immediately after you flop

Where did that happen??

Press should be free period, and the audience should hold them to a higher standard than they do

These are mutually exclusive demands. You cannot have a “free press” that is also “held to a higher standard”. Either they’re free to report what they want and be influenced by outside interests, or they’re held to a standard of fact-based and unbiased reporting. The two are almost never going to coincide, especially in a system driven by capital. Whether you want to face that reality or not is your prerogative.

You’d rather western press where they can publish any lie and denial of reality that suits capital interests? There are certain lies propagated by the west for the purpose of destabilizing the DPRK, which I don’t believe the DPRK is obligated to let float around in order for me to respect their democratic sovereignty.

You just won’t convince me that it’s a bad thing to enforce a shared observable reality which can be questioned and improved upon but not invented out of whole cloth to serve imperialist interests. The people don’t need to be told what their interests are; they’re the ones living their daily lives to observe that, and should be the ones doing the telling. Anything reported to them should be a plain factual recounting of events.

A democracy based on lies and manipulation is no democracy at all, which ironically happens to be what we have here in the west. For as “free” as our media purports to be, good luck getting any reach without a capitalist backing you in some form (especially before social media but even today; now that they’ve captured a large enough audience; the capitalists behind big tech are tightening up on what is allowed to have a platform). Which explains why you always see westerners project that onto any country they consider worse off and “authoritarian”, as if that is the sole reason why and actually “the free press” makes us immune to it.

I’m the opposite. Love automation (literally a programmer by trade lol), hate hate hate base building.

I’ve never played the game. Been meaning to for a while but so far have really only heard third-hand accounts of it. From the very little I know though that seems like a real possibility and honestly I prefer that interpretation.

@Jayjader@jlai.lu 's explanation gave me the impression it was nature’s way of fighting back against unsustainable practices. Like it lets you play as a bad guy and see the consequences of doing so, rather than pitting you against some diagetic evil and painting everything you do in a morally justified light.

I might have to eat crow on this one though, like I said I don’t even have entry level knowledge here.

There’s a section about this in the article. Plants take up lead from the soil they grow in (This phenomenon is actually well known and sometimes employed to decontaminate soil in brownfields; those plants aren’t used for human consumption though obvs) However, the companies don’t disclose where their raw goods are sourced from so it’s impossible to know for sure.

Liberals arent a singular group

They are when your definition of a liberal is material rather than aesthetic.

Yeah idk how they even measure that sort of thing and I’m skeptical as well, that’s just the numbers floating around. I wonder too if it’s tied to literacy in any way.

Though I suppose there are different ways for brains to work than just verbally. Some people’s brains turn sounds into colors (perfect pitch), some brains don’t have visual memory (aphantasia), and others supposedly have photographic memory. So who knows how this all actually shakes out.

Not necessarily

lol that’s not what I’m referring to. What they call themselves doesn’t matter, what matters is whether their policies/laws and/or philosophy/ideology align with neoliberal principals. In other words; we only care about the material reality of the matter. This is because Marxists follow a framework called dialectical materialism.

Words, especially those which a politician or lawmaker uses to market themselves to the public, are not material. They can’t be measured in any meaningful way and they don’t necessarily reflect reality. (You can, however, measure the material indications and effects of those words if you’re inclined to do so, but that’s besides my point.)

War is peace, apparently.

annihilation. great try though.

My best answer is to get diagnosed and treated for an anxiety disorder because these are not things that have ever popped into my head

It’s estimated that about 50-75% of people don’t have an internal monologue at all.

Put the rice in with the chicken. Problem solved.

nah. you will not catch me using a plastic receptacle in anything that gets hot enough to boil water. not on a regular basis at least.

Oh you know, only the ones making the laws.

I don’t think we should waste our time trying to convince fascists of anything (most of whom are the wealthy elites we outnumber anyways), other than by carrying out the consequences of their actions. Their interests are simply not aligned with ours.

That’s okay though, because threshold number of people required to disrupt the system and make real change is much smaller than you would think. All it takes is coordination between those of us that believe in upholding the dignity of the working class, and we gain that coordination by organizing and spreading class consciousness.

The thing is that most of the everyday people in the US already agree with us. Even Republican voters. Most people believe that housing, food, and healthcare should be affordable; that there should be real solutions to homelessness and crime; even bodily autonomy (pro-choice, gender affirming care) is popular among the people. It’s just that neither party puts up real solutions, both of them make excuses for why those things are not possible, and the Republicans are really good at making up scapegoats and creating non-solutions that sound really good to someone already conditioned to accept them, which the Democrats generally play along with and split the difference rather than putting up any real challenge or counter-argument.

As for the aesthetics of socialism, even Castro eventually had to spell out that it was, in fact, socialism that was responsible for all the gains they had made since their revolution - that the bogeymen they were so afraid of were simply projections made by their former oppressors. Working class consciousness doesn’t have to be 100% before anything can ever happen. It can grow as a result of our success after the fact.

Why is that? Have you ever spent time thinking about how that would be any more or less possible under the current system than, say, seizing the wealth of billionaires and socializing it back to the working class? How would the latter ever be possible by any means short of revolution, especially now if Trump gets his way? What will you do when the ruling class doesn’t put that kind of relief on the table? How much oppression and destruction will you consent to, if you believe liberation is not possible and things can only get worse from here?

If you don’t believe in it, you won’t fight for it. It’s a self fulfilling prophecy. That’s exactly why our system does everything in its power; both to obscure revolutionary working class history, and to inflate the state’s ability to repress dissent. So I’ll repeat this until the day I die: it’s been done before under worse circumstances.

Russians and Cubans were under brutal dictatorship. Haitians were completely enslaved by one of the most powerful colonial forces in their time. Vietnamese guerillas successfully fought off invasion by the single most militaristic nation in the world, and they aren’t alone in having done so (see North Korea, Afghanistan, Iraq, so on). If I could speculate, I’d say China’s political and economic situation in 1950 is a pretty reasonable outcome for the direction we’re heading now in the US. Regardless of how you feel about what came after each of these struggles, the factual reality is that these weren’t armies sponsored by any state. These were working class people fighting directly against the states that profited from their exploitation.

All of those people got organized and won liberation from their domestic oppressors, doing their part to weaken the empire, despite what would seem as insurmountable odds to a disorganized worker. It’s on us now to organize ourselves against our own oppressors, to get them off both our backs and theirs, and we can’t do that without maintaining optimism about our ability to win should we fight. We know that Fascism can only exist for so long until it cannibalizes itself. As a collective we are capable of beating it long before that comes to pass. If we allow the state to beat that optimism out of us then we are only greatly delaying our liberation and doing the ultimate disservice to our people.

“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.” - Ursula K. Le Guin

Is this about windows always turning on/waking my computer for no god damned reason every few hours, thus ensuring my computer is always on?