Aloha and Seasons Greetings Comrades! Pull up a chair, say hello, vent, or just stare until someone screams! This is the Weekly Discussion Thread, where grain is eaten and dreams are made or something.
Only two more weeks until 2024! Almost another year closer to the inevitable victory of communism and the working class! Venceremos!
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pirateborrow some from libgen or Anna’s Archive - For those of us who are more of a verbal learner, check out the Channel Socialism 4 All (the link is Yewtu.be, so no worries on the privacy)
Has anyone else noticed NAFO types calling Russians (and sometimes just anyone who isn’t foaming at the mouth calling for endless war) “Muscovites” over the last few months? It seems to have replaced “orcs” in the lexicon of the people I regularly encounter online, and they use it like a racial slur. It kind of seems the NAFO types are having a hard time coming up with a catchy slur they can use against Russians specifically that isn’t a slur against Slavs in general.
I think because orks made some moderates uncomfortable after the initial bloodlust and indignation wore off, so they’ve had to move to making it seem like all of Russia are just Putin’s mindless puppets.
I’m not sure how I feel about the emoji-sized emojis from Hexbear now. They were massive before but I kinda got used to them and now I’m squinting to try to see them in the same detail. I wonder if I’ll feel the same nostalgia about my landlord after we get the FALC update with Lemmy 0.20.3?
I hope all comrades have an acceptable and if possible enjoyable week
We wish the same for you comrade. To many more not-terrible weeks!
DDR my beloved
My comments started showing up in vomit yellow, as do comments from some others. Anyone know what the issue is?
No issue, thats just “new comment” tint, goes away once the comment is a few minutes old.
Thanks!
I’ve always had that, wonder why that’s not true for others.
the background colour has changed quite dramatically; it’s been fixed (at least for the “darkly” themes) and will hopefully be included in the next update
Just walked past a cafe and they were watching and chearing hamas videos like it’s a football match
…so like over here, lmao
it feels like our news sensationalizes this a lot like a football match
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Weeks after far right has won Dutch elections, security services suddenly start focussing on left wing extremism, saying they have ignored it for too long. But then again they are pointing at the Dutch socialist sub for being extremist, so… Lol
“sub” as in subreddit?
Yes. Unfortunately the left in The Netherlands does not own a submarine (yet)
I seem to remember you mentioning the Dutch “socialist” subreddit being full of racist socdems and/or ultras
Yeah most of them are your typical socdems. Which is worrying if THEY get called extremist as well.
That’s such an awful sub. I got banned from there last year after mentioning US involvement in the Ukraine.
if you’re lucky and they’re actually that clueless, maybe they’ll focus on the socdems instead of your party 🤞
His party (and mine, I’m a card carrying member) are fastly becoming more and more mainstream. Which is good because we’re growing and it’s bad because we’re becoming an institutionalised party that wants reform instead of revolution. (Also theh denouced Stalin, which I still can’t get over).
Liberal institutions have no response, other than unproductive hostility, against conspiratorial thinking because they require nothing but blind trust. The media doesn’t know the difference between a structured and informed radical analysis and whatever wierd stuff people on the internet come up with. Most importantly, conspiratorial thinking is the basis for creating myths about the imperialist’s enemies.
It’s up to us to provide the tools to build upon broken trust in liberal institutions
It’s an interesting hypocrisy, or dialectic if you will.
As you say, conspiratorial thinking is the basis for myths about the empire’s enemies, but at the same time “conspiracy theories” have been vilified at every opportunity by the very same myth making machine since the Kennedy assassination.
As a personal aside, my partner is concerned that I will fall into a “conspiracy theory” or “cult” bubble due to my ML leanings, and may lose touch with reality.
As a personal aside, my partner is concerned that I will fall into a “conspiracy theory” or “cult” bubble due to my ML leanings
That’s why it’s important not to fall into the old Soviet way of having a Marx or Lenin quote for everything. It’s a good exercise to vulgarise dialectical materialistic analysis and back it with academic sources, as well as references to the basis of logic and the scientific method.
Some people will still think you’re dogmatic even with that though, then a good way of staying in friendly territory is to take a shot at flat earthers and QAnon nuts from time to time
merry week to Oppo and everyone else
Parenti quote test.
The quote
In the United States, for over a hundred years, the ruling interests tirelessly propagated anticommunism among the populace, until it became more like a religious orthodoxy than a political analysis. During the Cold War, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them. If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.
– Michael Parenti, Blackshirts And Reds
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For me it has been a rough winter, not cheery in the slightest. What about our other comrades here? Faring better?
I used to like winter. I used to be depressed year-round.
Hate winter, now. Midwest blows. Convinced I have seasonal affective disorder. Convinced you’re abnormal if you live in the midwest and don’t have it.
I was going on walks, working out. Now I don’t wanna leave the house, ever. Winter blows.
Have you considered taking vitamin D?
I’ve done it before. It’s not a bad idea. Thanks!
Even if the supplements don’t do much, it’ll make me feel less bad about missing the sun so much and placebo can do its work.
If i didn’t have a calendar i wouldn’t know its december lol. It has been the warmest december i remember, haven’t gone to any party either (my decision, for the better). But it has been a near perfect weather for my crops lol.
Here in Brazil it has been a very, very hot summer. Literally hitting 50°C on some street thermometers during a heat wave.
Jfc that sounds awful, 40C in high humidity climates is nigh unhabitable.
It gets even hotter here and it is very humid here
how u survive 😐
Air conditioning
It has its ups and downs. It’s mostly passing by in great pace while I seem to be zonnig out a lot. I don’t know if it’s because I’m tired or bored or burnt out a bit.
It sucks to hear that you are experiencing hardship. I hope better thing will come.
So I was re-reading the German Ideology by Marx recently and I found his bit about ‘Mental Production’ really relevant in regards to Drill music in the UK.
So if you take what Marx is saying, that the mental production (art) of a society is controlled by the upper class, and those who lack the means to engage in mental production will be dominated by it. He gives the example that you just need to read history to realize this is true, as the only art that gets filtered through history and that gets to survive and be representative is what the upper class allowed to be uncensored, and what the upper class deemed valuable enough to fund with money both in purchasing, artists expenses and education.
In a modern context in the UK over 900 drill artists have been entirely banned from making music; 80% of them where never implicated in any crime what so ever, and 92% are black; the idea that drill music is an inherently violent genre of music that increases crime is a moral panic. Think about mods vs rockers, or satanic panic with metal etc; the only new element to the moral panic around drill is that it is now also racialized; it represents a sub-culture of defiance and is a truely bottom up from the underclass genre of music and as such it needs to be comidified, neuterued and the real pioneers of the genre stopped from making music so that the representation of what ‘drill’ even is can be whitewashed in history by the mainstream.
It’s part of the long history of the UK simultaneously ripping off black and Caribbean artists while disparaging them, it happened with Reggae, Ska, Jungle, Grime, Dubstep, Road rap, and now Drill. Drill is unique imo in that artists are not shy to talk about being a product of their environment, as decades of austerity and neoliberalism have led to increased poverty.
I didn’t know about this. Looking into it, turns out police literally cited music videos as the cause behind violent attacks, a theory that was unsurprisingly supported by an ultra conservative think tank. London having a normal one. Do you have a link to any such music?
So my main source on this was this book I read recently;
They talk about the origin of drill music in the UK as being linked to these tracks, so here you go;
They mention that think tank in the book, they also talk about how this attempt to associate black music with violent stereotypes is hardly anything new, its been going on to grime artists prior to this, I suppose the new thing about it is that drill artist get banned from even entering certain postcodes and given 4-5 year prison sentances for not comitting a crime, but refrencing a already convicted murder they where just aware of as it had been publicized in the news. Its clearly not about just censoring supposed violent music but about removing voices from the victims of austeirty.
the only art that gets filtered through history and that gets to survive and be representative is what the upper class allowed to be uncensored,
This is why I love the preserved graffiti in the ruins of Pompeii. They share a relatability with cave paintings that other historical art lacks.
That and Herculaneum, one of the best places to learn about the proletarian population of the ancient Rome empire
I can’t wait for xmas to be over. The commercialism sickens me. I try to put a face on but it’s so soul destroying. I guess if you have kids you have a different perspective of it but as a normal adult it’s just so terribly stupid. I must be a “grinch”.
Working retail at this time of year is hilarious. Thanksgiving and the 4th of July were panic-inducing enough. Inching closer to Christmas… can’t wait for all those last-minute shoppers.
I worked in a retail a lot in my younger years. Through christmases too. The piped xmas music was actual mental torture.
All I want for Christmas is you
Aaaghh! Stop it!
It’s already half of December and Christmas music is already blasting non-stop, send help, I want to go back to October😭
