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2 yr. ago

  • I have a Qidi X-Plus 4. There are a lot of reviews online raving about its reliability, how it's the first production-ready printer that's also affordable for hobbyists. It's also got Klipper firmware, which is open, so it can't be locked down the way the Bambu ones are.

    My old printer is a 10 year old prusa clone kit, which I wrestled with the whole time I had it. Compared to that, the Qidi is a dream.

    If you're on 110v power, make sure you get the fixed relay board. The original one can't handle the higher amperage of the lower voltage power.

  • I know Lenin said this:

    Reality tells us that state capitalism would be a step forward. If in a small space of time we could achieve state capitalism in Russia, that would be a victory.
    Lenin, Minutes of the Sessions of the All-Russia C.E.C., 4th Convocation. Verbatim Report

    You completely ignored that. Why?

    They controlled the entire economy, you've said yourself it was under central control, so they achieved state capitalism, exactly the thing that Lenin championed. Was he wrong about that?

    And why does wealth need to be intergenerational for it to create a bourgeois class? Oh, I know why, because otherwise you'd have to accept that your hero Lenin was bourgeois, and you can't do that. You named yourself after him, you're way too personally invested to see this issue clearly.

  • You still burned a fucking house down. That is the headline. "Local dipshit tries to light candle" is not. If someone says after that, "You burned my house down!" the answer isn't, "I was just lighting a candle!" The appropriate response is, "I did, and I understand why I can't stay in the same hostel as you now."

    Anyway, I think that analogy is pretty poor when it comes to either of these ideologies. It's less "I was just trying to light a candle uwu" and more, "All I did was dig a trench around the house, fill it with gasoline and set it on fire. I was trying to establish a firewall, how was I supposed to know the flames engulfing the house would be a problem? And now all my neighbours are angry at me because their houses burned down, and I'm just not responsible for that!"

    I don't know there buddy, I think you could've asked literally anyone who knows anything about fire how well that would go, but you clearly didn't care enough to figure it out. Either way, that's arson, either deliberate or through reckless indifference, you burned a fucking neighbourhood down.

    And now there are apologists running around saying, "But it kept burglars away, and nobody inside the house suffered from hypothermia! This person was a hero, how dare you call them an arsonist!"

    I think it's important to understand the distinction between a faux-leftist and a faux-libertarian, and an explicit fascist for that matter. I'm not saying we should throw the information out, I'm saying it matters whether we accept that they actually are libertarian or leftist.

    Also what people are "allowed" to do doesn't seem like it's relevant to any of this, but if you see your neighbour digging a gasoline trench you should probably stop them.

  • It's the AI-related way of saying "I'm not reading all of that."

  • There's no point talking to somone who isn't listening.

  • I have explained a more nuanced method of understanding things than the political compass.

    By calling these groups "faux-leftist" and "faux libertarian" I am drawing a distinction that the compass doesn't draw, without losing any of the - extremely limited - resolution that it offers.

    But you reduced what I said down to:

    left means "things I think are good" and everything else is "right"

    That tells me that you're not really interested in what I'm saying. It's hard to understand how someone could read what I've written and honestly come to that conclusion. I can explain further, but I think I'd need to hear that you were curious to understand my point, otherwise it's probably going to be a waste of my time.

  • Bourgeoisie aren't some genetically distinct group. The party supplanted the bourgeoisie and became them.

    I will never understand how tankies can see a small group gain control of the means of production and understand it as anything but a new bourgeoisie.

  • Yeah, but that's what I'm doing. I am evaluating the beliefs of authoritarians of all kinds and concluding that they are right wing.

    I'm not throwing out the labels, I'm saying this left-right-auth-lib pair of dichotomies is not useful.

  • I didn't say it was no different. You can tell because I used different words for the two things.

    I said it was no better.

  • At no point in any of this are you addressing the argument being made, which is that state capitalism absolutely is a thing, which means Lenin became a capitalist.

    You can make excuses for it all day, the only difference between them and the liberal revolutions is ideological at that point, which makes you an idealist.

    Edit: the state is counter-revolutionary

  • As long as you don't bother to make an argument I'd say I'm doing better.

  • The purpose of a system is what it does, and the tankie system results in right wing outcomes, which makes them right wing.

    I don't particularly care if their sweet little lefty hearts bleed for the working class, or if they're going to heaven. What matters is the results, and authoritarian structures are always right wing.

  • I accept that the single axis is insufficient, but I think the compass is worse.

    You're right that I don't think anything outside of the lib-left corner is actually left wing, if left wing means anything useful.

    In fact, part of my point is that the political compass is misleading and rehabilitates certain ideologies in a way that they shouldn't be. It is hopelessly naive in accepting whatever definition the proponents claim.

    I don't call an caps or right wing libertarians anarchists or libertarians. In the same way, I think tankies aren't actually left-wing, because left wing results aren't even in their goals. They expressly want to keep control of the means of production in the hands of a few.

    Like if your version of left wing is "claims to be on the left", then that's equally useless, because that includes the nazis. It includes nazbols. It includes democrats.

    It includes the accelerationist dickbag I spoke to one time who told me that everybody was a fascist if they were even slightly abusive, and all fascists should be punched at all times. Trump, according to this person, wasn't a fascist, and I should vote for him because it would accelerate the destruction of society. But that person claimed to be a leftist, so I guess they're in the club?

    Like what does left-wing mean in the political compass? Is there a rigorous definition, or is it kind of vibes-based?

    My solution to this is to call tankies faux-leftist, and the neo-feudalists I would call faux-libertarian. I think accepting their labels gives their cooption of left-wing language power.

  • Oh wow, you called me a bot and an American. Checkmate. No need to respond to anything I actually said, you obviously know how to get right to the heart of dismissing me so you can repeat your opinion without any actual argument.

  • Well, if we're interested in the ideals of the people, then yes the political compass is a thing that you can use. The problem is that when you drill down into right wing "libertarianism" you find landlords and bosses (EDIT: actually they're pretty much right there on the surface). They are in fact about the freedom of coporations to own and control human beings. They are pro-slavery and neo-feudalist. That is not actually libertarian, that is pro-slavery. Right-wingers always are. So in practice, it's just a lie.

    Murray Rothbard himself said that "those who call us anarchists are not on sound etymological footing". That's a wanker way to say it, said by a wanker, but it's clear he understood that words mean things.

  • It's why we can't just go around believing everybody who claims to be a leftist. We need to evaluate the actual effects of their actions. If they are oppressing the workers as every state does, they are not left wing.

  • Engels, Lenin and Bukharin all talked about state capitalism. Lenin decried it as not real socialism.

    the erroneous bourgeois reformist assertion that monopoly capitalism or state-monopoly capitalism is no longer capitalism, but can now be called "state socialism" and so on, is very common

    Lenin, The State and Revolution

    That was until after the October revolution, at which point he seemed to think it was based and cool actually, and that it was definitely what the USSR was doing.

    Reality tells us that state capitalism would be a step forward. If in a small space of time we could achieve state capitalism in Russia, that would be a victory.

    Lenin, Minutes of the Sessions of the All-Russia C.E.C., 4th Convocation. Verbatim Report

    This is around the time he stripped the soviets of their power and disenfranchised the workers in favour of a central state that alienated them from control over the means of production.

    You know, like a capitalist.

    And now tankies are distancing themselves because they can't square the circle that their beloved revolutionary heroes were actually capitalists, and they pretend the concept doesn't exist.

    So tell me, was Lenin wrong about this? If so, was he wrong twice? Why the flip-flopping on whether it was good or bad? Nobody seemed to dispute at the time that it existed, and an analysis of what happened shows that the USSR liberalised quickly. The bolsheviks were in effect liberal reformists.

    EDIT: They weren't revolutionary, I don't know why I ceded that rhetorical ground.

  • There's such a thing as right wingers who coopt left wing rhetoric and fool people into believing they are left wing. But anyone who says authoritarianism is left wing because it has some supposedly liberatory ideals is - and tankies will hate to hear this - an idealist.

  • Your last two paragraphs explain how they are actually right wing, because the authoritarianism has already happened and they still support it.

    "Planned economy" is just state capitalism. It's not better than neoliberal capitalism, it just has a red flag, and tankies are fool enough to think that makes difference.

  • My gender is a null-pointer.