2020 US Election

[ignatius]

8 minutes ago, Cryptowen said:

I mean to be fair I get why people stay away from theory. I went from being largely apolitical for most of my youth, to deciding in my mid 20s to read a few theory texts for fun, which has snowballed to the point where I'm reading theory five hours a day, waking up in the middle of the night to go look for pdfs on libgen, etc. And if anything I feel much less confident now than I did five years ago in terms of aligning myself with a particular ideology or explaining how I think civilization works. Theory is a rabbithole. i imagine teamsports is just so much more efficient if you want to dedicate most of your time to healthy relationships & appreciating art & shit like that

AntiFragile touches on some of those feelings about academia vs real life.  it's interesting if a bit repetitive w/the examples... but isn't a difficult read.  I'm not evangelical about it but it makes a lot of sense even though comes across as an "i told you so" once in a while... but i guess in the wake of when it was written that is understandable.  

https://www.amazon.com/Antifragile-Things-That-Disorder-Incerto/dp/0812979680

[Rubin Farr]

 

[Braintree]

1 hour ago, Cryptowen said:

4 hours ago, milkface said:

i appreciate the effort but this forum is choc full of smug funko pop synth nerd liberals there's no use sending them actual theory

I mean to be fair I get why people stay away from theory. I went from being largely apolitical for most of my youth, to deciding in my mid 20s to read a few theory texts for fun, which has snowballed to the point where I'm reading theory five hours a day, waking up in the middle of the night to go look for pdfs on libgen, etc. And if anything I feel much less confident now than I did five years ago in terms of aligning myself with a particular ideology or explaining how I think civilization works. Theory is a rabbithole. i imagine teamsports is just so much more efficient if you want to dedicate most of your time to healthy relationships & appreciating art & shit like that

Theory is fine and everything, but you need to keep in mind that it isn't concrete. It's not a hard science. It's not a science at all. I consider myself a socialist, but I arrived at that point after reading history, the news, and how things actually work. I fucking hate the "comrade," "bourgeoisie," "proletariat" speak. It's almost as if a lot of people got into it for the aesthetics rather than the content. And don't get me started on how 'bourgeoisie' isn't even applicable anymore. If you can't think for yourself then you can at least pick an ideology applicable to your own fucking century.

[cwmbrancity]

Can someone post relevant Proud Cunts getting knocked out vid comps ta

[zlemflolia]

1 hour ago, Cryptowen said:

I mean to be fair I get why people stay away from theory. I went from being largely apolitical for most of my youth, to deciding in my mid 20s to read a few theory texts for fun, which has snowballed to the point where I'm reading theory five hours a day, waking up in the middle of the night to go look for pdfs on libgen, etc. And if anything I feel much less confident now than I did five years ago in terms of aligning myself with a particular ideology or explaining how I think civilization works. Theory is a rabbithole. i imagine teamsports is just so much more efficient if you want to dedicate most of your time to healthy relationships & appreciating art & shit like that

I think it's good to have a foundation (still building my own I'm no perfect reader and am very lazy especially lately) and also a specialization related to your personal interests and domain specific career knowledge at the very least.  I'm not at risk of going down the rabbithole of reading theory all day long because I am a worthless piece of garbage.  If you're in the camp of reading too much consider yourself lucky and once that phase ends try to synthesize it and get back to basics

27 minutes ago, Braintree said:

Theory is fine and everything, but you need to keep in mind that it isn't concrete. It's not a hard science. It's not a science at all. I consider myself a socialist, but I arrived at that point after reading history, the news, and how things actually work. I fucking hate the "comrade," "bourgeoisie," "proletariat" speak. It's almost as if a lot of people got into it for the aesthetics rather than the content. And don't get me started on how 'bourgeoisie' isn't even applicable anymore. If you can't think for yourself then you can at least pick an ideology applicable to your own fucking century.

Comrade is lol but how are bourgeoisie and proletariat no longer relevant terms?  Would you prefer it to be generic like Owning class and Working class?  Making up alternatives to avoid sounding like you're referencing old shit seems like a waste of time.  Special words stick in peoples' minds.  I've noticed "bougie" is used as a slang insult or ironic self-applied term among young people nowadays, it can be useful to take the origin word and give them additional class consciousness

Edited January 6, 2021 by cyanobacteria

[Braintree]

5 minutes ago, cyanobacteria said:

Comrade is lol but how are bourgeoisie and proletariat no longer relevant terms?  Would you prefer it to be generic like Owning class and Working class?  Making up alternatives to avoid sounding like you're referencing old shit seems like a waste of time.  Special words stick in peoples' minds.  I've noticed "bougie" is used as a slang insult or ironic self-applied term among young people nowadays, it can be useful to take the origin word and give them additional class consciousness

It's not that they're not relevant, it's that the things they refer to aren't the same anymore. Proletariat referred to the working class - people that have to work (labor) to survive. The bourgeoisie referred to the middle class, and in Marx's time they were people that didn't need to work to survive since they owned the means of production. They exploited labor and were able to generate wealth. The 'middle class' in America, and basically every modern industrialized nation, has to work to survive, so the definition isn't the same as it was in Marx's time. The modern day middle class isn't able to generate wealth from exploitation like the bourgeoisie. They may have it off better than the lower class, but the middle class is still only a few months of savings away from being lower class.

[zlemflolia]

28 minutes ago, Braintree said:

It's not that they're not relevant, it's that the things they refer to aren't the same anymore. Proletariat referred to the working class - people that have to work (labor) to survive. The bourgeoisie referred to the middle class, and in Marx's time they were people that didn't need to work to survive since they owned the means of production. They exploited labor and were able to generate wealth. The 'middle class' in America, and basically every modern industrialized nation, has to work to survive, so the definition isn't the same as it was in Marx's time. The modern day middle class isn't able to generate wealth from exploitation like the bourgeoisie. They may have it off better than the lower class, but the middle class is still only a few months of savings away from being lower class.

Seems the same to me.  We are the proletariat if you exclude retirement capabilities and welfare which are just liberal concessions and utilization of small amounts of capital built up by the end of life.  The bourgeoisie who owns the means of production and therefore don't have to perform wage labor to survive still exist, it's just the term "middle class" that has been modified in our time to be meaningless whereas the original terms still make complete sense the way Marx used them and should be used

[Guest]

I agree with this. Not only the change in economic conditions between these centuries but other historical developments too. Population of the world during the hottest part of the cold war was like 3 billion and now it is over double that. Not only that but there is instantaneous communication across the globe and all of it collected or surveilled. And now this gets into tinfoil hat areas but I think that in the very very very distant future that there will be ways to collect medical information from large portions of the population at the genetic level and the technology like with drones moves more quick than there is time to consider the legal and ethics: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6813935/

Its just like how social media collects intimate details but more intimate what is going on in your body. Again I do not have a tinfoil hat but it worries me

@cyanobacteria I have some creativity but it is difficult for me to imagine how the type of revolution that you talk about can come to pass in a situation like this. By the way I have read a lot of your recent political posts and I sympathize with your views especially when your perspective tries to take on a voice for the voiceless kind of vibe and also when you say that a lot of people who live comfortably are complacent and do not think about how others suffer it just slips their mind. I am guilty of this too. For what it is worth I always thought that MLK had the best vision for society. I know that you might say that I am old fashioned or part of the problem or naive but in my mind he had the right idea and was a lot more radical than most people give him credit for. This quote is more on the conservative side but its a good one

https://www.plough.com/en/topics/justice/social-justice/where-do-we-go-from-here

Quote

Now, don't think you have me in a bind today. I'm not talking about communism. What I'm talking about is far beyond communism. …Communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social. And the kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism, but in a higher synthesis. It is found in a higher synthesis that combines the truths of both. Now, when I say questioning the whole society, it means ultimately coming to see that the problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together. These are the triple evils that are interrelated.

 

[Braintree]

22 minutes ago, cyanobacteria said:

Seems the same to me.  We are the proletariat if you exclude retirement capabilities and welfare which are just liberal concessions and utilization of small amounts of capital built up by the end of life.  The bourgeoisie who owns the means of production and therefore don't have to perform wage labor to survive still exist, it's just the term "middle class" that has been modified in our time to be meaningless whereas the original terms still make complete sense the way Marx used them and should be used

The term 'bourgeoisie' refers to a particular time in history. It is incorrect to use it colloquially as a synonym for our modern middle class, which, people that like to throw that word around general do. What people mean by the bourgeoisie is the upper class. They own everything.

We already have terms for these things and it's rather stupid to prefer using the terminology from a 150 year old paper. It's just aesthetic and not functional. To get back to my original point, a lot of people that throw theory books at you are just doing socialist cosplay.

Edited January 6, 2021 by Braintree

[Nebraska]

i guess that means the dems are winning stealing again

[zlemflolia]

1 hour ago, bupkis said:

I agree with this. Not only the change in economic conditions between these centuries but other historical developments too. Population of the world during the hottest part of the cold war was like 3 billion and now it is over double that. Not only that but there is instantaneous communication across the globe and all of it collected or surveilled. And now this gets into tinfoil hat areas but I think that in the very very very distant future that there will be ways to collect medical information from large portions of the population at the genetic level and the technology like with drones moves more quick than there is time to consider the legal and ethics: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6813935/

Its just like how social media collects intimate details but more intimate what is going on in your body. Again I do not have a tinfoil hat but it worries me

@cyanobacteria I have some creativity but it is difficult for me to imagine how the type of revolution that you talk about can come to pass in a situation like this. By the way I have read a lot of your recent political posts and I sympathize with your views especially when your perspective tries to take on a voice for the voiceless kind of vibe and also when you say that a lot of people who live comfortably are complacent and do not think about how others suffer it just slips their mind. I am guilty of this too. For what it is worth I always thought that MLK had the best vision for society. I know that you might say that I am old fashioned or part of the problem or naive but in my mind he had the right idea and was a lot more radical than most people give him credit for. This quote is more on the conservative side but its a good one

https://www.plough.com/en/topics/justice/social-justice/where-do-we-go-from-here

 

MLK was great.  I fully agree that we need to go beyond communism.  Any revolution meant to fix contradictions will generate more of them, arguably ones more difficult to fix.  Communism may tend towards ossification.  Sufficiently advanced automation may result in converting people into pets to machines.  Each of these have their own revolutionary requirements.

Edited January 6, 2021 by cyanobacteria

[may be rude]

wtf

[zlemflolia]

58 minutes ago, Braintree said:

The term 'bourgeoisie' refers to a particular time in history. It is incorrect to use it colloquially as a synonym for our modern middle class, which, people that like to throw that word around general do. What people mean by the bourgeoisie is the upper class. They own everything.

We already have terms for these things and it's rather stupid to prefer using the terminology from a 150 year old paper. It's just aesthetic and not functional. To get back to my original point, a lot of people that throw theory books at you are just doing socialist cosplay.

Maybe you're right and it's dry and some nuances need to be changed for modern conditions.  But that's foundational to Marxism to begin with that all theory needs to be applied to the conditions of the place in which revolution is being performed.  For that reason it doesn't make sense using new, vaguer terms not used in the original theory just because of historical nuances.  When most people think of the "upper class" they don't think of the modern bourgeoisie, they think of McMansion dwellers most likely.  As for socialist cosplay, if you mean all theory and no praxis, fair enough, especially on the internet.  But pointing it out doesn't give you the right to oppose theory in a reactionary way, that's liberal individualism and ad hominem with no meaningful content

Edited January 6, 2021 by cyanobacteria

[ignatius]

trump telling people to protest tomorrow in DC. should be fun. 

 

[may be rude]

tomorrow a lot of idiots will get arrested and get covid

[Braintree]

4 minutes ago, cyanobacteria said:

Maybe you're right and it's dry and some nuances need to be changed for modern conditions.  But that's foundational to Marxism to begin with that all theory needs to be applied to the conditions of the place in which revolution is being performed.  For that reason it doesn't make sense using new, vaguer terms not used in the original theory just because of historical nuances.  When most people think of the "upper class" they don't think of the modern bourgeoisie, they think of McMansion dwellers most likely.  As for socialist cosplay, if you mean all theory and no praxis, fair enough, especially on the internet.  But pointing it out doesn't give you the right to oppose theory in a reactionary way, that's liberal individualism

I get the distinct feeling that you don't understand my argument.

[zlemflolia]

9 minutes ago, Braintree said:

I get the distinct feeling that you don't understand my argument.

Well then you have to write it better lol

[exitonly]

1 hour ago, Nebraska said:

i guess that means the dems are winning stealing again

voter dump meaning counting votes in atlanta

[mister miller]

1 hour ago, Nebraska said:

i guess that means the dems are winning stealing again

Is he actually that dumb or is he acting in bad faith I can never tell

[Braintree]

Holy shit this is close.

https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/georgia-senate-runoff-election-results/index.html

Warnock is now ahead of Loeffler and Ossoff is basically neck and neck with Purdue. There are still a lot of DeKalb county votes to tally as well as absentee ballots.

For those of you overseas, this small runoff election determines who controls the senate.

[may be rude]

looking like dems did it

i'm gonna try to get @senatemajldr when mcconnell gives it up

[exitonly]

its looking good

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/01/05/us/elections/forecast-georgia-senate-runoff.html?action=click&module=Spotlight&pgtype=Homepage

the remaining ballots to be counted are coming from democrat heavy districts

[exitonly]

 

[Nebraska]

looking like dems did it
i'm gonna try to get @senatemajldr when mcconnell gives it up

another steal by the dems

Sent from my SM-N975U using Tapatalk

[dcom]

It seems that Ossoff and Warnock will win and the Senate will flip.