yeah on here. the left in general can be just as dumb as liberals when it comes to nuclear tech unfortunately
I would feel a lot better about nuclear power if the USA didn't have bridges falling down and crumbling infrastructure in general. So nuclear power good if the country isn't a crumbling shithole. Nuclear power not-so-good here and now until the USA gets its shit together.
that just means our government sucks though, you can mismanage other things and they will be far more dangerous than a nuclear plant's meltdown. for example: oil spills, chemical leaks, putting lead in your pipes, immediate area coal pollution (gives out more radiation than the average nuclear incident)... etc.
so yeah we gotta get rid of the government but thats nothing new. :monke-return:
Just because a particular shit hole country can't be trusted with it doesn't make it bad.
certain vegans are delusional if they think cultured meat isnt the only path forward for worldwide veganism. individualism, like with recycling and climate change, will not convert the world over to being vegan. and you will not be capable of amassing a purely vegan revolutionary army that somehow assimilates or subjugates all other competing socialist armies and chud armies that would arise in a civil war scenario. worldwide veganism simply wont happen without technology and making cultured meat cheaper and easier to produce.
now, the capitalists will likely still continue the old form of meat manufacturing. but a country like china would pounce on the ability to reduce the space required for meat production. and that is why their equivalent of the USDA has already approved it for production and there are already dozens upon dozens of restaurants that sell cultured meat in china and singapore. you can get a small portion of cultured chicken now in those places for 23 dollars.
the current issue is scale, but if you look at the graphs and trends, cultured chicken meat will be at scale and the same price as typical chicken in 2030-2040.
these 'certain vegans' argue against cultured meat for nebulous reasons like 'we have been producing vegetables for thousands of years! this new tech is a fantasy.' despite the fact that many crops are GMOs, have fertilizer and pesticides applied to them, and so on. and those things are necessary to keep the population of the planet fed. new technologies will be required to make mass farming methods ecological, too.
vegans that think this tech advancement is cool and good? completely fine and upright people, i like them.
also, there's a hidden benefit that the tech research for cultured meat helps with organ fabrication research so we dont have to rely on organ donations and anti-rejection medication.
the dream is highly optimized gmos and massive stacked hydroponics farms
Eat the bugs, live in the pod, own nothing, and be happy.
(or else)
The current issue is that we'll run out of climate before any of this nonsense is viable, so everyone will have to be vegan (or cannibal, if you insist) because mass animal agriculture will become untenable.
My main hangup about it is the body-horror-scifi-nightmare of creating lifeless flesh for consumption instead of just making it easier to not eat flesh.
also you should probably get over the hangup... its not unlikely that this tech will open up huge inroads for personalized medical science. think of the possibilities: you take a blood sample from a cancer patient and then you grow an organ based on their real dna. you can transplant a new organ in, or even more likely, test drugs on the organ to determine the efficacy against a particular kind of cancer. repeat and cancer as a riddle has become much easier to solve.
the possibilities are really endless for this sort of thing and will be crucial for treating many diseases and extending human life. cultured meat as a biproduct is just another way to contribute to the research.
edit:
also they could make fat cells pretty easy and give me big ol fat tiddies
nothing else is going to happen faster. unless youre in charge of the nuclear codes and we're ready to :monke-return:
I agree with the systemic analysis but have 1 nitpick and then a slightly different framing overall
these ‘certain vegans’ argue against cultured meat for nebulous reasons
The argument that I’ve heard isn’t nebulous at all. The production of these meats still involves raising animals for taste testing. So they’re not really vegan and that point at which they become vegan is kind of a ship of theseus thing.
And then framing-wise, I think there’s a tendency for some vegans to hear this sort of systemic analysis and add an implied “so therefore I can still kill animals without feeling bad”. And the reason they hear that is because that’s the way this argument is used against them all the time. You get enough reactionaries asking you “you think you’re better than me?” and eventually the temptation will be to answer “sure fuck it yes I am”.
I don’t think that’s what you’re doing here. Just trying to describe a pattern I see in vegan discourse.
for the purpose of the current tech, they use feathers that fall off a chicken. for other animals, they usually do blood draws. so yes, it will still require animals in captivity, but if people are gonna get butthurt over picking some feathers up while otherwise treating the animals very well, there's nothing to be done. one feather can make quite a lot of food too. and it will still be necessary to keep certain animals in captivity for conventional farming purposes.
No, we must take these animals bred for thousands of years to live in captivity and set them free. Domestic animals belong in the wild, where they will definitely live long happy lives and are definitely able to take care of themselves.
Oh I’m not talking about the source of the cultured meat. I’m talking about the source of the meat used in the taste test. It’s more similar to not using makeup tested on animals
im not quite following, are you saying they go and kill the animal to figure out how it tastes? the whole cultured meat thing arose out of research to reproduce organs and cells so we dont have to test products and pharmaceuticals on animals. plus its more convenient for the researchers, the idea is that by having the cells made in lab you can remove a lot of external factors.
Oh I see. I’m talking about commercially available versions of this. Maybe I’ve mixed up two kinds of meat alternative, in which case I’m sorry
You get enough reactionaries asking you “you think you’re better than me?” and eventually the temptation will be to answer “sure fuck it yes I am”.
Well, that's what veganism is, isn't it? People who are morally better than others.
If they could just lead by example and shut up about it, they'd be a lot more effective. But no, they have to tell everyone how superior they are, and in a (supposedly) egalitarian society that's going to rile a lot of people up, even people who would usually be on your side.
Well, that’s what veganism is, isn’t it? People who are morally better than others.
lol no
There’s a difference between doing morally preferable things and being smug and performative about it, so no
To be be fair to people who do a thing to be morally better are better than people who just as easily could but don't, then stubbornly defend that inaction on grounds of 'youre sanctimonious'
If it's not 16th century Leveller hymns it's not worth listening to.
I personally like to use it on the chuds who think Reagan said it and then watch them hurt themselves in confusion when they realize it was Karl.
I've also seen "under no pretext" thrown around the same way chuds throw around "shall not be infringed," and it sounds the same to anyone who doesn't already agree with you.
full context is [a] militia
lmao @ the Marx quote getting the same stretch as the 2nd Amendment gets in US politics.
I don't think it is that simple because you are assuming the people on the other end of that exchange will understand the nuance you mention when the reality is that there is a mistaken assumption that socialists are against violence and guns because these are right wing traits. I think there was a variation of that old meme that communists want to take your freedoms, your toothbrush, your guns etc...
When you throw the Marx quote around it should in the face of a lib in a bigger argument that you are NOT in fact on their side inherently(they take all leftists for granted mistaking real life for electorialism so they expect everyone to fall in line) just because you may agree things like school shootings are bad it doesn't mean you'll go around supporting whatever shitty pacifistic disarmament Democrat ideology and the broader picture of violence goes far beyond who gets access to guns or not.
They get to play the role of someone who is preoccupied with crime and violence while doing literally nothing to materially change society to actually reduce crime(e.g poverty alleviation) and they want to shame you into accepting their solution to the status quo i.e guns bad, guns in the hands of "problematic" people also bad etc.
The shit they pulled during the Floyd protests, all the civility anti-rioting/looting shit. They'll never be on our side, when the time comes they'll make sure that carrying a bottle or a stone will be as bad as a gun.
IMO I think you could make a reasonable list of vulnerable people who are never going to fight in a revolution so they don't need to be anywhere near a gun and that is fine and uncontroversial.
But from what I see sometimes there are people who genuinely believe in disarmament and want to go all the way if they could which is definitely Marx quote time.
I agree but I see it as strategically useful to ignore that context. It is simply rational to come to the conclusion that the proletariat must be armed in order to achieve revolution and the primary stumbling block of every attempt at any uprisings is usually "how do we get armed?" in countries where a high prevalence of weapons is not the norm. Without someone like the USSR to do the arming it's very important to promote.
The funny thing is that the Engels preface of the struggles in France also says that way of thinking became outdated.
Unions are good, but they are not revolutionary. In fact, a lot of the larger trade unions are so thoroughly tied to capitalist markets and so deeply captured by reaction that they are actually more of a threat to socialist organizing than a boon.
That's like...standard Marx though isn't it? Only the most pure Syndicalist would disagree (and national syndicalism is right there as a counter example.)
Even Marxists who ascribed radical roles to Unions like Luxemburg didn't think they could be revolutionary without direction from a party of revolutionaries.
Just my personal experience, I guess. Nearly every left-leaning person I interact with IRL lies somewhere along the syndicalist-ancom spectrum. This is a take that has gotten me in hot water with friends before.
Have you tried waving in the general direction of Falangeism/JONS and the original Action Française?
You'll have to explain that last one to me.
My go-tos for union skepticism are usually the truckers' strike that helped oust Allende, and the Solidarnosc movement in Poland.
But then that usually runs up against the "well, all governments are bad" argument.
So, in the late 19th century a bunch of French wierdos adapted Sorel and Proudhon's anarchist and syndicalist ideas to a heavily revanchist and pro tradcath revolutionary ideology marrying unionism to the defense of French "culture". Some were Corporatist, some Anarchist. All chuds.
These orgs (Action Francaise, Circle Proudhon) diverged rapidly from the anarchist movement (though there were repeated attempts at entryism into the CNT in Spain) and ended up spreading to Spain and Italy, where they were a key influence on proto-Fascism (Mussolini began as essentially a National Syndicalist before embracing Corporatism more strongly, and maintained Syndicalist measures until the late 20s where he finally caved to the ruling classes instead of the petty bourgois).
Later during the Spanish Civil Wars, they influenced the development of Flanagism (Franco's ideology) as well, though they rejected his centralisation of government, preferring a Fascist grand council of reactionary unions. As the Second Spanish Republic was formed they were gradually merged into the Falange however. A lot of Spains reactionary unions have heritage in this movement.
Christ. Really puts paid to the notion that MLs are the "red fash," don't it.
There’s a not insignificant overlap in rhetoric between the “red fash” anarcho-libs and the ancaps who insist that Hitler and Mussolini were big government socialists. In my experience, “all governments are bad” is a thought-terminating cliche. A principled analysis of power has a means of distinguishing between justified and unjustified hierarchy and can therefore compare the severity of abuse when that power is misused. But that’s a lot of work and not always situationally appropriate to actually walk through the analysis, so ymmv
Yeah, but then they go "Police arent workers ackshtually" and I've given up a perfectly good chance to be an utter edgelord and say "Anarchism is objectively the libertarian wing of Fascism"
I don't think even the Most Pure Syndicalist thinks unions are inherently revolutionary. Syndicalism is the belief that radical, revolutionary unions are the best path towards revolution, but it's also the belief that unions that aren't radical and revolutionary are shit at being unions.
I would love to hear about western examples of non-union organization that unions are actually a threat to. As far as I know, all of the non-union organizations has happened exclusively outside of the imperial core (which says a lot about how cool and good Maoism is)
When a friend joined a local mechanics union, they made him sign a contract swearing that he did not and would not, while a union member, belong to a communist or socialist party. When I was a teamster, reaction and anti-communism ran deep with just about everyone I worked with. Because of course it did, it had to. We were the beneficiaries of an agreement between imperial capital and imperial labor. They gave us good pay and good benefits, and in exchange we didn't rock the boat. Fostered an anti-boat-rocking culture.
Sure, teamsters will still fight back whenever capital steps too far over line and threatens that agreement. But it's not for the building of a better society. It's just protecting their interests.
The job of communists in labor unions is to convince their co-workers that being part of a larger socialist workers' movement and party is good. We've had some success on that front, I think, in teachers and nurses' unions specifically. But the unions tied more to market commodity production and distribution, like teamsters and painters, are substantially and often systemically less class-concious.
And to answer your question more directly, unionized cops pissed on the Black Panthers' breakfast food for kids.
Struggle sessions? WASTE OF TIME. Play video game, talk to someone, have fun. Why fight on the internet? Because it's cool? WORDS OF THE UTTERLY DERANGED! They played us for fools.
i'm gonna make a bideo bame called "Struggle Session" and nobody can stop me except my own brain
No no just one video game, no more. After playing 1 vidya, you cycle thru the list.
Struggle sessions as they're portrayed on here, yeah (bad faith interpretations of the other position, debatebro-ism); but dialectical discussion to find truth seems useful. Let's engage dialectically
America has practically no worthwile leftist anything and the only cause that matters internationally is the anti-war movement.
You're basically right, but I'm not convinced the anti-war movement has any legs in America either. Most people just don't care, and those that do don't have any power. Iraq being revealed to be a war based on lies was big news, but the interventions in Libya and Syria being based on the same shit? Barely a footnote.
Iraq being revealed to be a war based on lies was big news
How many war criminals were executed? :thinking-about-it:
Yeah, the bottom line is that Americans aren't interested enough in the rest of the world to build a socialist movement around anti-war sentiment (and that goes double for the more complex idea of anti-imperialism). I don't see any scenario where there's a broad anti-war movement that later turns into socialism. It didn't happen during opposition to Iraq, Vietnam, WWI, the Spanish-American War, etc., etc., etc.
On the other hand, I can see a socialist movement focused on domestic policies gaining steam and that later turning into not only an anti-war movement, but an anti-imperial one. There's a well-beaten path from Medicare for All to "yeah, I'm a socialist" to "holy shit we need to tear down this imperial death machine."
You know things are bad when Trumptards became anti-war. Like, WTF.
Doesn’t mean it couldn’t exist though. Still a lot of people here who it matters whether or not they starve to death
Mao had a bad haircut.
China is too capitalist sometimes.
China is too capitalist sometimes.
Hand on the Bible and gun to my head, I think there is a good chance that what is happening in China is largely how it will remain. Even if Xi Jinping is a genuine communist (this seems to be an open question, as I understand), the stated transition to socialism is around 2050. By that point, Xi would be nearly 100 years old. He likely would not still be the head of government, if he would even still be alive.
There could be a case where Xi's successor and other higher ups in the government and/or party have thoughts along the lines of "We got this powerful being like this, why should we change it up?", not to mention that nationalizing their manufacturing for foreign organizations would be giving up a lot of leverage they have.
To be clear, I think China could become socialist and that would be great, but it is hardly a guarantee.
I think it comes down to whatever makes someone succeed within the CCP. All organizations eventually become led by people who do whatever action gains power within that organization. Then they continue doing whatever that is, because the organization selects for it.
Whatever Xi believes and whatever the nominal goals of the CCP are don't really matter in the long run. Did Xi succeed in making an organization where advancing the cause of communism makes you gain power within the organization? Are other people that do this a threat to your own career? It's harder than just believing in the right things.
The degenerative effects of the dictatorship of capital will eventually rear their ugly head. There is the tendency for the rate of profit to fall, nationwide sprint toward automating as much as possible as fast as possible in production (replacing workers with dead capital) and both climate change and embargoes pushing China towards a closed loop and planned economy. If the BRI is successful there will be fewer and fewer countries for capitalists, including China's capitalists, to extract surplus value from.
The contradictions are only becoming stronger, and hopefully China, with its fully digitized currency and 4th-industrial-revolution economy with IOT reading inputs and outputs in real time, hopefully socialist revolution and the centralization of economic production with accounting based on labor hours will be inevitable regardless of whose in charge.
And even if it doesn't happen in China, the country is non-interventionist and already supports more Orthodox Marxist projects like the DPRK.
Let's just hope the backlash to Xi Jinping pseudo-nationalizing tutoring and the three mountains (Healthcare, Education, Housing) doesn't scare the party away from Socialism 2035.
They might require another revolution. That new state might require yet another revolution. It might be revolutions all the way to near communism. The anarchist who remain all the way might be the final revolutionaries to force the whittling away of the state.
I don’t give a shit if you’re vegan, it won’t matter until a mass class politic institutes veganism as an official state policy through genuine state socialist planning. Everything else is aesthetics
Exactly, veganism is a movement which seeks to grow to a point where such a policy can be achieved.
BDS actually tries to lean on the state via protests and exert political power. The boycotts of apartheid South Africa didn’t work when it was an individual effort, they started to matter when they gained mass appeal and became a governmental issue. BDS as a personal lifestyle choice will not, in fact, secure the bag
Oh my God yes. Like, even in an armed resistance situation, they neglect literally everything else and all their devices are already so heavily pre-pwnd and integrated into their lives that they can't put them down.
Because it's humiliating to straight men, and puts women in the "power" role. That's why it's so favored, it gives the middle finger to straight men. And the perfect reply to anyone who doesn't want to do it: "A real man doesn't feel threatened by this and is secure in his masculinity. Now, bend over or you're a pussy." Works every time. It's beautiful.
Just that act. Anal play is a lot better with other things, such as fingers/hands, as well as just simply holding the toy, since your hands are more limited than your hips.
Now, why is it fine with genitals? Mutual pleasure, as well as more awareness of your own body.
I think people celebrate pegging because it allows you to be horny on main and avoid the problematic connotations of being horny on main. More so than than the actual specifc act of pegging. Which, from what I have seen is pretty fun.
"Holy shit it would be so cool if a bunch of leftists pointed their swords at me"
Force the vote was a DNC funded op used to both whip the squad into shape and divide the left
The reasons vegans act like they do is because the majority of bullies are also bullied. Also, we need to get better at hiding our power level and infiltrating other groups to pull people our way. We can't beat fascists playing nice because the game is so heavily rigged in their favor. And, lots of leftists and "leftists" also need to stop freaking out about anime. Yeah, the cartoon woman has big breasts. I don't care if she'd have back problems "in real life," I'm not watching a documentary. it also doesn't matter if an adult watches a problematic show so long as they are capable of critical thought. yeah, the writer is a little misogynistic, but so's every cartoon from the last 60 years. I already have an ideology I practice and refine, I'm not going to give it up because of something I saw on TV.
"hey barney, we earned the land from the neanderthals. They just weren't using it enough."
There's a fairly recent Flintstones comic that has this as the exact premise
Fred and Barney are both vets who killed Neanderthals in a war of extermination because the Bedrock town elders wanted more land and resources
It's actually pretty good in a "Fred Flintstone wakes up screaming in the middle of the night" kind of way
"Barney, the sweet taste of winston's cigarettes is the cloying sweetness of blood! Every mellow puff draws us closer to perdition's flame, and the cries of our wives for help with housework is as nothing as the souls crying out against us!" "okay fred, want another one?" ".......yes."
Yeah, there's a lot of weird Hanna-Barbera comics from the last five years or so
Scooby Apocalypse: What if Scooby-Doo, but in a post-apocalyptic world filled with monsters?
Huckleberry Hound: What if Tennessee Williams was a blue dog?
Elmer Fudd vs. Batman: I don't have to explain this one
Get them however you like, they're entertaining light reads
Refusing to continue consuming media because that media has a new and upsetting context for you now is fine. Refusing to continue consuming media because you see it a symbol of the evil in the world is literally an anthropological lot recognized form of magical thinking. Which you know, is fine as long as you’re doing it on purpose
The left puts far too much emphasis on reading the original works of long-dead thinkers who lived in circumstances far removed from anything we have today. We're not going to build a mass movement around 150-year-old books originally published in German. We should use the ideas from those books, but 90% of the emphasis should be on how those ideas apply to the problems of today, not on close readings of the original works.
You can learn physics without reading a page of Newton's original works, and you should be able to learn socialism without reading a page of Marx. We should be repackaging leftist ideas to directly address what people care about here and now -- that's what Lenin, Mao, and other revolutionaries did.
The problem with this is that, unlike physics books, any books written to modernize for example Marx's works are heavily based on interpretations of his works. It's not a matter of simple equations, those works have to be interpreted to be modernized, and historically, his works have multiple conflicting interpretations. Of course, not everyone needs to read Capital, but a lot more people inside the movements should read it than currently have.
To me, it seems absurd to suggest the left focuses too much on reading old books, when it feels like only a small minority of leftists could explain even simple concepts like use and exchange value.
How does reading theory vs watching video essays or David Harvey lectures, solve the interpretation problem? If more people read the book directly, would there be fewer interpretations? I’m just not following the argument here.
90% of the emphasis should be on how those ideas apply to the problems of today
I see this argument brought up a lot but nobody has brought up how Marx or Lenin's analyses have actually fallen out of date or how labor relations have changed since then.
this, i think its all still remarkably cogent today. Some of the stuff is honestly prescient, it makes even more sense in todays context. I cant quote it directly, but I think Marx even wrote about the rise of branding well before it happened.
