General Discussion Thread - Juche 112, Week 52 (highjacked christmas edition)
Considering the sheer amount of influence the US holds on the global stage, every country would be justified in interfering. It's almost democratic.
As an exercise, open this link and search in it the words "by United States". And that's just on NATOpedia.
The US establishment is speeding towards an obvious pit, and has every opportunity to stop, slow down or change course. Instead they are filling their tanks in diesel with every action and hoping the car blows up before they get there.
One of the few things holding the regime together has been the blind faith in their institutions and procedures, and by casting doubt in that, either through denouncing foreign influences, or by accusations of election fraud, they're effectively guaranteeing a constitutional crisis.
They're making Louis XVI look competent.
Online games will now be banned from giving players rewards if they log in every day, if they spend on the game for the first time or if they spend several times on the game consecutively. All are common incentive mechanisms in online games.
As a person who is very prone to game addiction, to the point where I refuse to play online games, this is a very welcome change. Hope the pressure impacts companies abroad.
Couldn't they get into serious legal trouble by supporting full decolonisation? I'm not sure about the laws in Britland but I've heard that there's been some harsh escalation of persecution for "supporting terrorists" whatever that means.
When was his last trip abroad? He could just "vanish" and stay there to enjoy the retirement.
If you have a bias that all history about Buddha, Jesus and Muhammed is all messed up
Odd, I have actually never said anything like that. In fact I never mentioned Buddha (because I don't know much about him or really care tbh), and I even pointed out how a historical Muhammed was way more likely than a Jesus. I'm pretty sure I also haven't been rude to you, and not sure if my country counts as "Western" (Brazil). Nor have I claimed that I'm a "great historian" by pointing out that there are actually a lot of Christ Myth historians out there and that their theories don't fall apart with such well know texts like Tacitus's Annals. Putting words into other people's mouths to frame them as idiots or bigots is not exactly respectful.
I answered most of your remarks with why they're not a silver bullet against Christ myth theory, you responded with ad hominem, strawmanning my arguments or arguments of authority with Ehrman. Much as you follow Bartman and posted what you thought was credible information, I've read a lot of early Roman history and pointed out how you were misinterpreting that information. I don't see the need for hostility, though I admit I was partly at fault there for assuming you're Christian.
Also none of the myth theories involve entire societies faking entire histories. As I pointed out, a lot of it involves taking actual stories and shared experiences, pre-existing beliefs and myths and merging them in a syncretic fashion, often purely organically. For example in Brazil we have a set of very modern and specific religions that were formed by mixing Christian and West African figures and stories while under suppression. Later on they went on to become closer to Kardecism due to this one being similar but not banned. There wasn't a concerted effort to "fake" that Oxalá is related to Jesus, this was born out of the encounter of two diverse sets of beliefs colliding within the horrible conditions of slavery, genocide and religious suppression.
Again, that is not what I said. In all words: "there is not enough evidence to posit that the existence of Jesus the Man as an undeniable fact."
Some (probably most Western) historians believe that he did exist in some form, some believe that he was organically constructed after the fact from stories and common experiences. Some scares ones even believe that the entire thing was concocted by the Roman State Church to co-opt the movement into looking like the previous Imperial Cult.
But history is not a "believe all you want" situation and you can't just come here with all that self-righteous arrogance based on one YouTube video and a lot of faith and think you can just discredit serious historiographical theories while being taken seriously. You can have your faith personally, but to put it above historical investigation is anti-materialist and if you can't handle actual history discussion with civility this forum might not be for you.
There are tacitus, josepheus , Suetonius etc , that jesus existed.
Secondary sources about Jesus himself, they primarily talk about what is believed at their time, not necessarily attesting for the existence of Jesus the Guy.
The early Gospel which is of Mark also provides a historical account it has zero theological interpretation and was written in 70CE.
Again secondary source, and Christian one at that.
One thing for sure, Romans hated the christians and jews for political reasons and why would they fabricate of such.
This is a strawman. Nobody is arguing that the Romans randomly invented Jesus, but rather the most common Christ Myth theory is that earlier Christians (who had lots of other non-religious threads tying them together) synthesized the mythical story of Christ the Guy from stories about both real events and people as well as those o previous religions.
It's also very reductionist to portray the Romans as uniformly hating Christians. Lots of the Early Christians were Roman citizens and once the Church got integrated into the Roman state by the time of Constantin they obviously had incentives to rethink or rewrite the myths in ways that benefited state power. They had some 500 years post Christ where they constantly argued over the meaning of theological things due to their cultural and philosophical implications, like Arianism and Myaphitism.
Let's move to Arabia, why would Muhammed who was the prophet of Islam mentioned jesus positively and his mother. They are included in his revelations in Quran. According to him, he was prophet but not a "son of God".
Muhammed is said to have his revelation in the early 7th century. The Qur'an was codified in the mid-7th. Putting aside the idea that you can prove the historicity of certain myths by assuming other myths are true and engaging with it in a pure skeptical perspective, people in the 7th century already believed Jesus was real. It would follow that that people could be able to reference Jesus then without it proving Christ the Man ever actually existed as such.
In fact the Jesus of Islam is a significantly different figure, so if you choose to engage with historical texts with so much trust, you'll inevitably get some really odd contradictions. It doesn't help that there are also a lot "Muhammed Myth" theorists out there, like Tom Holland, who dispute the idea that Muhammed himself existed. Which leads to my following point.
I don't want to argue senselessly but rigid verified proof of suchlike athings don't exist. Can you prove the existence of Alexander the great? Simply because someone ancient historians wrote it?
Because unlike Christ the Man, both Alexander and Muhammed led movements that had immense and immediate impact on many different lands and cultures. Although it's actually difficult to provide incontrovertible proof of either existing, the existence of the movements they led and their impacts on the world is undeniable and unlike Jesus they lived out in the open for all to see, so most historians find it easier to believe that these figures had actually existed.
Meanwhile the deeds of living Jesus are not mentioned by his contemporaries, and historians mostly only note them as relevant lator on to explain the actual impactful post-Jesus Christian movements. It is not, in fact "simply because ancient historians wrote it," but because we can find evidence that isore convincing than just the words of ancient historians transcribed multiple times by ecclesiastical scribes.
And Alexander himself is a really bad example because not only is there much written about him, but a lot of referenced but lost works from his time, including letters and journals that are mentioned by future historians. It is such a large body of evidence that there'd need to be a large scale dedicated effort to forge it all, and unlike the existence of Jesus or God, no future organisation depended on the belief in Alexander to exert imperial authority.
I am not here to enforce any religion here but yeah... It's upto you to think all history is nonsense and nihilistic.
I have no horse in this game, I'm not a huge proponent of "Christ didn't exist" theory, but to throw out actual historical theories because of some evidence (which is usually accounted for in those theories) is pretty ahistorical. I can assure you that I don't take that view of history.
He isn't claiming Jesus for certain didn't exist, but that there's no decisive evidence that he existed, specially as a single person or like he is in the gospel. There are a lot of theories about who or what was the historical Jesus, but his legend is probably partially based on actual material events. The burden of proof that he did actually exist falls upon the Christ historicists.
A lot of people at the time and region were illiterate, believed in very diverse sets of superstitions and spoke different languages. That's prime time for a lot of sincretism and mythmaking. We know so little about historical Jesus, that I think it's fair to assume that he didn't exist until some trustworthy primary source is found. Even Tacitus is not that trustworthy due to some apparent doctoring of the oldest surviving manuscript by monastery scribes.
And there are so many "Christ Myth" proponents that they have a whole Wikipedia category, so I don't think it's fair to paint them as basically nonexistent.
One issue I have with many leftist podcasts I've found is that they're more like round-table talk shows than educative/entertainment. @nephs@lemmygrad.ml mentioned soberana.tv, that has something like that with their "Revolushow" one that picks a specific subject per episode to delve into, and I think Hexbear's Deprogram is kinda like that too, but I don't think they're enough.
One of the most radicalising works I've found in my life was Mike Duncan's Revolutions Podcasts, even if the author is a socdem. It was very entertaining and binge-worthy, but also helped a lot normalise the idea of revolution and desmistify a bunch of propaganda. I think we could only stand to win from building similar projects that mix entertaining narratives and educational value.
In order to agitate we have to be where the workers get their info. In Russia it was the newspapers, in Cuba it was the radio, nowadays a lot of it is in internet audiovisual media.
Brazilians here please consider a "Revoltas" podcast that's similar to Mike Duncan's one but for Brazilian insurgencies, revolts and attempted revolutions
Fair enough, sometimes I forget about that. Being from the Global South myself we constantly have this debate because China really doesn't do much to help revolutions against states they have deals with (as opposed to earlier China or USSR), so probably feels more obvious to me than it actually is.
Your question was fine, I was knee-jerky, don't feel discouraged to ask more in the future.
Edit: Also, besides what others have said about China following UN decisions, them supporting a two-state solution is fundamentally different from Western countries which provide aid for Israel also backing that. The first can pass as ineffective, naïve or disinterested, but the second is downright hypocritical by pretending they have no agency on what their colony does.
I'm surprised people here are still surprised at China taking a """middle-ground""" stance on geopolitical issues that don't directly impact them.
A huge part of their foreign policy since the 90s has been a philosophy of "don't stir the hornets nest" and even though that seems to be changing now that they've become an economic superpower, they stil don't intervene too much where they don't need to. Ignoring whether it's moral or not, it's rooted in pragmatism for their own survival first.
I did and agree with you. Besides their vast sums of investment from banks some of these corporations even have their own banking systems, and I wouldn't be surprised if some of their rent-seeking enterprises are the securities for their financial operations. What I disagree with the author (and I believe I agree with you here) is that the financial capital has in fact superseded and dominated the industrial capital, in which the latter has gone from being an useful tool and ally in the 20th century to basically an afterthought in the 21st.
I think the confusion may have happened because I did a long double negative there "I fail to see [...] that finance hasn't superseded industrial" because I was specifically disagreeing with the author, who was himself sort of disagreeing with the conclusions of Lenin's "Imperialism."
Don't know much about Hudson, but Doctorow managed to avoid that one on his book AFAIK, but sadly started using it at least in his blog after his review of Varoufakis's book. Him and his followers often sound like they're trying to go back to the "free market capitalism" age like you describe (I'd put Taplin there too), but for the most part I think his analysis of current trends are often spot on and very useful.
After thinking a bit I also don't think I agree with Mason's argument that there is a "back and forth" between finance and industrial capital. He is correct that both have existed together since the beginning, Lenin himself even writes that, but I fail to see from his arguments that finance (stock market, real estate) hasn't become the dominant force over the past 100 years, or specially since 1991. Most of the top companies by marketcap (but not revenue) today mainly own IP or software, maybe cloud services in the case of Google and MS, or are literal holdings. There's still the occasional petroleum company, but that's a far cry when a majority of the population was employed in production and extraction rather than this "service economy" rentier maintenance thing we got going on.
I can't really comment on the historical notes there about the dynamics of financial and industrial capital, but I definitely agree with you that none of those digital monopolies he cited could be classified mainly as industrial capital. Except maybe Wallmart, which is not digital (AFAIK), but is still mostly just a consumer-facing monopsony.
A few (possibly wrong) ideas here, but I believe that the existence of software has created the perfect conditions for rent-seeking, since software is incredibly cheap to reproduce and distribute, but can't effect change in the material world without expensive hardware or humans. Because of that, a corporation can consolidate a Doctorow's Chokepoint in a new market at light-speed, but the actual productive (and expensive) work-force mostly exists outside their employ.
And since the average worker doesn't have enough money for that much rent, the corporations make the most of it cannibalising smaller companies, with shit like Windows licenses for companies, paying to have your posts be read by your followers on Metabook, Google taking a massive cut on apps payments, or stores on Amazon having to pay to have their products appear when searched.
I'm not sure why Hudson, Doctorow and Varoufakis keep calling this "feudalism" but I don't think they're fully wrong in drawing a distinction between those two sections of the bourgeoisie, even if it can't be exploited for revolution.
Could be one of the "sicko" family of hexbear emojis.
the question of whether Joe Biden is pragmatic is complex and multifaceted.
There's no winning, either he's the presidential equivalent to a elder home scam, or he actually believes the shit he says. But I still think the smarter and "saner" party Democrats are trying to lose the election with some plausible deniability. They can't keep distracting people from their shittiness with their underdog "battles for the soul of our nation" if they fully control the government.
I know he's horribly full of himself, but he must be aware that his death clock is ticking already. I have a hard time believing that he actually intends to win the next election rather than just taking a very late retirement, since a Trump presidency is always very useful for the blue no matter who crowd.
Y'all somehow forgot to do a thing for Mao's birthday. The penalty will be deducted from the general Xibucks allowance.