Welcome again to everybody! Make yourself at home <3 In the time honoured tradition of our group, here is our weekly discussion thread!

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  • i_must_destroy@lemmygrad.ml
    18·
    2 years ago

    I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with twitter, but it seems to be taking a similar turn to Reddit earlier this year.

    Accounts that I follow are regularly bombarded by lib/fascist( and even patsoc) freaks. It’s depressing.

    Specifically, I’ve noticed Ben Norton being targeted. I’m even wondering if he should make his account private for a while or abandon twitter temporarily.

    Patsocs have started digging up his deleted tweets from like 2014. Any reasonable person is going to have totally different opinions as time progresses. Plus the fact that he deleted them means he no longer believes that. Total idiocy.

  • Catradora-Stalinism☭@lemmygrad.mlM
    18·
    2 years ago

    Life is… not good

    I won’t be seeing you guys for a while, if I’m back at all.

    I won’t forget you, my friends and comrades. May we meet when That Day comes.

  • DankZedong @lemmygrad.ml
    17·
    2 years ago

    A Dutch investigative journalist is now coming forward because she got her hands on a report made on her by the Dutch Intelligence Agency, marking her as a threat. She investigated right wing orgs and was often critical of current society.

    In the article other people came forward how they were contacted by agencies to write anti-Soviet/Russian and pro-US news. You often think it’s sort of meme-y to see ghosts everywhere but it’s fucking real, not only in the US. These people get paid for writing this propaganda. Disgusting again.

  • CriticalResist8@lemmygrad.ml
    15·
    2 years ago

    Been playing this idle type game on android called Idle Civilisation. It’s made by someone in Russia and idk if they’re a Marxist but you can tell dialectical materialism is all over this game. You evolve from a prehistorical tribe of homo sapiens all the way to space communism, or anything in-between. There’s classes

    It’s actually helped me refine my understanding of some concepts just by playing it and then unlocking achievements. When you achieve something the game gives you a text about the real-life equivalent. Following the game, the reason Marx’s prediction didn’t come true about a socialist revolution in Western Europe is because capitalists were too entrenched to overthrow at this stage. Whereas in Russia and China, capitalists lived alongside and were subordinate to the feudal system, which allowed the growing proletariat class to successfully overthrow the state.

    Only drawback really is that the game is an idle game and there’s not much depth to those, but you do have to take the right decisions if you want to follow a certain path and unlock achievements.

    • Leninismydad@lemmygrad.ml
      3·
      2 years ago

      Thanks for this information, gonna check it out, I love idle games for my neurodivergent brain.

      Any other suggestions?

      Edit Opening the game discussing class systems and means of production, damn lol

      2nd edit Quoting Engels

  • Shrike502@lemmygrad.ml
    12·
    2 years ago

    Re-posting from the old thread:

    So apparently the White House speaker proclaimed that republicans in USA are fascists. Not that it would surprise anyone here, but I doubt such open rhetoric is being used for no reason. Is US establishment preparing to go full mask off, “in the name of democracy”? Any comrades from the yankee land to clarify and/or correct me?

    • SovereignState@lemmygrad.ml
      12·
      2 years ago

      In Illinois, there was a press conference led by some leaders of the state-- governor, representatives, senators etc. The ideological war is being viewed more as a war by a lot of democrats esp. on the lower level. In this press conference, you could damn near feel like billionaire Pritzker was about to go full tankie mode and call for re-education facilities to be built, I mean it was wild. It’s become difficult to parse the reasoning for this, as democrat rhetoric, especially among the state level (as opposed to the federal) leaders, is becoming more and more fiery. They said the Supreme Court was undemocratic and “run by right-wing extremists”, that Illinois would protect the right to abortion by “any means necessary”, that the Republican party is overrun with women-hating white supremacists. It’s nuts.

      Two possibilities I see:

      • democratic leadership has a better grip on the pulse of the Amerikan psyche than they have previously and understand now that most Amerikans are against fascism. They’re only using this rhetoric opportunistically to get more votes and still don’t have any actual plans to defend women’s rights, or do anything besides preserve private property as they always have.
      • democratic state leadership is getting younger, more female, blacker, and gayer. More than a couple of the speakers at this event were gay women, and more than a couple were in their 30s rather than the geriatrics that usually hold these conferences. Left-liberal or social democratic “radicals” like the squad are more and more successful at “infiltrating” the democratic party than they have been in the past, and perhaps they really do believe these things and haven’t been consigned to vote and act based on lobbyists’ interests like the squad proper as it’s considerably easier to win state elections than federal ones without corporate funding.

      This potential ideological shift from the bottom may also be influencing the rhetoric of those at the top like the White House speaker. Anything correct that comes out of the mouth of someone who represents the federal government, I would immediately consider as almost certainly an oppprtunistic bid against people leaving the democrats in droves once they figure out democratic leadership and republican leadership are on the same side. Biden is saying shit like “the Republicans thought they knew the power of women. (insert state) proved them wrong” whenever a state votes against outlawing abortion. Biden obviously did absolutely fuckall in preventing the overturn of Roe V Wade, and he has a penchant for exerting his own power over women thru sexual assault – he doesn’t believe a word he says, he just knows that embracing feminist talking points will keep him popular with an increasingly more radical democratic base. This is likely true for anyone at the top calling Republicans fascists, I think.

    • JucheBot1988@lemmygrad.ml
      3·
      2 years ago

      When liberals talk about fascism, they mean the material base. Once I realized that, I was able to understand so much of the crap they regularly spout. “Fascism” for them is the material, concrete world (especially the world of labor) that moves by its own laws and can’t be reduced to their moralistic bullshit.

      Right now, the Democrats have gotten it into their heads that the Republicans are channeling working-class anger (which is only very partially true). So of course, the Republicans are now “fascist.” It’s really as simple as that.

        • JucheBot1988@lemmygrad.ml
          6·
          2 years ago

          Essentially, liberalism is a moralistic ideology. Its prescriptions are all on the level of abstractions, ungrounded in anything real. You see this in seminal liberal thinkers like Locke and Hobbes: they start, not from a consideration of history, but from a hypothetical “free, autonomous individual” existing in a “state of nature.” Liberal society ultimately tries to institutionalize the entire realm of human interaction, so that nothing remains which is not intelligible from the principles of liberalism.

          Of course, this is doomed to fail, because liberal ideas and liberal institutions are like finance capital: all spun out of thin air. Reality, history, people, the inner tendencies of economic systems, will all eventually have their say, and it will be against liberalism and capitalism. That’s what I mean by the material base in this context: the concrete as opposed to the abstract. Liberalism is at war with the concrete, and whenever it rears its head (or appears to) they call it fascist. It’s why (for instance) they can call Russia fascist for acting rationally in the Ukraine, and pretend that the Ukrainian government – which is run by, you know, actual committed fascists – is some sort of “true democracy.”

  • DankZedong @lemmygrad.ml
    12·
    2 years ago

    People in Belgium are now facing electricity/gas bills of 500-1000 euros a month, or an end bill next year of 3000-4000 euro’s. These are poverty numbers for a majority of people.

    But we owned the Russians, I guess. And our corporate overlords made record profits. Yay, poverty.

    • DankZedong @lemmygrad.ml
      8·
      2 years ago

      On top of this, and I kid you not, municipalities will be shutting down street lights because the electricity costs are too high.

      People have to sit in the dark because of this

      • redtea@lemmygrad.ml
        6·
        2 years ago

        I’m surprised they’re not installing huge hamster wheels connected to generators. Those cold people would soon warm up powering the street lights.

        It’s sickening and scary. Absolutely no idea how people are going to make it through this winter.

        Ruled by people who can only see the market. And if the market doesn’t provide, it’s our own fault. It’s ideologically impossible for the ruling class to accept the need for – or even to acknowledge – other models of distribution. And this applies to almost every ‘politician’. Even when a government steps in, they do so (inadvertently or explicitly) by asking the market to provide a solution which the state can buy at the ‘best’ price.

        • DankZedong @lemmygrad.ml
          5·
          2 years ago

          The bonus to this is that even the most milquetoast politically active people are starting to get a revolutionary spirit. The important thing for our party is to not let them turn to the far right.

          The message of ‘5-10 years of hardships’ from the prime minister awakened something I guess.

          • redtea@lemmygrad.ml
            5·
            2 years ago

            You’re right, there.

            I’ve found it remarkably easy to bring up our politics recently. Almost everyone I come across is feeling the squeeze in some way. Whether it’s energy, food, general inflation, interest / mortgage rates, house prices, rent, stagnating wages, redundancies. I can’t think of anyone I talk to regularly who isn’t worrying about at least one of these things. And they bring it up!

            This time five years ago, or even last year, pre- and "mid-"pandemic (I don’t believe it’s over), I’d struggle to find a common issue to bring up. Seriously struggling to pay the bills was only something that happened to the poorest, the laziest, and to people in other countries (in bourgeois eyes, anyway; we know better). If I spoke then about capitalism, I’d often get rebuffed. Not anymore. Well, not so much anymore.

            Although now the challenge is pointing out where the real blame lies (i.e. not Ukraine / Russia, Brexit, this or that party, ‘Chinese’ / ‘Russian’ investment (of course, it’s only ever the Russians and Chinese who would use investments to influence other countries)).

        • DankZedong @lemmygrad.ml
          5·
          2 years ago

          We laugh but companies actually proposed cutting working from home to ‘save us from higher energy costs wink wink’. That’s their solution it seems.

    • 小莱卡@lemmygrad.ml
      2·
      2 years ago

      To put this in perspective, a 3k euro salary per year is barely above minimum wage in Latin American countries.

  • Leninismydad@lemmygrad.ml
    11·
    2 years ago

    Any good articles on the heat wave in China that aren’t from Western sources?

    Edit: my original intent was asking for science articles but I missed a word, so thank you for the responses.

  • Amicese@lemmygrad.ml
    9·
    2 years ago
    Might be NSFW.

    I took cider vingear for a bit too long and now I have purplish skin bumps on my stomach, on my left leg, and my arms.

    There’s also some small amount of blood that gets on toilet paper when I wipe (softly of course). My poop is still brown, though a lighter color.

    It seems like I got lower GI bleeding. I really hope it isn’t serious and that it’ll heal…

    • panic@lemmygrad.ml
      1·
      2 years ago

      There’s also some small amount of blood that gets on toilet paper when I wipe (softly of course).

      I don’t know how to tell you that sometimes you can hurt your asshole by shitting and this doesn’t mean you have a hemorrhage but fucked up stools.

      “Small amount of blood when I wipe” sounds like an anal fissure. If your asshole hurts, that’s how you know your intestines are fine

        • panic@lemmygrad.ml
          1·
          2 years ago

          Nobody said fucked up digestion was easy. Get yourself some of that cream they put on babies’ butts and wet wipes (or a bidet). It’s a very embarrassing thing to happen but doctors will tell you it happens and you should “drink more water and eat more fiber”.

  • sometimes ashley@lemmygrad.mlOP
    9·
    2 years ago

    Time to get ready for another day of work in 45c (113f) weather on the roof of a 6 story building. Absolutely awful conditions. I’m dreading it

  • Shrike502@lemmygrad.ml
    7·
    2 years ago

    I had a funny observation the other day, which I wanted to share, but which doesn’t really require its own thread.

    If you take a gander at the loudest anti-Russian (and coincidentally pro-NATO) politicians of late, there’s a bit of a trend: Analena Baerbock, Liz Truss, Tikhanovskaya, that one Latvian lady whose name escapes me. They all look almost exactly the same. Same haircut style, same dress style, etc.

    This of course makes sense, given how they all rose to prominence. But at the same time, it’s all so blatantly manufactured, one can only be amazed at the apparent support they enjoy domestically.

  • Leninismydad@lemmygrad.ml
    7·
    2 years ago

    I’m not looking forward to living through the coming water wars. Shits gonna be way worse than any oil inspired conflict.

    2bn people living with water scarcity already and it’s getting worse every year. I’m a bit exhausted thinking about this.

  • Shrike502@lemmygrad.ml
    7·
    2 years ago

    Been driving my mum around and she’s lamenting the stories about a “list of artists that are deemed undesirable due to opposing the Ukraine war”. The list, mind you, does indeed float around, and does seem to contain artists that spoke out openly against the SMO. But mum called it a “return to 1937”. I’m just baffled by the logic. What did they all expect?