Can you tell me more about the march that was basically erased from the media? Or post a link?

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probably downloaded a book from libgen that was only available as an epub

I keep my tolerance low by only taking meds 3–5 days a week. If not for tolerance I would take it every day.

Maybe it's labor discipline? SW might put upward pressure on wages as employers compete with a form of lucrative self-employment available to millions of workers?

I want to second what propter_hog said, being a leftist is a process. There is always more to learn about the world and the forces that drive it. Keep learning, and develop some healthy skepticism and media literacy with regard to capitalist depictions of socialist countries, and you're on track.

do banks have a material incentive to crack down on SW?

(We’re trying to warn y’all about banking discrimination and the dangers of facial recognition technology too but that’s a subject for another post. Just know that they always test their hateful tech tools on us first, then roll them out for the respectables and normals.)

I look forward to that post!

I can talk to people, but it often feels fake to me. I don't have a coherent sense of self, let alone the social awareness to package myself to others in a way that is both authentic and lands well, so it's hard to be real with people. And, consequently, it's hard for me to form strong, lasting ties to other people. Music is basically the only medium in which I feel like a person.

*I'm working on it though

Stuff with drones sickens me in a different way. Something about the mixture of total impunity and fine control.

Speaking of formatting, if you see a comment with interesting formatting and want to know how they did it, you can click the "view source" button at the bottom of the comment

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Thanks for the rec!

this is great, really succinct, I probably will show this to people

price is more correlated with exchange value than wages, and exchange value is correlated with the amount of labor time that went into the commodity

Indirectly, isn't this saying that price correlates more with labor input than wages? How can that be? Aren't the two multiplicative? The capitalist pays for wages x hours.

I'll tell you my understanding, and you tell me if it matches or disagrees with yours:

My understanding is that price correlates with labor cost (wages x hours) because competition between capitalist firms drives prices down until they are close to costs, and most costs are ultimately labor costs—e.g., metal costs money because someone had to dig it up and smelt it. Capitalists manage to profit only because competition is imperfect, due to a combination of price-fixing, oligopoly, and "consumer irrationality"—to use the dorky term for "I buy food from the place closer to my house even if the place across town sells it slightly cheaper, and there is so much variety on the shelves that I can't always make an objectively optimal choice."

As for exchange value... my understanding is that exchange value, like price, also correlates to labor cost. Concretely, the idea is that you can log onto ebay and sell some stuff, then use the money to buy different stuff, and when lots of people do this you start to get a consensus about the relative values of different goods compared to each other. That makes sense to me, but, ultimately, doesn't exchange value tie back to the price charged by the original producer, which ties back to the labor cost? I don't understand the idea that prices correlate more with exchange value than wages, I don't see how price can correlate with one and not the other.

I'm still learning all this theory so I don't know if I have it all right in my head

Really though, I genuinely hope so too. I am really happy with how it has been handled since lyudmila started posting.

Yeah, me too, it's a relief to see people decompress and process things now that the action is over. I just wish we could have moved at this pace from the start.

I've gotten so much out of this site over the years, I hope we can keep things going here for many years to come.

No there weren't, that's a reductive representation... [paragraph I'm still wrapping my head around]

Sorry if I got it wrong. I don't have a very good understanding of what happened.

That said, I'm not here to re-litigate the details of what happened. I probably shouldn't have tried to find a real example.

My point is that the thread was not a functional discussion. People were escalating and not listening.

Following your analogy: The french revolution could have been avoided if the royalists weren't dumbasses

My analogy is that certain situations have their own emergent properties, not that the causes of a revolution can be mapped to the causes of a struggle session. I'm talking about the chaos itself.

Struggle sessions and revolutions are both examples of situations that gain a life of their own. Emergent effects dominate over the desires of the participants. No one's in control of the situation.

My takeaway is that we have to look at what happened and finally confront the current structure of moderation of hexbear is one that is inherently flawed.

That might well be, but I hope we can talk about it slowly and patiently from here on out.

My understanding is that struggle sessions are rarely one-sided, they're a feedback loop of escalation, hurt, and defensiveness in which all sides contribute. In this session, for example, there were comments accusing the mods of being a cabal of power-seeking transphobes. That's an escalation that shuts down discussion rather than fosters it.

I make the analogy that, just as revolutions tend to be chaotic and bloody regardless of their ideological content—libs conveniently forget how mess the French revolution was—struggle sessions have their own realities independent of the specific topic and specific people involved. The same unstable feedback loops arise in any struggle session.

My takeaway is that, in general, looking past this specific struggle session, we all have to work together to foster healthier discussion dynamics here.

We might benefit from a new thread mode for conflicts. "Slow mode" or "struggle session mode" or "effortposts only mode."

boycotting products /groups that advertise on their videos.

and pressure campaigns against those advertisers.

I think targeting the advertisers is the big one. It would work better if MeToo still existed, but the Biden campaign killed that. Maybe MeToo can be resurrected as an offshoot of the abortion rights struggle that will be escalating in the upcoming years. Maybe campaigns can appeal to parents of daughters. "This is what YouTube is telling your daughter's male classmates." "This is what those male classmates are saying. [Some vile quotes]" "YouTube is profiting off of victimizing your children."

Why would capitalist owned media companies stop boosting capitalist, right-wing propaganda?

Not voluntarily, but mass action can sometimes force concessions.