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"We thought after we made it there the enemy would flee, but it didn't turn out that way."
  • I was just listening to the trashfuture episode on the Falklands war, and fuck me if it isn't exactly the same thing.

    Like, this shit

    From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paraquet

    On the next day, the 15 men of Mountain troop, led by Captain Gavin Hamilton, were airlifted onto Fortuna glacier by two Wessex helicopters. They were immediately confronted with extreme conditions including 100 mph winds and freezing temperatures. Deep crevasses slowed the advance, and when the men attempted to set up camp and wait out the storm, their tents were swept away by the wind. Finally, after 15 hours on the glacier, Captain Hamilton requested evacuation, with the message "Unable to move. Environmental casualties imminent." Three Wessex helicopters were dispatched from the Task Force: two Wessex Mk5s from Tidespring and one Mk3 from Antrim. After one failed attempt, they managed to locate and embark the stranded SAS men, but in whiteout conditions, one pilot became disorientated and his aircraft crashed. The passengers were loaded onto the two remaining helicopters, but soon afterwards one of these hit a ridge and crashed, though once again without any serious casualties. The last Wessex, Antrim′s Mk3, after having offloaded its troops on board the destroyer returned to the glacier and after two failed attempts managed to retrieve the downed SAS and aircrew, though their equipment had to be abandoned. The pilot, Lieutenant Commander Ian Stanley, managed to nurse his overloaded aircraft back to Antrim and make an emergency landing on her flight deck, for which he was later awarded the Distinguished Service Order.[9][10]

    They're so desperate to do special forces stuff, they are so absolutely obsessed with a squad of elite supersoldiers doing what no one else dares, overcoming all odds through grit and determination by being superior heroic individuals. And then, when all that failed, the Royal Navy bombarded the hills opposite the Argentinian position and they surrendered immediately with no further shots fired.

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    On 'Sub-Imperial Power' [aka "I've just come up with a brand new theory that definitely nobody has thought of ever"]
  • I feel the same way, although rather I feel dialectical materialism has made all bourgeoise philosophy obsolete. Any philosophical endeavor that doesn't take dialectical materialism as its basis is like a physics hypothesis that ignores general relativity. Like always, I will plug The Destruction of Reason, which shows how bourgeoise philosophy has only regressed for about 170 years since Hegel, and has no further purpose but to quiet the guilty conscience of capitalists or rouse their petit bourgeoise footsoldiers to defend capital.

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    The Hero We Deserve
  • There are several hundred thousand vengeful dead patrolling the Donbas border by now... sadness-abysmal

    Gozer the Gozerian gonna manifest in downtown Bakhmut Artyemovsk

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    The East Is Red
  • The popularity of securing a state job - known in Chinese as "landing ashore" - has fuelled an unlikely fashion trend, in which young men display their aspirations with sombre suits, windbreakers and even Communist party badges, a vogue known as "cadre style"

    sicko-wistful I wanna be dripped out cadre style...

    Chinese chatbots have struggled to compete with ChatGPT [citation needed], because the Party imposed rules requiring them to uphold "socialist core values" (If you ask ErnieBot, a Chinese version of ChatGPT, whether Xi Jinping is pragmatic, it replies "Try a different question")

    As if the capitalists would show such restraint che-laugh I can't ask ChatGPT myself cause I'm not giving them my damn phone number, but I wonder what it would say when asked "Is Joe Biden pragmatic?"

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    Is there any good reading material that explains the 1956 Hungarian uprising and the 1968 Prague Spring from an ML perspective?
  • A book I can recommend on the Hungarian uprising is The Truth About Hungary by Herbert Aptheker.

    It's been a while since I read it but to my recollection it makes a pretty undeniable argument that it was a fascist uprising, taking place as it did just 11 years after Hungary - an Axis member - was defeated in WW2.

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    Ex-chancellor of Germany confirms that the Ukrainians did not agree on peace because they were not allowed to. For everything they discussed, they first had to ask the Americans.
  • But the column! Guess I have to blow the dust off these again.

    Here's the Marine Corps Gazette explaining what happened.

    The Kiev regime is controlled by genocidal Nazis trying to ethnically cleanse the population of Donetsk and Luhansk. Those places were already 'denazified', the problem was the Nazis on the Kiev side of the trenches continuously shelling the civilian population for eight years (with western support).

    But thankfully the denazification spread!

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    Banned for not breaking the rules, but disagreeing with a mod
  • Well I was gonna bother responding, then I noticed your account was created five days ago and has done nothing but both-sides this conflict

    Have a very shitty rest of your shift officer 07

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    can somebody ELI5 commodity fetishism
  • I would like to jump in and specifically explain the word 'fetishism' because it causes some confusion, although it's also explained in this article.

    The term or idea of fetishism originates in colonial anthropology. Basically, colonist anthropologists would show up in one of their victim's societies to take notes, watch their religious practices, and see them use objects such as figurines or statues to represent various divine or spiritual figures. The anthropologists would know that, of course, the inferior mind of the savage couldn't possibly be using these things as props or metaphors, they must be literally worshipping the objects - they must believe the objects themselves have a divine spirit inside them (and then those same anthropologists, without the slightest shred of irony, went back home, went to their Sunday services and worshipped the crucifix). The anthropologists called these objects 'fetishes'.

    Marx would have been writing all throughout the period this 'research' was being done, and found it was a useful metaphor for the idea that commodities themselves contain value, rather than their value being the result of a series of social interactions (as other people have already explained). But Marx also opposed colonial brutality and was an abolitionist, and was probably about as anti-racist as someone could be under his material conditions, so I personally think the choice of term was a fully intentional irony - oh, you think the 'backwards savages' are so inferior because their society has these fetish rituals? Well, your allegedly superior society runs entirely on fetish rituals, with your fetishes being commodities.

    Unfortunately, in the divergence of language, the term was also used in the phrase 'sexual fetish', which originally meant some object or act that someone required during sex, later just meaning something that someone enjoys. The phrase was eventually shortened to just 'fetish' so that for the majority of people the term has an exclusively sexual connotation. People then get the wrong idea and think 'commodity fetishism' is simply the 'sexual' thrill of owning or buying commodities, which is not correct. That phenomenon might be real in the sense of the related idea of conspicuous consumption, but the actual meaning of commmodity fetishism is a much deeper idea that cuts to the heart of social organisation under capitalism and how that organisation is obscured in the eyes of its participants.

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    Banned for not breaking the rules, but disagreeing with a mod
  • The argument for it being Israel:

    • Israel has complete air superiority
    • Israel is conducting a bombing campaign against Gaza
    • Israel has threatened to attack hospitals
    • Israel has previously bombed hospitals
    • Israel has previously bombed this exact hospital
    • The audio and visual characteristics of the bomb and the damage caused (captured by multiple, independent observers) match with a JDAM guided bomb, which Israel has already used
    • Israeli sources first claimed the hospital was a Hamas base or had Hamas tunnels or arms caches, before rapidly rolling back their position to "we didn't do it"
    • It is clearly in Israel's interest to kill Palestinians and destroy Palestinian infrastructure, especially medical services and supplies, because they are conducting a genocide

    The argument for it being Hamas:

    • Israel says it was

    Reddit, or rather reddit-logo, is controlled by the US security state, so r/combatfootage - which banned all combat footage from Palestinian viewpoints - is not a reliable source. The idea that a 'rocket piece' could accidentally fall on a hospital and kill 500 people (a number reported by a first-hand MSF witness) is laughably absurd. If a Hamas rocket could cause this kind of damage, Tel Aviv would look like the surface of the fucking moon. It was OBVIOUSLY another genocidal act by the entity continuously and overtly engaged in genocidal acts. To think otherwise requires you to want to fall for their propaganda. No one in full possession of their faculties looking at the facts dispassionately could possibly conclude it was anything else.

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    Five years after killing a journalist in cold blood, Saudi Arabia is stronger than ever
  • To further add, that's in line with the modern "neoclassical" definition of the free market, which is almost exactly the opposite of the original definition used by Adam Smith and other early capitalist economists. Smith defined a free market as one free of rents, that is, unearned incomes taken by (mostly at the time feudal) landlords, craft guilds, church tithes, monopolies and through usurious debt. He was especially vocal about what he thought should be done to landlords!

    Whereas, the "modern" definition is a market where all actors are free to do whatever they want with their money, including buy up rent-extraction opportunities, form monopolies and cartels and trap people in debt servitude - all to the detriment of the actual productive economy - and no democratic process should be allowed to stop them.

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