FanonFan [comrade/them, any]

I look into this every few years and have yet to see any evidence of it. Even the scale alone means any of them would have to be orders of magnitude worse than high fructose corn syrup or sucrose to be worrying, since they’re multiple orders of magnitude sweeter.

For a comparable level of sweetness to HFCS, a serving of artificial sweeteners is a fraction of their Acceptable Daily Intake.

There’s quite a few caffeine free, sugar free sodas, at least in the states. Taste is subjective tho

Kinda depends on what you’re looking for. Going through my podcast app:

Dimension 20 is a bunch of CollegeHumor actors doing DND campaigns. I don’t play DND but have enjoyed this so far.

The Dollop is a couple comedians riffing about strange people and events from history. More entertaining than educational but you might expand your knowledge a bit as long as you don’t put too much weight in their research.

Blowback is a history podcast that goes over major historical events that people probably know of but not much about. The production quality is amazing and the research is really good. It’s like listening to a well-made documentary. Plus they got Jon Benjamin as a guest actor for season 1.

Welcome to Nightvale is a surrealist horror/comedy with a fun vibe. Lots of memorable one-liners.

My Dad Wrote a Porno is pretty funny, although I felt like the bit sort of wore out after a few episodes and stopped listening. Seems to have an audience and still be going so maybe it picks up.

Citations needed is a solid critique of news narratives.

Monday Morning podcast is okay if you want to hear Bill burr rant to himself for a while. He’s been doing it for like 13 years so there’s probably gold in there, but I think he’s better when he has someone to riff with. Only listened to a handful of episodes though.

Damn this is a good one. It captures such specific emotions.

The child has sadness and worry in his eyes but is outwardly happy, perhaps hopeful for a better future. The hope and worry are gone in the adult, but the sadness persists. Now it’s a tired, worn-down sadness. The possibilities that existed in youth have converged into a simple, predictable future. Get up, get ready for work, go to work, come home, unwind from work, go to sleep, repeat until death.

Maybe this is one the futures the child had hoped for, a life with stability and predictability. That’s what he studied and worked for, it’s better than many people have. But now that he’s on this path with nothing to look forward to but the rest of his life, he’d rather look back on a time that had more hope and possibility.

The weird jab is only working against the fash because they’re obsessed with aesthetics. And now that it’s being overused by people who are similarly hollow, it’s gonna lose its impact very soon.

You’re not getting a serious answer because everyone here is irony poisoned as a defence mechanism from watching liberal electoral politics fail over and over again while continuously being gaslit by Dems. Most of us voted for Obama because we believed his progressive rhetoric. Then we watched him bail out banks and continue bloody imperialism and torture, failing to fulfill most of his promises despite at times controlling all three branches. We’re living in the world of Obama’s cynicism, or backing up further, of (Bill) Clinton’s rightward shift into Republican politics with a Democrat mask.

Most of us backed Sanders then watched him get ratfucked twice. A lot of us still voted for (Hilary) Clinton because we believed she might be marginally better than Trump, and we watched her lose the electoral college despite winning the popular vote. A lot of us voted for Biden for the same reason, then watched as he continued Trump’s policies and funded genocide.

At each step more and more people started realizing bourgeois electoralism is a sham and turned to reading theory and organizing. So we really don’t care who you vote for. If you actually care about anything more than aesthetics, read some theory and join an org.

You know what, you’re right. I’m gonna vote for Biden too. It’s HIS turn

I’m writing in Trump.

Ivanka trump.

It’s HER turn

If you actually care, go join an org and read some theory. “Snoozing the timer of the bomb” requires working for a real solution that can be actualized in this supposed extra time. Otherwise it’s the same performative nonsense we’ve been told by liberals for the last three elections.

Wtf is this 2012 meme lmao

Someone as old as you should have recognized the lesser evil trap by now

Fr like half of modern drugs were invented or refined by militaries lmao

I strongly suspect the prison- and factory-like conditions :foucalt-madness: of schools contribute to violent norm-enforcing behavior. The strict hierarchical division between the authoritative “knowledge giver” and the supposedly empty-minded “receptacle of knowledge” as well.

Freir’s Pedagogy if the Oppressed may tangentially be relevant to this topic, although I don’t remember specifics.

Scientifically, broadly speaking. I can’t speak specifically because I’m not an expert in child sociology and I don’t know how a theoretical future state might handle things, nor how people might behave in a future state.

But look to initiatives taken in current socialist states (well, most states, really). A problem comes to light, experts are called in, a plan is discussed then voted on then enacted. After some amount of time the results are assessed and any needed adjustments can be made.

I feel like my comment is so vague as to not be saying anything. But the gist I’m trying to get at is that a key component of scientific socialism as a methodology is constant analysis, constant dialectical engagement with the real world, a process of synthesizing theory and practice into praxis, moving abstract notions into concrete results. Universalities are a starting point that get honed down by specificities.

Not to deter anyone from voicing lived experiences, nor silence discussion. Both are essential to developing theories that can be tested. There’s a limit to how far we can get with conjecture about a future world, but the ideas may help us think about how to engage currently.

Words are symbols for meaning, they don’t possess anything in and of themselves. There are certainly times where it’s useful or interesting to dissect and examine the relationships between signifiers, concepts, and reality, but it’s almost never effective as an offensive tactic. Pushing against semantic drift requires massive social power, of which the little power we have is better spent elsewhere.

The symbols that we use to represent concepts are effectively arbitrary (although not random nor devoid of historical residue and material tensions) and a general term may become specific, or split into multiple more specific terms, as concepts grow more complex.

Antisemitism currently signifies hatred and oppression of Jewish people in the vast majority of people’s minds and has for a long time. This hatred and oppression is a material reality that holds a unique place historically and exists regardless of the symbol used to represent it. Not only that, the zionist entity benefits from its exacerbation, since it helps provide an influx of people for its settler colonial project.

We could argue for a regeneralization of the term, spend countless hours arguing about using a different symbol or whatever, and in the mean time the material currents will flow unabated.

Interestingly, the zionist entity also seems to be pushing for a generalization of the term-- although from the angle of what actions qualify as antisemitism-- attempting to reduce concepts of anti-zionism and antisemitism to the same term. In this case it’s the bad-faith semantic dancing that’s characteristic of fascism.

I’d guess it’s because it captured the demand for english-language isekai at a mid reading level, and snowballed with hype around new releases, which quickly got rolled into the movie franchise as well. For 15 years there was a new release almost every year, between the books and the movies, so you couldn’t really avoid hearing buzz about it. If it was just one book without regular injections of hype into the public consciousness, it’d probably be largely forgotten.

Kids don’t care so much about prose and they’re usually too naive to pick up on political subtexts, at least consciously. As a kid I liked them for the escapist fantasy and the simple narrative.

Thanks for sharing!

Honestly diving deeper into mao and Chinese history has been an incredibly enlightening experience.

Guerilla History is halfway through a four-part series (plus a precursor episode on GH or revleft) on China which is a great resource for anyone curious.

Lotta western leftists seem to learn class analysis 101 without deconstructing their liberal moralism

Anyone worried about this: read any historic class analysis; read about past revolutionary movements and the diverse material interests that comprised them. Also stop obsessing about the moral purity of entertainers, there’s so many more important things to do.

I don’t vote for racists sorry

Welp if Biden wasn’t going to lose, he sure is now lmao

:michael-laugh:

To me it makes me think of the intellectualization of revolutionary theory to the degree that it’s no longer revolutionary, merely a means by which academics can advance their careers. I get that impression with a lot of western Marxian/critical theory from the last few decades tbh (although that doesn’t mean the works don’t contain interesting ideas).

A quote from Marx that I like:

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.

Yet some academics remain content to idly interpret while benefitting from the spoils of imperialism and colonialism.

Oooorrr it’s just a comic by an anti-communist trying to point out a perceived hypocrisy so they don’t have to engage with the ideas lmao