Welcome again to everybody! Please sit down, stay awhile and enjoy our groups most honoured tradition, our weekly discussion thread! Oh and if you find the giant spoon, please let me know, I seem to have miss placed it when changing the thread over this week.
We have a Matrix homeserver at genzedong.xyz. See this thread for information about our Matrix space.
Short reading list for new MLs here. To find theory, try z-lib, libgen, or Sci-Hub (for scientific articles). If an article is unavailable, try the Wayback Machine.
I absolutly love your weekly landscape photos
thank you 😊 I’m very glad that the comrades like it . I will be doing more posting weekly landscape images.
reminder that openai board has already CIA officers
2021 seems late for them to have joined.
Not quite comparable but SpaceX had a handler from day one.
Considering Microsoft invested in OpenAI a lot, along with Musk afaik, it’s not surprising if it’s used as a huge intel collection machine. In any case it spews the usual Western propaganda.
Gigachat and BaiduGPT will be better
I’ve wanted to try Baidu’s LLM but it seems to be Chinese only at this point. In the past month, FOSS LLMs have gotten a LOT better, so I expect that by the end of the year we’ll have fairly capable alternatives. You can compare some over at https://chat.lmsys.org
Sat down with an old acquaintance for the first time in a couple of years yesterday and she’s unsurprisingly turned into a complete radlib. Not the screeching twitter type, she’s extremely well meaning and nice about it.
I haven’t talked to someone with politics like that in a while and man are discussions with them hard. They have such a fundamentally different philosophical disposition. Their entire worldview and ideology is idealistic. Talking to them as a Marxist is frustrating as hell, because dialectical materialism is so so foreign to them and creates difference on every single issue in every conceivable way. Class is missing entirely in their world, so no matter the topic you always have to explain your position from the ground up, starting at the very basics.
It’s kinda interesting too, but in a way it feels like talking to a toddler.
Yet as a Marxist my contributions to conversations are shrugged off as liberals for being “too idealistic.”
Arguably that’s because they don’t understand the meaning of the word. Just like they don’t understand the term “democracy”, “authoritarian”, “labor”, “value”, etc
Actually that’s one thing I never had thrown my way. But I usually stick tie everything to class and production, which is material and which they don’t understand. It’s also too ‘technical’ for them to label as idealistic. I also rarely talk about future revolutionary goals, but criticism of the status quo and fairly immediate causes of action.
But their view of ‘realism’ is messed up anyway. Like this acquaintance has always been super against the military, because bourgeois pacifism and they alway saw it as a breeding ground for nazis. Yet somehow, now, we need to pump it full with blood money, swarm Ukraine with weapons, because some hundreds of thousands dying now is somehow a more realistic path towards peace than negotiations.
People around me tell me I’m innocent and idealistic in a positive way because as a Marxist I have a positive view of a possible future, but it’s kind of annoying because I’m a materialist with “pessimism of the mind, optimism of the will.”
I know someone who funnily enough is anti-american and has some historic understanding of the heinous crimes of the US, but just goes “oh but the leadership doesn’t know what its doing, poor dudes!” I point out that it’s usually for corporate interests, and imperialism in general, and they just wave it off.
Audience member: But is it really a conspiracy?
Michael Parenti, every time: Of course it’s a ******* conspiracy. What did you think they’re doing in board rooms and meetings? They’re conspiring!
Haha yes, Parenti being great as always at answering these kinds of questions. IIRC there’s a chapter in one of his books where he talks about the term “conspiracy,” it was very enlightening regarding the subject.
fuck all american politicians
but fuck desantis especially
all bourgeois puppets are puppets but not all of them are neocon rightoids who tortured people at Guantanamo Bay
Great, so the Republican candidates so far are basically a war criminal vs a rapist. Yay USA
but not all of them are neocon rightoids who tortured people at Guantanamo Bay
Aren’t they? The blues and the browns, they all maintained this system, kept Guantanamo camp running, engorged themselves on plunder while sowing chaos around the world. The likes of desantis simply say openly what they all say behind closed doors
DeSantis was literally torturing people there in person, if that clarifies things
As in, personally?
His title was of a human rights lawyer to make sure the conditions in gitmo were humane, and up to international law standards. He got people to tell him which torture methods were the most painful, then instead of getting them eliminated he told the torturers to escalate certain methods. He took pleasure in their pain. Previously, force feeding was done only lightly and relatively not painfully (through injection through nose), after Desantis, the syringes for force feeding were sharp and it was done more roughly, and people were left with nose bleeds. I could go on, It was worse with other methods of torture. If you want more information check out the podcasts the Eyes Left podcast made on it.
Thank you for this information. I stand corrected then - fuck that monster in particular
Twitter doesn’t work for me
Its an interview of a former Gitmo detainee talking about his interactions with Ron DeSantis
Thanks!
Blaming a country for suffering economic blockade by ANOTHER country is like blaming yourself after being fucked up by a bully. Actually i got it wrong, it’s the bully blaming you for them fucking you up.
just found out that indian second PM was killed by CIA. it was a confession. the PM was poisoned at tashkent when soviet union invited India and PK for peace deal.
he was a pacifist but CIA thought India would have nuclear weapons even though he vehemently denied
One of India’s top nuclear scientist Homi Bhabha also died mysteriously in a plane crash in Alps after 13 days of PM Shastri’s death.
It would really be great if you link some further readings on this.
there is now a research center named after bhabha. BARC. https://www.barc.gov.in/
He is a legend and they crashed a full passenger plane to get him 😭
The confession from CIA is the only concrete proof we have so far. His death mystery is a black hole in indian history post british period. There is a book by Anuj Dhar your prime minister is dead where he does some investigation but that is a little old. This guy denies CIA involvement tho.
Another thing is, soviets are worlds best in embalming a corpse (stalin and lenin bodies still exist and look great), but no one requested them to embalm Shashtri dead body and the whole body is completely swollen. Again Indira was seen happy after this incident.
The union associated with my org just ended up on a Chinese newspaper, we are famous omg
(context: in the 26th of may that particular union, about a million strong, per Wikipedia, launched a general strike. And that has piqued the interest of CCTVnews)
Let me guess: Britain? Or the United States?
Nvm, you don’t have to say.
i pretty much doxxed myself many times soooo, the union is USB (funny name, they always joke about it) and the country is Italy
Edit: here’s a screenshot if a comrade that knows Chinese wants to translate
中文：意大利全国多个行业举行罢工抗议高通胀
英文："Strikes in various industries across Italy to protest high inflation„
Thank a lot, also I want to start learning mandarin, is it really as hard as some people make it out to be? For now I only know Italian and (broken) English
No not at all Comrade. it’s not that “hard” as some people say.
is it difficult ? Yes !
I started learning it since I was little, so. that is why is very easy for me to read and write it but I don’t know how to speak it.
The writing is hard but grammar is fairly simple compared to European languages.
Your written English is great.
Chinese is a fun language to learn. I could write out characters all day. There’s a real poetry and logic to the stroke order and ‘radicals’ (one of the building blocks of the characters). Each character contains a clue as to its meaning and it’s pronunciation.
The Communists simplified the characters and introduced ‘pinyin’ to improve literacy.
Some of the basic characters are a picture of their meaning. For example a ‘person’ is a stick man without arms. There’s a character with two of these, which means crowd/group. ‘Big’ is stickman with their arms outstretched.
The grammar is straightforward enough. And you can look forward to the day when you come across Mǎ kè sī and realise what it means.
You’ll be able to get to a decent level in 6 months to a couple of years, depending on how much you study each day. Afterwards, as you’ll know from learning English and growing up with Italian, that you can spend the rest of your life improving (and still want to learn more) but you will be able to enjoy Chinese texts, audio, movies, etc. So it will be an enjoyable process.
Give it a go!
Unfortunately, I had to put Chinese aside. I focused on Spanish instead, using the ‘listening-reading’ method (LR). The creator of LR claims that learning to listen to and speak Chinese with LR takes about the same time as it takes to learn any language with the method. The time-consuming bit is learning to read and write, but she claims that this is much faster once you already understand the spoken language (which takes 250+ hours of LR).
(If you search Lemmygrad for LR, Listening-Reading, Princeton, and maybe Sally Rooney or Ken Follett, you should see some my other comments explaining this method and listing some Chinese resources.)
AH
I hate medical insurance companies and the MIC (medical industrial complex) consisting of all the shitty Western pharmaceutical companies (GSK, Roche, J&J, Bayer, etc).
Fuck you all.
I wonder how many have died because of their “intellectual property” and “risk-taking”.
Edit: used wrong word, pharmacology instead of pharmaceutical. Annoyed me too much so had to change it.
I work in a small niche industry which makes some of the machines these horrible conglomerates make their drugs on. The sales people are always so excited about large scale systemic health issues, because it means the get to sell more. Just the other month the sales manager complained that order volume in Brazil has gone down since Lula got elected, and nobody can possibly know what China will do in terms of foreign business. It’s so sad how out of touch with reality most people are, but that’s ultimately a choice people make (consciously or not) based on their material conditions and their private material interests.
Also of course another Malaysian Chinese guy that blew up in anglosphere internet (Nigel Ng) has to lean onto anti-Chinese sentiment (social credit, cancelled, Taiwan province etc) meme to woo over Western simpletons.
I read a comment months ago about how “overseas Chinese” are meticulously planning for the downfall of socialist China and you know what this only gives credence to that.
Obviously I don’t believe that wholeheartedly but ffs these people make it too easy to think that way.
I mean comedians are petty bourgeois anyways so what am I really expecting.
Today was a normal day, was listening some music and Gojira came out on my playlist with a song from their latest album called “The Chant”. I liked the beginning and so looked it up on youtube to send the song to a friend. First thing that comes out is the official music video and what do I found? Bs propaganda about “Cultural genocide” in Tibet by China. Day ruined. Not listening to Gojira again.
Once you start identifying propaganda, there is no going back. It’s EVERYWHERE
what you said is true 😭. Never listening to gojira again.
Dared to get some Indian food for my birthday yesterday and now I’m sick with food poisoning lol.
At least I have time to continue reading The Jakarta Method.
I’ve read The Jakarta Method myself, I can state it’s quite a good read and has much information about the 1965 massacre in Indonesia and its atrocities. Although it’s surprisingly good in some aspects, being written by a (ex?) WaPo journalist, it has the usual Soviets bad trope and iirc it criticized Mao at one point, but it’s easy to filter.
Yeah he does have some weird takes from time to time but I figured he just isn’t a communist (yet). His takes on the general situation is pretty good.
Yeah, he’s a WaPo journalist.
It’s a great book.
lol what did you eat? it’s the first time i’m hearing about it
I had a thali with different things. But I’ve eaten there before and my gf ate with me yesterday and she’s fine. So more bad luck than Indian food being bad.
oof
Just thinking about how stupid it was that your reward for scoring high on those SAT tests in high school, was getting more exams!
At least that’s how it happened to me during high school, i was forced to travel to another city to take another fucking exam. Of course i burnout and didn’t study at all.
Would a news thread, similar to Hexbear’s fit for Lemmygrad? Instead of fully-fledged posts, we could post fast tidbits comments-wise.
that’s not a bad idea, we could have a sticky weekly thread here if there’s enough interest
Sounds great, I like sharing news articles I like and making a comment is rather easier on a centralised weekly thread where you can easily see everything at a glance
I made a stickied thread for now, we’ll see if there’s interest
Great!
I hope you all have a nice week :D
Re-reading the later half of Socialism Betrayed is torture man. How in the actual fuck did such an inept, clueless fucking moron as Gorbachev ever make it into such a high-ranking position? It’s insane just how dumb this mfer was. Like even for being a pos revisionist he was so incomprehensibly inept. Is there any historic example like this where the leader of a country just demolished its ruling apparatus and the entire state just because? What the actual fuck was his foreign policy? Just give the US what it wants and then some, because…uhm this will surely profit us somehow. It’s maddening.
Didn’t Gorbyboy get really rich afterwards with all kinds of deals and public speaking events?
I woudn’t be surprised. But he could’ve gotten rich without destroying everything the way he did. He was just clueless on so many things like nationalism/the national question. Says a lot when even the Yanks were wondering wtf in god’s name this dude was doing
A lot of anti communist things happening back then were a surprise for the yanks despite their unending involvement in these regions. I think that if you try to overthrow these movements often and long enough, some unexpected shit will eventually turn up. It wouldn’t be a surprise if Gorbachev was an actual happy accident for them
They got him with the stupidity gun
I am currently following from close the development of an allegation of sexually predatory behaviour from a big-name musician in the metal industry. Reading accounts of the disgusting things this millionaire has been doing to working-class women with complete impunity for years by using his fortune and fame has only strengthened my wishes to see this rotten system overthrown and all these people held accountable in the most severe of ways.
who is that?
Till Lindemann, vocalist and lyricist of Rammstein.
Fucking hell, I was just listening to Amerika an hour ago and it inspired me to reflect on how the Fascists once tried to Germanize the world, failing where the U.S. succeeded.
I was a little reluctant to mention the inspiration because I was worried that that would have made others here berate me (I feel like I read somewhere that there were ties between Rammstein and neofascism, but I could be misremembering). Now that I know that Till Lindemann is basically a heavy metal Michael Jackson I’ll be careful to mention the inspiration critically.
I do not know where is it that you heard about Rammstein’s ties with fascism, but if it was in this page, chances are it may have been from me.
That being said, I do not think that phenomenon you describe is a novelty to the 20th century. I personally think Britain has been to this day the one with most success at it - As well as the most destructive.
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