quarrk [he/him]

Doing a land acknowledgment while doing nothing about it, indeed actively supporting anti-indigenous policies

Thesis: Nuking your reddit account is good for your mental health

Antithesis: If everyone nuked their reddit accounts, a lot of invaluable information (especially in niche communities) would be lost, and this would primarily hurt average people and not reddit as a corporation

Synthesis: Nuking all reddit accounts is good for society’s health. Reddit is a trash website. In the short-term it will hurt, but long-term we are better off moving these communities to decentralized platforms. There are ways to archive the important information from reddit. Reddit thrives off the free contributions of countless users who are paid nothing, and reddit claims ownership and monetizes all content freely published to it. If you don’t like reddit, simply stop posting to it, no matter how juicy the bait

A channel I subscribe to just posted an explainer on spin, for anyone interested

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYeRS5a3HbE

It is a good demonstration of the limitations of our own thought. We understand new concepts in terms of familiar concepts. If there is no direct analogy to something familiar, the human mind is utterly lost and has to trust in rigorous analysis while only half believing what it proves.

Correct, there is not much of a difference. It is a question of translation. A translation into English may opt to use the word “liberal” in certain places because of the precise connotations of that word to an English-speaking audience. In other languages they may opt to translate the concept of bourgeois/liberal ideology into a word that does not specifically refer to the classical liberal movement.

Is this true in the non-English-speaking world?

Mao wrote the notorious “Combating Liberalism” essay, but I don’t speak Chinese, so I can’t verify how direct that translation is. It is possible that the original text referred more generically to bourgeois ideology, and not specifically the classical liberal movement in western Europe.

The poster is confused why the term liberal is used so often in English Marxist contexts, so it seems plausible that non-English Marxists do not often refer specifically to liberalism.

are they adding extra ethanol or something?

Yes. 88 has up to 15% ethanol. You should check your manual before using it.

Perhaps the difference is just that the term liberal has more historical relevance in English-speaking countries. The specific ideology was invented by British and French thinkers, especially influencing the leaders of the American Revolution.

Ok, use Android then. Millions of people don’t care about those things because they have different priorities for their phone which Apple accounts for when they decide which features to roll out.

It’s in beta 1. Some apps look kinda bad if you’re trying to pick a horrid color. Hopefully they do something to improve contrast before release.

Every new Android version adds features that have been on iOS forever. Both OSes have different priorities.

Android will often add new features but they are poorly integrated or thought out. iOS tends to add features with a much higher level of refinement the first time around.

I mean whatever is meant by collapse of the US. I would presume that includes economic decline, geopolitical weakening, reduction or disappearance of military presence in other countries.

If, according to Lenin, this collapse could happen in a relatively short time, then how would Americans react? That’s what I was pondering. Just some half baked ideas.

I think it will take time for Americans to accept a reduced prestige and standard of living. If it happened overnight, I’m speculating that Americans would not tolerate it and be more likely to lash out violently, compared to a protracted, almost imperceptible decline. But I can totally see how the opposite could be true, that if people can see the slide happening, that it would be more upsetting than if it happened all at once.

Probably so.

That Lenin quote,

There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.

applies here. It’s hard to gauge exactly when it will happen. But when it does, it will be rapid.

It depends a lot on the timing of certain things external to the US. For example, Ukraine and Palestine; China’s movements; the upcoming Indian election; future EU elections which could either move more reactionary or (optimistically) people start to grow tired of taking Ls for the US; climate change; anti-colonial momentum in the Sahel alliance of Africa; etc.

To be honest, the safest overall course of action may be for a gradual decline instead of a rapid one. If the US fell within one generation, people won’t accept the new reduced standard of living and are likely to still hold American supremacist / white supremacist ideas. That would increase the odds of a world war. Whereas, if the US just gradually gets shittier over a generation or two, then maybe people will understand it as an internal systemic breakdown instead of an external attack.

Same cognitive dissonance that prevents libs from understanding why communists either supported or were a part of every progressive movement of the last 150 years. It’s not an accident that communists were a century ahead of the left-liberals on race, gender, religion, antisemitism, and imperialism, in addition to their bread-and-butter of labor movements.

The Soviets in particular advanced the rights of women both in ideals (see the USSR constitution) and in practice (women in STEM increased significantly). The empowerment of women in the Soviet Union was so self evident that it spawned the movie trope of the headstrong, independent Russian woman who can’t be wooed by James Bond or some other “gentleman”.

It was the Bolsheviks who saw the reactionary character of antisemitism, which during the Russian Empire was especially horrible.

”It is not the Jews who are the enemies of the working people. The enemies of the workers are the capitalists of all countries. Among the Jews there are working people, and they form the majority. They are our brothers who, like us, are oppressed by capital; they are our comrades in the struggle for socialism. Among the Jews there are kulaks, exploiters and capitalists, just as there among the Russians and among people of all nations. The capitalists strive to sow and foment hatred between workers of different faiths, different nations and different races. Those who do not work are kept in power by the power and strength of capital.” — V. I. Lenin

The communists historically have been a driving force for positive social progress. Liberals co-opt these gains as products of their own enlightenment, either consciously to deny the communists a win, or unconsciously because they don’t have a theoretical basis for understanding historical development.

I used to help with the 101 commie subreddits until one of the powermods banned me from all of them (yes one user was a mod of several subs).

I never posted anything particularly sectarian because I honestly didn’t have the energy to go beyond questions with unambiguous answers.

I’m pretty sure the thing I got banned for was saying that I don’t care if we call it socialism or communism; that both terms are quite old, so they can technically have definitions inconsistent with Marxism.

Anyway it was at that point I think I really gave up on reddit as a whole because I had no other purpose to be there.

Biden wants to destroy Russia before going to war with China

Trump only wants to improve relations with Russia in order to go to war with China now

Both seem to be interested in going to war with Iran in the next 5 years.

Deleting my reddit account has been great for my mental health

I realize it wasn’t the main point of the post, so without getting too debatey I will clarify a little more before I leave it.

The idea of “an economy” as an external object attached to a society is peculiar to capitalism, for the fact of commodity fetishism, in which relations of production dominate over capitalist society as an external force. Only under these conditions does it make sense to treat an economy as a model that appears dispensable or interchangeable (but is not actually so).

Although societies have started out with consciously defined rules — and by rules I mean property relations — the aim of these rules has nothing to do with creating a stable society. The purpose of the rules is to define who retains privilege, who is oppressor and who is oppressed. Only after the rules are set does the task begin to make these rules practicable. This logical sequence is glossed over when talking of societies’ economic relations as external objects called economies.

An economy is a model for allocating labour and resources in a way that meets the needs of the people in the country.

Economies are no more “models for allocating labour and resources” than Darwinian evolution maximizes the happiness of all species. All past societies have existed on the simple condition that they were compatible with their material bases. They are not necessarily perfect or optimized for productivity, happiness, justice, etc.

You probably didn’t mean it this way, but an economy is not necessarily a consciously applied, a priori model. Most societies have not had planned economies, let alone for any purpose like meeting the needs of the population.

Of course there must be some way that societies reproduce themselves. It is typically brutal as a ruling class exploits another class, the most obvious example being the various societies based on types of slave labor.

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” — The history of society has been the history of economies for the benefit of a single class, or in legal terms, the history of exclusive property rights held by privileged classes.