Mathematics student who upon completion of his degree was ripped from the university's caring bosom and cast into the ghastly cold world of employment

  • 5 Posts
  • 376 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
cake
Cake day: February 2nd, 2021

help-circle



  • Communist parties do not "await" revolution. When you only wait for revolution, you will keep doing that forever. Communist parties work towards forcing a revolution (to the best of their abilities), by bringing about the conditions under which revolutions are successful, and this means organising, building a public presence, teaching theory, and supporting the actions of the revolutionary element of society, such as unionised labour, student groups, and the proletariat in industry and service economy.

    They also protest against the police state and the war machine, engage in antifascist activism, and try mitigating the most immediate environmental and psychological effects of capitalism while they are unfolding.






  • People genuinely without political awareness do not believe they have existential enemies. They think all it takes to change a Nazi's mind is a sound and well-structured argument, for the sake of which they are willing to let them talk back and entertain their talking points, as if anyone ever becomes a Nazi on the basis of rational consideration. This wishful thinking may be exacerbated by a common liberal fallacy that balanced equals unbiased and that unbiased equals true or trustworthy.

    Right-wingers on the other hand do everything they can to try to rehabilitate and excuse even the worst figures amongst their ranks, because it broadens the acceptance their ideology can find. If someone points out Rommel's colonial aspirations and murderous exploits to expand the reach of Hitler's empire into Africa, they fall back on saying they're not an expert and did not know about his crimes, even immediately after telling their "nuanced" stories about him.


  • Functioning under capitalism is the highest form of lying. You must put nice words in white print on your resume or else a bot will reject it. You must brazenly invent years of experience in interviews for an entry-level job or else they won't hire you. You must wear a grinning mask when dealing with a customer under all circumstances or else the deal might fail. You must act like your dearest and most interesting things in the world are spreadsheets and sales pitches, or else you'll be reprimanded and then fired. The whole thing is a hologram of paper-mache painted to look like marble, one facade after another, there is no place for humans, only for their images. Nothing in this economic system is about truth, or justice, or even basic respect. It's all about appearances.










  • There is some popular knowledge about Soviet-era science-fiction, but although there are several books you can find in Western libraries like Obruchev's Plutonia, Tolstoy's Aelita, or the Strugatsky Brothers' short stories, the discussion about Soviet science-fiction books specifically always remains in the shadows of movies like Stalker or Solaris. I think this is only partially due to a Western bias and has more to do with the fact that Soviet leadership has always emphasised the importance of cinema as a medium all the way back since Lenin.