Fiction: GRRM Dunk & Egg series
Non-Fiction: The Assassination of Fred Hampton
Gotta say I expected something different from this. More of a biography a la Malcolm X. Still interesting and just insane to what degree all levers of power worked to kill this 21 year old local leader. The whole state apparatus of the global hegemon was used to execute this young Chicago dude who barely got started with his work. And then you still have idiots 50 years later, whining about muh US democracy.
But the writing itself kinda irks me. It’s just so painfully…American. The author seems to have done some very good work in his life for the cause, but he talks and writes just like any other self-gratifying Yank high-achiever. It’s all about the self, how hard you work, how tough you are, but in such a self-important way. Dunno, really not my cup of tea at all. It’s a quick read though, so not too bad.
According to the organizers about 10-12000 people showed up, according to police 4.3k. The International Rosa Luxemburg Conference the day before had a record number of attendants at over 3000 in person and over 15000 online. Pretty good numbers for events with an actual peace message during these times. Bourgeois media is ofc ignoring them for the most part.
Parenti’s Assassination of Julius Caesar.
Have been relistening Mike Duncan’s History of Rome a while ago and while it’s an excellent story he’s telling, it’s a bit strange how he sticks to the story told by ancient story tellers. Of great men driving history by their ambition, quest for honor, etc, etc. Just kept asking myself “what was the actual driving force here? What were the class antagonisms? Man I wish someone wrote a materialist history of this”.
Turns out the goat himself did. So refreshing to read history analyzed like this, critiquing the childish, idealist, individualist version we’re constantly told by mainstream historians and school books.
Also felt good to get some validation for the instinctual dislike I always had for the likes of Cicero, Cato, etc and the interest I had for the Gracci, Caesar and many of the famous tribunes.
Still on the Shock Doctrine audiobook I posted about some time ago. Gotta say it gets better after the initial wave of anti-communism in the first chapters. It’s generally a fairly good book and covers a lot of ground. It’s just - and I can’t say it any other way - Naomi Klein is a dumbass. I’m sorry, but how the hell can you write a book like that and still not only refuse to draw the proper conclusions, but spout the same anti-communist nonsense as the people the book is criticizing?
She’s correctly identifiying the conditions under which the liberal ‘welfare states’/Keynesianism she keeps harping on about (‘threat’ of the USSR/socialist movements), she’s also correctly identifiying the effect the fall of the USSR had on those welfare states - their ongoing dismantling. Lady, these two things are connected, it isn’t some fucking coincidence social democracies fall into neoliberal hell every god damn time, as this book aptly points out, so how the fuck do you still ramble on and on about muh Keynes. It doesn’t work.
My god, it’s just infuriating how close and yet how far she is from getting it. Like Chomsky really, just even worse.
Edit: I also can’t get over her equating Deng and the Dengist reforms with Yeltsin and constantly portraying the Tiananmen protests as result of ‘corporatist’ shock therapy by the CPC. Yeltsin caused 70mio Russians to fall below the poverty line, Deng’s reforms lifted almost a billion Chinese out of poverty. How the fuck are these in any way comparable?
From Wikipedia’s article on his book Dark Alliance
James Adams, Washington correspondent for the Sunday Times, wrote a largely negative review for The New York Times. Adams was critical of Webb’s “failure” to contact the CIA to “cross-check sources and allegations,” and concluded that “For investigative reporters determined to uncover the truth, procedures like these are unacceptable. Neither the editors of the San Jose Mercury News nor the publishers of these books should have allowed their writers to take such relaxed approaches to a serious subject.”
Is this dude seriously saying someone reporting on the CIA’s drug trafficking to fund death squads in Nicaragua should check sources and allegations with…the CIA?
Either something remote, programming related, or something hands on. Carpentry or some kind of wood working would be awesome. Other than that possibly fishing/seafood related maybe.
Love productive manual labour, but while relatively well paid under capitalism sometimes you also feel the exploitation to such a degree I just can’t do it long term under current status quo.
Many prisoners say they enjoy the jobs, if only because it gets them out into the free world and gives them something to do
Yes, because incarceration has been made such a horrible experience over the past decades with torture techniques like solitary becoming standard MO that inmates prefer slave labour over it.
I assume for the same reason anyone would ever buy any crypto - in hopes of large rates of growth. That’s all it ever was anyway, no? If you continue to buy at low points and sell at high points the crashes would even become desirable to maintain the rate of profit even when the highs in absolute term don’t reach as high?
Again, I haven’t really looked into this stuff since like 2018, but that’s what I figured back then. If this is something different - and media is making it sound like it is - I don’t understand how especially the relevance of the stablecoin stuff.
Can someone update a comrade only tangentially informed about the crypto-sphere? Read this article earlier today and that opened up more questions than it answered. Is this more substantial than the countless previous crashes/downturns?
This has been going on for a while. Just look at Berlin - full of well-off petty bourgeois/labour aristocracy kids moving to the hip, somewhat run-down, “scene” parts of town, buying >100$ tshirts in exclusive boutiques, wearing golden signet-rings, living in unaffordable houses “among the poors”, wasting hundreds of bucks per month on blow, other drugs and raves, always carefully looking run-down and wasted to fit in with the aesthetic of the actual poor parts of the city and its population. It’s become a fashion statement to live as close as possible and look as close as possible to the most desperate parts of the population. Heck, if you manage to score some friends from the lower classes for clout even fucking better.
It’s the final commodification and abstraction of poverty and it’s fucking disgusting.
of its own government
I think this is crucial, because Lenin writes as Russian on the position of Russians in a conflict between Russia and another country. Most of us clearly aren’t Russian, so our desire doesn’t have to be Russias defeat. That’s something the Russian comrades have to wrestle with and for them it might very well lead to a deviation from Lenin. If so, that doesn’t have to be bad. We shouldn’t be dogmatic about these things and as ksynwa pointed out the material reality in this conflict is significantly different to that of WW1 - mainly the global hegemony of the US and the fact Russia today probably can’t be called imperialist in the Leninist sense.
Still, for us Non-Russians and Non-Ukrainians we should desire the defeat of our own governments as he laid out. Beyond that our main enemy is US hegemony and Western imperialism, our main ally the international proletariat. A Russian defeat here would be a gigantic loss for the latter and a win for the former, so I don’t see how this is a position we could take, especially in a social and political climate as one-sidedly hostile to Russia as we’re in today.
Dunk & Egg, so The Hedge Knight, Sworn Sword and Mystery Knight