meth_dragon

worry about how the reliance on industrialization will negatively impact our evolution if we overly rely on technology to do everything for us

this is my pet concern as well and it's always struck me as being bit darwinist. i cope by telling myself that instead of environmental evolutionary pressures, it'll be social and cultural pressures instead. so long as those pressures are grounded in material reality and are able effectively act on the population at large, we won't evolutionarily overfit and get stuck in some local minimum. all the more reason to prefer socialism over liberalism.

for me it felt like gaiman/ishiguro/murakami for kids

the main impressions i have left of it are of trippy kaleidoscopic space fabric and someone in a jar; i distinctly recall being very frustrated that the author did not bother to explain in great detail exactly how the space witch went from being a star to being a space witch

child me yearned for the spreadsheets

in parlance, he's called an uncle chan.

it's an interesting exercise to map racism and self hatred against class interests, particularly in the context of america and china's antagonistic relationship. mao's perenially applicable class analysis has changed somewhat over the years, but the gist remains the same: the big bourgeois landlords/compradors have morphed into corrupt officials and bureaucratic monopolists, the middle bourgeois are now real estate/insurance/finance goons or factory owners and right wing petty bourgeois have added techbros to their ranks.

in my experience, the big bourgeois are largely past this level of ingroup status signalling, they're too busy hustling their stolen capital out of china and race for them only matters insofar as who lets them stash their cash where. meanwhile, the middle bourgeois and the upper rungs of the petty bourgeois are likely most prone to this sort of behavior. they don't have enough cash or clout to feel like they're above the party, but they have a big enough amount of ill gotten goods/chips on their shoulder to make them feel like they might be arbitrarily targeted (or maybe they feel like they deserve more but for the intervention of the party), and so they channel that resentment into hating other chinese people.

less rich people also ape western affectations for a wider variety of reasons, but i will say that western media penetration into china is very deep and pervasive and that the 90s/chimerica years resulted in at least a generation of thought leaders and public intellectuals that are extremely ideologically compromised and it is unclear how fast their influence might be dissipated, if ever.

i am once again relieved that libs are too lazy and ignorant to investigate anything beyond the ccp bad that msm tells them, and that chinese libs hate themselves too much to think themselves worthy of educating their lib betters about cpc atrocity conspiracy theories.

though tbf at least shit like tiananmen is falsifiable, i think i'd have an aneurysm if white people on the internet started telling me that mao never left his palanquin and ate the PLA's entire stock of chicken over the course of the long march. like big spoon stalin but in earnest

obligatory mentions for tengger cavalry, nine treasures and SULD

i'm a freshwater guy myself but i also do paludariums and vivariums. always wanted to try a topoff only saltwater system based around mangrove filtration with macro and seagrass but am too nervous to make the plunge lol

what is hegemony? what is the balance of power? what is security? why did we need security from iraq? from libya? who or what was this security for? what was wrought by these conflicts that changed the lives of the average american for the better or more secure?

the MIC supported continuation of vietnam, who else supported it? who stood against? why? how was it ultimately settled? what were the consequences? why were these consequences? where are these people and parties today?

labor aristocracy work for people but the people they work for are sufficiently subsidized by global imperialism that they can compensate the labor aristocracy in a manner that would be equivalent to the bourgeoisie anywhere outside of the imperial core. the labor aristocracy understand this at a base level and thus tend to align their interests with the interests of imperialists and global capital accordingly. hence the fascist base comment.

from zak cope's divided world, divided class.

on class:

...class denotes a dynamic social relationship corresponding to the system of ownership, the organization of labour and the distribution of material wealth as mediated by ideological, cultural and political institutions and practices. Above all, class is the product of political practices, with the relationship between the state and class struggle revolving around the issue of class domination.

cope explains:

The bourgeoisie is that group in society which directly (through full or part ownership of the means of production) or indirectly (through being paid super-wages ) depends upon the exploitation of workers for the maintenance of its income. The working class is that group in society which sells its labour-power in order to make a liv­ing. The proletariat is that section of the working class creating val­ues under industrial (urban or rural) conditions which owns none of the means of production and is forced to subsist entirely upon wages equivalent to the value of labour-power.

The labour aristocracy is that section of the working class which bene­fits materially from imperialism and the attendant superexploitation of oppressed-nation workers. The super-wages received by the labour aristocracy allow for its accrual of savings and investment in proper­ty and business and thereby “middle-class” status, even if its earnings are, in fact, spent on luxury personal consumption.

The labour aristocracy cannot, however, be wholly equated with the middle class or petty bourgeoisie. Although the labour aristocracy forms part of the middle class, the middle class also encompasses self-employed property-owners, shopkeepers, small businessmen and professionals whose income largely does not derive from wage labour and whose characteristic ideology is bourgeois.

and lastly:

Ultimately, however, the embourgeoisement of the proletariat, that is, the creation of a middle-class working class, is a political question centred on increasing superexploitation. That is the explanation for the appearance and continued existence of a wealthy working class in the world s core nations. Imperialist national oppression is both the most crucial “historical and moral element” of global wage differen­tials and the sine qua non for working-class conservatism.

you invest it in (foreign) right wing radical organizations bent on overthrowing their democratically elected government. that way, when these groups eventually succeed due to your generous contributions they will allow you to swoop in and buy up their country's previously nationalized natural monopolies at bargain bin prices through local intermediaries at which point you can cut costs and inflate prices for the citizens of the entire country and receive many orders of magnitude ROI

it's win-win so long as you propagandize enough people about how this specific thing that you're doing is actually defined as democracy, they'll be totally ok with it and won't suspect a thing

authoritarianism is when you do things and get results, the more results you get the more authoritarian it is

true democracy is when so much nothing is happening that everyone is stochastically dissolving into elementary particles like it's the heat death of the universe

feels like thedeprogram sub hoovered up all the gzd people who missed the lifeboat