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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • iriyan@lemmygrad.mltoGenZedong@lemmygrad.ml*Permanently Deleted*
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    1 year ago

    Who are the non-westerners and why are we against westerners?

    What does this title have to do with the image?

    If 40 countries in Asia, Africa, even S.America would form a treaty against NATO, would that be automatically something to support?

    Shouldn’t we be a bit more critical against false binaries and polarization?

    Comrade Manning Marable said on the last US elections “the choice is between a neoliberal nightmare and a neofascist disaster”. It is such binaries we are becoming used worldwide in the last 2-3 decades, trying to choose what will cause the least amount of damage, the least of all evils, and can’t see a ray of light in the dark era capitalism has sentenced humanity and the planet.

    Anti-Trump, anti NATO, anti-EU, anti-coal, anti-oil, anti-electricity (why not?), anti global-warming, all those fronts that are all so manageable within capitalism, without much else changing, even if the fronts were victorious and won their battle. The warriors of those fronts at the end, tired and in ecstasy due to their victories, go home back to good all capitalism as usual.

    The thugs that took over and sucked Russia dry after 91 were cornered, isolated, and forced into a situation that the west forced them to. Still with enormous personal gains unlike the millions of Russians and Ukranians wasting their lives and their land, so BP can sell oil and gas out of Azerbaijan for a multiple of the profit predicted before war. And the US military machine can sell protectionism to puppets of their game such as the insignificant and dismantled capital of social-democracy. The Swedes are handing over communists to the Turkish butchers to execute or burry in a dirty prison. This is what is left of “socialist Sweden”. The glass-front of European anti-communism of post-ww2 Europe.


  • I think through your argument and question you provide a false definition or perceived difference and others here respond based on the false premise of this difference.

    The difference between “blue collar” “white collar” is not whether the one is working inisde an office/lab/building or outside in the field/machine room/dock etc. The difference has to do with the hierarchy of work/production itself. Whether you are doing the actual work that is part of production or overseeing the work done by others. Whether you are a secretary, a truck driver, a lab analysis technician, or a stock room clerk is not what makes you white collar. To oversee and direct the work of others doing work is what makes you white collar, even if you are in the field, whether you wear a suit or blue overalls doesn’t matter. I even had worked in a machine shop many ages ago where the owners themselves (2) would wear blue overalls and come to the shop and actually work the machines and tell new comers how to do something right, or how they wanted it done. Meanwhile there were people who wrote code/programmed machines to do mass-production (3d printing they call it 40y later) and never wore blue uniforms, they sat on a desk, read blueprints and typed in codes.

    In some work settings those who are “managers” and oversee others’ work can terrorize them to do it right or do more or face unemployment, they do evaluations and if they don’t like your face or think threatened by you as knowing more than they do, especially when you prove them wrong, and will burry your future of raise or promotion. Those are problematic when they are in union as they act as snitches of the bosses and are really never on the side of the worker.

    There can be engineers, material scientists, expert machinery technicians in the field, with construction boots whose only office may be a trailer parked in the mud. The bosses (owners) can not live without them, but their actual role of getting work done correctly or snitching on who is lurking and who is not, is a different issue.

    Who tells you what to do and what to not do, who threatens you with having work tomorrow or not having any, or how necessary it is to put in overtime (sometimes for free) or don’t expect to work too long or at a higher pay, or in a better position, are they in the union?


    Work for home is some bullshit notion that never did and never will work. The pathology of the capitalist is to actually see the army of the exploited and their managers on their means of production, not invisibly having work done off-site. There is “out-sourcing” for those things that can be done off-site. It is almost as a test to see who and when are essential and with the production can do without. So if your boss says take this task and do it home and bring the results in (or mail them in), it is a trap for being able to do without you. Those that physically must be at work are always more secure than those that work from home. Say people working on IT who must have access to the systems that need to be available for those lurking at home on their pijamas. If the servers are down and don’t respond there is not much you can do remotely to reset them or solve the problem.

    There is much of capitalism producing and reproducing psycho-pathology that results from the insecurity of the bosses, which of course is caused by class struggle. They have no illusion there position in wealth and power is never secure, everyone around them can benefit from their demise. In this respect they want to see faces, they want to employee people who are actually useless in production but assure them their ownership and operation is secure. So they pay extra for some white collar thugs to maintain a buffer zone between the exploiter and the exploited. They want someone else to be mean and nasty to workers so they don’t have the emotional weight of doing it themselves.



  • I want bullet trains

    The first word, I, is wrong, when the preceeding sentence is we. Why is a fast train preferred over a slow train, why the rush? Ask your average sporty cyclist, above 16kph(10mph) the effort needed to maintain speed or accelerate increases exponentially due to wind resistance. Same for any vehicle, land, sea, air. On whose clock are you running? The capitalist clock where time is money and money is time?

    What you want and what society needs may be in contradiction. Who decides what society needs? Popular vote, majority rule, experts, politicans, scientists, … everyone?

    We most definitely do not need fast trains, planes, or automobiles. The reason they are available is because they are profitable to someone(s).

    The world better slow down or it is burning itself up



  • I can understand English not being your native language, and it doesn’t really matter if one doesn’t speak a language well, as long as he/she honestly makes an effort to communicate.

    BUT, “imma hop to another distro” is pushing peoples patience a little too much, don’t you think?

    Gentoo turned to crap ever since they decided to adopt IBM’s trojan horse, elogind, and abandon consolekit2 and seatd which are active and adequate alternatives. But IBM must be paying well the heads of some distributions so they can become their little puppets.

    If using openshot is the reason to use linux, are you aware it is offered for windows 11 too?


  • Now wait a damn minute. It is not just the working class that owes loans for schooling, one may say the lowest economic class in the US made the least use of student loans, it is the middle class that benefitted the most. Kids that got out of public school and went straight to work, either in factory, construction, etc. made very little use of those loans. On the other hand some who did get loans may have used them as capital to escape work and are now well off, just didn’t feel like paying.

    The populist right invested in this reality and got a significant part of the real working class who never saw a student loan to “rightfully” say if you are going to donate 30-50.000 to others why not give me just as much too?

    The neoliberal nightmare (Biden) as brother/comrade Manning Marable called him (in contradiction to the “neo-fascist disaster” Trump) invested in appealing to this lower middle class of managerial stuff and their kids, to give them a gift so he can get elected. And he did probably on this promise for a gift himself. He may have known it wouldn’t legally make it all the way so it was a cheap promise to make. Who knows what’s next from this war-monger constitution abolitionist (covid violations of constitutional human rights).

    The 1.2 trillion of fake dollars printed and distributed wasn’t illegal, corporations sucked it all up, but loan wavers are, because they are not for everyone’s benefit.

    EDIT: To go to a short term trade school to get a license or certificate within months (such as CDL driver’s license) only costs a few thousands in loans and mostly the payments of were made sortly after by an employer. To go through university and graduate education loans could easily reach 50+ k$, for which an MBA could graduate, start an Inc. consulting/accounting/financing and as a person can have unpaid loans while their business could be bringing millions. Truck driver got 3000, and it was paid 6-9mos after first job. Golf-club life member owes $100k with penalties and interest and doesn’t care, it was government guaranteed and nobody is chasing to throw him in prison.


  • swiftessay: undefined> They are much more focused on ritual, on human connection, on sociality, and experience of the divine. And those things aren’t at all incompatible with a thoroughly materialistic view of how the sensible world works.

    Human connection, sociality (I’d say you mean socialization) are very much material, and so is behavior, communication, etc. The “experience of the divine” is beyond those, and you seem to want to mix things in order to connect them. How does one who is not a metaphysical believer exeperience the divine? If there is such divine how does it relate and affect our material existence?

    I know it is very mechanistic as is our understanding of the material world though science. Science, begins with certain axioms, assumptions if you will, and builds up on those in a rational way for which you can backtrack back to the assumptions at any point you are in doubt. Just to see if you have made an error somewhere in the “line” of thought and end up with incorrect conclusions.

    With metaphysical thought of any religion, eastern western, northern, southern, there is no such sequence, things are all over the place and not necesseraly need a connection.

    The Christian religion you attribute to European origin, may have spread through Europe initially, but it is just a fork of a middle eastern religion, Judaism in specific. So is islam, an non-European religion, also a fork of Judaism, Historically and archaeologically it is hard to separate Judaism from the Greek times and language, in which rationalism and materialism is born, and on top of this philosophical base science and methodology. The religious claims may be going back thousands of years but the scripts in their earliest found and mentioned references data back to Hellenistic times. Jesus comes 7 centuries after Heraclitus wrote, whose writings were available and are referenced by others in the library of Alexandria which christian clergy says were destroyed.

    To be a scientist or attempt to be scientific and serve metaphysical beliefs at the same time, if nothing else, to me it indicates mental contradiction and discomfort. If the metaphysical can not have any relation to anything physical/natural/material process or condition, why bother with it? It doesn’t belong in this universe and in this physical life and presence. Why would illusion be necessary to a someone in search for material reality, in order to know what to do to change it, or improve it? It can only be an obstacle.

    Is it because some religion serve as providing a social contract under which people are expected to behave against each other? We can do this by other agreements, social, political, legal. To maintain a social contract in fear of the metaphysical consequence is just a way to terrorize and manage humans to control them, with ultimate political and economic benefits of doing so.