:kropotkin-shining: :AC-AnarKitty: :anarkitty:
1 Sickle and hammer megathread post = 1 Anarchy megathread post
I put this in the last megathread right before it closed for business so I'm putting it here too. Sue me.
Why is every /r/Neoliberal cretin that I end up coming across in random subreddits the absolute most dense, yet overly confident people in the world?
I was defending protections for renters and support of decommodification of housing and one came out of left field to drop a brookings institute link and call me a trump supporter? In what fucking world?
They don't think and just regurgitate information from neolib sources. their point of view is dominant in culture so they get celebrated for it, which creates a positive feedback loop for the brainless regurgitation.
see also how straight A students are often (not always, just often) trying to do insane shit like memorizing the answers to all the math exercises that might be on a test
My 2nd year physics professor always put one open problem on the exam worth 15% of the exam mark (like, "work out the total energy output of the Sun based on its mass." It was always new and you could in principle solve it using the stuff you'd learned over the semester, but it didn't resemble any example problems. You had to understand the actual subject to decide which equations to use and how to apply them.
It was amazing watching the rage of the straight HD students.
Not sure how serious this is, but this is going to be a huge block of text in response so I apologize in advance: TLDR Neolibs think they’re incredibly smart and correct because they have sources. All of the mainstream political discourse agrees with them.
Long answer: Because of this, they never consider that every single one of those sources is biased literally due to the core tenets of neoliberalism itself but self criticism is impossible when the ideology itself demands to be immune from criticism.
This is part of what makes Marx so fucking smart and relevant to this day. He wrote self criticism into the ideology itself in the form of dialectical materialism. We base our observations of the world in the reality we know to be true and come to conclusions based on that. That’s why ideologies like neoliberalism seem so fucking insane to the left, because they are openly inconsistent in both observation and attempt to address the problem.
You may have never read theory in your life, but if you’re on the left you’ve likely come to the realization that almost all of the world’s major problems stem from very few actual sources and then branch out from there. Neoliberalism tries to address the problems by pruning the individual leaves and twigs and branches of the tree, whereas Marxism will tell you that if you saw clean through the trunk you also kill off all of the problems present in the leaves, twigs and branches.
Lukács says it quite beautifully:
“Orthodox Marxism, therefore, does not imply the uncritical acceptance of the results of Marx’s investigations. It is not the ‘belief’ in this or that thesis, nor the exegesis of a ‘sacred’ book. On the contrary, orthodoxy refers exclusively to method. It is the scientific conviction that dialectical materialism is the road to truth and that its methods can be developed, expanded and deepened only along the lines laid down by its founders.”
To put it simply, we don’t believe Marx because he’s Marx. We believe Marx because reality backs up his claims, and as a result we expand on them.
and one came out of left field to drop a brookings institute link and call me a trump supporter
Isn't the "you're with us or against us" mentality the same one that ISIS has?
I browsed reddit for the first time today in months and man, I forgot just how unnecessarily rude and absolutely joyless the people are over there. Saw a thread where this person posted a dope tattoo they got and the comments were full of weird incel shit or just mean.
All sorts of astroturfers, influencers, hoaxes and psyops have been plaguing that site for years, and that's before you get into the petty moderator politics and drama. The sheer amount of effort invested into manipulating people on Reddit is absurd. It has created an environment where you cannot give anybody the benefit of the doubt.
Reposting here cause I posted in the old megathread like a lib.
You comrades ruined batman for me. I used to love batman. Went back and played one of the Arkham games for the first time in a while, and all I can think is how the cops are massive dicks, batman is a rich asshole who beats up random citizens for the crime of being outside, and the criminals/villains kind of have some good points.
At least the new Spider-Man stuff is cool.
Origins you can beat up the cops at least.
But I feel the same with almost any media we are meant to consume. I think that’s the curse when you dive into Marx and dialectical materialism, you see the threads and where the strings go to connect what you are interacting with, within larger capitalist efforts to keep you satisfied and sedated.
Here's what gets me about Batman: When they try to make villains its okay for batman to beat the shit out of, they create really sympathetic people who actually kinda sometimes have a point (Mr. Freeze, The Invisible Man), but when they try to make a villain relatable and "In the right" they create just some complete psychopath with absolutely no redeeming features who should be shot at the first opportunity (White Knight)
Read the recent-ish comics, the super villains appear before Batman
In the 2011 reboot the super villains appear first, and becoming Batman is a necessary to stop them. So it might be more enjoyable to read. It's pretty cool.
I’m watching Gotham right now and having a pretty good time laughing at all its cop shit logic.
Decided to scroll through my Steam friends list and see what all the various people I've added over the years are up to, found out my old pyro buddy from TF2 now has a John Brown pfp.
:john-brown:
Hope u see this m8
UN Says 233,000 Yemenis Dead After 6 Years Of Saudi-US Coalition Bombing
Where that Dubya “mission accomplished” banner at? Dronie make Brown people go boom boom, splat splat.
My prof just said that Chinese activists go to saunas for private meetings because it's normal to leave your phone.
New rule: if you are organizing with me, it must be in a steam bath, buck fucking naked.
At 3k deaths per day, Coronavirus will need nothing but a month to kill 100k people.
The USA is at 2.5k/day, and growing last time I checked. They'll reach 300k soon, and will probably reach 350k a few weeks later. That's 3 times the death toll of the WW1 for the USA, with many, many more people left with permament scars.
But the US isn't even the worst, the worst is Belgium, with twice the death rate compared to the USA. If there's a god, it abandonned us long ago.
Sounds like a hoi4 run where you accidentally leave things running, and the AI creates the most cursed world imaginable.
Feeling a bit guilty about radicalizing my best friend because not only is she going through the "oh my God everything is terrible all of the time" phase, she's determined to radicalize her boyfriend and it's not working, at all. They had a pretty solid thing going before this...
I have a few lib friends that I want to radicalize and I think I could get them to listen to Citations Needed and start the process, but at the same time sometimes I wish I could go back. Imagine being able to feel hope right now because Joe "nothing will change" Biden was appointing strong women of color to his cabinet. It would be a nice change of pace to my constant sense of dread.
It really doesn't feel like December. This entire year is a weird stretched out blur
so this cdc guy on npr said he’s expecting +150k deaths this winter in the us. That pushes the death count to some absurd rate like 1 in 900 people dying
Yep excess deaths being so much higher than the confirmed COVID-19 deaths is a huge indication that deaths are under counted. Of course some of these are due to other factors like 2020 being stressful af as well
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2771761
um but my uncle on facebook said the death rates are exaggerated. Are you saying my dear uncle is wrong?
I urge everyone to watch videos of old Russians talking about their lives in the USSR. It counters the “COMMUNISM IS DEATH” but it also counters the “THE USSR WAS A UTOPIA”.
As a Lib Soc it’s very eye opening.
The collapse of the USSR was the biggest tragedy of the 20th century, because even for all its mistakes and flaws combined, it still was a force for good in the world. Saved the world from nazism, but couldn't save the world from capitalism.
Yes sorry. I was being lazy.
https://youtu.be/ui11x8vLQFI
https://youtu.be/sjI8jwn0Upo
https://youtu.be/H0PnpMVkD5E
First link are interviews done by an American Socialist. Second one is some random YouTube channel. Last one is a dude interviewing his Kazakh grandfather who was a professor in the Soviet Union.
There's also Bald & Bankrupt who is a lot more fly-on-the-wall, and basically does travel vlogs around places like the former USSR. Pretty much everywhere he goes he hones in on the first 40+ person he can find and asks them if they prefer the USSR, and they always say yes.
There's a great bit in the video about Chelyabinsk (~12:30) where he's being guided by a younger Russian who says that he thinks older people liking the Soviet Union is just nostalgia, and that it's crazy people would have to go on a waiting list for a car or a TV - to which Bald says "I suppose nowadays they wouldn't be able to afford one at all"
The Russian guy goes :surprised-pika:
A really good oral history on the collapse of the Soviet Union is Secondhand Time by Svetlana Alexievich. It's a real depressing read but if you want to know more about people's thoughts on the Soviet Union looking back I definitely recommend it.
https://b-ok.cc/book/2717653/84bc0c
How is there a general strike in india with almost the population the US and yet still so little coverage on it?
Edit: Of course the glowies at R*ddit deleted the post with 34k upvotes over being "misleading" https://old.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/k5ljxn/this_is_a_revolution_sir_workers_in_india_last/
