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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: July 11th, 2020

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  • This was from a private publishing firm that produces supplementary learning material (everything from math workbooks, English worksheets, and this pseudo-history). It got semi-viral on facebook, which this photo is from, and the firm pulled it from their shelves. Also, unless you’re getting your kid a single subject supplement like math, these books are fucking massive. I have a fair suspicion that this publisher is basically a privatized extension of the school board so they can do fuck-all to update their materials, but don’t quote me on that. I grew up with textbooks older than myself!


  • Honestly a lot of people I’ve talked to disagree with what I’m saying partially / completely, but I really feel like we can do a lot of work through social media --> memes, visuals, music, promotion of materials, etc. Obviously a concerted effort behind an org. works best, but I’ve yet to see any marked change in engagement through institutions like Gravel, CPC, CPUSA, SRA, local groups, what have you. With the sheer scale of the internet, we should be spitting these things out like candy. It’s free real estate. There is potential for backfire with liberalism, and that’s something I think everyone’s seen too often, but otherwise it’s a net positive so long as the people engaging in them join a party and educate themselves and mature over time. Liberals and their ilk will complain about tankies online all day while also wanting better living conditions at home. Sooner or later they will make the connection that either A) their POV is outright wrong or massively inefficient in seeing anything through; B) when they finally achieve something–UHOH-- they pulled a Tanky or whatever and finally shut up; or C) related to (A), they will waste years of their lives operating at a snail’s pace that they become jaded and give up.

    Now, I’ve seen a lot of well-minded folks pull a Trot and just devote their entire being into a newspaper that no one but themselves read, so don’t do that. I swear to God if I see another newspaper / blog plug I’m going to fucking blow a gasket. There’s hundreds of them, just funnel everyone into a few that’re good. I try to plug RedSails.org bc I believe Roderic Day is really good writer, and great at journalistic writing. Too many write like it’s the Next American Novel and it drives me up the fucking wall. Also, holy shit, these folks should just get a laser printer or transition to digital. These liberals ironically do more for HP and Dell inkjet profit margins than raising any CC I swear to God.

    The rapper Noname has done infinitely more good in this respect than these dime-a-dozen litterers. I don’t even listen to her music but I see her social media presence gaining traction with thousands. PLUS she isn’t a liberal (so far I’ve seen) and plugs actual theory, and she does so tactfully and says little to nothing about China, Russia, etc. Now some might say that’s a negative, but I believe baby steps is > hitting the gas pedal right at the start. Get the folks interested and reading, and then they will come to us. That’s how it happened for me, and it’ll happen like that for others.

    More traditional POV: join a union, learn organizing tactics and agitate from within. Attend marches on things, but I personally believe these to be a waste of time and often outright detrimental; public talks are a better alternative.


  • It’s fine. One thing to note is that technocracy’s flaws can only be found in capitalist nations, but never attributed, and hand-waved as an inherent flaw in design, whereas its successes can only be found in AES, but always de-fanged from its clear ideological / political perspective.

    The Good:

    • policy based on expertise / merit
    • cool trains and nice city planning
    • that’s about it.
    • China. USSR.

    The Bad 1:

    • Even highly educated / trained people can make mistakes.

    The Bad 2: Only Happens Under Capitalism But People Make Mistakes Guys Please Edition:

    • Tuskegee (racist, exploitative, common denominator of capitalism)
    • History of eugenics and scientific racism (racist, exploitative, common denominator of capitalism)
    • Wall St. economists (exploitative, common denominator of capitalism)
    • Military actions (racist, imperialistic, common denominator of capitalism)
    • “China will collapse by the year 1999, 2000, 2008, 2010, 2012, 2016, 2020 because of ghost cities, inflation, debt, COVID” - that dude who keeps shilling his book

    *** There’s more to it obviously, and I remember there being a couple of lectures / papers that seriously discussed the potential flaws in technocracy wrt bureaucracy, lags in policy and differences in opinion (e.g., doctors’ vs economists’ opinions on healthcare), but it’s all sorta meh to me? I don’t see it happening in a socialist state tbh. I can try and dig those back up if I can find them.



  • This is actually a well-written article. Short, simple, great opening, no grammar mistakes, well-organized in headings and images, cited hyperlinks with M/D/Y (should be Y/M/D, oh well) … Sad how we’ve been conditioned into reading awful writing over the years. I don’t understand how NYT maintains its image of quality when so many of their writers have a fetish for becoming the Next American Author, which drags would-be 500 word articles into 1200.



  • There’s always one who goes “yeah but they invest and stuff. Investing is good! Landlords are good!” but they forget about the fact that they invest insofar as they’ve insulated themselves in a market. There’s one LL firm that owns all the real estate in my area, and there’s another one down the road that does the same for them. Rent increases on a regular basis and the reason given is useless cosmetics and beautification, like $100 increase on changing the balcony glass inserts. Oh, and the rent never goes down once it’s complete. Gee I wonder why? The goddamn elevators don’t work! Someone nearly drowned in a fucking elevator from rainwater flooding because it was built on flood-prone land with absolutely zero safety precautions against it. Again, gee I wonder why?

    Like, if I started a business of kicking guys in the balls, and some schmuck down the street starts a bodyguard business to protect against my business, suddenly we’re both valuable? Oh, if you don’t want to be kicked in the balls, just hire the guy who doesn’t kick you in the balls. If you get rid of the ball-kicking business, you kill all the jobs of the ball-protectors and the investment opportunities of the ball-kicking enterprise. Tim’s neighborhood doesn’t have anyone kicking his nuts! Like, dude, the money involved in this socially legitimized CBT scheme doesn’t actually do anything. Stop letting me kick you in the nuts just because I do it to a lot of people.


  • Only off the cuff in seminars and art exhibits because they brought it up first. Of the dozens I’ve talked to they’ve been universally abhorrent people who only care for their immediate concerns and will gladly kill you if given the chance. Their aligning with leftists movements seems to be a coincidence, if not outright opportunistic. They’ll appropriate terms and ideas and bastardize them in their own ideologically inconsistent way (like “lived experiences”, “bodies”, “dialogues”) while refusing all historical precedents (USSR, East Germany, DPRK, PRC, Vietnam … but for some reason never Cuba?*), and subscribing to racist ideas of blood purity and enlightenment race science like IQ, propensity for violence, “creativity gene”, the proportion of black athletes in basketball (??), penis size, “care-giving gene” of Asian women, phrenology, and a bunch of other mind-numbing nonsense. Like, they’re so obsessed with this shit while also wanting a minimum wage increase or something, and suddenly that makes them O.K.? It’s so strange. Maybe I’m just living in a so-called shit hole? They’ll always ask if I studied history in a condescendingly bewildered way. Yes, I majored in it, this is exactly why I’m saying it.

    Never met a more closeted racist bunch in my life; at least the conservatives are open about their hate. Somehow the conservatives I’ve met are more knowledgeable about Israel’s fuckery, which is just about the only thing I agree with them on, whereas these SJW types will cry about antisemitism for the nth time, and will always mention the Doctor’s Plot and some forced connection to the Holocaust, as if they’re going through a mental checklist. Yes I am bitter about my university experience. Hopefully that changes post-COVID when they realize their idealist visions are impossible.

    The one thing I realized is that debates (formal or otherwise) are useless and serves as an exhibit in rhetoric and sophistry. I believe Plato or Aristotle said something akin to it, but I never thought to put two and two together until recently. If you want to convince someone, they have to be the one to approach you, in earnest, and you have to tread very carefully. The Socratic method works best when it’s an apolitical topic, and when both parties are neutral and intellectually honest with themselves. I’d rather just tell them off and give resources than baby someone like that.

    *My pet theory for Cuba is that they come from privileged backgrounds, and have some memories of vacationing at their resort beaches.



  • At the end of the day, information is information. Communism is both a highly specific and flexible lens with which we view the world. It’s not the be-all and end-all, however, as many, if not all, are still bound to tradition, culture, etc. We shouldn’t be surprised if a communist / communist sympathizer turns out to be anti-LGBT despite the penchant for liberation, equality, etc. Likewise, we shouldn’t shy away from learning opportunities just because they don’t fit our stripe.

    To give a personal example: the most helpful economics courses were, in fact, the same neo-liberal garbage that universities manufacture to sustain capitalism. These were the same profs that I would both learn from and would gladly strangle given the opportunity. The math doesn’t lie, the logic is sound, but often the methodology is fraudulent, and the bias is as clear as daylight. I feel a bit strange whenever I give out financial advice or help with homework, but this is information worth knowing so long as it’s relevant. The only exceptions were my labor and macro profs, who were Chinese and Polish respectively. They didn’t / couldn’t say it explicitly, but it was very clear they were pro-China and pro-USSR.

    Meanwhile my history prof is a centrist white sexpat fuck who covers his fetish for Vietnamese women with a PhD in “Modern Southeast Asian History and International Relations”. That being said he’s incredibly knowledgeable and I learnt a lot from him. I’m also shooting him the first chance I get.

    You know the joke about atheists being the only ones who actually read the Bible? It’s cringe but the point stands.