Not_mikey @ Not_mikey @slrpnk.net

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1 yr. ago

Pacemakers have batteries and modern ones broadcast a lot of telemetry, and last up to a decade. Not sure how much more power would be needed to broadcast to a satellite or cell tower though.

Another L for bidens lame duck. Why not just say your going to do full climate reparations and make us not look like asshats on the world stage. Yeah trump will just repeal it but at least we can blame it on him and not the entire country.

Yes, marx always thought a socialist revolution would come in the late stages of industrial capitalism. Everyone thought it was going to be in Germany up until WWI. The problem is capital becomes entrenched and people become comfortable, especially if they benefit from imperialism and exploitation abroad or of a minority racialized underclass.

Another problem with skipping the first revolution and industrializing under socialism is it gets blamed for the the horrors of industrialization. The early stages of industrialization are always horrific with long hours, bad working conditions and slum living conditions. Combine that with general conservatism and desire to stick to a traditional life and you have to coerce the peasents into going into the cities to become industrial laborers. Capitalism did this through enclosure and farm consolidation, the soviets did it more blatantly, sometimes at gunpoint. Either way it builds an animosity with the system that robbed you of your traditional life.

One thing I'll add that I haven't seen mentioned is communisms relative weakness in the propaganda department. If you look at democracy as a bunch of competing interest groups i.e. parties trying to win the masses over to there side to win, then there main tool / weapon is information that will make the opposition look bad and your side look good, i.e. propaganda. Good propaganda requires intimate knowledge of people's desires and a knowledge of how to shape those desires to the benefit of your program. Capitalism is very good at this due to competition forcing them to better understand there customer so they can sell them more. Capitalism creates great salesman which is fundamentally what you need to create good propaganda. You can see this expertise most plainly in advertising pushing the message that consumption is good, fulfilling and will make you happy.

This expertise combined with the large amount of resources capital can Marshall to push there message makes electoral politics extremely difficult for communism or any program that goes against consumption like environmentalism. Even if you completely eliminate capital and it's control over media in one nation foreign actors will still come in using the same expertise and resources to try and bring back capitalism. So since communists can't compete electorally with a free press they go towards autocracy to keep power.

but you have many capitalists competing, so the power is kinda distributed inside the capitalist class.

This isn't always true, and is arguably not the natural state of capitalism. Capitalism, without state intervention, will tend towards monopoly as economies of scale and market power push out any competition.

Note: all of this is steal manning dengism, I am not a tankie advocating for it

They are in the first stage. Classical Marxist theory divides development into two revolutions / stages:

1. The first revolution is the bourgeoisie overthrowing the feudal order, eg. The American revolution, the English civil war, French revolution of 1830. After the bourgeoisie take over they will use the proletariat to industrialize and develop the means of production. This will eventually lead to a boom in efficiency and production, the peasants moving from the countryside to cities, and abundance of necessities. Eventually though everyone's needs will be met and without an expanding market to profit from capitalist will be forced to produce more efficiently with less labor to get profits from there now limited market. This will lead to mass layoffs and unemployment which leads to
2. The socialist revolution where the proletariat overthrow the bourgeoisie and sieze the productive forces. They will then distribute labor fairly so you have 8 people working 10 hours instead of 1 person working 80 and 7 others unemployed. This then leads to communism where people have control over production and use it to guarantee well being and leisure instead of profit.

In order to get to this communist phase though you need to industrialize and develop the means of production so you can provide people with basic needs with little labor. The problem is the two major countries where socialism took hold, Russia and China, were still largely agrarian feudal societies. So they had to develop the means of production, Russia, and maoist china did so with 5 year plans, which had some success and some catastrophic failure but was ultimately pretty inefficient. So after mao a new leader in China named deng Xiao ping took over and followed a policy of allowing capitalism into the country to develop the means of production and industrialize. This unleashed powerful forces in the country that needed to be tamed by an even more powerful state, otherwise they would take over like they did in other capitalist countries. Then all the bloodshed from the original Chinese revolution would be for not as they would have to do another revolution to remove the bourgeoisie again. So the state maintains tight control to avoid "regressing" into a capitalist democracy until they fully develop and industrialize. At which point they will use that powerful authoritarian state to disposses the capitalist class and usher in communism.

The dictatorship of the proletariat was supposed to describe the will of a fully conscious proletariat majority being executed by and with the consent of that class. In other words a democracy unclouded by bourgeois interest and false consciousness.

The problem was that at the time of the Russian revolution the proletariat weren't the majority, the peasants were, and what proletariat there were lacked full class consciousness. So Lenin used the vanguard party to emulate what a dictatorship of the proletariat would do, but that wasn't an actual one as Marxist would've described.

He's president, not prime minister. Removing him would require an impeachment, which usually has a higher barrier then a no confidence vote, though I'm not familiar with Korean government.

Not in this case, Elon does have some standing here. He was (is?) A significant investor in openai and he made those investments when the company was claiming it's goal was to advance safe ai, not make money, so this transition to for profit is sort of a bait and switch.

That combined with his interest in a competing platform make it so Elon should at least be heard. I hate Elon as much as anyone on here but in this case I think he's in the right.

To all the people in this thread claiming he needed to pardon him or trump would do something, without naming what that something is or using hyperbole, trump doesn't care about hunter. The hunter case was about

1. Dragging the Biden name through the dirt and making them seem like a crime family. They don't need to do this anymore because Biden hasn't been a threat to trump since that last debate. Its not like he's afraid to run against him in 2028
2. To call out them dems for there hypocrisy and try and make some equivalence with trumps convictions. This pardon plays perfectly into that narrative and now gives trump an excuse to pardon himself and all his accomplices.

Hunter is of no use to the trump administration now, don't try to sell this as anything but a powerful father bailing out his failure of a son.

the crimes he was convicted of are rarely enforced and almost never resulted in jail time against first offenders

This is the same line trump supporters use when defending his convictions, and it probably is true for both. If your in politics you and your family are, and should be, under more legal scrutiny then an average person. That's the price of power.

In the whole of human history no older generation has ever been correct regarding what the upcoming generation should or should not do

I may not be a scientist but I know enough about history that any statement that says "in the whole of human history..." and doesn't finish with death or taxes is bullshit.

Was the older generation wrong when they told there kids not to do crack when it started becoming popular in the 80s? granted I'm pretty against the war on drugs but even if we do fully legalize we should still keep it away from kids because:

1. It can be addictive and addiction and developing brains aren't a good combination.
2. It is a major decision with positives and negatives that a child can't fully understand

Both of those are true , albeit to a far lesser extent, for social media.

I mean science does show this generation has very high incidence of anxiety, depression, suicide etc. Not saying social media is all of it, but it's probably a very big cause.

Was hoping for a concrete wall, but I guess hurdles will do

Probably, this is how tribalism and war work. People will almost always side with there in group even if they are the obvious aggressor. Any attack on your in group, even in retaliation, will tend to reinforce bonds and further entrench you rather then make you "wake up" and leave the group or turn against the agitators. You want revenge and you aren't going to turn against the one guy who's shown he's willing to help you get that revenge.

Again your assuming that the Lebanese blame hezbollah for that fallout, and not the ones actually causing it. This is a classic imperial tactic of framing the ones fighting the system as troublemakers and blaming all the destruction the empire does in the name of repression on them. The Viet cong are the reason for us napalming children, if they weren't here we wouldn't have to do that. This can work on people sympathetic to the imperial project, but people who are less sympathetic think the empire is the trouble maker and the cause for the destruction, so anyone fighting them must be good.

Think, if trump went full dictator, and then antifa blew up an ICEstapo building and then trump started bombing Portland in retaliation, would you think this is all antifas fault like fox News would be pushing. Or would you think antifas a bit extreme but trump is a tyrant who is killing way more people who i am sympathetic to.

The sympathy for Israel among Lebanese and especially among shia is near 0, so if they're looking for someone to blame it's gonna be them.

Their approval among there base of shias has only gone up since the conflict started, there approval among non shias has remained constant. Your assuming that Lebanese view the situation as western media portrays it with hezbollah as terrorists and the ones to blame for the destruction but:

Seventy-eight percent of Lebanese respondents said Israel's onslaught of Gaza was a "terrorist act", while only 11 percent viewed Hezbollah's attacks on northern Israel as "terrorism".

This jump in approval among there base is despite them being in government and a horrific economic situation in Lebanon, that's how much the shia in south Lebanon hate israel and its genocide in Gaza.

It'd be coming from the cap and trade sustainability fund, so it couldn't be used for housing, unless you could show that housing would reduce emissions. Still a lot better ways to spend the money, solar and wind, grid scale battery capacity, mass transit and high speed rail investment etc.

Washington was talking about the militias that were present in the early parts of the war that were under trained and undisciplined. The red coats took them easily and they fled often so the continental congress started the continental army lead by Washington, which was a trained and disciplined army in the style of European standing armies, which was able to take on and even defeat the British occasionally.

After the war the ruling elite still had this idealized vision of citizen militias protecting the liberty of white man and saw it as a less tyrannical, and cheaper model then the European professional standing army and made the second amendment to encourage it. Washington was saying that that system failed and will never work and that we should have a trained army ready to take on European powers if they come back.

Now we have the worst of both worlds, a massive army that gobbles up tax dollars and a bunch of untrained citizens with guns who barely understand what a militia is much less can protect the liberty of the nation.

Guns!, the cause and solution to most of America's problems.