Heya!

“We’re all living in America”

They were also in a place where they could achieve those things, with the support of those around them. There are no 1-person revolutions, comrade, we do it together!

Denying consent is just 1 part of the puzzle. You will still be accepting all “legitimate interests”.

How do you hate western philosophy if the only philosopher you’d read is a western socio-economic political theorist?

I was at a pride march early sunmer and there was a “Iranian government protest” that I randomly came across. What made it clear for me that these ‘protests’ are influence campaigns by some other state were the music was pure AI (it sounded exactly like “we are charlie kirk”), a pride flag, a Israeli flag, and a Ukrainian flag. Waving a USA flag would have looked like it was in its natural habitat.

Seeing all the people holding lion and sun flags listening to an american AI song wailing about some bullshit and I don’t know how anyone can believe these protests aren’t orchestrated by some foreign government. There’s nothing genuine about them!

Thats where I was hoping you can expand, comrade! If we still rely on the wage system, where others are paid more for their contribution beyond the common needs of others to pay for luxuries then I don’t know how revolutionary the future’s day to day will be. I struggle to see if the money-wage system is still in place how different it would be from today. The then joyful task of tallying and monitoring and weighing and counting and judging the individual contributions of all at scale with I expect the office to do all this work (and then enforcing and punishing and shaming?) then we are not really too far away from how the world works today. But the challenge of reward or punishment to work is a difficult one, so that’s where I’d love if people can give some insights, as my view is very pessimistic in that for of labor relations.

Today, festivals are luxurious, expensive, and artificially constrained to extract the most amount of capital for the least amount of effort. The idea then is to maintain a fine line from extractive food-drink prices, entry-stay fees, artist-lineup attractiveness, and to make as much profit and maintain as much of a reputation to do it all again. In a communist society, extracting money for profit is not the goal, and the luxurious nature of organising cultural events for society should be seen differently. We’re quite biased to the monopolies of festivals today and need to lean much more towards something like Aste Nagusia in Euskal Herria (basque country), you’ll love its revolutionary character.

The “extraction of surplus-value” is a, if not the, defining characteristic of capitalism, and a eureka moment in Marxist theory. I am interested in then how this productive force use converted into surplus ‘value’ - meaning working beyond the needs of society and our collective plan for the betterment of society to grow. It feels distinctly ‘line must go up’ so any material you have to help me there would be helpful!

Is there anything further you could expand on or have some more get support on this poiny?

This just sounds like ‘money’ with a different face, and those that can’t contribute will be penalised. This is where I get stuck with any ‘contribution’ system, as it will involve an ever more complicated system of totalling and tallying and tokens and cheques and so on. If we still are left with a wage system, we’ve failed.

Slay the spire 2 is a fun game, I can attest to that! Its also multiplayer, so if you have a couple of folk that could join you it adds an extra layer of complexity. I have heard good things of fields of mistria from people who like the cozy games. Apparently the first moonlighter is fun too which might be a nice intro if stardew is nice in theory but tough in practice.

I have only heard good things from pokopia but might not be worth it unless you can find something cheap.

You could also play EU4, I honestly thing its one of the best games ever made. The more the merrier ;)

What games look interesting to you at the moment?

I bet they’re really happy they worked with the US on selling their oil.

Douglas Valentine: Sure. This is one of the primary covert operations of the CIA. Basically, the essence of its mandate is to—through sabotage and propaganda—control political and social movements in foreign countries. And they do this set up for a variety of ways. It’s been standard practice and sort of the driving principle since after World War II.

If I can just give a little background. After World War II, the communists had really formed the underground forces of resistance against the Nazis in France and Italy and in a couple of other European nations. And so immediately after World War II, communist parties became politically influential—and I’ll just focus on France and Italy—and they, all of a sudden, were in control of the governments. But the CIA could not fight wars against France and Italy. So, they developed a program called “courting the compatible left.” In order to get France and Italy away from communism, they supported the Social Democrats, people who weren’t hardcore communists, but people who were willing to work with capitalism, accept American aid and work with the Americans. And so, the CIA resorted to very subtle ways of luring hardcore communists away from communism into its social democratic movement. And this began to bloom and blossom all across the world as a standard operating procedure. When the communists were intractable, then they would do such things as hire Corsican gangsters, which they did in Marseille right after World War II to break up communist strikes.

But, generally speaking, they tried to do this through subtle forms of propaganda, blackmail, bribery, sabotage and methods like that. There’s a pretty good book about that… [The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters by Frances Stonor Saunders] …It’s about how the CIA waged cultural war in the 1950s and 1960s that a lot of Americans played, people like Gloria Steinem and other intellectuals in the United States, who actually helped the CIA in this effort to lure people out of the Communist Party into a social democratic movement.

https://web.archive.org/web/20200702014722/https://covertactionmagazine.com/index.php/2019/11/21/inside-the-organized-crime-syndicate-known-as-the-cia-an-interview-with-douglas-valentine/

I would come back to ‘the challenges’ people face, as this is where my ‘just do it’ brain says so what?

Zoos, for the most part, are conservation programs. It is not just the animals, plants, and such you see behind glass that are in some cases the last of their species kept alive by people with the passion to do so, but also the wealth of data and samples and collections that are used for research and medicine.

In a world where climate change is going to render large parts of the world uninhabitable as we know it, these will be some of the only places left on earth that have any forms of biodiversity.

Does it matter? It gives the US an opportunity to use this agreement in the future if anything goes against their ‘legal’ agreement. 20 years from now is a generation away, and gives so much runway to the US that if Venezuela does ‘regain sovereignty’ and tries to ‘take control’ of what the US thinks are now their resources.

I do not know the challenges people face where you are, but why do you not see much squatting?

Sitting down with a coffee and making myself at home. With a dozen books in different states of being read, I wonder what to start/continue. I also need to learn from my books and not just regurgitate what I remember.