askchapo

(I posted this on lemmygrad but I want to get some discussion from here too.)

I’ve been meaning to ask about some stuff regarding parenti that I see come up on different places.

One of them being about parenti’s book blackshirts and reds. So I’ve run into specific people who have claimed and bought up that parenti is lying about : how social democrats in germany gave fascists a path and its actually fault of soviets.

To paraphrase them

Soviets gave kpd direction to be hostile and also it wasn’t just “socdems will ally with nazis”. It was cause soviets gave advice to be hostile to the spd.

To boil it down, they say that parenti is wrong about rise of fascism and he whitewashed soviet mistakes.

The other thing that's bought up is the bombing of germany and american industrial ties. I see it brought up that parenti is just lying about bombing in cologne of ford factory. And its actually all lies and say the charlie higham “trading with the enemy” reference is bullshit. They go on to say that american industrialist involvement with german industry is not that deep. And that parenti (and other communists) lie about this to make a grand narrative of american involvement. They bring up nazi economy book by tooze and this site as a debunking lies material.

Now my post isn’t so much about parenti, I wanna broadly discuss about the whole notion that soviets or german communists were the reason nazis came to power and that socdems were really not at fault.

And also to discuss that american industrialists involved with germany is some bullshit conspiracy. Which it isn’t, given the lengths across the board they spread collaborating after and before the war. I’ve been reading a lot of stuff on dulles, hw, and nazis spread across into different places for american interests. So I don’t think american involvement is some fake conspiracy.

What are your thoughts? (Sorry if this post is too long)

I read the tiny Wikipedia article on it but I couldn't draw any conclusions from it and not sure how accurate it is

Scholars have discussed this issue for eons, if I bolt a DshKA to a cargo bike, is it a technical? We need to find an answer

I'm very introverted, so loneliness was usually not a big problem for me. But now I feel like I just need some more people to talk to. Just something else to do besides work.

How do you all do it?

Since you gotta bomb places to do freedom and all, how do the freedoms stay so free in burger land? Are there secret bombs being dropped on us?

Edit:

Edit 2: guys, I don't wanna know anymore of where our freedoms come from.

In the 2020 primaries, Donald Trump said that Mayo Pete looks like Alfred E. Neuman (which is devastatingly accurate), and Pete countered that he'd never heard of Alfred E. Neuman and it "must be an old person thing." That was incredibly weird to me, because I'm younger than Pete Buttigieg and I know who Alfred E. Neuman is.

It seems like there's three possibilities: One is that Pete does know who Alfred E. Neuman is, and his retort was simply try-hard and pathetic. Another possibility is that Pete does not know who Alfred E. Neuman is because he's been such a careerist psycho his whole life that he knows nothing but the most basic of pop culture references and whatever his staffers tell him about. The third possibility is that I'm unusual in my age cohort for knowing Alfred E. Neuman. My friends and I read Mag Magazine as kids, but we were nerds, and it may have been well past the heyday when Mad was a universal cultural touchstone for kids.

show your work

No, it's not the one about how Democracy isn't Coca-Cola

The main phrase of it was something along the lines of "The Communist Party must follow the people into the fire", that is, it must defer to the outcome of votes and the popular will even when it believes the outcome will be for the worse (presumably while expressing its own view) so that it does not grow out of touch with the people and instead gains trust and credibility from them in the long term.

It's not on redsails, unfortunately, but I'm sure one of you all linked it to me in the first place.

I just got a comment deleted and my account banned from noncredibledefense@shitjustworks (or however they parse that out). It was a shitty meme fantasizing about Japan getting to do more murdering in China, in the event of a war over Taiwan. I got called a tankie and banned for questioning whether Japan had any appetite for a war with China, and that I thought S Korea would be kept out of the conflict by the threat from N Korea.

Friends, I did not glorify communism, nor did I take any position on the disposition of Taiwan. Basically my sin seems to have been pointing out the "non-credibility" of the meme.

Anyway, I just didn't know where else to post about this (can't even message the mod that banned me!). I know hexbears shun that whole server, so I guess I'm really finding out why.

Without going into too much detail I’ll be participating in a strike action tomorrow related to the college encampments from the past month. While I’m excited to be a part of on the ground action, my anxiety over confrontation is flaring up quite a bit. Especially with there being such a big Zionist presence in my city, I’m worried about not just the police, but reactionaries coming to pick a fight. And while organizers say the likelihood of this is low, it’s something that will always be on the back of my mind. Is there any advice for overcoming these fears and making the most out of tomorrow?

Which one is faster?

Some friends on Discord say that Opera could be better and, hell, some don't understand why I use Mozilla Firefox to begin with outside of privacy concerns.

Apparently, Opera can do more and is faster.

Thoughts?

Think I should switch to Opera?

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/4657758

Can you find love after 30?

Can a guy who hasn’t had much luck with women until his 30s find love by then or is it already too late for him?

I'm trying to write a thing.

I keep seeing this online and in person. I don't know how to respond

I am starting to shave most of my body, but I have an issue, and that issue is a safety razor. It works well for my face, albeit with some irritation. The blades also dull pretty fast, as I have really coarse hair, and this issue only gets worse if I'm trying to shave my legs. It also takes quite a long time to get everything with a safety razor, in addition to it being irritating and also failing at it's one job. I appreciate any recommendation and/or reply, thanks in advance y'all!

Also search engines suck, everything is SEO and affiliate links, I promise I wouldn't be bugging y'all otherwise ;)

I feel like this has been a concept for a long time within imperialist studies, but I can't find it. Surely it's a thing. What would you call it?

EDIT: thanks for all the brilliant responses

as an aside in the latest Trillbillies episode Terrence said that we need degrowth communism and it got me wondering what that means to everyone. to hopefully stifle any silly debates i'll clarify that i'm talking about the West, not underdeveloped/overexploited nations in the Global South.

an end to oil drilling, gas extraction, and coal mining will obviously be necessary to stop climate change. how much modern technology can we replicate without relying on those things or other ecologically violent resource extraction? what does an agriculture system that doesn't rely on petrochem-derived fertilizers and herbicides look like? how do we repair the immense damage that's already been done?

i'd really appreciate some book recommendations on this topic as well as everyone's thoughts

I understand that Hexbear has young and vulnerable people, making it potentially unsafe for something as personal and private as sexuality, but I was wondering if there are many online spaces that are friendly and nonjudgmental for that.

There are topics I'd like to discuss like classism in hookup culture/kink communities, but I don't want to make people uncomfortable. I also can't account for wreckers and just general topic derailment.

Also in general, are there considerations I should take when broaching these topics in online spaces?

I feel like we're doing a good job of protecting people from sex pests and I don't want to make a safe place unsafe.

If anyone remembers if they can please help me find it again I would be totally psyched because I lost it.

It needs to be the kind of place you could pretend to have done entry level IT for

For purpose of discussion, assume that due to bad luck, this asteroid has evaded the detection of all amateur and professional astronomers until about six months from impact. The asteroid is too large to deflect with humanity's current spacefaring capabilities, and the general scientific consensus is that the impact will end all multicellular life on Earth.

What do those six months look like?

Looking for opinions on what I should do about this. So I have a sort of working relationship with my mom that we just don’t talk about political things. She’ll try to but I’ll just shut her down. I have to, she got deep into Q and Great Reset stuff, very big on MAGA, space lasers and antifa creating forest fires, pizza gate, energy frequencies, etc, like all the insane conspiracy grifts from the last 8 years she’s gone into.

This past year she’s gotten very involved in South Carolina politics, and now she’s apparently going to be a delegate for her district or whatever at the RNC this July in Milwaukee.

On the one hand, her being a delegate doesn’t change anything, and like at the end of the day it doesn’t seem to really matter. But on the other hand, she is going beyond just having far right opinions about things and is actively participating in an evil political process to do evil things.

Should I just brush this off? Does this even matter? Or should I tell her this is a shitty thing to do? There isn’t a single thing I could say that would make an impact on her. Her far right Christian Nationalist identity is seared so deeply into her bones and baked with layers of unresolved trauma that she is literally too far gone, and confronting her would be a huge argument like always. But keeping the status quo with her and just pretending she isn’t going to do this at the RNC feels like I’m rolling over on my values. Idk what to do

I've fucked around a bit with ChatGPT and while, yeah, it frequently says wrong or weird stuff, it's usually fairly subtle shit, like crap I actually had to look up to verify it was wrong.

Now I'm seeing Google telling people to put glue on pizza. That a bit bigger than getting the name of George Washington's wife wrong or Jay Leno's birthday off by 3 years. Some of these answers seem almost cartoonish in their wrongness I almost half suspect some engineer at Google is fucking with it to prove a point.

Is it just that Googles AI sucks? I've seen other people say that AI is now getting info from other AIs and it's leading to responses getting increasingly bizarre and wrong so... idk.