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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 27th, 2022

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  • STEM folks having low comphrehension of the world around them is very near the bottom of the west’s problems. A much bigger issue is most people specialising in history, philosophy, economics, international relations etc. not having a clue about their field. One can spend decades studying this or that monetary theory, but without reading the foremost critics of the system of economics, or even realising this system isn’t a natural thing given to us by a metaphor-god, it’s absolutely worthless. Studying history without a proper understanding of materialism is like building a brick wall, making massive holes and then filling them with foam.

    Worst of all in my opinion is that westerners can’t differentiate between theory, conjecture and speculation, regardless of education. Something’s only true or false based on one’s preconceived notions.





  • Their approach to game design is as simplistic as their approach to politics or ehatever this moron was thinking. The top 4 best selling video games are as follows:

    Minecraft: Enemies don’t direct you towards shit, they spawn in every direction.

    GTA5: In level design the claim sort of holds up but normally the enemies are pigs and again, they come from every which way.

    Tetris: No ”enemies” to fight.

    Wii sports: You don’t move around so moot point.

    #6 is Mario and that feels like it might be true but then again, the game forces you to go in that direction and shortcuts aren’t advertised by enemies.

    This isn’t my list of best games or anything, but to take a small level/dungeon design concept and to generalise it first to all games and then to life, vaguely, isn’t clever. This isn’t theology dear fellow, your starting position with a western education, some games and 0 books doesn’t grant authority for shit. I know this is just the musings of some kid, but most westerners are uneducated idealists who approach the world this way, and I’ve lost patience for it years ago.



  • My favourite part of the holding your baby fee story is that whenever the photo makes the rounds on reddit or wherever, people try to explain the situation, i.e. relay the explanation the PR department of the hospital issued. The “explanation” is that the regular procedure is to take the baby away immediately for medical reasons I don’t remember. Either the hospital is lying and this was a bullshit charge people with a newborn couldn’t object to, or they really have an inhuman procedure that charges a new mother for one of the most human things she can do. I don’t even know which would be worse.


  • No obvious fact I’m afraid. It’s only meagre analysis. If some disaster befell random oblasts scattered across the Union it may be true that a decentralised system could deal with it better. I wouldn;t make that argument but I’m willing to hear one out. Famine-causing disasters on the other hand, namely floods and drought, occur in lumps, in this case a large swathe from Belarus to Kazakhstan.

    Reading the correspondences in this matter, there seems to be nothing but confusion. Collective farms asking for seed, CPU members vaguely hinting at low sowing without ever explicitly saying there’s a famine to be alleviated and leadership of the Ukrainian SSR bemoaning the grain procurement demands of the CC of CPSU while working to over-export as late as December 1932. Kaganovich was sent to the Ukraine to sort out what was going on and it took him months to realise they were facing a famine and officials in Belarus were questioning the state of affairs since historically Ukraine had fed Belarus and not the other way around. I don’t really see any sort of decentralised system, be it at a soviet or oblast level, figuring out the situation to a significant degree, finding who might spare the grain and establishing the connection to get that grain over many hundreds of kilometres. I’ll hear out if you’ve got any ideas, but I just don’t find it realistic.



  • a more sort of decentralized or horizontal system should be able to better distribute food when a socialist project is still establishing itself and reorganizing or rebuilding its agriculture, right?

    That’s definitely not a takeaway from the famine of '32-'33. It took months for a powerful central government to sort through the conflicting reports from local officials, get an accurate picture and mount an alleviation. I don’t think it’s possible that decentralised system would’ve grasped the extent or even the fact of a famine in a more timely manner.



  • AmarkuntheGatherer@lemmygrad.mltoMemes@lemmygrad.mlDemocracy!
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    1 year ago

    You’ll have to forgive the copy-paste reply, I answered about the same question on r*ddit. Even if you aren’t read-up on DOR Korea enough to take it at face value that they’re socialists, there are key differences.

    We know for a fact that the Kim family aren’t enriching themselves or exploiting their country’s resources like the western backed dictators. If they were living with all the luxuries of the modern day bourgeoise or cheaply selling ores or whatever resources for cheap, that’d be quite difficult to hide. This is also why the only argument westerners have to prove their luxury is how fat they are in a country with such low obesity rates, obviously not a serious argument that merits a response. I don’t know about Kim Il-Sung or Kim Jong-Il’s positions, but Kim Jong-Un really isn’t in a position of supreme authority. In fact, he has less direct control over policy than most western leaders.

    On the other hand, Omar Bongo (the father) was literally installed by de Gaulle. He had french backing from day 1, he and his family lived in all the bourgeois luxuries and exploited the natural resources of the country to the benefit of France just like the rest of the neo-colonies in west Africa.

    Best way to learn about Korea would be to read up on the war and the writings of Kim Il-Sung. If you need convincing more than clarity, you can read Che and Fidel had to say about the DPRK.







  • I don’t recall how exactly it started, if I had to guess I’d say I made a remark impying all employers are exploiters. I tried to explain the concept of the surplus value in the simplest terms. I explained the simplest model, they said the worker doesn’t actually sell the product and that there’s other factors involved. I explained that logistics, selling etc are also labour and that I’m only talking on a simplistic model, that it can be expanded. They brought up an individual, a friend who happens to be a bourgeois leech, said he works hard (he does). I explained that his managership and ownership are essentially different hats, and that he could employ people to do the job, not work a second, and still go home with money. They mentioned insurances and shit.

    I got flustered. I had faith in the intelligence of these people, and they just said that. I don’t remember how it went later, but it got into the subject of risk. I said proles risk far more, life and limb, while capitalists risk comfort and ranking. One of them claimed he had many friends who lost everything they had, presumably he meant start-ups, he knew a lot of those. I guess I made a flippant remark because it got heates and we had to just arguing to cool off.

    At what point does this barrage of minutiae stop being honest questions and become sealioning? I can’t tell. It’s a cringy memory for me all around but if nothing else it was an experience.