2y ago

General Discussion Thread - Juche 112, Week 28

Welcome Comrades to this, our weekly tradition! All I ask is that no one touch the Giant Spoon, we just got that back and I do not want to explain how it got lost again.

We have a Matrix homeserver at genzedong.xyz. See this thread for information about our Matrix space. Did you know we have a Theory Reading Group, in the matrix space? well we do, and we would like you to be a part!

Short reading list for new MLs here. To find theory, try marxists.org, Anna's Archive, libgen, or Sci-Hub (for scientific articles). If an article is unavailable, try the Wayback Machine.

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I tried baked beans…and I liked it. Help, am I becoming British??? 😦😦😦😦😦😦 Please, I don’t wanna become British. Help, help!!! 😭😭😭😭😭
- You're hardly British until you get an irresistible urge to plunder
  
  You ever read into the guy who wrote Invictus?
  Motherfucker (William Ernest Henley) had the gall to suffer his entire adult life from disability brought on by tuberculosis, yet talked about the need for the superiorly bred Englishman to civilize the savage world.
  Invictus reads quite differently in hindsight. Wish he had, in fact, lost the will to live.
- No. You only become British when you put the baked beans on toast
- Controversial opinion:
  British food is good.
  I’ll die on this hill
  
  And you will die alone on that hill LOL
- They are good, though.
With the number of Reuters headlines I read proclaiming Ukrainian advancement on the front you’d think they’d be at Vladivostok by now
- They pushed too hard and went around the whole world, ending right back where they started.
It's been raining since Saturday. The city is drowning, and it's not really a hyperbole. We've gotten almost twice the monthly norm of rain in three days. Several routes of public transport have been suspended. Cars are breaking down mid-road, because water gets under the hood.
What improper infrastructure does to mfers.
I spent the weekend with friends. Drinks on a patio on Friday. We went to a 90s music night at a local bar on Saturday. I got laid! It was a great weekend! Summer is 🔥
I was chilling on a Basque mountain when all of a sudden I got the news that AFTER 13 FUCKING YEARS DUTCH PRIME MINISTER MARK RUTTE RESIGNS GOD FUCKING DAMN IT 13 YEARS OF NEOLIBERAL SHIT IS OVER (well, maybe not, elections will come) LETS GOOOOOO 🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀
- What are the odds he'll be replaced with someone even more ghoulish?
  
  High. I fear a more extreme right wing government now. Or the right implodes because of this, because most neofascist parties in the country are relatively new and inexperienced, and the two biggest left wing parties merged recently. I hope they can take over.
Several minutes ago I asked my stepfather (a propertarian), ‘Hey, I got a funny question: did you know that Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935?’ He shook his head. I asked my mother the same thing, and she didn’t know either.
I know that it’s an odd thing to bring up, but to me it seems like a pretty basic subject of which more educated adults should at least be aware, and yet for the life of me I don’t remember seeing anybody casually mentioning it, except for one communist in a Discord server that I frequented (and even then they had little to say about it). I have a feeling that if somebody polled thousands of ordinary Westerners on the subject, the number of respondents with awareness would be heartbreakingly low.
This ultimately goes back to why I study and share research on Fascism, because it feels so backward to me that most ordinary adults—I am guessing—are probably at least vaguely aware of the concept but unaware of many major events in its history. If we want to articulately explain why fascism is not in our best interests, we damn well should be able to mention events like the reinvasion of Ethiopia.
- The only people that know that Ethiopia was invaded by Italy in 1935 are Hoi4 gamer nerds, and hardcore history nerds.
  I would assume 95% of the population would have no clue about that war.
- Where is this?
  
  through the magic of the reverse image search I have found that it is a volcano in the Golan Heights in Syria, illegally occupied by Isn'trael
- Normally I have a strong averse reaction to any snow or cold in a photo but this looks gorgeous, thanks for sharing
I hope you all have a nice week :D
- I hope you have a wonderful week Comrade Oppo
Since I'm working on a danganronpa fanfic, I have a couple of ideas bouncing around for future projects. 1, a sequel where a Junko ghola is brought on a spaceship in hopes of restoring her previous memory by her caregiver Leto Naegi, and they end up being amonguss'd by capitalist splinter aliens. Or, alternatively, some AU stuff in a world where two continents are separated by weird storms that can only be passed with modern-ish technology (like late victorian stuff). One continent is male-dominated socially, while the other is female-dominated. Then they meet, and we get vaguely WW1-ish war shit, yay.
Marxism IS engineering. I just came to the sudden realization that Kaizen (continuous improvement) is dialectical materialism applied to manufacturing processes 🤔
Found this blogpost from a startup defending democracy by using AI in drones.
Blue MAGA is running serious damage control on President Biden right now. 3,000 inactive reserves are going to be activated and shipped over to Europe, under the cover of Operation Atlantic Resolve which is a known readiness exercise. Trouble is, there could not be a more volatile time to do something like this. The level of pushback is very natural.
Ok comrades, not to beat the 'muh modernity is degenerate' drum, but can someone seriously explain to me what's going on in this vid?
Like I honestly do not get what's happening, but whatever it is, it gives me serious existential dread
- They are basically acting as a living reply bot. Every time someone donates a “sticker” (the currency on tiktok) they say a voice line/do an action associated to that sticker.
  It’s horrific.
  
  The wildest thing to me is, that she is imitating something like an AI generated bot. AI imitations of humans are sometimes quite unsettling and uncanny, but this is a million times more terrifying to me. And to be fair, she's doing it really well. It looks robotic as fuck.
  Obviously this is the natural conclusion of the commodification of everything, every aspect of what it means to be a human. It's like the division of labour in factories, the breaking down of complex manufacturing into easily repeatable, mechanic processes - just here the commodity produced is human interaction.
  It's terrifying what this says about the zeitgeist and modern societies that there's even demand for it. That people are so alienated from the interactions they produce, they're now consuming them in these repetitive, bite sized, alienated, simulated portions.
  Horrifying, as you said. I honestly haven't felt this weird and uneasy about anything on the internet in a very very long time.
- they basically roleplaying as ncps, do whatever donators ask for.
- It's just how elf culture be. It's always a little hard for us humans to understand the ways of the forest.
Does anyone know any good intro YouTube videos off the top of their head that they would show their friend who is just starting to question capitalism? They’ve seen clips of the recent strikes in the US and they’ve been very much agitated against “CEOs.” They don’t read much and that’s how I started my journey so I’m fairly clueless on the video side of theory.
- Maybe people like Second Thought, JT has this modern consumable format that makes it really easy to get a basic introduction into socialism and revolutionary ideas. Adjacent but a bit more dense on that stuff is Hakim. Both of them and their show The Deprogram with Yugopnik I think are truly an amazing introduction to socialism and revolutionary anti capitalism theories. They are very basic stuff, but it is intentional so that they communicate easily the point without getting bogged down in the more nuanced parts of the theory. As a starter I would pick that.
- BadEmpenada and Knowing Better while not being full ML’s are decently good at at slowly prying away capitalist conditioning and introducing people to the truth of the world without scaring them away with to many big scary communist words.
  Good starting block but make sure they do not get stuck there.
Boss is setting more ridiculous deadlines, finished the day feeling frazzled.
The server I host my bots on caught on fire earlier this week.
So, an update on me doing some praxis last month in my exams.
Today I found out that I got an A+ on my Sociology Exams. 😳 😳 😳 I was actually surprised, I didn't expect to get this high marks after writing so positively about socialism and kind of denigrating capitalism. I wonder what marks she gave me on each questions, especially on the Capitalist/Socialist questions.
She didn't ask me anything either, like why I wrote what I wrote. Oh well, I'll take it I guess lol. 💅 💅 💅

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