Most famous universities in the west are famous because they’re social institutions of the capitalist class, they’re pipelines into upper management positions in big companies or federal political office. Of course they’re up to horrible shit.
I’ve been watching a lot of documentaries lately and one thing that’s always missing from the mainstream ones is any sort of exploration into why the people or organizations involved do exploitative things. I understand of course why even a simple superficial questioning of the conditions that motivate bad behaviour is taboo. I’d love to see more documentaries with a dialectical materialist angle.
I want to see hopeful stories. I want to see a character start a story with some great idea about how to make the world better and see them start to make it happen, rather than be stopped by a super-powered imperialist “hero.” I want utopian stories which make us think about what humanity could accomplish and inspire us to work towards some of those ideals. I want to see the stories artists come up on their own time from their own heads, without deadlines or profit maximization infinite universes of never-ending fascism.
It’s ok, Amazon’s just gonna buy up the clinics and hospitals so they have legal access to all the records.
When you dig into this kind of stuff there’s so much to be suspicious about. It seems like most online privacy projects have links to the US intelligence apparatus. Signal is another big one for example, there’s reason to be suspicious about Proton Mail as well. The journalist Yasha Levine writes a lot about this topic.
This is almost crazier than the ideas that come out of Elon Musk’s drug induced human exploitation fantasies.
It’s not just the Greens anymore, their anti-science propaganda is so deep that most Germans believe it, or at least blindly accept it.
I am well into the Broken Earth trilogy in terms of fiction. There are so many interesting concepts developed in those books. For non-fiction I’ve just gotten into Super Imperialism, although I feel like I need a crash course on balance of payments to really grasp some of the concepts. Overall I enjoy reading science fiction the most, especially stories that imagine a reality beyond capitalism.
His main grift is stock price manipulation, I figured it was just that.
Inb4 Rogers increases prices 40% to invest in improved infrastructure increase profits some more.
I haven’t thought much about this yet personally, but my hot momentary take is that it has to do with class consciousness. I’m going to ignore the volume of anti-labour/anti-communist propaganda in capitalist nations for a moment as I’m not sure that’s as important to this. I also just read the essay "Masses, Elites, and Rebels: The Theory of “Brainwashing” which was pretty hot on lemmygrad a month ago which has definitely changed my perspective.
People in the west do not have class consciousness, or even the sense that class struggle exists and is happening. I think if you’d ask random people on the street they’d tell you that class is basically just income brackets.
Capitalism forces all of us to be selfish to an extent, so without a base level of class awareness and active class consciousness we often choose the path of highest rewar and lowest risk for ourselves. When the going gets tough in a union building situation for example, we can cash out as it were, and rat on management, thus turning the situation positive for ourselves.
Whereas in socialist countries, there is a common sense of class consciousness. Even if the thing your union or workplace or municipality is doing in this moment may not benefit you directly in this moment, you have been given the tools to see how it will be beneficial for your community, your class, and thus for you in the future. Or maybe it’s not beneficial to you personally at all, but again with that class consciousness in mind you still work towards that goal or at least step aside to allow others to do what they need to do to for the advancement of the cause.
I also question this idea of leftist infighting. I see a lot of it simply coming from the fact that a lot of self-proclaimed leftists aren’t leftists at all, and they get in to fights with radical anti-capitalists such as MLs. There’s not going to be any unity there without breaking the ideology to the point where it’s useless.
We’re definitely going back to company towns.
Not like any member states will be ready to support that many electric cars by then. It’s also just kicking the personal transportation time bomb another few years down the road.
I get the feeling he’s playing a little more liberal than he really is in an effort to not turn too many people away from the ideas. He’s really pragmatic while also being idealist and sticking to Marxist/ML concepts.
One of the most interesting things I find about his perspective is that he went to school with a bunch of the neoliberal ghouls currently helping the empire turn in on itself, and he calls them out on it.
I’ve been reading some novels from Chinese and Black authors (African American as well as African heritage). Even some western fiction isn’t as you describe, Ursula Le Guin for example is quite famous and often writes about various forms of non-capitalist societies. No its not visual art but the concepts and themes are quite different from the tropes we are used to in western fiction.
Let’s goooo!
I’ve also read that Tesla is having a hard time adjusting to German labour laws and expectations. Absolutely shocking. /s
One brand, I think it is Vizio, is specifically known for over the top selling of user data to “subsidize” the consumer facing price of the TV. Of course all of the brands do it but even the ones who are very transparent about it do well enough to stay on the market.
I have a Google TV based “smart” TV and use PiHole. The balance is blocking just the right queries to maintain acceptable privacy and security, while allowing queries which are necessary for desired functionality. The domains often change as well. These can be more efficiently blocked with RegEx queries but those have a higher chance of breaking functionality as well.
You can also deactivate the “smart” features or simply not connect the TV to the network.
M365 is a data collection tool, plain and simple. Of course they’re hawking it like their lives depend on it.