SocialismForAll liked a comment with this in it:

We just had an intense and insightful discussion around landlordism under Capitalism, during a potential transition away from Capitalism, and in an “ideal communist world.” For example, she has previously sought becoming a landlord to escape the struggle of being working class. The discussions she has seen about landlordism tend to lack nuance, such as how the system propagandizes towards ownership as as desirable lifestyle, the material conditions that could lead someone to buy into that “hopeful message”, and how most people do not have the tools for recognizing the inherent economic exploitation involved with being a landlord. Instead, the conversation is aggressively vilifying landlords without attempting to meet people where they are and educating them from there. The conversation is over before it starts and thus there can be no education or radicalization from it. She also doesn’t like the arguments that happen where a landlord’s personal character, and thus her potential character, is assaulted for having sought this method of existing within a Capitalist system.)

Fuckin’ done with that idiot. Even my boomer liberal dad who hasn’t rented in decades dislikes landlords and knows they need to be done away with. This commenter’s excessively liberal wannabe-landlord GF is not someone who has any useful insight.

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From Alpha To Omega had a podcast on the history of Yemen that was really good and one point that stuck out to me was that the west (US, I think?) was sending in anthropology students/degrees to go into Yemen (I think it was the relatively bourgeois North Yemen, but might have been ML South Yemen) to acquire intel and do sabotage basically. This guy seems like the continuation of that.

You know why.

Shoulda’ posted this in c/beardtube.

“Vietnam Syndrome” - Yussef Cole

America’s political landscape is rarely forced to be as honest. In reckoning with Vietnam, America took the position of the latter Mianaai: we chose to ignore reality and make up a story that allowed us to continue growing our empire, unchanged. Cold War lives within this uneasy blind spot. It recognizes, as liberal history does, that Vietnam was bad. But it also refuses to learn any moral or foundational lessons from the experience. It refuses to recognize the humanity of the men and women who fought us, who challenged our assumed superiority, who brought us to our knees.

Within this blind spot we seemingly must continue doing the same thing over and over, murdering and shooting the same people ad nauseum. In Cold War’s mind-control mission, this manifests literally, with the player’s character stuck running through the same recursive loop of memory, the same rice paddies and hamlets, the same firefights, the same bodies. We’re forced to circle this visual drain until we finally find the unrelated intel, and Vietnam is washed cleanly away, slotted back into history until it becomes needed once again.

Like the Hollywood industry it leans heavily on, American videogames, particularly ones like Call of Duty are inextricably tied up in the baggage of empire. Iran-Contra mastermind, Oliver North, consulted on Black Ops II. Its lead writer, Dave Anthony, went on to work for the Department of Defense. Many of the guns used in these games are based on real models and uncounted sums are paid into the weapons industry as licensing fees. In this irredeemably compromised model, it is vital to pay attention to how the victims of America’s imperial ambitions are portrayed, how little care is afforded to the people of these countries, and how that reflects the mainstream understanding of the conflicts that rage today. As long as we continue to misunderstand and ignore the implications of these wars in our art we will continue to do so in our politics, pushing mournfully, and blindly, into the future.

https://bulletpointsmonthly.com/2020/11/20/call-of-duty-black-ops-cold-war-vietnam-syndrome

Hopefully it works out. Amazon’s been hiring pinkertons and other infiltrators to quell unions for awhile.

A team within Amazon’s Global Security Operation Center, which includes former military intelligence analysts, according to LinkedIn, closely tracks organized labor and union activity in France, the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, Germany, Poland, Austria, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia—noting where organized labor groups are strongest and could influence Amazon workers.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dp3yn/amazon-leaked-reports-expose-spying-warehouse-workers-labor-union-environmental-groups-social-movements

More or less. Though he just refers to them as advertisers.

For emulation I’m messing around with RPCS3 right now. I got Scott Pilgrim working fairly well and Siren: Blood Curse almost working decently, but almost everything else has massive issues like Castlevania: Harmony Of Despair, the menu just won’t render for me though I can blindly navigate it. I don’t think my computer’s powerful enough to handle most of the 3D games, the only reason Siren works I think is because it’s borderline PS2 level (which is totally fine). Trying out Under Defeat HD and Hard Corps: Uprising right now and they seem to work near perfectly, which is cool.

The lows and highs of Leftypol:

It’s mostly Marxist-Leninist of some kind, which is good. Pushes back on some of the western hyper-IdPol stuf, which is good, but the schizophrenic image board structure sucks and encourages endless bickering and making stupid statements. Some of the chan culture seeps in to the point of actual bigotry that only gets gently pushed against at best. There are some good threads, but it’s basically a slot machine of whether you’re going to see good posts or absolute stupidity which renders it useless as a political space.

I think they’re right about how we should be condensing leftist/marxist efforts in cases such as the wikis though.

Unfortunately, yeah. There never is. Unless they edited it out.

I saw this post on Leftypol talking about the distinctions between class, caste, stratum, and cohort and I was wondering if you had any opinions on it since it’s related.

I think they’re referencing other criticisms of Marxism they’ve heard of though out it, but they don’t explain anything and I’m skeptical about the 60 classes in Maoism thing, for instance. It reads like a long run-on sentence generated by a GPT-3 bot almost. I don’t think they actually care expressing their idea here, they seem much too sure of themselves to bother.

I disagree with whatever small points I could make out of it. The main point about Marxism not being 100% accurate at the individual scale for everyone sounds reasonable until one realizes they’re making an argument that class, relationship to the means of production, etc. almost don’t exist and they’d have a hard time labeling even someone like Trump as bourgeoisie because of it. Class is actually pretty simple and powerful as an explanation of how capitalist politics works, so for them to reject that for some ultra-individualistic anarchist, almost post-modern, nonsense is just stupid. The marxist definition of class relating to their relation to the means of production lays out why worker and employer have opposing politics, which we can see is obviously the case, while they’d struggle to prove even that with their model that cares only to label everyone as unique individuals who can’t be labeled.

A lot of it reads like they didn’t even try to understand Marxism and at best read a bunch of Libcom and bourgeois criticisms of it.

OK, this is the worst one. They don’t think the definition of class involving wage labour is enough because of their stupid graph that doesn’t take into account fucking time (proletarian children will grow up into wage labour at some point) and dependencies on the wages of family members.

https://nitter.net/NullMagitech/status/1327863539067801601

A gender neutral term for a group of people could be “all of you” or “Are you all taking…” specifically in the case of your post.

I can’t really answer your other stuff since I’m just a poster. I’ve been thinking lately it’d be cool if we had automated posting for various forms of marxist content on here though. Rather than having to rely on people manually posting podcasts, lefttube material, marxist blogs, leftist news it’d be cool if it was automated as a way to generate discussion and promote access to this content.

Not sure if anyone else would be interested in that though, in terms of hoe the community would decide what gets included, the effort to maintain it, etc.

So Reddit is actually slowly targeting communist sources like this? I wish we could get them hosted on better sites, like this one. Everything on Reddit, Google Docs, Twitter, YouTube is liable to disappear at any moment.