duderium

If so, how / why? Do you have any regrets?

(don’t pay attention to how Data answers her)

The pandemic didn’t fall out of the sky. Looking back, it’s easy to see so many warning signs.

The acceptance of white yoga anti-vaxx moms hosting parties to infect their kids with bizarre diseases is an obvious one. I live in a blue area, so these people were very present pre-pandemic. I very seldom run into them now, but when I do, I see that they’re also anti-maskers. Big Mask is in league with Big Pharma. Death drive is very present in the psyche of the bourgeoisie because they know, deep down, that capitalism cannot continue forever, and they would rather destroy themselves and everything around them than admit this.

Then there’s Americans’ total lack of interest in masking pre-pandemic, even though in Asia people voluntarily masked in order to protect each other years before the pandemic started. Making a collective effort to protect one another? Forget it! I've got crumbs from the table of imperialism I need to lick up off the floor!

Also the poisonous environment of America pre-pandemic. This country was founded by settlers deliberately infecting indigenous people with horrifying diseases in the name of profit and land theft (A very, very blue area in Massachusetts, Amherst, still bears the name of the guy who did this), and nothing has changed. Everyone being sick in so many different ways—from being forced to eat poisonous food, being forced to drive for how many hours each day, never having time to exercise, never having decent health care, never having the most basic health education, always being economically stressed —but then being blamed for all their problems. You have basically lived in Mordor all your life, but it’s your fault for not looking like Legolas, you just haven’t worked hard or smart enough, and you are insane if you question this. (Marxists referencing LOTR is like liberals referencing Harry Potter I suppose…)

We also can’t forget individualism. Every American, deep down, thinks he is a cowboy. The contempt for intellectualism (and science) has also been talked about in America for decades. Liberals are obviously not immune here. At this point they really are just as contemptuous of science as chuds. Their peaceful protests are just a rebirth of medieval flagellants—they're happy to punish themselves for enjoying capitalism, but not so happy to actually destroy capitalism itself. Most doctors have also literally gone mask-off during the pandemic, but some scientists at least (Rob Wallace for instance) are still doing their jobs, still uncovering new ways in which this nightmare is fucking us, and very few people are listening.

“Juking the stats” is a phrase from The Wire (watched it in my liberal days), but we see government officials at every level doing this constantly with covid. It’s become very difficult to figure out just how bad the pandemic is, though there are things the bourgeoisie is unable to cover up—deaths and life expectancy, for instance. Diseases associated with long covid have continued to climb, even if there are shithead doctors out there who claim that long covid is just in your head. (They were also doing this with chronic lyme pre-pandemic!)

So in a way, the pandemic is not really something new. It’s just a massive intensification of factors in American “life” which were already well-established. Disabled people were already being ignored even by Marxists before the pandemic, but now there’s a lot more of them, they’re in so much more danger, and it’s easier to become disabled than ever before.

Barring revolution, I think things will continue to get worse. (There are rumors of nurses striking to bring back mask mandates, which is a positive sign.) I’ve also wondered—if Trump “wriggles out of this one,” and if he becomes president again, will liberals go back to pretending to care about the pandemic? What’s stopping them from saying that Biden did a good job during the pandemic, but Trump is fucking it up now? It would also be a pretty effective way to mobilize large numbers of people against him.

As an aside, the pandemic has taught me that the apocalypse isn’t necessarily what we expect it to be. Had anyone made a film about this pandemic before it started, absolutely no one would have believed it.

Edit: this thread is also about LOTR and the Foundation trilogy.

Comrades, I started using this app a few days ago and I have to recommend it. It's a language exchange app. So far it's helped me spend a lot less time arguing with strangers on twitter. I'm addicted to this app instead, but I think it's a healthier addiction. Basically, if you speak English, people around the world really want to talk with you. A lot of those people aren't going to get angry if you say that X Western country sucks. For me, I'm surrounded in my daily life by incredibly annoying white liberals and fascists, so it's actually really refreshing and therapeutic for me to be able to say that America sucks and to get people actually agreeing with me. The exchange might seem unequal but I think it's a win-win. I want to vibe with left-adjacent people, they want to learn English.

If you're a cis dude like me, using the app is going to be different than if you're a woman or trans obviously. Twice now I've been in group conversations where a Black English-speaking woman expressed doubts about getting married, only to have like a swarm of dudes (of many different races actually) going apeshit over the idea of female athletes defeating male athletes in sports. It went from "I'm not sure about getting married" to "people have market value, women want men who can provide, men want physically attractive women, I'm not sexist but Serena Williams says she couldn't beat Roger Federer," and on and on and on. This seems to happen in the evenings when these eternally dateless dudes get off work / give up exploiting their workers and log on to harass women. I avoid people on the app who have western flags basically, but these are also opportunities for radicalization, and both women in these rooms were listening and agreeing when I talked about how marriage is evil, the bourgeois family is a social construct, etc., etc. The dudes on the other hand would just not shut the fuck up. They are seriously freaked out by the idea that women might be human beings who don't want to be their slaves.

What else? It's nice speaking with Chinese people. Not all of them are crazy about China but the vast majority are so far. I've talked a lot with Algerians. They tell me school is free there and that the government will even pay you to become a doctor. One said yesterday that the current president is giving away homes to people. On the other hand, there are issues with liberals who want to learn English and escape their countries to come to America. An Iranian I spoke with was desperate to move to fucking Texas, ugh. I also spoke with a Venezuelan who had moved to Chile and who told me she hates communism. I didn't know she was a gusano until it was too late. Yesterday though I briefly spoke in Spanish with a Mexican who agreed with me when I said that Americans are barbarians. She had been complaining earlier about the USA and Canada.

Basically, I just have had a lot of interesting conversations and it made me feel good. There aren't a ton of people to talk with where I live and they're all fucking white liberals or fascists so this is a major relief. My spouse is on vacation so I was going nuts—I really needed to just vibe with adults. I just wanted to let hexbear know that if you're in a similar situation you should check this app out. I subscribed for a month ($12) but kind of regret it, it might be better to have some self-imposed limits on this app since an hour of talking with these people is probably enough for the day.

If so, how is it going wrt covid and everything else? Nonparents feel free to answer if you know any kids going to school and what their situation is like. Teachers also please chime in.

Because birds don't give a fuck about private property. They perch wherever the fuck they want. Some birds are apparently as "intelligent" as children, but I think they're actually way smarter than the bourgeoisie specifically because private property and national borders are all meaningless to them. The entire natural world is anarcho-communist and even Homo sapiens was like this for 95% of our time on Earth.

"No, actually you're wrong because birds have territories they defend and therefore capitalism is natural and we should all embrace it."

Really? Do birds enslave other birds to make money? Do they ever eat more food than they need? I don't fucking think so.

Also, birds are complex. Some are loners. Others hang out together. Sometimes different species even hang out together.

There are also far more bird species on Earth than there are mammal species. In some ways the reign of the dinosaurs never really ended.

When I lived in the American puppet state of "South Korea" I remember hearing about the wildlife in the DMZ and how certain birds there would fly back and forth between the DPRK and the "ROK" because they didn't give a fuck about the border. Based fucking birds.

Also, sometimes I saw spoonbills in the "ROK." That was really cool.

Right now there's a bunch of bluejays freaking out about something just outside my house. They get super active when it rains for some reason. That's why I'm writing this.

Assuming that the left gets its shit together before Homo sapiens goes extinct.

My vote goes to either the USA or France. Especially because the Paris Commune already happened. “Smeagol did it once...he can do it again!” Paris seems to have been packed with rioters 24/7 for several years. Not so different maybe from the American Midwest. The ruling class is investing heavily in police in both countries. It’s afraid!

I know this seems partly delusional of me and that there is far more hope in the Global South unifying and then strangling the imperial core from the outside. But still, gun to your head, pick an imperial core country and explain how and why it will fall first. Marx, after all, predicted that socialism would come first to those places that had progressed along capitalist development the most. (Yes, you are invited to explain how wrong I am about this.) The USA falling to socialism would probably cause the rest of the planet to fall the same way.

edit: my choices seem embarrassing now, thank you for enlightening me comrades.

I've only read the first few pages of Pedagogy of the Oppressed. It's really good. For anyone who struggles with basic theory, Freire writes with a pretty incredible clarity and succinctness. To me it reads almost like a rehashing of The Communist Manifesto, just without the words "proletariat," "bourgeoisie," "workers," etc.: oppressed people around the world must organize to overthrow their oppressors. All Freire seems to add is that they shouldn't be dickheads when they finally succeed. (He also throws some shade at philanthropy.) In contrast to modern Hegelians like Todd McGowan, Freire believes that contradiction can be overcome, that we can really build a fucking sweet new world free of oppression and dehumanization.

Anyway, this is my question. I've worked for many years as a teacher although I've actually never received any formal training or gone to teacher's college or anything like that. (I worked as an ESL teacher abroad and as a sub in Amerikkka.) I've heard that Pedagogy of the Oppressed is basically required reading if you intend to become a professional teacher in the USA. Yet we all know that nearly all American teachers are either libs or chuds. (I will say however in their defense that the average American teacher is probably way more open to human liberation than the average American.) But still: how the fuck can you read this shit and then basically lick the boots of the pigs on patrol in the hallways of the school you work at? How do you read Pedagogy of the Oppressed and then teach an American history class where you say that the founding fathers were guided by the ideal of liberty rather than their thirst for human blood?i

Edit: lol okay as it turns out I am completely wrong about this book being assigned reading in the USA.

I'm listening to RevLeft's episode on proletarian feminism and wondering about this. I think we can agree that in a global socialist society, the sex trade disappears. Under socialism, people only have sex because they want to. At the same time, almost all pornography produced under capitalism is itself produced under coercion. (A small number of porn stars are relatively wealthy and produce pornography because they enjoy it, not because they have to.) If a socialist society decides to make access to that pornography free for all, doesn't that mean that the porn stars (and all other workers involved in the production of pornography) are still being exploited, even if they're dead? In a socialist society, does all desire to jerk off to pornography wither away, since a sexual revolution has presumably also taken place and most people are relatively satisfied with regard to their sexual needs? Will some pornography still exist, produced by the proletariat for the consumption of the proletariat? Will future socialist porn stars be considered heroes of labor? I don't think we ever catch anyone in Star Trek jerking off to porn.

I was listening to Cosmopod’s recent episode on August Nimtz’s book about Lenin (The Ballot, The Streets, Or Both?) when they mentioned that a top Bolshevik leader, Malinovsky, had turned out to be an Okhrana agent provocateur—and not only that, these secret Okhrana agents (like Malinovsky) had actually assassinated high-level czarist officials on behalf of the police! That seemed so insane to me.

Until learning this recently, I had been guided by The Battle of Algiers, which features a scene, early on, where revolutionary forces test a new potential comrade by ordering him to murder a police officer. Their reasoning? A police informer would never actively harm the police. But the reality seems to be that police informers can be anyone and can do anything, and that ultimately it is impossible to detect all of them. (Lenin himself was fooled by multiple high-level Bolsheviks who were working for the police.)

I decided to take a look at Victor Serge’s book about the secret police ("What Everyone Should Know About State Repression"), published in 1926 after the USSR discovered and examined the Okhrana’s entire archives. It turns out that the police are incredibly powerful and sophisticated (duh), but so long as revolutionary forces are aligned with the proletariat, they will eventually triumph. Serge was probably feeling pretty optimistic, given the time and circumstances. The successful overthrow of the United States government is obviously not guaranteed. As Nimtz says in the podcast, the only thing we can guarantee is class struggle. We can't guarantee the victory of the proletariat, especially with nuclear weapons and climate change as factors.

Anyway, the Okhrana delivered its last paycheck to thousands of police informers the week before the February Revolution. Serge also claims that trying to outsmart the police (by deploying triple agents, for example) is useless, since whatever they tell the police is checked by other informants, and triple agents themselves only come into contact with one police officer, their handler.

Both of these sources—Nimtz’s book on electoralism versus street action, and Serge’s book about police infiltration—have tons of excellent advice for budding revolutionaries. The Cosmopod episode also mentions Democratic Centralism, which I had to actually look up: the idea that party members can freely discuss policy , but once the lower members vote on policy, their decisions are binding for all members. This is (apparently) a great way of maintaining party discipline and preventing factionalism, which we all know to be a major issue. Just thought I would share.

Links:

https://cosmopod.libsyn.com/revolutionary-parliamentarism-with-august-nimtz

https://www.marxists.org/archive/serge/1926/repression/index.htm

Also have to mention that someone here recommended this excellent podcast with Vivek Chibber, who discusses the current socialist moment as well as whether socialists should focus on race or class:

https://soundcloud.com/user-194914331/racecraft-feat-vivek-chibber?ref=clipboard&p=a&c=0