21Gramsci

I just had to sit through an hour long presentation at my workplace by a top manager at a privatized public utility. This Boston Consulting-bred mf who probably makes six figures was talking about "reshaping the cost base" as a euphemism for major job cuts, while in the same breath bragging about being acquired by a Private Equity firm. He literally had a fucking bullet point about a highly unionized workforce being one of the main challenges facing the company.

I was struggling to even sit still, it was maddening. I made an effort to contain the rage, but even the few angry comments I made about it afterwards with my colleagues seemed to fall on deaf ears. I might have already jeopardized my job if rumor of them reaches the wrong people. Unfortunately my rent doesn't pay itself, and this is a relatively good job as far as they go.

How do you deal with the rage? How do you manage the anger internally when expressing it might genuinely lead to losing your job? I really tried to keep my mouth shut today, and I still kinda failed.

Good on the admins for declaring a Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution to root out reactionary elements of our site. I support the mod team's revolutionary commitment to root out the "Two Olds" (dunk and dredge). I just wonder what that will mean for my academic posting job... I guess it'll be fine.

Hold on, what are those students doing out in the square?

MAINbe this is the wrong comm for this but I just wanted to say I've never found an online space that has as deep of an internal culture as this one. This place has the 21st century equivalent of a fucking oral tradition. This place has heroes and myths and legends. New youngling users are told the stories of heroic posters from past generations. Memes live and die a thousand inane lives until any memory of their origin is lost. has always been and always will be.

Every now and then I see someone reference the and I have a moment of existential dread as I realize I've lurked this space or its various iterations for a significant portion of my lifespan. I tear up as I remember that the first time somebody here called me a and told me to read theory was many years ago on a different site. I light a candle for the posters martyred in the fight against slaveowners.

Anyway whatever I'm drunk and having a nostalgic moment. Death to the tank comms and long live c/main. You can use this thread to remember the posters of ages past (unless they've returned).

Was feeling nostalgic for late '00s eurotrash antifa ska-punk, so here you go.

Death to America.

As the US elections draw near, I must once again bitch about being subjected to US cultural hegemony.

It's so fucking exhausting folks. Please, God, somebody invent the "Mute America" button. I would genuinely get one of those brain chips implanted in my head if it would allow me to smoothly silence any content about US politics.

As a weakling who only speaks two languages, I am cursed to either suffer my home country's discourse (which, trust me, is just as brainrotten as the US's if not more), or to stay in the anglophone media space where America reigns supreme. Nowhere is safe. There is no dark corner where I can hide from Trump's dementia-ridden quotes, or Gamers4Harris, or whichever way Musk is embarrassing himself this time, or the general attitude of people regularly forgetting that the world - and more specifically their online audience - does not all live in the US.

The world should institute a reverse Great Firewall to contain American discourse within the physical boundaries of the 50 states, like the dangerous infohazard that it is.

Please. I beg for mercy. We have suffered enough.

It's a glorious day. Henry Kissinger, former thief of oxygen and current polluter of soil, is dead. Unfortunately, death won't stop him from claiming more victims.

During the Vietnam war, Laos was officially neutral and engaged in its own civil war between the monarchic Royal Lao Government and the communist Pathet Lao forces. Its territory also hosted parts of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a crucial supply route for the North Vietnamese army. The US, in order to both combat the spread of communism and stop the flow of weapons into South Vietnam, started the so-called "Secret War": a years-long bombing campaign in which they dropped more ordnance by weight than in the entirety of the second world war. A planeload of bombs was dropped on Laos every eight minutes for nearly a decade. It's called the "Secret War" because it was largely kept secret from the US public. While Kissinger didn't himself start the Secret War, he vastly expanded its scope, to the point of personally picking or approving targets for bombing runs.

If the title of "World's Most Bombed Country" wasn't enough of a burden to bear, the sheer amount of ordnance dropped means that to this day, half a century later, the Lao PDR still has a massive problem with UXO. People still die today from bombs dropped by US planes 50 years ago. A large portion of the bombs dropped were cluster munitions, each of which could contain hundreds of bomblets (called "bombies" here in the Lao PDR). Between 10 and 30% of bombies used in those years failed to detonate on impact even in ideal conditions. They are the size of a tennis ball, if children find them they will often pick them up and play with them. Thousands of kids have died or been maimed this way since the war. Once again, to drive the point home: Kissinger is responsible for these deaths.

If you feel like celebrating the old bastard kicking the bucket by doing a good thing, there are organizations you can donate to that are working to undo the damage done by him in Laos. UXO Lao and MAG International are running projects to either directly clear the land from UXO, or support affected communities.