Yeah I hear sustenance farming was great for the elderly and disabled. Do they deserve commodities? Workers have to produce surplus if society cares about non-workers.

I'm upvoting this and all posts about wsb. For the Discourse.

something something David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs

I think it's highly likely that for every post showing a successful payout, there are dozens of lurkers who have lost even more. Considering the fact that the majority of professional brokers/traders perform worse than index funds, I worry that it encourages desperate people to essentially gamble away what little they have and lose it to Capitalists.

tfw you love Socialist Realism but hate Norman Rockwell

For New York:

Write-in results are shown in the aggregate. Individual names for write-ins are only published in the official results and only by the State Board if a write-in candidate is a winner.

TIL Bill Maher has nuanced opinions about Religion

You know that Islam isn't a singular monolithic ideology, right? Like any religion, specific sects can be great allies to the Left while others are committed enemies. Most people who describe themselves as religious don't even have strongly-held theological or political beliefs, and the ones they do hold are often rife with contradictions. This is a Bill Maher tier post.

Still not convinced this isn't just a PR stunt. The current media landscape has made running for President (and other prominent offices) and losing an incredibly lucrative endeavor. Not just with figures like Buttigieg/Stacy Abrams, but look at Marianne Williamson's public profile now: I'm sure her next book will see better sales.

A debate with a mute button is the final form of the American Presidential "Debate" - two people standing kinda near each other having entirely separate conversations with themselves to pander to their particular base. Both will lie; nothing matters.

I mean my state rep has full-on Russiagate brain, and posts about how any COVID-19 research/vaccine out of Russia should be ignored; they also tweet out China fearmongering often. I still voted for them the first time around when they primaried out a shitty incumbent, but probably won't vote for them again.

I think feed-based social media platforms can be a place to learn new things and find amusing distractions at best and at worst they are a place to simply score personal points against others and waste huge amounts of time.

Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, and all similarly-designed platforms are disasters for curating and presenting information in a coherent sequence.

This short essay is something I think about a lot regarding the amazing potential that the internet held, and how shitty most of the internet ended up being:

The promise of the internet, as I recall it from growing up in the 1990s, was that you’d be able to use your access to it to browse an incredibly rich network of interconnected information with a structure that emerged organically from the links between pages and websites: the World Wide Web. Even the first implementation of HTML fell far short of the potential of the original vision for hypertext, but it showed how powerful this new, networked method of organizing information could be.

That emergent, organic structure is destroyed by being shoved through the narrow hose of a content feed. A linear sequence of undifferentiated items, ordered only by how much of a reaction they get out of you. It’s there, you respond, and then it’s gone. Then a year or three later you may get reminded of it. Every technical decision is made in deference to the eternal present of ephemeral items in a feed. The idea of searching through my own message history with someone I know for something they sent me months ago is a distant joke; finding something that I want to see again without remembering who posted it is even more so. It’s cheaper that way: older resources not in the “current” index are loaded only as they are needed - needed not by users, but by the platform. The density and complexity created by users is hidden away, indexed into an archive no one can see.

In the end, perhaps, maybe the other 1990s metaphor for the internet won out: the "information superhighway." Everyone going slowly in the exact same direction, wracked with gridlock, fighting for a tiny bit of momentary space, day after day after day. What seemed to be the fastest and easiest way of getting to your destination ended up being incredibly stressful and occasionally lethal.

from a strategic perspective, we'd be far better off if we don't let the existing platforms set the terms of the debate.

That's very reasonable.

Is left antinatalism absolute? Isn't the logical endpoint of antinatalism the extermination of humanity?

No future revolution will ever be lead by Leninists, MLs, Maoists, Trots, etc, etc. We'll simply retrospectively name future revolutionary actors after their contemporary leader(s). The aforementioned tendencies may be influential in guiding future revolutionary action, but they are inherently insufficient in scope and tactics for the 21st century. The world is not as it was.

I recently moved to Europe from the US, and in my city there's a pretty huge incentive for households to recycle. Trash for curbside pickup has to be in these specific brightly colored bags with the correct logo that cost roughly $2 USD per 35-Liter/10-Gallon bag. Curbside compost pickup is twice weekly and cardboard recycling pickup is once a week, which is free. It's also free to recycle PET bottles, glass, aluminum, batteries, etc. This has really transformed my own approach to waste and recycling: now I only use about 1.5-2 trash bags per month. Plastic/Carbon taxes are of course still a good idea and need wide implementation ASAP.

This article and its framing is a bit heavy-handed, in that recycling isn't bad per se, but our systemic plastic usage is absolutely destroying our planet. "It's not worth recycling plastic" misses nuance and takes a profit-oriented approach to the issue. The recycling of PET and HDPE plastics should be encouraged and subsidized, while we need to move away from most other plastics (and single-use containers in general).

The original Three R's framework is absolutely fantastic, and has simply been co-opted by capitalists. Reducing, Reusing, and Recycling are all good and necessary when appropriately administered in an economy.

Yeah the Hexbear is okay as far as mascots go, but it's also a weak unclear brand. I personally kinda like the name of the old Chapo discord: Dirtbag HQ. But if the Chapo.chat name/brand gets dropped, it'll have to be replaced with something at least vaguely leftist-sounding.

The General Intellect Unit discord is fairly legit. But yeah, we need more of the above for sure. We need to be actively encouraging the development of new Theory and Praxis outside of the academy. I think that's kinda the goal of Catalyst magazine also.

correct. I also think dialectics add an unnecessary layer of mysticism to material analysis. Contemporary research methods in the Social Sciences with paired with simple terminology is better.