I hate to think what else this pig has done. Stay safe out there.

does anyone have a XHS link to the post?

I agree that you don't need the LTV to argue that we are exploited. You just need a simple moral argument, "my limited time on earth should not be 1000x less valuable than your limited time on earth."

But I also think that if we are Marxists we should be able to articulate and defend some form of Marxism, especially if it comes up organically in conversation. If we can't do that, we look like cranks.

that's all good, but not directly relevant to the kind of conversation I'm thinking of. Suppose people are already talking about "what communists think about economics." For example, maybe someone says, "I've heard that communists don't believe in supply and demand? is that true?"

@TheLepidopterists@hexbear.net I made a thread in emoji@hexbear.net about the maybe-later-kiddo person. https://hexbear.net/post/4313486

If you have their socials you could post them there and I'll edit them into the post

i'm also not trying to convince people who are already entrenched neoliberals. I'm thinking of less-committed people who might read the comments of entrenched neoliberals, and will be easily swayed by them unless they hear an alternative. And I'm thinking of hexbear users who might try to argue with neoliberals out in the wild. As communists we need to be able to communicate in a variety of contexts, including when people start talking about economics. Here on hexbear we can help each other do that. Hexbears carry rhetoric from this site out into the world, so with that in mind we should try to come up with some good rhetoric here.

You might be picturing something slightly simpler than I had in mind. My intended audience is lay people who are interested in economics. "Economics" is one avenue of attack against Marxism as a body of thought. Because Marxist economics is not the standard academic position, we are vulnerable to being accused of "not understanding economics." If we want to defend against this, we should learn to articulate our position in clear, simple, concrete language, simple enough that people think, "How could that possibly be wrong?" This forces liberals to contend with the arguments instead of brushing them aside, and most liberals are not capable of this.

I want to leave it open. Someone might argue that the labor cost is itself determined by supply and demand, for example.

*Basically, I don't know what lines of argument I should expect to see, so I want to keep the prompt open-ended.

The LTV says that socially necessary labor time largely determines the equilibrium about which prices fluctuate, while supply and demand contribute to the fluctuation

That would be cute, you should give it a shot!

how much of this is just the government preferring TikTok over xiaohongshu/LRB/rednote?

And yet the violence didn’t even occur in the square, it was over on Chang’an avenue iirc, involving a completely different group of people than the student protestors. So it’s more like, “there were violent clashes elsewhere in NYC but literally nothing happened at OWS.”

Here’s our megathread of articles and sources on Tiananmen. It could use some editing though. https://hexbear.net/post/271448

Wouldn't it look bad if we banned our own ambassador account?

have discussions about the future of hexbear or possible changes on hexbear, not matrix

This would be more democratic, which is good, but could lead to struggle sessions erupting in those threads if we're not careful. I think it could work if we enforced strict conduct rules in meta discussion threads, like the "no fighting with other users" rule in this current thread we're in.

This is a great idea.

If it's a @bureaucrat-type account, though, it needs accountability. There needs to be a record of who wrote what as that account.

Just some musing: I also think the tone should not be too stiff or formal. It should feel like a human being behind the account. We aim for a queer commie dive bar vibe here, and the ambassador(s) should represent that too. The tone should be knowledgeable but not self-important. This also helps undermine the stereotype of communists as dogmatic fanatics.

Here you go https://hexbear.net/post/271448

Schlaaang Super Seat in real life

https://youtu.be/T0StyKPJrNY

I once wrote a youtube comment that merely listed a series of locations and dates where America toppled socialist movements or governments. It was in response to someone, I said something like “Tell that to [list].”

The comment got shadow-deleted.

I once, as a test, wrote a comment that merely said “West Bank.” Shadow-deleted. At that point I think my account was flagged for talking about Palestine, so the censor was stricter for me.

There is also fierce censorship on the major subreddits. I don’t really post on reddit so I haven’t experienced it, but the censorship is flagrant enough that I think a lot of people are aware of it.

Then you have Snowden’s leaks, arrests and assassinations of whistleblowers, mysterious deaths of civil rights activists during the George Floyd protests, a media in near lockstep with the State Department, widespread involvement of the military and intelligence communities in Hollywood (Theaters of War discusses this), rampant propaganda about foreign countries, and… oh, right, the actual fucking wars and interventions America conducts constantly. US involvement in the Middle East since 9/11 has contributed to over 4 million deaths and displaced over 38 million refugees by some counts. America midwifed the conflict in Ukraine for a decade or more. The Gaza genocide is just an acute expression of standard US foreign policy.

We have a government owned by corporations. 70% of Americans want single-payer healthcare but our politicians would never dream of it, because they’re all vetted and bribed. The housing industry is gamed by big finance. Rents are skyrocketing while the bulk of our politicians are landlords themselves. Adjusting for inflation, the minimum wage has fallen 50% since the 70s. The opiate crisis continues unchecked. The food industry has free rein to sell the most addictive, obesogenic foods science can conceive of. Student debt is insane. There’s infinite money for war but no money to help ordinary people, because politicians don’t want people to realize that change is possible.

We have a megathread debunking Tiananmen here, do we have one for Xinjiang? It would be nice to put all the evidence in one place