Competition

Yea, I just open the comment in browser if I need to. Easier than googling the image and pasting it in.

Huh. Until right now, I thought rabbit and hare were synonyms.

When I saw my first European Hare, I noted how not-cute and cuddly it looked… and thought to call them “hares” to denote to myself that they were not the cute rabbits I was familiar with. But now I feel dumb because that’s literally what it is.

I only ever see notifications of direct replies, not indirect ones.

Definitely by design. I do not want to receive a geometrically increasing number of notifications as a comment chain expands underneath my comment.

On reddit (maybe it was the Enhancement Suite) IIRC is an option to Watch a thread, which basically does what you want

I wouldn’t delete an email to mark it as read. I don’t think hide is sufficiently similar

A channel I subscribe to just posted an explainer on spin, for anyone interested

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYeRS5a3HbE

It is a good demonstration of the limitations of our own thought. We understand new concepts in terms of familiar concepts. If there is no direct analogy to something familiar, the human mind is utterly lost and has to trust in rigorous analysis while only half believing what it proves.

Ok, use Android then. Millions of people don’t care about those things because they have different priorities for their phone which Apple accounts for when they decide which features to roll out.

It’s in beta 1. Some apps look kinda bad if you’re trying to pick a horrid color. Hopefully they do something to improve contrast before release.

Every new Android version adds features that have been on iOS forever. Both OSes have different priorities.

Android will often add new features but they are poorly integrated or thought out. iOS tends to add features with a much higher level of refinement the first time around.

Same cognitive dissonance that prevents libs from understanding why communists either supported or were a part of every progressive movement of the last 150 years. It’s not an accident that communists were a century ahead of the left-liberals on race, gender, religion, antisemitism, and imperialism, in addition to their bread-and-butter of labor movements.

The Soviets in particular advanced the rights of women both in ideals (see the USSR constitution) and in practice (women in STEM increased significantly). The empowerment of women in the Soviet Union was so self evident that it spawned the movie trope of the headstrong, independent Russian woman who can’t be wooed by James Bond or some other “gentleman”.

It was the Bolsheviks who saw the reactionary character of antisemitism, which during the Russian Empire was especially horrible.

”It is not the Jews who are the enemies of the working people. The enemies of the workers are the capitalists of all countries. Among the Jews there are working people, and they form the majority. They are our brothers who, like us, are oppressed by capital; they are our comrades in the struggle for socialism. Among the Jews there are kulaks, exploiters and capitalists, just as there among the Russians and among people of all nations. The capitalists strive to sow and foment hatred between workers of different faiths, different nations and different races. Those who do not work are kept in power by the power and strength of capital.” — V. I. Lenin

The communists historically have been a driving force for positive social progress. Liberals co-opt these gains as products of their own enlightenment, either consciously to deny the communists a win, or unconsciously because they don’t have a theoretical basis for understanding historical development.

I used to help with the 101 commie subreddits until one of the powermods banned me from all of them (yes one user was a mod of several subs).

I never posted anything particularly sectarian because I honestly didn’t have the energy to go beyond questions with unambiguous answers.

I’m pretty sure the thing I got banned for was saying that I don’t care if we call it socialism or communism; that both terms are quite old, so they can technically have definitions inconsistent with Marxism.

Anyway it was at that point I think I really gave up on reddit as a whole because I had no other purpose to be there.

Biden wants to destroy Russia before going to war with China

Trump only wants to improve relations with Russia in order to go to war with China now

Both seem to be interested in going to war with Iran in the next 5 years.

Deleting my reddit account has been great for my mental health

I realize it wasn’t the main point of the post, so without getting too debatey I will clarify a little more before I leave it.

The idea of “an economy” as an external object attached to a society is peculiar to capitalism, for the fact of commodity fetishism, in which relations of production dominate over capitalist society as an external force. Only under these conditions does it make sense to treat an economy as a model that appears dispensable or interchangeable (but is not actually so).

Although societies have started out with consciously defined rules — and by rules I mean property relations — the aim of these rules has nothing to do with creating a stable society. The purpose of the rules is to define who retains privilege, who is oppressor and who is oppressed. Only after the rules are set does the task begin to make these rules practicable. This logical sequence is glossed over when talking of societies’ economic relations as external objects called economies.

An economy is a model for allocating labour and resources in a way that meets the needs of the people in the country.

Economies are no more “models for allocating labour and resources” than Darwinian evolution maximizes the happiness of all species. All past societies have existed on the simple condition that they were compatible with their material bases. They are not necessarily perfect or optimized for productivity, happiness, justice, etc.

You probably didn’t mean it this way, but an economy is not necessarily a consciously applied, a priori model. Most societies have not had planned economies, let alone for any purpose like meeting the needs of the population.

Of course there must be some way that societies reproduce themselves. It is typically brutal as a ruling class exploits another class, the most obvious example being the various societies based on types of slave labor.

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” — The history of society has been the history of economies for the benefit of a single class, or in legal terms, the history of exclusive property rights held by privileged classes.

Okay? “Videos” in general, not this particular one in every aspect…

It’s not how I would have scripted the video, but until/unless I make my own content, I’m not going to bash him too hard. Still consider him a great contributor. I’ll leave it at that — thanks for the discussion

I agree that the theory should adapt. Just not in that way. Political climate and popular opinion, in a word ideology, are distinct from material conditions and relations of production.

The historical changes that require updating theory are things like Western financial imperialism that works concurrently to de-industrialize the West while increasing exploitation in the Global South; what Andy Higginbottom calls “super-exploitation”. Michael Hudson and Radhika Desai have also discussed this in detail.

It has always been difficult and unpopular to advocate revolution, even in Marx’s time. It is not uniquely difficult today even with the Red Scare. There was a time in the early 20th century that there was some modicum of support for revolution in some countries, but in every example it still required a bitter civil war.