Happy first night of Passover, Good Friday, and Ramadan Mubarak to all who celebrate. And a warm welcome as well, of course, to our comrades who do not.
Julio Cortázar is my favorite Spanish-language author, so I'm making today's mega about him. If you'd like to share something random with the class, please feel free to make a mega in the future!
Anyway...
Cortázar is an Argentinian writer, and according to Wikipedia, "He is considered one of the most innovative and original authors of his time, a master of history, poetic prose and short story in general and a creator of important novels that inaugurated a new way of making literature in the Hispanic world by breaking the classical moulds through narratives that escaped temporal linearity."
So that's pretty cool. He was particularly active in the 50s and 60s.
In general, what I really like about Cortázar's writing is the clarity and purposefulness with which he writes. He neither condescends to the reader, nor seems to go out of his way to try and impress. He is certainly clever in his writing and it's by no means simplistic, but it feels like every literary flourish has genuine purpose. And contrary to what my Spanish literature professor said, I maintain that his story about getting trapped in a sweater is simple, funny, and not some bizarre allegory for a penis. Sometimes a sweater is just a sweater. (My professor was sort of obsessed with seeing phallic and/or sexual imagery, motifs, and innuendo in everything we read.)
I think his works sadly lose a lot in translation, as with many Spanish-language authors, particularly from that era. But maybe I'm just a fuckin hipster?
I'm still planning to do a mega on sleep, btw, but it has gotten postponed.
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:lenin-shining: :unity: :kropotkin-shining:
Anarchism and Other Essays :ancom:
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my greatest joy at my job is getting into a conversation with customers and watching the conversation drift into "we need to enact savage violence against landlords" in one way or another. Nobody's like "oh we need rent control" or anything relating to voting, full on " I have been rejected from 4 different apartments and it's clear what the answer is ".
like yeah burgerland politics are generally incomprehensible but if like, fast food managers, teachers and welders say shit that's further to the left than most of the Bernie movement we're not that bad off. I'm not influencing the outcome that much either, if you talk to someone who doesn't own a house it just more often than not comes down to "I don't know who Mao is but if I did I'd say he was right".
I don't respect your post a single bit. I'm talking about seeing the actual victims of capitalism, displaced and vital members of what you could call our society reacting to getting displaced with a need for violence, specifically against a group of people based off of what they perceive to be a profession and what we can define as class. I didn't like, egg them on and lead them to this, I ask them "what brings you to my place of work", they talk about it for 5 min and if they aren't just totally beaten down, they're so fucking angry they have tears in their eyes. They're not going off about any specific race or gender or some shit, even if they have reactionary tendencies and living in burgerland they probably do. That's fine, if your socialist project doesn't account for bringing in some reactionary people and uniting them though their class interests in order to dilute or eliminate their toxic views, it's gonna fail.
Your response to that is "look at this youtube video's comments". You need to log the fuck off right now if you think for a second that this bubble we interact in is any sort of genuine assessment of anything and not just a bunch of intelligence/advertisement agencies playing yaldabaoth. Is my personal sample size indicative of anything? Probably not, I might have just gotten lucky that I've had 10+ people across different ages and races all came to the conclusion that they're getting fucked over (specifically by my class's enemy!) and the only way to deal with it is through force. Also like, sorry, I've worked enough jobs where I have faith in the working class of this country and I believe we will succeed in creating a society ran by workers on the continent. If I didn't believe that, I'd either try to get out of the country by any means necessary or walk into traffic.
And also, what the fuck does posting that on this site do, even if you do genuinely believe we're in the timeline of darkest reaction? Why are you here? We lost apparently, if this is just an aesthetic thing or a hobby, pick up an instrument or something. Awful, demoralizing post. We will win with the support of cashiers and warehouse workers, and I don't doubt that for a second.
you can’t just call everyone on the internet a fed
I didn't call you a fed, I didn't even kinda suggest it, you just kinda sounded like someone who was terminally online. But you do understand why posting on a "leftist" website "you lost and you're fucked" and then instantly responding with "I'm not part of the FBI" would make me incredibly suspicious of you.
neoliberalism holds us in an iron grip
I don't know how you can see dollar hegemony collapsing and an Amazon union forming within a month of each other and say that this system isn't in terminal rot.
you will keep losing. you can keep having faith in them, and you will keep being disappointed. there is NO hope in the west
I'm not disappointed in the first place. Like you said, we live in the most propagandized country on the planet. We're not perpetrators, we're victims and the whole point of my first post was that, despite that, without me trying to angle shit in that direction, there is genuine desire against our enemies. My optimism comes through actual participation in labor and the experiences I've shared with my coworkers and other people who have to work for a living. I don't expect them to be socialists just because Bernie ran, but they're on the right track and that's all I want from them until the collapse of these institutions allow for a left to form without being geeked (which, hey, again, look at those supply lines, look at who has all the diesel and fertilizer, we're not talking decades here). They don't work for me, I work for them.
people are absolutely not going to start stringing up their landlords, give me a break.
yeah no fucking duh the mom with three kids isn't gonna buy a glock, cowboy up and do mao shit. And if they did it right now, it wouldn't make things better. But they want to and no matter how you try to spin that, that's a W. You can say it doesn't matter but there's popular support for what we want to accomplish.
And again, why are you here? Never wanted to touch that, huh? We're just a bunch of larping losers anyways, there's no point doing anything outside of keeping your head down anyways. What was your post trying to accomplish? Telling people to "get real, disengage, this is never gonna work and whatever victories we do get are pointless" is actively detrimental and if your post is sincere you should be fucking ashamed.
dude I don't know what to tell you, you just sound like a cop or someone who doesn't want to be responsible for not doing shit, like nothing you posted was even kinda right and I feel bad for having wasted time on you in the first place
I started out with hope and wanting to change things, but I learned enough to realize that there is no hope, so now I’m just trying to learn for my own satisfaction. it’s fun.
well if you actually did learn a goddamn thing you wouldn't be posting the dogshit you did
idk, I like being around leftists, and I like learning about this stuff. it’s, as you said, a hobby. I would like to understand the world.
if you're just gonna post detached and blatantly wrong shit, we don't like you, fuck off
usually i agree, but youtube comments are in fact not a clear window into the soul of the people. they tell you more about youtube and its partnered PR firms being the central venue of capitalist propaganda in our age.
no chance? maybe, but there should always be hope
or to put it in a meme way. We can have a little hope, as a treat.
You need to get out there and talk to actual poor and working people. Online is online, actual working people are pretty receptive to these ideas. This shit you're on right now isn't any kind of informed analysis, you're just laundering your own depression and isolation through left-wing vocabulary
Idk what to tell you then, just lay down and rot I guess. It beats having to actually put in any work
So my dad is really sick, the hospital can't bring his fever down. idk what to feel or think, I've been crying off and on, I can't take this stress.
Thanks. THings have to get better, right? Like the cosmic arc is that eventually it evens out, no? I just have the worst luck.
I don't know. But I think you should be appropriately proud of even the littlest achievements because you had to overcome like 10x the normal amount of shit do to them.
Existentialism is hard and I think different people need different things. But I think there's something to be said for living to spite the universe. Like seeing the universe throw everything it possibly can at you, and still sitting down with a hot cup of coffee and giving it the finger.
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@thelastaxolotl @WhoaSlowDownMaurice @Quimby
mega time
I think the one of many things the left lacks is vibes. The right makes you feel good. Calling someone the Gamer Word is like a hit of cocaine. Here's some cool Pit Viper glasses, and this sick Hugo Boss Uniform. You want some barbecue :grillman: ? Trigger the libs have fun :matt-jokerfied:
Meanwhile the left be like:
Hey uhh so climate change is going to extinguish almost all life on the planet and we fucked the planet up so bad it likely won't recover for millions of years, the country the vast majority of people posting on the Anglophone internet have been conditioned to love is basically the Fourth Reich, all of your past comrades died horribly, the first and only communist superpower got absolutely beaten, curbstomped and vanquished and everyone associates our ideology with death, destruction and misery and thinks you're a naive idiot for having read all these dense ass, boring books you have to read to even understand what I'm talking about.
That’s why I’m trans, we got leftism AND good vibes
Edit: this is not actually why I’m trans, but it helps
yep. people suck at the marshmallow test.
It's fuck around vs find out. No surprise that fuck around is dominating.
The right is all fun and good vibes at first - once you actually get through the front door they're all vicious grifters who alternate between trying to build up their pyramid scheme "brands" and trying to fuck each others' wives
Here’s where I’m at.
The car I was living in broke down this morning. I’ve had it towed to the Toyota Service Center. It’s going to be several days before it can be fixed. The repair is likely to cost in the ballpark of $3000.
The options I have right now as I see them are;
Call Toyota and see if they will cover the cost. This is a known issue that was covered under an extended warranty that expired in August of 2021, or past 150k miles. It’s April of ‘22 and I’m just over 150k.
Take out a loan to cover the repair costs. I can’t imagine this gets processed before Tuesday.
Get a hotel room for the night. One night pretty much leaves me broke. I need shelter until at minimum Monday afternoon.
There is a Salvation Army shelter a few miles away. It is first come first serve and I have been informed they are quite busy recently. It will cost almost the same as the hotel just to get a ride back and forth.
Sell the car and get a plane ticket back to Idaho. My father says I can live with him again.
Is living with your father a safe situation for you? And is that going to mean quitting a job where you’re at?
Thinking I might check myself into rehab next week, if I can. I'm drinking again. The dog kennel near my home can board cats, so I'd have a place to house Mr. Softie until I got into a sober house.
When I was still a baby I thought leftists were delusional about BLUE MAGA and now I'm like holy shit the average liberal these days is like a fucking Bush republican rofl
They're so fucking racist too, even some of the nonwhite ones are like Grand Dragon KKK but wrong color by accident
just taking a minute to appreciate the surgeon who told me that it wasn't possible to give me the result I wanted cause of limitations in how they actually perform the procedure and then went ahead and delivered anyway. the man is my hero this year. the man also some how cut me up and left me with almost no visible scars on the outside - there's one if you know what to look for but it looks like my normal variation in skin tone, with my skin pressed together kinda funny along the line where there were stitches for a while. when that skin tightens up, there's gonna be no way to tell. on the inside there's more visible scars but all that skin is also still visibly healing - there's a few white lines where new skin looks to have formed really recently but it doesn't look the way scars do on the rest of my body. it's just new skin that hasn't pigmented yet. we'll see what that looks like in a few months.
I have my complaints too but just taking a minute to be happy about what worked out better than I dared hope.
Alright I've left my wake of commie uncle magic comments on :reddit-logo: if I don't get banned by morning then I'll try harder next time.
I got a new stain on my desk, drop some hot sauce and just stared at it instead of cleaning it :wut:
Broke up with my girlfriend of 2 years last night, puked an insane amount during work and had to leave this morning, missing a good day of tips (after a bad week) and had to reschedule an interview.
Of course I think I did the right thing, still hurts and I hate that I had to hurt someone else too. Not to mention a group of people may now exist that hate me. Meh
I had a real zinger of a post for you but I forgot it you'll just have to take my word for it
I'm sure I would have laughed (expelled air quickly through my nose and smirked) at it.
There really needs to be a word for that brief nasal expulsion that isn't a sneeze
weed/moon people what's the consensus on harvesting on a full moon
My baby needs two more weeks but doesn't have two more weeks
This is it this is my good post if u dont like it fuck off im an aquarius
Found a movie analysis video that felt pretty coherent, and then out of nowhere the last fifth of the video attempts to absolve all media corporations of only producing lazy nostalgiabait shit because "companies just follow where the money is" and then blame the audience for somehow actively forcing all media to be uncreative and played as safe as possible, it's your fault you didn't like the right kinds of movies now nobody tells original stories anymore
How do you get so close to a systemic understanding of companies only making what's profitable but then fall back into this individualist vote with your wallet shit :yea:
I mean I think that's generally correct. We decided film should be made for-profit by giant soulless corporations instead of funded publically, so they have little incentive to challenge the viewer. If the populace is dumb and would rather see an origin story miniseries on Nurse Ratchet :so-true: instead of original content that's what they're going to make.
Scolding film studios for reflecting a dumb, racist, sexist society's entertainment desires feels kind of undertheorized. They're not going to just "make better shit" if they perceive that to be a greater financial risk because their audience are full of Marvel-brained morons who would organize a boycott if the studio made Batman a Vietnamese power bottom.
