Welcome again to everybody. Make yourself at home. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is the weekly discussion thread.
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☭ Theory discussion group on /c/theory@lemmygrad.ml
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Ugh, my statistics professor sucks
I mean i want to like him, but he has such a goddamn ego about him. Are first and second classes were basically about the goddamn 13 page long syllabus, and we forgot literally 1 inconsequential thing in it and he’s like “I’m so disappointed i told you guys to read the syllabus.” And i know we don’t hate ai a ton here but he has such a goddamn insistence about using it that it bugs me.
But whatever, he’s the only professor for this class so there’s no use in crying about it
Lots of chatter in OSINT channels about CENTCOM deployments. Expect some sort of US military operation In Iran or allied regions soon.
I hope you all have a nice week :D
call me the band featured on XXX by kendrick lamar the way i’m saying “u2”
You too Oppo!
You too comrade!
You too!
RIP Michael Parenti
Have a good week everyone, stay safe.
As always, communism will win.
Thank you comrade!
So we can just discuss about anything? It’s the first time I open the General Discussion Thread.
I was looking for the post regarding Xi Jinping “purging” Zhang, to hear what other comrades (well read comrades) had to say about it.
The “selling nuclear secrets” story is just ridiculous.
It’s like a mastodon replacement, basically
yea we can! i tink. i hope. i dont even think neccessarily attached to ML stuff or analysis, weekly megathreads in many places allow for the users to just talk and commune w others :3
on the purge stories they seemed pretty irrelevant to me first time around, afaik prc has so many purges that go under radar since its no dog and pony show. makes sense for them to be so stringent atm with how shaky the world is, it reassures me at the least. plus i never trust whatever western rags have to say about largely confidential machinations in prc especially pla
So we can just discuss about anything?
Nope. This is the General Discussion Thread. You are only allowed to discuss generals. Zhang getting fired is permitted discussion.
oh fuuuckkkkkkkkkkkkk theyre gonna purge meeeeeeeee :L…
Yep, you can discuss anything you want!
he was forced to listen to a liberal mention the dprk
If the USA collapses from within, a lot of digital infrastructure will have to be redesigned from the ground up in many countries around the world. Think of all the jobs this is gonna generate. I can already see the lines going up, maybe those tech investors should help out.
We shouldn’t be waiting until the US empire collapses to start building an alternative digital infrastructure. China and Russia have already started. Doing so now will also help protect countries from the rampages of the dying empire.
the good news is that with so many open source alternatives out there if a state decides to actually seriously try to switch i dont think it would be too difficult to just start paying a bunch of devs to fix up the open source alternatives that arent up to snuff, biggest issue would be getting all the businesses and what not to switch
finally anti-imperialism will be in my material interest
how does one approach ostensible commies/comrades doing the whole #freeiran bullshit, in the Netherlands a bunch of “pro-Palestine” orgs are outing themselves as zionist by either expressing support for “Iranian protesters” or doing a “both sides” thing where they say “fuck both the regime and the US” (whatever that means??)
should i still go to events even if the organizers parrot that imperialist bs, should one discuss it wherever possible, voice it until i get kicked out, etc
or should one boycott them and just involve oneself with the extremely few anti-imperialist orgs still present
You need to plan this out carefully, otherwise they will just deal with you, especially if you are alone, but you can agitate within the larger groups.
If their leaders censor your opinions uncritically, they lose legitimacy in the eyes of any potential turnover.
should one discuss it wherever possible, voice it until i get kicked out, etc
That would be my instinct. Do it loud. Do it hard. Do it with planned talking points like “Free Iran like how they freed Iraq? How is Syria doing with all that freedom? America has never made anywhere better. All they ever do is steal, murder, and r pe. Even their own country is a shit hole because of the actions of their government. anyone who thinks a free Iran involves the USA or israel is a zionist fascist who belongs in Barbara pit mine.” and when anyone pushes back You say “Oh look a running dog for imperialism. Are you getting a paid by the CIA or are you a soulless monster for fun?” “anyone associating with these running dog of empire is not my comrade. I can forgive ignorant liberals but I expect comrades to know better than to support american interventions.”
The next best thing for the State Department, if they can’t get leftists to outright support imperialist intervention and regime change, is to get you to “both-sides” it.
They don’t need to get you to support imperialism if they can, for all practical intents and purposes, simply neutralize your opposition to imperialism.
There is absolutely no comparison between a global empire and a state defending itself from imperialist aggression and nefarious regime change operations.
If Iran’s government is toppled it will be subjugated again to the interests of imperialism as it was under the Shah, its resources extracted for Western profits.
How did the regime change in Syria turn out? How did it turn out in Libya? Are the people there better off now?
There is only so often that we can tolerate imperial core so-called leftists to fall for the same trick over and over again before we have to admit that maybe they’re not being tricked.
Maybe they are siding with empire over the victims of empire because it validates their chauvinism and advances their material interests.
If you’re reading this, you are now breathing consciously, feeling your tongue in your mouth, and remembering every time you saw a liberal think they’re smart by citing Umberto Eco’s Ur-fascism as a definition.
Has anyone gotten their friends into communism?
I’ve seemingly started a chain reaction within my online friendgroup of people turning into leftists and getting into communism. I first got my friend into it by just talking about politics and stuff, he even used to argue with me about “communism’s never worked” or “doesn’t North Korea do [thing].” Eventually he switched up and I actually got him to read theory like Marx. Then, me and the first guy got another friend into it and now he’s beginning his journey into theory and understanding. Today, I’ve just seen that 2nd guy sending another guy Principles of Communism.
It’s really cool seeing people start out, how they grow and change with it.
All of these people were liberals/left-aligned/not even really interested in politics before, so, it goes to show that liberals and the such aren’t always a lost cause and with some effort you can get them into it.
I was a liberal last year, I credit youtube docs for that more than anything else really
I first got into socialism through the DPRK. I got into the DPRK through Boy Boy’s video “We Went to North Korea to get a Haircut” The video made me realize exactly what the US is all about, what it has done, and what it continues to do. As an American, you understand that the US has done bad stuff, but you never actually think about it in terms of the US being the pure evil it actually is.
And from there I really branched out and got where I am today. I went from being a pseudo-conservative that was indoctrinated by SJW videos and other bullshit, to a self-described “centrist” liberal, and finally into a communist. I don’t think I ever actually believed in that bigotry shit; I’ve always been socially intelligent and empathetic. Liberalism was understanding things were bad, but not having the proper analysis viewpoint on the issues to think of actual solutions or change.
Although I was into socialism for around a year, the true death of my liberalism was the 2024 election. I was of course rooting for Kamala, and was upset she didn’t win and that he’d be back, but, I just sort of realized that it was all a sham and, Kamala or Trump, the neoliberal system would be maintained.
I’ve been firmly socially progressive ever since I got ever my edgy phase when I was like 13-16 years old so when it came time to vote I was a Labour voter, originally Corbyn and then Starmer. I didn’t go deep into what these people represent or what they have done I just thought it was a fight to keep progressing and getting rid of the tories. I lacked any real political education and feel for the culture war bullshit, like many people.
All I heard all my life about communism is it is violent and brutal and it doesn’t work and so on, I knew my country was far from perfect but I didn’t think they would lie to me my whole life in so many different ways, so in a way the naïvety kept me anti-communist.
A few years ago I started getting really depressed and realised I had been quite depressed for a long time, it lead me to question everything, why should I live, what is this society, what type of person should I aim to be e.t.c. and while this was happening I was seeing the end of 14 years of the conservative government, I put all my hope in Labour bringing back hope and progress. Well it became clear maybe about 6 months in to Starmer’s term that these guys are not the solution. Then I started getting into the tax the rich and wealth inequality sort of crowd (AOC, Gary’s economics, JimmyTheGiant, Hasan somewhat) that pushed me to be less of a liberal and more of a demsoc, socdem type of guy and be opposed to neoliberalism and centrism.
But crucially after that depressive episode and the existentialising that came with it, I had learned to keep an open-mind and I realised that now identifying as a socialist, I was hearing about Marx and Lenin and I just decided to hear out these communists side of the story, because what didn’t make sense was that if the USSR was everything I had been told about it, no one in their right mind would still be a communist.
I think it might have been Hakim who did the most for me with youtube class consciousness or whatever you wan’t to call it but I can’t remember an exact video that "pushed me over the edge’, so to speak. It didn’t take long for me to recognise the genius in Marxism-Leninism anyway, I then had to undo all my anti-com propaganda (that was still making me doubt if I was on the right path) and start learning the theory, science, philosophy, start applying it where I could, and here I am now, still doing that. I’ve come to really love the online culture the imagery, the music - red sun in the sky will always be a hell of a tune - and the community of course, I really want to see that kind of community IRL one day.
Given what one has gone through, you or others lurking here may find this useful, if you haven’t read it already:
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Malone’s Concessions ie birth of the modern west: https://redsails.org/concessions/
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Kyle Ferrana’s Why the World Needs China
Christ, so being able to own a home quite easily under western capitalism was only possible due to the pressure of communism (also it was 100% a white privilege), revolution really is so much more effective than reform it’s laughable.
Xi Jinping, keep winning please!
In my opinion it is one of the easier arguments to make that the workers of the west used the Soviet Union as leverage of threat of domestic revolution to gain the concessions they did for the welfare state, and thereby forced capitalists to invest in “human capital” that allowed massive upskilling of the work force and unlock the tech ladder as we know it today. And when the USSR collapsed (and potentially you could even use the fall of the Berlin wall) that leverage was lost and thereby the losing of concessions gained leading to the state of affairs as we know it now. It puts the like of Stalin and Lenin head and shoulders over any known Western leader.
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🫵 You WILL have hope, comrade.
I think everyone should know how to download webpages from the internet to keep as a mirror on their devices. Even if there’s nothing coming, it’s always good to have a backup of important information.
Wget is a tool on your computer which can download entire webpages onto your computer. It downloads and all links into files. Here’s a video on installing and using it, as well as a place to download it if you’re on Windows.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oe40pxcjPpM&list=PLCkxwA9NkiYcaldUslJPmRiVyaWLXrJ4K&index=47 https://eternallybored.org/misc/wget/
I have personally downloaded Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il, Mao, Lenin, Stalin, and the Black Panther’s entire Marxist Internet Archive pages. Everything from them on that site.
Let me know if there’s an even better place to put this
Last week a work colleague used a new (new for me) word “collectivist” an umbrella term under which they placed socialist, communist, fascist & nazi. I don’t know where to even begin approaching this. It is like a pre-emptive dismissal of any rational discourse. :-(
You can approach it by asking what the best star trek was. He watched enough to allow the Borg to influence his political ideas.
(He will probably say TNG.)
Classifying fascist ideologies as “collectivist” is a bizarre choice.
Fascism doesn’t have a collective. You’re expected to obliterate yourself for the state - sometimes literally. Blind, unwavering loyalty to the ruling class without exception. What on Earth is “collectivist” about being a proud slave?
The logic is this: Collectivism is when you have to prioritize the state over your own well-being. This describes both Nazi Germany and the USSR. Therefore Nazism and USSR are collectivist and that is why they were so bad.
This is the vibes based ideology of liberalism.
Churches are collectivist when they feed the poor and raise money for flood victims. Cults are collectivist when they all drink poisoned Koolaid together.
These are clearly the same thing.
Prioritising the group over the individual is the rallying cry of almost every depiction of armed conflict in fantasy books & films. It is in Lord of the Rings.
this is common among neoliberal economy lovers. chicago school, austrian school, &c. their “economists” use “individualist” as a word meaning anything they like, and “collectivist” to describe anything they don’t like
Fascist being collectivist is outside my typical understanding of the term. The fact that they used it in that way is wild. I mostly heard this term in my phycology class where they referred to the west as more individualist and Asia (including non-socialist countries) more as being collectivist. The implication was that in the west individuals are more likely to put themselves(and sometimes their immediate family) before society, but in the collectivist mindset, the individual was more likely to put themselves after society. This typically applied to duties, behaviour, and sacrifice when it was discussed in the class.
This is something that I need to interrogate since I haven’t really thought about it for several years since I was a lib in university. My initial thought now is that socialist society engenders solidarity with your fellow workers, allowing you to see the benefit in helping other people. Honestly though, I shouldn’t speculate too much without further investigation.
I would like to know a single nation that does not fit into the “collectivist” definition in some shape or form. Capitalist countries prioritize the collective group of the capitalist class over the rest, socialist countries prioritize the collective working class over the capitalist class.
I had mentioned my passing desire to go on tour to the DPRK (since it’s not very far from where I am now). He had said that if given the choice he would rather be shot than visit North Korea. My response was “well that’s certainly a choice” hoping he would get how rediculous he sounded. Luckily my other friend pointed out that what he said was really dumb. I then had to tell them that they literally know nothing about North Korea and that they shouldn’t blindly fall for propoganda. The conversation moved on after that, but it was an odd thing to hear someone say.
Iol every single content creator would kill for a chance to visit the DPRK, meanwhile your propagandized friend would rather die? Lmao
I know right! He is full of liberal brain worms. He’s not fundamentally a bad person, so I’ve been trying my best to counter his negative opinions, but it’s an uphill battle.
