The political desperadoes and ignoramuses, who say they would “Rather be Dead than Red”, should be told that no one will stop them from committing suicide, but they have no right to provoke a third world war.’ — Morris Kominsky, 1970

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Cake day: Aug 27, 2019

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:::spoiler [Excerpt] >The [New People’s Army] has fought indefatigably over the past 54 years. Although it has grown by leaps and bounds, the balance of forces remains overwhelmingly in favor of the enemy. During this stage of the people’s war, it must continue to establish, expand and consolidate its guerrilla fronts, build guerrilla platoons and companies, combined with even greater numbers of people’s militia units and supported by tens of thousands of village self-defense corps. The task is to wage extensive and intensive guerrilla warfare on the basis of an ever widening and deepening mass base. > >[…] > >The Second Great Rectification Movement (1992-1998) was launched by the 10th plenum of the Central Committee to rectify the errors of military adventurism and urban insurrectionism and reaffirm the Party’s basic principles, its correct analysis of the semi-colonial and semi-feudal character of Philippine society, its program for a people’s democratic revolution through protracted people’s war and its anti-revisionist stand. It raised the theoretical knowledge and grasp of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism through a study movement and campaign to sum-up experiences and clarify the comprehensive revolutionary tasks. Brilliant victories were achieved in the ideological, political and organizational fields which allowed the Party and all revolutionary forces to strengthen steadily, solidly and in all-rounded way. > >[…] > >The Party leadership has issued the call to sum-up experiences of the past five and 25 years in order to draw important lessons in carrying forward the people’s democratic revolution through protracted people’s war. Cadres of the Party and NPA Red fighters are earnestly studying Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, basic documents of the Party including Our Urgent Tasks, Specific Characteristics of Our People’s War, Rectify Errors and Rebuild the Party, Reaffirm Our Basic Principles and Rectify Errors and others, in order to identify the ideological, political and organizational root causes of some problems in a number of regions. :::
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I know, but given his latest shenanigans, including breaking the record for the most money lost by a single individual, it looks reasonably possible for the near future.


>The challenges of recovering from the storm are compounded by the global divide between fabulous wealth and extreme deprivation. Although Africa is rich in mineral wealth, it has the highest poverty rate of any continent. Of its 54 countries, 34 are among the poorest 50 in the world, with 40% of Africa’s people surviving on less than $1 per day. Yet the United Nations has offered the three countries impacted by Cyclone Freddy just $10 million in aid for recovery. > >Africa’s poverty stems from the brutal history of enslavement and colonization. The massive theft — not only of mineral wealth but of somewhere between 12 million and 20 million human beings — funded the expansion of capitalism, making it the dominant mode of production globally. Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, characterized by the growth of monopoly and the domination of finance capital, came into being on the backs of African people. > >Trillions of dollars are owed to Africa and Africans in the diaspora for stolen resources, labor and people.
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When you put it that way you make it sound vastly more interesting than it truly is.


I remember watching my half‐sister play Active Worlds all the way back during the dot com boom, and aside from the lack of virtual reality it sounds like it was almost identical to this: level‐building, character creation, custom textures and models, vanities like pubs and rollercoaster rides, but it had a substantially larger userbase and consequently more content. (It probably even looked better than this, too.)

That was a little over two decades ago. It should be no surprise to anybody that this latest entry in the glorified chatroom genre was dead on arrival: the only new thing that it brings is the virtual reality aspect, which isn’t good enough and just makes accessing this product more expensive.

Everything else that this offers has already been done and done better in Active Worlds, Second Life, Roblox, and other glorified chatrooms that have more than umpteen times the content of this gimmicky crap. They don’t even care enough to moderate it properly!

It would be awesome if this bankrupted Meta, but I’m sad to say that they’ll probably have to do a lot worse than this. Maybe Elon Musk can give Meta a few pointers—or seize it himself.



>Nearly 60 percent of South Koreans said they are against a move to resolve a wartime labor row between the country and Japan that would see **Seoul** compensate former Korean laborers, a public opinion poll found. > >The result by Gallup Korea reflects public antagonism toward the resolution, **which would not require direct payments from Japanese companies, regarding ~~alleged~~ forced labor during Japan's colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula.** > >The survey found 59 percent of respondents are opposed to the plan as they believe it provides no apology or reparations from Japan, while 35 percent said the solution will help bilateral relations and national interest. > >The South Korean government announced last week its decision to compensate wartime laborers under [the Empire of] Japan's 1910–1945 colonization through a government foundation with donations from South Korean companies. > >**The move came after two Japanese firms — Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd and Nippon Steel Corp — were ordered in separate rulings by South Korea's Supreme Court in 2018 to pay damages to former Korean laborers and their relatives over alleged forced labor during World War II.** > >The two Japanese companies have refused to comply with the South Korean top court rulings, as the Japanese government has maintained that all issues stemming from its colonization of the Korean Peninsula were settled under a bilateral agreement signed in 1965. (Emphasis added.) :::spoiler [Additional information] >About half of respondents in their 60s and 70s expressed support. But only around 20% of those in their 30s and 40s — a demographic that takes a less favorable view of the Yoon administration — responded positively. > >Compensating wartime laborers has long been a source of friction between South Korea and Japan. Lawsuits brought by former laborers against big Japanese industrial groups played a rôle in the fraying of bilateral ties over the past few years. > >The Japanese government maintains [that] all such claims were resolved by a 1965 treaty between the two countries. > >Asked about relations between Seoul and Tokyo, 31% of respondents said ties should be improved as quickly as possible, while 64% said there is no hurry to do so unless Japan changes its attitude. > >A senior official from South Korea's Foreign Ministry told reporters Friday that Seoul did not envision the accused companies participating in the plan in the short term. The government is not closing the door on the possibility of contributions from Japanese businesses, however, and hopes they will do so in the long term, the official said. > >The American Chamber of Commerce in Korea has welcomed the effort to improve South Korea-Japan relations and said it will donate to the foundation. U.S. President Joe Biden also welcomed the compensation initiative. ([Source.](https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Japan-South-Korea-rift/Wartime-labor-proposal-opposed-by-59-of-South-Koreans-poll)) :::
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>As Workers World Party’s First Secretary Larry Holmes wrote in October 2022, “This is no normal economic downturn. However long and drawn out this economic crisis is and whatever events push it forward, it’s the development that many Marxists (as well as bankers and billionaires who are willing to utter words of truth) consider to be the biggest global capitalist economic crisis in history. The capitalist crisis that is under way is unique in that it is symptomatic of a dying system entering its end-stage.”
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I just noticed that gusanos and other anticommunists, who deny the very presence of communists in former people’s republics, are utterly silent on the fact that there are still numerous neofascists in countries that were once under Axis occupation.



Isn’t there something monstrous about the idea that men of power and wealth will try to block much-needed health insurance for the poor by dangling the scarecrow of a phoney Lenin quotation? And even if Lenin had said this, what would be its relevance forty or forty-five years later? Must millions of Americans be barred forever from adequate medical care because of something Lenin wrote?

— Morris Kominsky, 1970


>The layoffs disproportionately impact Black and Brown tech workers, especially workers from other countries. The job losses jeopardize the immigration status of many families who depend upon visas as a condition to reside in the U.S. As pointed out in a Feb. 2 Workers World article, “A sign of capitalist decline: Pink slips hit tech workers hard,” many tech workers have H-1B visas. Laid-off H-1B holders need to find an H-1B sponsoring job within 60 days of losing the job they had or face deportation if they don’t leave the U.S. within 10 days of losing their H-1B status.
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the history of atrocities around banana plantations.

but have u considered mao stalin che marx


Pity that we don’t have an antisocialist here to say ‘WHATS CAPITALISM GOTTA DO WITH THIS???????’ Because we’ve seen how obvious phenomena like marketability and profitability suddenly become foreign concepts when they’re linked to anything embarrassing.

Alternatively: ‘at least you can still get bananas. under commulism you dont get anything and they genocide your entire neighborhood if your suspect of having a banana’ (a classic evidence‐free accusation, unless you count ‘my grandparents are chinese north korean cubans from venezuela so i should know’ as evidence).


>These new layoffs in the tech industry are a continuation of major cuts over the last year. According to the tech-job tracker layoffs.fyi, there have been more than 200,000 tech jobs eliminated since the start of 2022. They include 18,000 layoffs at Amazon in recent months and 11,000 at Facebook parent company Meta in November. > >To add insult to injury, many of the Google workers only discovered they were terminated when their key fobs didn’t work after they arrived at work. Google notified the workers through an email, rather than through personal contact. Meanwhile, corporate spokespeople and human resources representatives of the tech giants can be heard condescendingly telling laid-off workers to “build their resumes.” With mass layoffs at such a high rate, it is difficult for the displaced workers to be optimistic about future job opportunities.
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I have to admit, RationalWiki exceeded my expectations here. The Lemmygrad hit‐piece was of the same low quality as its other articles on ‘far left’ subject matters, so I am mildly surprised that they deleted it anyway.

RationalWiki is still pretty hopeless, though.



>The Meta layoffs go along with a tremendous decline in its stock value. Valued at $1 trillion only a year ago, the value of the company, measured by its price on the stock market, dropped to a quarter of what it was at its peak. Meta’s stock decline is roughly the same as the decline in cryptocurrencies over the same period. According to the Nov. 10 New York Times, “Stocks like Meta, Microsoft, Amazon and Apple have suffered staggering losses [in market value] this year.”
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>**ADT:** In the 1960s, we wanted to break out of [foreign] domination and a model based on exporting only a few raw materials, without ever using them locally — so as to create jobs and transform our agriculture and our own production of food needs. To this day our economy consists of producing for international demand and the needs of others. Mass unemployment, mass poverty, emigration and what is called jihadism are directly related to these economic issues. (Emphasis original.)
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>Musk’s acquisition of **Twitter** seems like a new chapter in history, but his choice to either skew **Twitter** to be friendly to the right (as his right-wing cheerleaders believe he is doing) or to run the network into the ground is only the latest episode of monied interests pillaging our communications infrastructure for financial or ideological gain. Musk’s **Twitter** takeover seems new, because it impacts new media rather than the old. But what Musk is doing to social media has long been done by monied interests to traditional media—much to the poverty of our journalistic culture. (Emphasis original.)
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The only advantage that I saw to Musk acquiring the company was the possibility of him running it into the ground. With any luck, Twitter will go the way of MySpace or maybe even face complete dissolution before the end of the decade; it was already a poorly maintained, advert‐riddled piss bucket before and it’s just been getting shittier and shittier every year.


Perhaps not coincidentally, some parts of modern Havana are quite colorful.


No, the real problem here is that mass housing is supposed to be purdy. That’s why every house in my neighbor is based on three generic models with a dull shade of paint.


>In many left circles, talk of capitalist crisis leading to revolution is considered proven wrong by history, and talk of revolution is considered unrealistic at best. Unfortunately, these notions make it easy for a section of the capitalist ruling class, such as the Democratic Party in the U.S., to control the working class and keep it tied to capitalist-class interests. > >The global economic crisis unfolding before us is going to change all of this. Already, we have seen young radical workers breathe new life into the working class with organizing drives that are transforming the old traditional labor movement. Socialism is already more popular than it’s ever been, and this capitalist crisis is going to explode the ranks of anti-capitalist militants. > >[…] > >The whole capitalist system was so shaken by the crash of 2008 that they decided to do something completely unprecedented. The major central banks of the world, led by the Federal Reserve Bank, agreed that in order to prevent such an unimaginable crisis in the future, they would collectively lower interest rates to reboot financial markets. > >But they went further. Under the label of “quantitative easing,” the banks printed trillions in currency and funneled it into the financial system. The Federal Reserve pumped at least $20 trillion into the financial system, not into the actual economy but into the big banks to use as they pleased. > >In the early days of the pandemic, with the economy closing down and financial markets crashing, central banks led by the Federal Reserve pumped trillions more into the financial system and into the economy to prevent a worldwide depression. > >The problem is all this money, that central banks printed to prevent the financial system from collapsing, had no relationship to anything of real value; and therefore, all this currency was virtually worthless. This is one of the main reasons why there is such a gigantic debt crisis. > >The size of the debt crises is concealed until there’s an economic crisis that is so big that the real value of things can no longer be hidden, and the extent of debt is exposed. This is the reality that is beginning to unravel. The central banks can’t keep the financial system on life support forever; this reality is central to the crisis the system has entered.
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Sputnik doesn’t count. That was just a little satellite and everybody knows that artificial satellites are completely fucking useless to modern society.


Wow, DLC but for electronics. It’s even more overpriced, too. Maybe capitalists should take a cue from this and start selling all of their baseline and obligatory accessories individually. You can buy a TV for $999 but have to pay $40 for the remote, $399 for a smartphone but $20 for the receiver and $10 for the speaker, $499 for a stove but every temperature costs $5 extra…

…wait…oh shit, there might be some capitalists lurking here and getting ideas! I was only joking, guys! Really!


Being right for the wrong reasons is just as lousy as being wrong in the first place.

Young adults’ standards keep evolving with each generation and I suspect that it’s only a matter of time (maybe before the end of the decade) before everybody is just as unimpressed with this tokenism as I am and will seek out better.

I doubt that the capitalist media will start publishing works that are in the style of Under Fire, Burn!, Salvador or Lion of the Desert in a desperate attempt to keep their services alive, but I think that it’s reasonably plausible that this half‐assed pandering will go the way of newspapers, ‘breastaurants’, GameStop, and cereal boxes in the previsible future. It’s getting old, young adults will demand better, and the business world will have more difficulty appeasing them.


Actually, several anonymous refugees in Miami and a report (which is still pending peer review) from the Mises Institute have informed me that Cuban doctors are ordered to immediately execute anybody asking for an abortion, which is another reason why every year more than 100,000 Cubans escape to live in the U.S. The legalization of abortion was just government propaganda all along.

Sources: come on, who are you going to trust: millions of innocents who fled communism and went on to lead successful lives, or a communist government?


Nonetheless, it must be emphasized that the tactics of the East German secret police generally consisted of openly attempting to persuade people not to take actions that damaged the State (Riecker, Schwarz, and Schneider, 1990), and that tactic was in stark contrast to the West German secret police strategy of doing everything possible to penalize people for any anti‐government opinions (Schultz, 1982).

(Source. The otherwise readworthy Stasi State or Socialist Paradise? denies that persuasion was a default tactic, but says absolutely nothing about the work that The Trimuph of Evil cites.)


In particular, many people mistakenly believe that the [planned] economies must be inefficient based on an assumption that they do not allow for decentralized decision making and result in long waiting lines and shortages. Waiting lines, shortages, and waste did often exist in [the people’s republics] because the government purposely set the prices of many goods too low to clear (and also because richer capitalist countries placed embargoes on the export of the high technology goods to [the people’s republics]). However, the low fixed prices (and the right to a job with income) did ensure that everyone in [the people’s republics] had the right to essentials like food, housing, medicine, and clothes, unlike in capitalist countries where a large portion of the population do not have access to such essentials even in far richer capitalist countries such as the USA. Also, the centralized fixing of prices greatly reduced the amount of time spent on wasteful tasks performed in capitalist countries of price shopping, price negotiation, and attempts to avoid marketing manipulation and fraud.

[…]

Given that East German income would have been higher than in West Germany without the reparations payments, it can be deduced that it would not have been necessary for East Germany to have the Berlin Wall if West Germany had made its share of the reparations payments for [Fascist] Germany’s war crimes. In particular, the burden to East Germany would have thereby been enormously reduced and would have allowed its income to be substantially higher. At the same time, West Germany’s income would have been reduced by it making its share of the payments. In this situation, it probably would not have been necessary for East Germany to have slightly longer work weeks (since it would not have been necessary to catch up with the West), nor to have such severe shortages (that could have been alleviated with greater wealth), nor to spend so little on pollution control (that reflected East Germany’s relative poverty), nor to restrict political freedoms (that East Germany did not want the richer West Germany to take advantage of), nor to have such an obnoxious secret police (whose primary purpose was to keep East Germans from leaving the country for the greater riches of West Germany). All the relative disadvantages of [economic planning] in East Germany may therefore derive, at least partially, from its postwar reparations (and not from communism).

(Source.)



Can we really say that the Cold War ever ended?
Unless the goal of the Cold War was simply to dismantle the Soviet Union and its closest allies, I don’t think that it’s perfectly accurate to say that it ended (in either the 1990s or elsewhen). The anticommunists continued to struggle against popular communist parties in the Russian Federation and elsewhere, they are trying and failing to dismantle the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the Republic of Cuba, the liberal reforms in the People’s Rep. of China and the Socialist Rep. of Vietnam were poor substitutes for overthrowal, and so far the anticommunists [haven’t balkanized the Russian Federation](https://lemmygrad.ml/post/122907). If we view the Cold War as essentially a complex class war (which would be quite [reasonable](https://lemmygrad.ml/post/343582)), then it certainly never ended, or even been on pause.
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I had to check to make sure that you weren’t pranking us, and I was astounded when I confirmed it. Wow.


Uhh… wasn’t some of our water already in sewers before being sanitized? Did they only start doing this recently? I’m confused.



Coincidentally, seeing people express their disappointment in Close Enough’s cancellation is actually what got me started on watching it yesterday. There are times when it feels like a generic ‘adult cartoon’, but it still makes me laugh out loud at other times and features subject matters that actually feel adult, something that few cartoons have done for me. I appreciate that.

Because, honestly? Just hearing the term ‘adult comedy’ is almost enough to induce groans in me. It’s not that I hate the concept; it’s how roughly 90% of them are executed, because they don’t typically deal with themes that most children would find uninteresting or hard to understand: depression, separation, arguing (with loved ones), financial security, difficult choices, acts of desperation, and the complex topics that you mentioned.

Instead, they’re ‘adult’ only insofar as they contain materials that Western culture traditionally considers inappropriate for children: feces, sex, flatulence, genitals, gay stuff, trans stuff, flatulence, bloody violence, feces, inconsequential drug abuse, inconsequential alcoholism, inconsequential rape, incest, STDs, profanity, more flatulence… did I mention bodily fluids? They’re basically taking a page out of Fritz the Cat only making it even worse; rapid‐firing ‘taboo’ subjects at us for cheap laughs, if that makes sense.

Anyway, I’m just ranting and getting slightly off‐topic myself here. (But it does relate to how homogeneous the market is.)


I suspect that the long‐term goal of Shoah denial, aside from sanitizing the Third Reich, is to further portray Jews as deceptive. If Shoah denial were correct, the implication would be that scores of thousands of Jews have been lying for undeserved compassion and remorse, thereby making anti‐Semitism look less unreasonable.

Of course, Fascists and neofascists have had only limited success with this strategy since the 1940s, which is why many of them prefer trivializing the Shoah by arguing that we’re far worse. I believe that Fraud, Famine and Fascism has evidence that anticommunists consciously inflated the death toll of the Soviet famine of 1932–3 after hearing about the Shoah’s death toll.

If you are interested in exploring this phenomenon, I recommend checking out Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It?. It demonstrates that many Shoah deniers are actually quite competent salesmen (figuratively, but sometimes also literally), which clashes with generalization that they’re all foul‐mouthed, trashy, unhinged skinheads. They’re also surprisingly good at frustrating Shoah survivors, because many survivors don’t know the inner and outer workings of the Shoah beyond what their life experience provided them.

Rejecting the ‘famine–genocide’ conspiracy theory doesn’t mean that most or all Ukrainians are horrible people. It means that the Soviet government had better shit to do than commit self‐harm, namely preparing for the anticommunist reinvasion.


>‘*Some of the shows being memory-holed were hits; Summer Camp Island had 100 episodes and tons of fans! Others were about to premiere new seasons, which now no one will ever see. Creators spent YEARS pouring themselves into these projects; most weren't even told this was happening.*’ ([Source.](https://nitter.namazso.eu/i/status/1560515629999742977)) >‘*[This picture of our crew](https://nitter.42l.fr/juliapott/status/1560312477019123712) represents 37 teams of artists who found out online that their shows were being stripped from HBO MAX and for some, episodes we worked on for two years during a pandemic would never be released. @discoveryplus has no respect for artists*’ In related news: >[HBO Max is expected to layoff around 70% of their development staff](https://nitter.pussthecat.org/i/status/1554899717263282176) And interestingly: >[During #WarnerBrosDiscovery's earnings call, HBO Max was identified as "male skew" while Discovery+ was considered "female skew."](https://nitter.kavin.rocks/i/status/1555318881345892354)
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I’ve never seen anything that suggests the USSR wanted to invade Europe (maybe you have some sources for that?)

Quite the contrary. Michael Parenti once said that ‘the American Historical Association published a set of documents that were rather intriguing—that—which they got out of the State Department under the Freedom of Information Act, which shows… that people in the State Department never believed… that the Soviets had any intention, or any interest, or any capability of invading Western Europe… in the late 1940s, or in the ’50s, or ’60s, or today for that matter.’ Unfortunately, he was not more specific than that, but it’s a good place to start.

On the other hand, Daniel Ellsberg has confirmed that Moscow had no interest in invading Western Europe. Likewise, David Holloway confirmed that ‘[t]here is no evidence to show that Stalin intended to invade Western Europe, except in the event of a major war; and his overall policy suggests that he was anxious to avoid such a war, and not merely because the United States possessed the atomic bomb.

And the claim is incredible just from the viewpoint of common sense: why would a country that just survived the largest invasion in all of history want to gamble with its existence and remaining resources invading Western Europe? The Soviets may have loathed the Western ruling classes, but they were not suicidal either.

So why the fearmongering? Because the Fascists wanted to finish the job, and their fellow anticommunists embraced them.


Good post. It would benefit from more citations (particularly for ‘the goal of NATO was to provoke the USSR into war’), but many of these statements should be fairly easy to confirm.

I would like to add that the Estado Novo, a country that wouldn’t have qualified as democratic even by neoclassical liberalism’s own standards, cofounded the NATO. Needless to say, nobody was in a hurry to get Greece out of the NATO either when it was a military dictatorship from 1967 to 1974, or get Turkey out when it mutated into a military dictatorship twice. So much for safeguarding democracy.


It defends capital against the international proletariat. That counts for something, surely.


YOU KNOW WHO ELSE WANTED HOUSES FOR THE HOMELESS? STALIN!!!


The dogma that “wages determine the price of commodities,” expressed in its most abstract terms, comes to this, that “value is determined by value,” and this tautology means that, in fact, we know nothing at all about value. Accepting this premise, all reasoning about the general laws of political economy turns into mere twaddle. It was, therefore, the great merit of Ricardo that in his work On the Principles of Political Economy, published in 1817, he fundamentally destroyed the old popular, and worn-out fallacy that “wages determine prices,” a fallacy which Adam Smith and his French predecessors had spurned in the really scientific parts of their researches, but which they reproduced in their more exoterical and vulgarizing chapters.

I feel that this is particularly important to note, as the claim that higher wages increase inflation continues to remain popular among capitalist apologists. Thanks for sharing this.


In my experience, the other pedestrians that I’ve encountered haven’t been particularly friendly.


according to the governor of the Bank of England

You mean the same Bank of England that gave a loan to Fascists enabling them to settle an absurd quantity of unpaid trade credits, but apparently can’t pay workers a living wage without provoking the Apocalypse? That Bank of England?



Now see, I certainly agree with statements like this one, but after using Reddit for so long it’s hard for me to avoid imagining somebody replying to it with ‘OH YEAH? WELL UNDER COMMULISM THEY WOULD JUST KILL YOU FATALLY TO DEATH UNTIL YOU DIE SO STFU STOOPID IGNORANT TANKY READ HISTORY BOOK!!!!!!’

I know that it’s far less likely in this community, but if somebody is taking screenshots of these posts for the amusement of his dipshit anticommie friends then I am sure that somebody would say that.


I have postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome. Standing still for as little as one or two minutes is a challenge for me and people have told me before that my feet ‘looked red’ or that I suddenly looked uncomfortable when all that I was doing was standing in place. My blood pools in my feet and sometimes I can even feel them throbbing. My condition is not so severe that I need a wheelchair, but I need to sit down or I’m very uncomfortable and at serious risk of fainting.

I’m just glad that I have no plans to fly anywhere because the best that these seats might do is delay my symptoms for a short while. The absence of proper seating would be a little more serious than an ‘inconvenience’ for me.


Yeah, sure, I guess that a celebrity is doing far worse maybe…

…but still, can you just immediately forget about her and focus on fixing your lifestyle more? Can you? Come on! Pretty please, with sugar and a cherry on top? Do your part!



G‐d, I hate that mentality. It implies that we’re all just as culpable as the upper classes for the earth’s decay, which is classist and demonstrably untrue.


Yesterweek I returned to Fallout 2 for the first time in several years, patched it, and it almost became an addiction for me. I started another playthrough recently, but I’m slower to attend to it because I’m getting a little burnt out.

I tried Ultima IV yesternight for several minutes, but couldn’t get into it. The interface and controls were too clunky for me, and I wasn’t interested enough in the world or the story to commit to them.

I’m unsure what I’ll play next. Unlikely to be anything current‐gen, though, given my office‐grade computer.


>Many prisoners say they enjoy the jobs, if only because it gets them out into the free world and gives them something to do. The biggest problem: They are often paid less than $1 an hour. And despite the misconception that everything in their lives is paid for, prison life is really quite expensive. Prices for goods are about the same as in the outside world. From pens and paper to envelopes and stamps, it could take a full week for some prisoners to buy what they need to send a single letter to a family member by mail.
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Somewhat off‐topic, but I’ve noticed that lately crowdfunding is becoming an increasingly popular method for studios and individuals alike, coinciding with tipping becoming an almost mandatory practice on behalf of service workers. This correlation is probably far more significant than anybody realizes; it’s as if the upper classes are slowly and subtly outsourcing the task of payment to us.


Yes! While admittedly I don’t know for sure if she ever identified herself as socialist (it seems more likely than not), I have a great deal of respect for Dorothy W. Douglas, an economic anthropologist who closely studied life in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic and the Polish People’s Republic. This is one of my favorite books and it helped me develop a more mature understanding of the people’s republics. (It seems that she also studied child labor in Imperial America, but I haven’t read that one yet.)

There are various other women that I could mention, but I can’t say with absolute certainty if they were socialists either. Others that I could mention are people that I can’t identify.


According to the Motion Picture Association of America, showing someone gleefully firing a weapon is fine for children, but showing what happens when bullets strike a person is not.
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> The **Young Turks**, hosted by Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian, is a left-wing news commentary channel. Uh… not really. The rest of the article is fine (if painfully unsurprising), though: > While **YouTube** offers the possibility for independent sites to reach a wider audience, its most-subscribed news channels remain largely reflective of the corporate biases of the global media landscape as a whole.
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Mozilla CEO increased her salary from $2.5m to over $3m in one year (10+ times more than her peers’) despite poor performance, still wants donations
>**Summary**: While laying off many workers the CEO of Mozilla piled up a lot of tax-exempt cash, and it continued to increase in spite of criticism (the above isn’t even the latest; it may be a lot more by now).
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Meeting the Real Elon Musk: “Why I Hate Elon Musk”
ETA: I should warn that the author of the video is probably right‐wing, but the information presented should still be verifiable.
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>On Feb. 24, the day Russia invaded Ukraine, the stock value of these arms manufacturers soared. Raytheon and Lockheed officials openly told investors the Ukraine conflict was “good for business.” In a company “earnings call,” issued Jan. 25, Raytheon CEO Greg Hayes described how they could benefit from the conflict. Similarly, Lockheed CEO James Taiclet told investors the “great power competition [between the U.S. and Russia] over Ukraine bodes more business for the company.” (The Wire (India), Feb. 28)
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>Between December 2015 and December 2021, railroads cut up to 35% of workers on Class 1 railroads — carriers with revenues over $900 million. From 2000 to 2020, there was also a 30% increase in the average tonnage carried by individual freight trains. The impact of these cuts leaves little room for error.
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