redtea

Hello Comrades,

Thanks for all your advice about setting up Linux. It was a success. The problem is that I'm now I'm intrigued and I'd like to play around a bit more.

I'm thinking of building a cheap-ish computer but I have a few questions. I'll split them into separate posts to make things easier. Note: I won't be installing anything that I can't get to work on Linux.

Question about storage and swap memory.

I plan to install an SSD of maybe 128–256GB for the system files and a larger HDD for storage. I would partition the SSD so that I could install a few different distros without losing any installation. This way I can commit to some longer experiments before deciding which distro to use.

The question is: should I have the swap partition on the SSD (with the OS partition) or (separately) on the HDD?

And if I install multiple distros, do I need a different swap partition for each one? For example, if I install 16GB RAM, do I need a 16GB partition for, say, Mint, Debian, and Ubuntu? Or can I let them 'share' the swap partition?

Are there any additional security/privacy risks of installing more than one distro on the same SSD card?

This is a parallel text experiment. It's not a my translation. It's the text from the Spanish and English editions on Marxists.org. There are some differences. I won't indent – it's all quotes, from the title onwards. (Edit: footnotes removed.) I'll split it into this into a post and a comment. Hispanohablantes, feel free to point out and correct errors.

Spanish first, then the English, alternating paragraphs.

Déjame saber si este es útil.

Let me know if this is useful.

Pensé que el texto seleccionado es relativamente fácil entender.

I thought that the text selected is relatively easy to understand.

**Mao Tse-tung, 'Stalin: Amigo del pueblo chino'.

… 'Stalin: Friend of the Chinese people'**

Este veintiuno de diciembre, el camarada Stalin cumplirá sesenta[uno] años. Es fácil imaginar que su cumpleaños suscitará cálidas y afectuosas congratulaciones en los corazones de todos los revolucionarios del mundo que conocen esta fecha.

On the Twenty-first of December, Comrade Stalin will be sixty[one] years old. We can be sure that his birthday will evoke warm and affectionate congratulations from the hearts of all revolutionary people throughout the world who know of the occasion.

Felicitar a Stalin no es una formalidad. Felicitar a Stalin significa apoyarlo, apoyar su causa, la victoria del socialismo y el rumbo que él señala a la humanidad, significa apoyar a un amigo querido. Pues hoy la gran mayoría de la humanidad está sufriendo y sólo puede liberarse de sus sufrimientos siguiendo el rumbo señalado por Stalin y contando con su ayuda.

Congratulating Stalin is not a formality. Congratulating Stalin means supporting him and his cause, supporting the victory of socialism, and the way forward for mankind which he points out, it means supporting a dear friend. For the great majority of mankind today are suffering, and mankind can free itself from suffering only by the road pointed out by Stalin and with his help.

Nosotros, el pueblo chino, estamos atravesando el período de los más amargos sufrimientos de nuestra historia, un período en que necesitamos más que nunca de la ayuda de otros. Como dice el Libro de las odas, "El ave canta buscando el eco de sus amigos." Este es precisamente nuestro caso.

Living in a period of the bitterest suffering in our history, we Chinese people most urgently need help from others. The Book of Odes says, "A bird sings out to draw a friend's response." This aptly describes our present situation.

Pero ¿quienes son nuestros amigos?

But who are our friends?

Una clase de "amigos" son los que se adjudican ellos mismos el título de amigos del pueblo chino; algunos chinos, irreflexivamente, los llaman también amigos. Pero tales "amigos" no pertenecen sino a la categoría de Li Lin-fu, primer ministro de la dinastía Tang, que tenía fama de ser un hombre con "miel en los labios y ponzoña en el corazón". Son, en efecto, amigos de ese tipo. ¿De quiénes se trata? De lo imperialistas, que declaran tener simpatía por China.

There are so-called friends, self-styled friends of the Chinese people, whom even some Chinese unthinkingly accept as friends. But such friends can only be classed with Li Lin-fu, the prime minister in the Tang Dynasty who was notorious as a man with "honey on his lips and murder in his heart". They are indeed "friends" with "honey on their lips and murder in their hearts". Who are these people? They are the imperialists who profess sympathy with China.

En cambio, hay otra clase de amigos, los que sienten real simpatía por nosotros y nos tratan como hermanos. ¿Quiénes son? El pueblo soviético y Stalin.

However, there are friends of another kind, friends who have real sympathy with us and regard us as brothers. Who are they? They are the Soviet people and Stalin.

Ningún otro país ha renunciado a sus privilegios en China; únicamente la Unión Soviética lo ha hecho.

No other country has renounced its privileges in China; the Soviet Union alone has done so.

Durante nuestra Primera Gran Revolución, todos los imperialistas se opusieron a nosotros; únicamente la Unión Soviética nos ayudó.

All the imperialists opposed us during our First Great Revolution; the Soviet Union alone helped us.

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/986807

Here's a long list of texts about race and racism.

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/986808

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/986807

Here's a long list of texts about race and racism.

Hopefully this works. It might be time limited.

The 'Shorts' reel on the CGTN Español YouTube channel includes loads of short Xi quotes. The text is in English but the audio is in Spanish and there are Spanish subtitles. Looks like a good way to absorb some Spanish vocab, grammar, and pronunciation while learning about Xi.

Edit: better link (I hope)

Someone curious asked:

Do you know of any resources where I can hear the options of average Soviet citizens during the time of the USSR?

I linked Dessaline's GitHub page: https://dessalines.github.io/essays/socialism_faq.html#did-the-citizens-of-the-soviet-union-dislike-their-government.

And I suggested Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds but I don't think it quite fits the description.

Can anyone think of other resources, maybe a peoples' history kind of thing?

I've not used this yet, but it could be useful for creating parallel texts for Spanish learners.

El conflicto ucraniano desenmascara a Occidente.

Rusia sigue luchando por la formación de un nuevo orden mundial justo, en el que terminará con la dictadura de Estados Unidos y surgirán nuevos polos de fuerza del mundo multipolar; y uno de ellos será la América Latina. …

No es nada nueva la política estadounidense de sabotear a los gobiernos soberanos, autónomos que no se les arrodillan, ¡revisemos la historia! durante la Guerra fría por ejemplo, Washington financió a los rebeldes radicales en la América Latina y participó activamente en el derrocamiento de los gobiernos latinoamericanos electos legítimamente, principalmente aquellos que colaboraron con La Unión soviética. Para esa fecha, la casa Blanca exhibía públicamente y sin pudor su ambición, convertir nuestro continente en su patio trasero y controlar rigurosamente todos los procesos que se desarrollan en la región. …

Una vez más la crisis de Ucrania demostró la arrogancia y el descaro de la política exterior de los Estados Unidos y el gran desprecio que sienten por los intereses legítimos de los estados. Sus intentos de mantener la dominación mundial tuvieron efecto contrario y provocaron el surgimiento de los nuevos centros de poder en la arena internacional y evidentemente entre ellos los países de América Latina.

"Entre los días 5 al 10 de junio de 1967 las fuerzas sionistas, atacaron a los ejércitos de Egipto, Siria, Irak y Jordania bajo el pretexto, que las fuerzas egipcias apostadas en la península del Sinaí representaban un peligro para Israel. …"

('apostadas' significa 'posted'/'stationed')

Este artículo debe ser bastante comprensible para Marxistas aun si ya no logró un nivel alto en español.

Algunos cuestiones para otro aprendices de español:

1. ¿Que sucede en Asia Occidental en mil novecientos sesenta y siete?
2. ¿Quiénes eran los beligerantes?
3. ¿Que significa 'tergiversar'? (Lenin también usa mucho este palabra.)
4. ¿Qué te gusta o no gusta de este artículo?

Hispanohablantes, sentir bienvenidos a responder también.

(Feel free to correct my Spanish.)

I've wanted to go over to Linux for a long time but I have no idea how to go about it. I hear about incompatibility problems with hardware and all the different options for different Linux OS's and that's it, I forget about it for a while to avoid the headache.

So where do I start? I don't even know how to choose hardware or what to look for. The number of options with Linux makes things a little confusing.

And although others here have answered the question before, I'm unsure what I have to do to stay 'safe' on Linux. Are there extra steps or is it just the standard, don't open dodgy links and turn off Java script in the PDF viewer kind of thing? Does Linux come with a trustworthy firewall/antivirus/malware detection? Is there a chance of Linux e.g. sending my passwords, etc, to someone or just letting someone into my harddrive? I hear that 'open source' means people can check the code but how do I know if someone has checked the code—I wouldn't know what to look for myself.

I followed the Linux subreddit but the users the can be rather… enthusiastic, which is great, but I need something far more basic to get started lol.

Is there a good step-by-step guide somewhere? Or can anyone give me some pointers/tips/advice?

I mainly browse, type, and read pdfs and other text files. No gaming, although I wouldn't be opposed to it. No need to be mobile; laptops are terrible for my back so I always use an external monitor, anyway, so I won't be using it 'on the go'.

Edit: Thanks for all the advice. I got a machine up and running from a bootable USB.

Any others who read the comments here because they're interested in trying out Linux – if you have Windows installed and want to keep it on your HDD/SSD, partition your drive within Windows. Then boot from the USB. You can partition your drive (and keep Windows) from the bootable USB but it's a bit more complicated and it makes it harder to create a swap partition and a storage partition. I had to go back and forth a few times to figure this out.

Omg I've been here for a year today!

I just wanted to thank everyone for making this place what it is. I've never been much of a poster elsewhere because I can't stand much internet drama. But here, where good faith is the starting point, I feel that I can talk as I wish and have meaningful conversations and interactions.

Take care, everyone.

This isn't intended to close the debate on what counts as socialism. It's a comment I wrote in one of the federated instances that I suspect will be deleted. So I'm posting the text here as I thought it might generate some good discussion:

It's okay for us to disagree on our assessments of AES, but these disagreements must be based on some common understandings. I don't think we're there at the moment. Partly this comes down to the way language has shifted in the last 200 years.

The dictatorship of the proletariat is to be contrasted with a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. It means 'dictatorship' in the way that liberal democracies are dictatorships because they are governed by consistent (class based) institutions that hold executive, legislative, and judicial power.

The meaning of dictatorship has changed. Back then it more clearly meant something like 'governance by', and Marx's contemporaries would have inferred this meaning.

A dictatorship of the proletariat means the workers, not the capitalists, control the state and the means of production. In the words of one scholar, it means something like:

… either state-controlled [where the state is controlled by the proletariat] or private-but-worker-controlled economy with a democratically elected government and not necessarily single party.

The idea being that capitalism is a class-based political economy, and communism is the abolition of classes. The dictatorship of the proletariat is the stage of history where the workers have control of the state/means of production. Once the workers have such control, the distinction between bourgeois and proletariat falls apart. At that point we have reached communism.

You might even challenge the way that this has been tried so far. I would say to look again, if so. But either way, it doesn't change the theory. One can detest the way that an idea has been put into practice without rejecting the theory. As Kwame Ture advises, an ideology should be judged by it's principles, not it's practicioners.

No state has yet reached communism. The very idea is an oxymoron as communism is stateless. What some few states have begun to achieve (but no state has quite got there yet, as the class struggle is ongoing, although China, at least, is close) is socialism.

Marx used different terms in different works to discuss all this. As primarily a critic of capitalism, he didn't really flesh out a theory of socialism or communism in the way that you suggest. For that, we must look to Engels and to Lenin's State and Revolution. Nonetheless, a birds eye view of Marx's work reveals that he advocated for socialism (a dictatorship is the proletariat) as a stepping stone to communism. The logic of this progression grows directly out of an historical materialist analysis of class society.

At the same time, there is another sense of the Marxist concept of communism, but I don't think this is the one you mean. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels wrote:

We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. Further, in the Communist Manifesto, they wrote: Communists everywhere support any revolutionary movement against the existing social and political conditions.

In this sense, Marxist-Leninists are 'literally communists' but Marxist-Leninist states cannot be 'literal[] communism' but they are socialist (or trying to be).

If you want to read a short text about socialist governance, you might enjoy Roland Boer, Friedrich Engels and the Foundations of Socialist Governance. His Socialism with Chinese Characteristics may also be of interest for giving a detailed analysis of governance in China.

You can still disagree with MLs, AES, and the above definitions and propose other definitions, but that would involve speaking at cross purposes. It might also involve idealism because throughout history the only revolutionary socialist projects to have succeeded for a significant time have been guided by Marxism-Leninism. It's okay (albeit idealist) to have a different concept of socialism but a definition based on concrete examples must look to Marxism-Leninism.

And one cannot simply dismiss the experience of the attempt of billions of people trying to build socialism as not socialism because it doesn't match an esoteric and contrasting definition of socialism.

Edit: the scholar referred to in the text is the person I was replying to, who criticised the DotP but gave a definition of socialism that could describe a DotP.