I'm sorry to hear that. It wasn't my comment, was it? I'd have to have upset you.
I've got a pile of climate change books that I'm trying to work through. The problem is, it's depressing af. I can read for a few weeks but then I need time off. Sometimes a day or two will work. Other times I need a month or more.
You do a lot of great research and share it with us but some of the topics are a bit grim. Would it be worth taking a break for you to recover if it's making you feel that way? I wouldn't want you to stop posting but if you need a break, you've got to look after yourself.
You're colleagues should slow tf down. What's wrong with them?
Don't feel stupid. Capitalism is not set up to get the best out of people, and the effects of this have no bearing on your worth.
Have you been in your job/role for long?
China does make me question the usefulness of applying dialectical materialism in political decision making. Like, how accurate can it really be for predicting things when every time China makes plans and sets targets it smashes them months or years in advance?
Since you seem to be in a exclusive romantic relationship with misinformation.
Cyber Ghost of Marxist Dunkers Past
CW hate crimes
I wonder what the Venn diagram is for people who argue for talking Nazis out of their views and people who support (or do the work of) planting hidden barrels wrapped in razor wire and barbed wire along the US border so that asylum seekers are forced into a deadly river.
Jfc the more I learn about the world the more I'm convinced the fascists didn't lose in the twentieth century, they just changed their mask and tactics. How do any of these people live with themselves?
I like to call it Eurafrica when I'm talking with libs. They dislike being reminded that the foundations of European culture were almost all developed in Africa.
Then when they'd stolen all they could, they forgot about the continent and plummeted into the dark ages until they met west Asians, whose scholarly outputs helped backwards Europe to turn the lights back on.
After draining all they could, they stagnated again until they found the Americas, where they found parliamentary democracy and many other theretofore inconceivable inventions.
Marx called it primitive accumulation when the capitalists started doing it but Europeans have been propping themselves up on the heritage of the rest of the world for millennia. I guess Europe could be called 'Thievesope' but that is a bit tautologous.
There's only so long you can go with empty catchphrases before the reality of 'US support' is obvious to everyone (except western libs, of course, but I'm willing to give more credit to Ukrainians who are on a much sharper side of US promises than are western libs tucked up safe and sound).
… the community dedicated to posting our w’s to get mad at.
May as well sign up and sort by local at that point; all we post is w's.
You're right, at that. I was thinking of dunks like this:
Classical economy always loved to conceive social capital as a fixed magnitude of a fixed degree of efficiency. But this prejudice was first established as a dogma by the arch-Philistine, Jeremy Bentham, that insipid, pedantic, leather-tongued oracle of the ordinary bourgeois intelligence of the 19th century. Bentham is among philosophers what Martin Tupper is among poets. Both could only have been manufactured in England.
Imagine if libs came along with wit like this. Unlikely, still, but is it worth the risk?
(A: yes)
I don't understand pre-ordering games at all. Do they limit sales somehow? Can't you just buy it on the day it's released? I only play games when they come down in price so I've never tried to buy a game on release day.
(Books, however, I regularly pre-order but only when I know the author has finished the book and there's a definite release date; this way it gets shipped to arrive on the release date and I can help authors get up the best seller list (that's why you see all those obscure Marxists at the top of the NYT bestseller list all the time – it's me buying one copy).)
Before coming to Lemmygrad I realise I was fucking clueless about privacy and security. I thought I knew but I wasn't even close.
Exactly. Imagine developing space travel and then coming across a species that still largely thinks it can achieve anything by leaving all the great development projects to random individuals – 150 years after the discovery of dialectical and historical materialism. Not exactly a mark of distinction.
Then consider that if aliens manage to get here, the native species believes that they won't have the technology or resources to find out a little about them before they make themselves visible. If aliens do arrive, they'll know everything about us before they show their 'faces' and they'll be stopping off at Beijing first.
I've wanted to go over to Linux for a long time but I have no idea how to go about it. I hear about incompatibility problems with hardware and all the different options for different Linux OS's and that's it, I forget about it for a while to avoid the headache.
So where do I start? I don't even know how to choose hardware or what to look for. The number of options with Linux makes things a little confusing.
And although others here have answered the question before, I'm unsure what I have to do to stay 'safe' on Linux. Are there extra steps or is it just the standard, don't open dodgy links and turn off Java script in the PDF viewer kind of thing? Does Linux come with a trustworthy firewall/antivirus/malware detection? Is there a chance of Linux e.g. sending my passwords, etc, to someone or just letting someone into my harddrive? I hear that 'open source' means people can check the code but how do I know if someone has checked the code—I wouldn't know what to look for myself.
I followed the Linux subreddit but the users the can be rather… enthusiastic, which is great, but I need something far more basic to get started lol.
Is there a good step-by-step guide somewhere? Or can anyone give me some pointers/tips/advice?
I mainly browse, type, and read pdfs and other text files. No gaming, although I wouldn't be opposed to it. No need to be mobile; laptops are terrible for my back so I always use an external monitor, anyway, so I won't be using it 'on the go'.
Omg I've been here for a year today!
I just wanted to thank everyone for making this place what it is. I've never been much of a poster elsewhere because I can't stand much internet drama. But here, where good faith is the starting point, I feel that I can talk as I wish and have meaningful conversations and interactions.
Take care, everyone.
This isn't intended to close the debate on what counts as socialism. It's a comment I wrote in one of the federated instances that I suspect will be deleted. So I'm posting the text here as I thought it might generate some good discussion:
It's okay for us to disagree on our assessments of AES, but these disagreements must be based on some common understandings. I don't think we're there at the moment. Partly this comes down to the way language has shifted in the last 200 years.
The dictatorship of the proletariat is to be contrasted with a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. It means 'dictatorship' in the way that liberal democracies are dictatorships because they are governed by consistent (class based) institutions that hold executive, legislative, and judicial power.
The meaning of dictatorship has changed. Back then it more clearly meant something like 'governance by', and Marx's contemporaries would have inferred this meaning.
A dictatorship of the proletariat means the workers, not the capitalists, control the state and the means of production. In the words of one scholar, it means something like: > … either state-controlled [where the state is controlled by the proletariat] or private-but-worker-controlled economy with a democratically elected government and not necessarily single party.
The idea being that capitalism is a class-based political economy, and communism is the abolition of classes. The dictatorship of the proletariat is the stage of history where the workers have control of the state/means of production. Once the workers have such control, the distinction between bourgeois and proletariat falls apart. At that point we have reached communism.
You might even challenge the way that this has been tried so far. I would say to look again, if so. But either way, it doesn't change the theory. One can detest the way that an idea has been put into practice without rejecting the theory. As Kwame Ture advises, an ideology should be judged by it's principles, not it's practicioners.
No state has yet reached communism. The very idea is an oxymoron as communism is stateless. What some few states have begun to achieve (but no state has quite got there yet, as the class struggle is ongoing, although China, at least, is close) is socialism.
Marx used different terms in different works to discuss all this. As primarily a critic of capitalism, he didn't really flesh out a theory of socialism or communism in the way that you suggest. For that, we must look to Engels and to Lenin's State and Revolution. Nonetheless, a birds eye view of Marx's work reveals that he advocated for socialism (a dictatorship is the proletariat) as a stepping stone to communism. The logic of this progression grows directly out of an historical materialist analysis of class society.
At the same time, there is another sense of the Marxist concept of communism, but I don't think this is the one you mean. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels wrote: > We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. Further, in the Communist Manifesto, they wrote: > Communists everywhere support any revolutionary movement against the existing social and political conditions.
In this sense, Marxist-Leninists are 'literally communists' but Marxist-Leninist states cannot be 'literal[] communism' but they are socialist (or trying to be).
If you want to read a short text about socialist governance, you might enjoy Roland Boer, Friedrich Engels and the Foundations of Socialist Governance. His Socialism with Chinese Characteristics may also be of interest for giving a detailed analysis of governance in China.
You can still disagree with MLs, AES, and the above definitions and propose other definitions, but that would involve speaking at cross purposes. It might also involve idealism because throughout history the only revolutionary socialist projects to have succeeded for a significant time have been guided by Marxism-Leninism. It's okay (albeit idealist) to have a different concept of socialism but a definition based on concrete examples must look to Marxism-Leninism.
And one cannot simply dismiss the experience of the attempt of billions of people trying to build socialism as not socialism because it doesn't match an esoteric and contrasting definition of socialism.
Edit: the scholar referred to in the text is the person I was replying to, who criticised the DotP but gave a definition of socialism that could describe a DotP.
I heard someone refer to Cuba as state capitalist.
When I hear the same thing said about China or the old USSR, I can usually tell when 'state capitalism' is being used in good faith or not.
But with Cuba, I don't know enough.
My instinct, based on little knowledge, is that Cuba is not 'state capitalist'.
Is it?
What kind of economy does Cuba have?