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?

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.

Organise them!

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.

Earth’s civilisations are so backwards rn, too. If aliens did manage to get here, they would be far more advanced. It would be like walking to the shop and stopping to talk to an ants nest.

I think you’re starting to reach the libs.

I don’t know about others, but I’ve learned a lot just by keeping a close eye on your interactions. It’s helped me to develop what I hope is a less hostile approach.

Not to say it isn’t difficult af sometimes. One problem is that Marxists criticise each other as much as others, it’s just that for others, it might be the first time they’ve ever encountered real criticism. So they don’t take it well. I can’t say that I always enjoy harsh criticism, either—it depends what it concerns—but at least I expect it. Others often lash out when they experience it. Then it’s all too easy to summon Lenin-when-he’s-talking-about-/-to-his-own-mentor-Kautsky. Then there are the copious trolls.

This was said about us recently (3 days ago):

As an aside, I have to like this new method of discussion many of you lemmygrad people are now employing. It’s like you had a planning meeting where somebody said “perhaps we shouldn’t be assholes, that doesn’t convince people”.

It’s mildly back-handed but it suggests that whatever we’re doing differently is working. I suspect that as the Lemmyverse exploded, a few dedicated anti-communists tried to rile us up to make sure that others would see us in a bad light. At first, we fell for some of the bait. But I think we’ve got better already. This is good as we can reach a lot of people with our seditious Marxist ways if we can out-game the trolls, etc. One good outcome would be that people come here to lurk and see how we talk to each other; it’ll be hard for people to see us negatively when every other comment here is one of concern for each others’ well-being.

At the same time, most westerners don’t even know they need to be organising. Attempts like this—and their ultimate failure —can radicalise the people involved and people watching. Because one day, they’ll ask, why isn’t this working. And the spirit of a revolutionary will start to visit them in their dreams.

“Why are all these soldiers traumatized?”

That’s an interesting idea. I’ve said something similar irl, that there’s a bourgeois script.

There’s no point arguing with someone who goes into it by default. Especially family members. Not everyone uses it, but for those who do, the only end point is an exchange of insults.

Good examples are reactionary TV ‘news’ presenters. They aren’t interested in the argument or evidence, only providing their audience with another example to confirm their pre-existing worldview. There’s always another quip, another reason why they don’t have to consider a new idea. It’s infuriating. But when you can recognise it, you’ll save yourself a lot of intellectual hardship and emotional pain.

No, I k don’t think so. I didn’t realise exploding heads was an instance. So I thought you were talking about the emoji.

This is making a lot more sense now. I thought this emoji 🤯 was a dog whistle for something and felt too daft to ask.

this bit was the cherry on top

Omg it’s too much I’m dying. Thanks, comrade. Thank you very much. Double-nice good find.

Did the article in question make it peer review? If so, wow, standards are lower than I expected for those who support the empire.

Even down to basic logic. If a ‘tankie’ community forms by ‘siphoning’ users from other ‘far left’ online communities, can one really conclude that the number of ‘tankies’ has grown? Surely that’s only evidence that Marxists move around (let’s not mention that one reason is they keep getting booted from mainstream platforms, while extreme right wingers get algorithm’d to the top of everyone’s feed).

The number of ‘left extremists’ didn’t go back to zero e.g. when Chapo Trap House got quarantined. They just couldn’t congregate on they sub anymore. So they didn’t magically grow again when Hexbear or GenZedong were created. They just moved. It seems obvious that numbers have grown. But that’s not directly supported by the argument.

Can’t wait for the next project where they follow up with their suggestion and compare left wing ‘extremists’ with right wing extremists:

“Left wing extremists don’t commit terrorism and are frequently found arranging protests on behalf of the most vulnerable people. They hold outrageous views such as the right to basic health and safety precautions at work and the right to access a doctor when ill. If they are involved in violence it is as subject to the violence of the state or of right wing extremists. Nonetheless we conclude that these people are dangerous. Because they make our brains feel mushy with cognitive dissonance by pointing out that the good guys^TM get up to some downright bad guy behaviour.”

Edit: I’m obsessed. It gets worse:

We’re not learning if something is racist or not – we’re learning which is more racist. Who knows what we’ll find … [?]

Jfc. Only someone who never has to worry about being subject to racism could say something like this with such hubris. What a redacted. At least they’re honest that with liberals—the majority of most online spaces—it’s only a question of degree.

If anyone wants an example of how technology, including AI, is designed to be intentionally racist, this is it. The results of this project could be a machine learning moderation algorithm that doesn’t try to prevent racist speech but only to moderate the more racist of any two utterances. A deliberate intention to build into AI the exact kind of techno-structural racism enacted by liberal humans up to now. Liberals just can’t help themselves, can they?

Heaven forbid anyone apply the same logic to European states that aren’t in Europe. No idea how they got there but it’s fishy if you ask me.

World you participate in a mild, painless experiment? Would you carefully read Roland Boer’s Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, and then come back here with an honest review? You don’t even have to agree with him. All I ask for is a fair treatment.

The imperialists didn’t give all that ‘aid’ to Ukraine for nothing. They’re going to want the contacts to rebuild part of the country, whatever happens.

I expect that accepting defeat will be career ending for a lot of the politicians in the west.

A lot of those might only have till the next election anyway, thanks to the inflation they’ve either encouraged or done nothing about. Then again, support for Ukraine is kinda cross-party in the west. It’s hard to predict. Considering the brain worms, one thing we might hope for is that media barons somehow lose a load of money because of the war and shift the narrative hard. This might be too much to hope for, though.

I fundamentally agree.

There’s something to unpick in relation to the LtoV, though. Value is socially necessary labour time. Does this mean that other people in society would still need to want your art for it to have value according to the LtoV? Is this the theoretical basis for what you observe about needing consumers?