If reddit and lemmy (to a lesser degree obviously) have anything in common, it’s that they both desperately need perspectives from outside the US to be heard more. I mean just knowing what is meant by “foreign”, shouldn’t happen. Like foreign to which country? Oh of course the global hegemon again… Why is this the default on an anti-imperialist site?
It’s remarkable how there are uncountably many non-normal numbers, yet they take up no space at all in the real numbers (form a null set), since almost all numbers are normal. And despite this, we can only prove normality for some specific classes of examples.
It helps me to think, how there are many “totally random” or non computable numbers, that are not normal because they don’t contain the digit 1.
Do they offer that much for information on any murder? Or does it depend on your class? (rhetorical questions)
There is one right there?
Because they are old. Ghosts are just the anthropomorphic manifestation of people’s fear of growing old. Religious framings are just an add on.
Trauma and grief can’t run their course if your mind is so senile and your short term memory so feeble, that you’re basically forced to live in the past. Forever repeating old arguments, reliving past trauma and never overcoming old fears. With your mind so set in it’s tracks, that you can’t even imagine leaving the place where you lived all your live — your “old haunt” so to speak. How could you live in the present, if you can’t even recognize your own children half of the time? But the long term memory often still works. Ghosts are real and if you’re lucky enough to live that long you might well become one. Of course aging isn’t always like this, it can be graceful and dignified but when it isn’t, that’s what people are afraid of.
People are scared, when they see older relatives acting stranger every day, especially in times before any way to diagnose Alzheimer’s and other forms of neural degradation. They might seem like they are not quite here anymore, like the person they were had long since died and yet, something lingers. Ghost stories are a socially acceptable way to express those fears.
Just observe the effects ghosts have on their victims: first, they are reminded of their own mortality. Then their hair suddenly turns white or gray or falls out, they lose sleep, wake up tired or grow old over night. They might lose their mind or die themselves. That’s all just normal aging.
Here is a handy key to select monsters and their meaning:
I recommend the podcast “the horror vanguard” for details.
Ah, that makes sense, thanks for taking the time!
Good effort comment, thanks! Are you sure about merit based evaluation for MJ? Wouldn’t people just strategically exaggerate their grades?
MJ encourages honest evaluation because exaggerating grades can backfire if too many others don’t follow suit.
I guess I don’t quite understand this point. Why wouldn’t everyone exaggerate grades?
Dolphin liberals would just tell all the dolphins to give dolphin Harris an excellent grade, insisting she was excellent in comparison to dolphin Trump. (Sorry to break out of the thought experiment.) So this:
This can help identify when all candidates are weak
wouldn’t happen when all the dolphins try to game the system. Did I misunderstand?
Why does it increase all over Canada though? Volcanic activity?
In addition to the advice about a group, like if you don’t have a group try to join one and talk to them and so on: In the meantime think about your limits and needs for yourself. It’s okay to feel overwhelmed and you don’t have to be able to deal with the stress in a certain way. You can still contribute meaningfully, if you know your triggers and are mindful of them. Decide beforehand, what to do if a situation is too much, like getting out or getting some distance or trying calming exercises.
Edit: You might even decide not to go to a protest, if police presence is too high and that’s okay too. You can still connect to people and help organize or render support.
Also talk to them beforehand about what you will do in specific situations, like if the police attack or threaten arrest or if it just feels like to much for you. Decide where to meet if you’re split up. You could have three meeting places for the start, middle and end of the route of the protest.
And within your group, you could have pairs or triplets of people who agree to stay together no matter what. Within these, the member least willing to engage further in an action or protest should determine when to leave with no shame or questions asked.
And talk to people afterwards too to debrief. This whole concept is called an affinity group.
Yes and also, nuclear power is really expensive. No one would ever invest in it without state help. No one insures it. The cost per watt is way to high and set to rise further with depleting uranium deposits. And much much higher, if it was mined in a slightly less destructive and exploitive way. Higher still if security precautions were forced to be up to date. Incredibly high, if waste was properly taken care of and the costs included in the calculation.
Nuclear power was never profitable. The only reason it ever gets founded is because governments are motivated by the urge to amass more and more deadly nuclear weapons. Or keep that option open. Or to feed the industrial complex that grew around that.
It’s the most roundaboud, stupid and primitive way to go about creating electricity to collect rare ultra poisonous, slightly warm rocks, throw enough of them into water until it boils and push that through something similar to a steam engine. All the technology around it is just to keep the rocks from poisoning us too quickly.
Compare that to all the genuine novel research that goes into solar and batteries. The advanced materials like complex semi conductor alloys. The clever techniques using the latest in quantum and nano technology. How they squeeze every bit of efficiency out of remotely collecting energy from the nuclear fusion in the sun, that’s already going on for free and at a save distance.
Nuclear energy on earth is superfluous, dangerous and expensive and every month new advancements are made in solar and battery and other genuinely green technologies, that make them even better and cheaper and widen the gap even more. And of course China is investing heavily in both solar and battery research.
Yes, exactly. I completely agree.
Yes, that’s definitely a good heuristic, if applied correctly.
All workers can understand that they are being exploited because they experience it, and rising up against the exploitation is a unifying idea.
If only that were true. But not yet. Class consciousness is lacking and structures like racism, sexism, etc. destroy class solidarity not just ideologically but materially. A cis, straight white male worker in the west is privileged in many very real ways, that allow him to profit off less privileged workers.
He profits from unpaid or badly paid reproductive labor and care work from women at home, can boss around racialized people in lower paying positions at work, has an advantage over openly queer people at the labour and housing market, has an material interest in maintaining global imperialism for a steady flow of cheap products and resources to his country and so on.
These are material contradictions in the marxian sense. Calling struggles around them “identity politics” can be problematic, because it implies, that they are only ideological rather than material.
Furthermore, they are structural. Sexism is needed in capitalism for reproductive labor. Racism for colonialism and imperialism.
So they have to be addressed along side the contradiction between socialized labor and privatized profits. Not just as an afterthought. That requires self criticism and giving up privileges. One can’t do that by dismissing struggles that don’t immediately concern oneself or saying:“Wait your turn, the main contradiction comes first”.
people end up being laser focused on their particular cause and see anybody championing a different cause as competition.
Yes, I agree, that we shouldn’t see these fights as separate or competing, but need to support all of them at once to unite them.
All in all the problem you describe is real, but not new, only it’s real name is not “identity politics” but opportunism. And that’s not foreign to labor struggles either. E.g. there are plenty of opportunistic unions.
I just checked, Polaris is about ten times younger than sharks. The other two stars of its ternary star system are older, but not visible to the naked eye, so early sharks would not have been able to use them for purposes of navigation.
Yes, class solidarity and class consciousness are necessary for revolution. But criticism of “identity politics” can serve reactionary purposes too and we have to be weary of it.
The forces that impose class injustice and economic exploitation are the same ones that propagate racism, sexism, militarism, ecological devastation, homophobia, xenophobia, and the like.
These are precisely the things, the ruling class uses to split the working class. Organizing against them is class solidarity. Denouncing genuine class solidarity as mere “identity politics” can be reactionary and it happened before, parties have split over it. E.g. trotzkists in Ireland (and all of Europe) split over queer rights, the feminist movement split over trans rights, anarchists in the Spanish civil war weakend themselves by excluding women from active battle to gain back international support that never came.
On the other hand, movements acting in solidarity but without class consciousness wield a blunt weapon and are therefore deemed “acceptable leftists” by the ruling class. They even go against class solidarity, when they opportunistically exclude or distance themselves from class struggle and revolutionary action. That’s of course, what Parenti has been saying all along.
Would you say you inherited some of his ‘working with one’s hands’ sensibility?
Maybe I did to some degree, but I rarely practiced it. Went to university and only did some small projects at home. Maybe I’ll practice more.
Yes, working together can feel so good if no one steals what you make as profit.
Thank you! It’s really awesome of you to make all these quality posts all the time and share these cool comics.
My grandfather, a machinist, build their house in his early twenties with his own hands. It was in a kind of cooperative, where you could pay in party by working on building sites to help others build their houses. So, even though he had help from others in the coop, he really effectively build identical houses multiple times. He learned as he went and did everything except electrical work, even the heating and plumbing. My grandparents raised five kids in this house. It really was his proudest accomplishment and near the end, he told the story again and again, almost every time I saw him and I made sure to listen.
The reason is that all those other things create actual value, thus cutting into profits of capitalists if publicly funded. If you’re a capitalist state that wants to steal massive amounts of wealth from the people and redistribute them to the rich by funding an Industry, then war really is the industry you want because it only destroys value. For example, if you cancelled the Pentagons budget and funded centrally planned healthcare instead, no private healthcare provider could compete. It would completely close down a huge market. Same with education, infrastructure, etc. War doesn’t have this problem of closing down a market, but has the advantage of opening up new markets (resources, cheap labour, more consumers, even rebuilding after the war, etc.) via imperialism.
Edit: In short, imperialism is in part a reaction to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and offers an opportunity to renew primitive accumulation.
Yes! Finally someone else who is amazed by this! It’s crazy to think, that magnetism can be understood as nothing more than a relativistic phenomenon.
Private space. I used to share one room with my siblings. It was alright as a child, but I don’t want to go back. And I know that many families around the world have very little space for two, three or four generations living under a roof.