Welcome again to everybody! Make yourself at home, as we fly on the first supersonic aircraft for the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is our weekly discussion thread.
Such a beautiful aircraft. Western media always tries to portray fictional Soviet machinery as boxy and ugly, but when you look at actual designs it's all flowing lines and style
I first saw one in a 70s Soviet movie -- can't remember the name -- about a Georgian bush pilot who dreams of flying a Tu-144. After knocking around Moscow for a while with an Armenian friend, he gets his dream, but decides he misses home and so goes back to his old job. Just a good heartwarming movie.
Anyway, it's an absolutely beautiful aircraft. Seeing it on the ground almost makes you do a double-take, because it looks like something whose native habitat is the air.
So, embarassing confession time: I was kind of holding onto (hope I'm not the only one) an irrational hope that the patsoc crowd would someday get past their rightist nonsense and turn into genuine Marxist-Leninists. With the latest split between Maupin and Haz+Jackson Hinkle, I've finally seen what everybody else probably saw a long time ago: not gonna happen.
The thing is, the whole phenomena is just as media and personality-driven as the radlibs they criticize. Maupin is a TV reporter; Haz and Jackson Hinkle are "influencers;" Sameera Khan, who seems to have dropped off the face of the earth, is a model. And they're all jealous of each other's media presence. Maupin seems upset that Jackson have a bigger internet presence than he does. Haz and Jackson Hinkle are jealous that Maupin, as an RT reporter, plays in the media "big leagues;" going to Kremlin press conferences, interviewing the president of Iran, etc. Compared to him, they're small-time operators, and they know it. Hence the attempt to glom onto Andrew Tate -- very weird, because whatever Maupin did back in August last year, Tate did, and worse. Just a bunch of weird opportunists who mistake personal drama for advancing the revolution.
They were all grifters from the beginning, I didn’t expect any reform. More alarming is the continued prominence of patsocs that pretend they’re just regular principled MLs and are held up as such (I’m looking at you Midwestern Marx).
For real. I think Haz has been threatening to start his organization (the based and MAGA-pilled version of CPI or something) "next month" since January. So far all he's done is print a bunch of Infrared Gorilla Gang hats and get in arguments with random Australians about white nationalism.
But if your original strategy was "tweet and get fellow Khmer Rouge fans to infiltrate the CPUSA with the goal of taking it over next election cycle," it's hard to see how Plan B could be much of an improvement. (Everybody, including Maupin and Jason Unruhe (!), said this kind of lazy infiltration doesn't work; if it did, Bernie bros would be in charge of the Democratic Party by now. But what can you do -- the real, non-internet world has a way of messing with the plans of would-be materialists).
If everything goes well the next few weeks, I’ll have a lot of free time the next few months for some effortposts on SEA history and politics.
One I especially wanted to do for a while was comparing South Africa vs Malaysia, specifically comparing the racialised class structure of their economies.
This is because in my preliminary research I found out that the the South African BEE (Black Economic Empowerment) programme (for all it’s faults) were inspired by Malaysia’s NEP (New Economic Policy) that aimed to redistribute wealth among the racialised classes in Malaysia. I wanted to explore more on that and also assess the failures of the aforementioned policies in actually transforming the racialised economic base of both countries (and improve my understanding of their histories as well).
Stay tuned for that.
If anyone has any material relating at all to this, by all means share it with me.
I remember reading a quote about how coalitions are essentially agreeing on the least-radical platform, with nothing taken from the more radical members. I thought it was in the state and revolution, but I couldn't find it. If someone knows what I'm talking about, please post it here.
Best part about this is the projection, because the west and their funded troll farms in Taiwan (1450 troll army) are doing exactly this to the PRC. Mainland social media has plenty of pro-western, pro-IJA, pro-fascist filth being spread around there lol.
They use the exact same terminology you'd expect from libs.
"Common values"
"Rules based international order"
"Instead of going against the US, we should reflect why the whole civilised world is against us"
"How does any of our country's achievements have anything to do with me and my low salary?"
"Slobber Zuccini, anyone who doesn't support justice is a yellow skin Russian"
"This country is infested with pro sisipee pinkos"
I think I might try and touch grass a lot next month. Might spend all of October just focusing on reorganising my life and my work so things are a little easier on me. Had a rough month last month and have just been ignoring the frustration it was causing me. I've been avoiding dealing with my issues and distracting myself instead of focusing on improving things. Might just take a break from here as well. It's nice to talk to actual socialists (I have maybe 1 actual ML friend IRL) but it is frustrating to just see all the sheer hateful ignorance from the libs. It's fun to dunk on them, but it probably isn't good for my mental health to expose myself to all that right now. Making fun of them doesn't really do anything to combat those attitudes anyway. Sorry, this is getting rambly. I'll see people in a month.
I am curious if this happens in your countries. There are these businesses that sell stuff from local entrepeneurs, the catch is that the business charges a rent fee to showcase your products and also take a cut when they sell something 😂 funnily enough they are called "collectives"
This is at least how hairdressing and tattooing work for a lot of merchants in Amerika.
If you go to a hairdresser, more than likely they're a contractor renting part of the building whenever they have appointments, rather than being directly employed by the building's owners. Much of the reason prices are so exorbitant for these two services -- you're not only paying for the service, but for the servicer's rent.
Comrades, Google has failed to give any useful information because of enshittification. Anybody know how to have a different working language between excel and word? I know VBA and all excel-associated commands in english but my work is in a different language. I type/work in that other language all the time except for in excel where I forget how to do the fuckin sum command. But changing the working langauge makes it a shitshow with spellcheck and several other issues. I'm tired of that BS. Any advice?
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !genzhou@lemmygrad.ml
I posted this same question in the literature mega by accident, but anyway, I need a poignant question for a First Nations speaker to answer in front of my entire Clanadian workplace. I was thinking something along the lines of the irredeemable nature of us forcing them onto reserves, or what issues are being faced by FN people's on reserves and how that relates to our current [liberal/capitalist] society.