one on one, and then add 66 2/3 per cents, I got 141 2/3 chance of winning at Sacrifice.
See Joe, the numbers don't lie, and they spell disaster for you at Sacrifice.
I bought a cheap table that's supposed to go by the side of your couch and a tiny keyboard (like only up to the G key) with the intent of playing pc games on the tv still using kbm. Kind of excited for this lol.
Had a weird alien invasion bodysnatchers nightmare where the human "hosts" were going like Rage virus mode and we had to hole up and defend ourselves with hammers and knives and shit, also posting 0's with some other emoji I can't remember was trending on social media as it all went down
I can't remember if it was the hosts posting as a threat like "0 humans left alive" or people being like "trust no one, purge your group until there are 0 possible hosts"
comrades I have a bit of a dilemma...I have a cat who is extremely, unusually needy. Like won't stop crawling all over you and nuzzling you and stuff even if you give her affection - she just always pushes for more. Since me and my partner split up I really really feel like I'm not giving this cat what she needs. I've been trying to be more social and not be in my apartment terribly often at all, and when I am home I really just want solitude (she's not the kind of cat who you can just passively give affection to, it's always gonna be an active effort that costs emotional energy so I can't really just chill with her while I'm focused on doing something else).
I've had her for 8 years and I do love her but this is the first time she's only had one person taking care of her and I don't feel up to the task. Should I like...try to find a new home for her? Like I'm still keeping her alive and healthy ofc but I really don't think she's terribly happy with me as a solo caretaker.
wouldn't a really sensible half-way to nuclear disarmament be the monitored separation of warheads and missiles? like everyone keeps them separate and it'd take a few days to get them operational, but nobody is actually 'naked' or disarmed. no power would be able to invade and secure your weapons stores conventionally before you'd be able to put them back together, but the risk of accidents & preventable escalation would drop substantially if there was this in-between step
Employers having you receive and then submit a criminal background check is so humiliating. Hate receiving letters from the government that say I'm not cool
Alright. Well I just saw my neighbor fight with someone who I'm assuming is her boyfriend. The guy pushed her to the ground and then sped off in his car. I was just getting around to put my street clothes on and ask if her if she needed help and she took off. ffs these fucking people.
Iron Hand Götz: "Yeah I fought for the peasants in the German Peasants war. Did I mention that time I fought a feud against the city of Cologne, the city of Augsburg, and the entire goddamn Swabian League."
Some dudes transcend dudes rock in ways scarcely imaginable.
I have the money to buy new shiny pc parts. I havent for the past 2, maybe 3 years, but I also don't play graphically intensive games anymore... I only play CS. So even though I could, I probably shouldn't. But damn. Because PC parts improve so quickly i get that urge quicker
But if i rlly want to ig i'd get more out of buying some great headphones & dac, something I've never had before, and would be a giant leap for my audio quality and worth the cost in usage.
For any nerds interested: I'd replace my vega56 for a 6800xt ($550), and my 3700x for a 5800X3D ($330)
Kiryu when the other guy he knows with 'ryu' in his name also has a dragon tattoo (Ryuji talking about how there should be only one dragon wasn't obvious enough for him)
Right before my shift as cartpusher ended I came across a swarm of girls from NYC (who relocated to south carolina and apparently went to my high school for as long as I had without me remembering) and it legit felt like I was in a Sidetalk episode for five whole minutes
Since the fermentation of fructose, the most common sugar in fruits, ends up with several stable esters as a product, it acts as a biologicial preservative.
This means that fruit is incapable of expiring since it never decays beyond a certain point.
"To be disloyal to the Orthogonian cause- this is the fifth type of Franklinism. A comrade must be steadfast and unwavering in his efforts to establish the Orthogonian dictatorship." - Comrade Richard Nixon
The track for the August 8 Yuma Colorado tornado has been released and it's quite unusual! Most tornados move in a fairly straight line from southwest to northeast
I told chatgpt to critique that In Xanadu poem like an internet reviewer collaboration and I gotta say, it pretty much captured the cringey vibe I wanted lol
[Start in Nostalgia Critic's style]
Hey there, everybody! Nostalgia Critic here, and today we're diving headfirst into the poetry pit to dissect a classic that's got everyone scratching their heads: "Kubla Khan" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Oh boy, where do I even begin with this one? Strap yourselves in, 'cause we're in for a wild ride!
[Switch to Angry Video Game Nerd's style]
What's up, it's the Angry Video Game Nerd, and I'm not sure how the heck I ended up talking about a poem, but let's roll with it. "Kubla Khan," huh? More like "Kubla Con-fusing"! I've read this thing more times than I've played terrible video games, and let me tell ya, it's like trying to beat Silver Surfer on the NES blindfolded!
[Back to Nostalgia Critic]
I mean, seriously, Coleridge? What were you even on when you wrote this? Was it opium or just pure insanity? It's like he took a bunch of random words, threw 'em in a blender, hit frappé, and voilà, we got "Kubla Khan"! It's all dreamy and trippy, like he's trying to give us a glimpse into a drug-induced hallucination. I get it, art is subjective, but come on!
[Switch to Angry Video Game Nerd]
It's like trying to decipher the cryptic controls of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde for the NES, except it's words on a page! I'm trying to wrap my head around these lines, and it's like playing E.T. for the Atari 2600 – an absolute mess that leaves you wondering what the hell you just experienced!
[Back to Nostalgia Critic]
And let's not forget about Xanadu! What even is Xanadu? Is it a place? A state of mind? An ice cream flavor? Coleridge, you can't just drop a word like Xanadu and expect us to just nod along like it makes perfect sense! It's like reviewing "The Room" and not mentioning "Oh, hi Mark!"
[Switch to Angry Video Game Nerd]
Xanadu? How about you Xana-don't! I mean, who needs a GPS when you've got this poem leading you through the dense forest of confusion, right? It's like playing a game with no instructions, no clear objective, and no freakin' point!
[Back to Nostalgia Critic]
In the end, "Kubla Khan" is like a fever dream without the fever. It's got potential, like the concept for a fantastic movie that never got made. Coleridge, you've left us scratching our heads and reaching for that rewind button, just like when you're stuck on an impossible level of Battletoads!
[Switch to Angry Video Game Nerd]
So there you have it, folks. "Kubla Khan" – a literary enigma that's more mind-boggling than a game of Superman 64. Coleridge, you've created a puzzle wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma, and I'm throwing down the controller. I'm out!
[End with Nostalgia Critic]
Remember to like, subscribe, and comment below if you've ever felt like you're stuck in the "Kubla Khan" of life. Until next time, I'm the Nostalgia Critic, and this poem gets a big ol' "What were they thinking?!" from me!