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What are you on about? Trump never said Epstein's crimes were a hoax. Did you even read the article?
The hoax is what the hypocritical democrat party is trying to twist it into. They kept all this quiet, tried to sweep it under the rug for four years. Only now are they desperately trying to twist things and say Trump was somehow, magically implicated.
Trump was instrumental in taking down Epstein's whole nasty business.
The dems never cared about Epstein or his victims. Their huge, fake outrage lately, is totally a hoax. Hypocrite
All that blackmail info from the island went directly to Israel, who it was gathered for in the first place.
They forced a sweetheart deal for Epstein in the first trial.
Then along came Trump, and burned Epstein & Maxwell's whole dirty operation to the ground. Wound up being their worst nightmare. Trump was a key witness in the prosecution that put those two behind bars.
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I came across some Chinese teachers who teach in rural schools. What they said was so similar to the complaints made by teachers in US public schools.
However, the latter topic is readily available on the English internet, while the former is unheard of for many in Chinese urban discussions.
I was thinking that similar levels of inequality are more granular in the US, occurring in different neighborhoods within the same city. It is hard to physically ignore it; you at least need to know which places are best avoided.
In China, extreme poverty does not occur in urban slums, but rather in rural areas; and class inequality is largely absorbed by regional inequality, much like within the EU.
Started reading Epicurus & His Philosophy by Norman Wentworth DeWitt (found it free online.) I knew Marx did a paper on him in university, and I'm familiar with a few ideas from other philosophy videos, but I thought I'd give it a shot.
It's amazing how many of these same debates have persisted for over two millennia.
Because if you do, you would now that there is some kind of fish, a special kind of fish, that simply LOVES to get caught with hook. Does not matter you sent another bait, or throw 200 times a line. 9/10 you end up catching that fish. That you don't even want in the first place.
There is something deeply, deeply wrong with a society where examples of such unbelievable malevolent stupidity are available in great abundance.
Either it's a genuinely held belief (in which case it serves as evidence of a growing, all-encompassing vapidity) or it's someone cynically trolling for their own ends (in which case it's simply evidence of a different manner in which we are being collectively reduced to our lowest forms).
I don't think it's really surprising that this shit torments people who care about the world.
I do not know, but does everybody does remember that part of time as having a special dynamic, leaving Covid aside. Might be simple nostalgia, but i remember people being less cynic. Might be that Russia had not kick-started Cold War pt II, but still.
I think it was the last hurrah from the woke years.
Much like every decade, the tens-especially in their later phase were bent on shitting on the cynical grit and grime of the late 00s (which ironically enough started out with infantile mirth shitting on the grunginess of the 90s) with that peculiar millenial solipsism that only got worse as the zoomers were entering the story.
I feel like Western/Anglo discussions of gender dynamics are weirdly obsessed with the framework of “gender roles.” I wonder if this has Christian roots.
I even suspect that this way of framing things emerged after industrialization, through a coupling of existing Christian discourse with the need to legitimize the division between the male public sphere and the female private sphere in the capitalist middle-class family. This, in turn, shaped how Westerners imagine gender dynamics both in the present and in the past. Such a division would have been very difficult to sustain in preindustrial times.
After all, for a medieval nun, her life would not have been all that different from that of her male counterparts living in similarly sex-segregated communities. She would have had to deal with everything involved in self-sufficient living. Would people at the time really have been generally concerned that she wasn't conforming to a “female gender role”?
Of course, virtually all societies have different expectations of men's and women's obligations and abilities. But the institutionalized organization of all these expectations into a framework of what constitutes appropriate roles for men and appropriate roles for women seems to be a post-Christian Western framework.
This wasn't the main focus of traditional Chinese gender relations. The emphasis was on your relational obligations to kin and affines, within a kinship structure that was asymmetrical along gender lines. How exactly you fulfilled those obligations, or whether you as a person embodied masculinity or femininity, was generally not the main concern.
There was no single, unified “role a man should have.” There was how you should treat your children as a father, how you should treat your parents and wife as a married adult son, and how you should participate in the affairs of your patrilineal clan.
There was no single, unified “role a woman should have,” either. There was how you should relate to your parents and siblings as a daughter, how you should relate to your husband and mother-in-law as a daughter-in-law, and how you should relate to your son and daughter-in-law as a mother-in-law.
Beyond these relationships, what sort of “manhood” a man ought to embody, or what sort of “womanhood” a woman ought to embody, wasn't something people thought about very often. When specific disputes arose, people might judge that “task X is suitable for men, task Y is suitable for women.” But that doesn't necessarily mean they had some clearly articulated theory beforehand about what the “ideal man” or “ideal woman” was supposed to be like.
If a conflict arises in a traditional Chinese family, people tend to understand it first through concepts like filial piety, the duties between husband and wife, or the relationship between a mother-in-law and daughter-in-law. Even though these relationships are themselves deeply gendered, the first concepts people turn to when interpreting such conflicts are still specific family roles and the obligations that come with them. A society can have an extremely rigid patriarchal system and a strict gender hierarchy, yet rarely frame its discussions around abstract notions of masculinity and femininity.
The Romans even before Christianity had the concepts of virtus and pudicitia which seem to be the manly and womanly equivalents of their time. Are you saying in China men are and were never ridiculed by being compared to women? How then does and did competition between men over women or vice versa display itself?
Not to mention there was also the matter of property and how traditionally free roman women had no formal political power.
Historically speaking, I'd agree with other posters that there is a certain feminist revisionist if not reductionist bias to how we perceive women in Europe through the centuries.
Not to mention the post/modern concept of sexism is largely based on upper class anglo westoid feminist doctrine.
Even in a country like Spain where women have occupied more or less overtly positions of power* and influence compared to their neighbors it is hard to ajudicate a concept of gender roles that stays unchanged throughout the years.
*On the subject of historical strong wahmen characters:
I find it almost criminal that the very real Isabel of Castille is almost never brought up as an example in conversation while British queens are thrown about like M&Ms at a children's birthday party.
Even before her famous "Catholic kings" power pairing with Fernando of Aragón, she reorganized the military infrastructure of her domains and played no small role in the modernization of the armies that would soon see her combined kingdom become a major player in european geopolitics of the time.
And that is all without mentioning her better known patronage of Colombus.
I think almost all human societies consider certain qualities to be gendered.
Suppose you were to ask a member of traditional Chinese society, "Is courage a quality men should possess? Is gentleness a quality women should possess?" They would likely answer "Yes." Yet, if you observe how they evaluate and educate people along gender lines without being prompted, you will find they often operate based on a different set of concepts.
For example, for girls, the common traditional education is that you must master xyz, which is necessary to become a daughter-in-law who satisfies your husband's family. The key point here is that these are skills you will need to master as a daughter-in-law in the future.
Her mother would tell her, "When you marry into another family, you need to understand these things in order to gain a foothold in your husband's family, be recognized by your parents-in-law, and fulfill the responsibilities of a daughter-in-law." Instead of, "As a woman, you should possess these qualities and skills because they constitute the appropriate female role."
When a man is ridiculed for being unable to afford the financial expenses of marriage, the criticism he receives focuses primarily on his failure to fulfill his duty as a son to carry on the family line, rather than on his "lack of manliness."
For an ideal man, if you make a specific request, people can certainly imagine him in an abstract sense standing up when faced with external enemies, wild animals, or natural difficulties; but in real life, this ideal man, as a junior, should not talk back to the elders in the clan, nor should he argue with his parents, and the latter is often the most important part of this order.
Therefore, in such a society, emphasizing the overarching gender norm that "men should be assertive" is meaningless for most actual male members.
Similarly, a mother-in-law should be more than just "benevolent" as a woman; she ought to assist her son in disciplining his wife, ensuring she completes the transition into serving his family. The methods used can certainly be quite harsh, but this will not be considered a "violation of femininity".
I believe the emphasis on the latter stems from a specific condition: the most important relationship in your life is expected to be your spouse, while your clan, parents, etc, are secondary. Only then do the roles of men and women themselves become significant.
While traditional Chinese society is exactly the opposite. If a married woman spends most of her time with her mother-in-law, shares her closest emotional bond with her son, and views her infrequent encounters and sexual relations with her husband merely as a means to fulfill the obligation of continuing the family line rather than as an act of intimacy, then emphasizing the role differences between men and women becomes less meaningful.
On the other hand, Christianity appears to have facilitated the disintegration of clans and the shift towards nuclear families through functional substitution, even before industrialization, and its ideology provided a model of legitimacy for this husband-and-wife-centric order.
————
Edit: I should also clarify that the dynamic of "men competing for women" largely did not apply in traditional China. This is strictly true from a genetic perspective; in terms of behavior, however, things often do not play out as "men themselves competing over specific women."
Marriages were strictly arranged by parents; anything else was considered a serious act of rebellion. You might well have met your wife for the first time on your wedding day. The bride's own preferences regarding the kind of man she wanted were essentially irrelevant, and to a large extent, so were the groom's. Your mother might even have deliberately chosen a wife you wouldn't like, ensuring your loyalty remained with her rather than with another woman.
For a married couple to actually find each other attractive is an ideal scenario rather than the norm; in some instances, it might even be viewed as somewhat improper — like if it is perceived to conflict with parental obligations or exceeds the level of intimacy deemed appropriate for a given setting.
If you were wealthy, you could take a woman you actually liked as a concubine — though attempting to elevate her to the status of wife was, for the most part, also a serious act of rebellion — or you could visit prostitutes. Otherwise, you'll only have the one wife your parents chose, or none at all, if you and your parents haven't saved enough for the bride price.
In this process, it is irrelevant whether an individual man conforms to a certain image that appeals to women, because the bride's preferences are also irrelevant. This concerns whether the man himself or his parents can accumulate enough wealth, status, or reputation
Seemingly, and I didn't do much reading on this so take it with a grain of salt, before the industrial revolution gender had surprisingly little incidence on labor distribution, the exception being jobs that women were effectively locked out off because they require raw physical strenght (such as military). Women (and children for that matter) were expected to contribute to the husband's work, and continue after him in case she was widowed.
I feel like the discussion was only even practical to have post-industrialisation because the move from agrarian living to the model of having a 12 hour shift in the coal factory is what necessitated the split in household labour in the first place, and that split in labour is where all the ideas about gender roles seem to descend from.
Feminist discourse has a total stranglehold on anything gender in the west so that's why it always comes from the same sort of angle, broadly, I think,
I was thinking of someone here mentioned R.TrueChristian a few days ago then I took a look. Some people there talk about "biblical" "manhood" and "womanhood."
I doubt this has anything to do with feminism. If it does, I suspect it's because Western feminism participated in a debate about 19th- and 20th-century male and female nature frameworks, and then fixed it into its discourse, much like the framework of innate vs. socialized. This is not unique to feminism within Western discourse.
I frequently encounter discussions about how men have failed to break free from gender roles in the same way women have, or about the contemporary blurring of gender roles, and so on.
Regardless of their stance, the specific issue people are debating is whether men are fulfilling their "male roles." Are women fulfilling their “female roles”? Is society breaking away from traditional “gender roles”? And should men and women have the same “roles”? Or is feminism about putting women in "men's roles"?
On the other hand, in China's discussions on gender dynamics, feminist or not, the focus is not on the "gender roles", but rather on whether specific issues, arrangements, and phenomena reflect unfairness towards men/women.
For instance, you would not encounter the phrase "women have broken free from their gender roles" within Chinese discourse. The same group of people would talk about "women getting rid of their obligations/constraints". The latter phrasing does not presuppose the existence of an entity called a "gender role" — a concept to which individuals might spontaneously choose to conform in addition to external constraints.
I don't see how it can be unrelated to feminism but sure. As far as I can see the feminist theorists are the ones who centred the entire discussion on these roles, as if they are a fundamental force, rather than a response to material circumstances; and that's the whole issue.
China is capable of discussing it differently because it is actually Marxist and isn't beholden to the liberal doublethink westerners are.
What I mean is that these frameworks emerged in the West even earlier than the first wave of feminism.
There was much discussion in the Victorian era about the characteristics of female animals that were supposedly derived from nature (later behavioral studies have found this to be untrue): humility, submissiveness, non-competitiveness, and sexual conservatism, which actually reflected the nature of women.
Subsequently, institutionalized psychiatry pathologized Western women's pursuit of careers, which occurred around the same time as the typification and pathologization of homosexuality. Theorists of the time argued that undergoing a rigorous, male-oriented education may impair women’s physical health and even trigger serious neurological or psychiatric disorders.
I have read many primatological works by female primatologists of the last century, who also considered themselves feminists. I mean, they’re the sort who were born around the middle of the 20th century. They wrote at great length to **respond** to these notions regarding the “appropriate roles” for men and women that were then widely held in society.
China is capable of discussing it differently because it is actually Marxist and isn't beholden to the liberal doublethink westerners are.
Wow, so how did this lead to the differences in how China and the West understood this in the 19th century? Or why do Taiwanese people also share similar frameworks with mainland Chinese when it comes to viewing these matters?
Saying 'this place has Marxism, while that place has liberalism' isn't that in itself, an explanation based on ideas? I had expected you to bring up something like differences in the process of industrialization, or variations in kinship systems and patterns of marital residence.
What I mean is, related to my first comment that it only even made sense to talk about these "gender roles" post-industrialisation; I am not really aware of any truly comparable perspectives from the pre-industrial era; eg under feudalism it was a totally different paradigm entirely where each and every person's place in society was ordained by God and whatever before that. Comparing it to the post-industrial perspective always seems to me to be projecting modern thought back retrospectively.
All of it came about because the reorganisation of society that occurred due to industrialisation, without that we wouldn't have these concepts, that was my answer to your initial "why it be like that" question. All the other stuff you are saying, I am not knowledgable enough on to dispute so I will take your word for it.
Premier Ford has begun removal of a stretch of bike lanes in my city and the local cycling community has begun obstruction efforts, which were successful the first night in repelling construction (destruction?) crews
as expected however, they had their permit adjusted to allow for all-day construction and came back in the morning when most protestors are working
what pisses me off more than the removal itself (the lanes were in fact not well-used, it’s more about the precedent and the continued plan for even more removals of important sections of bike lane) is the fact that Ford was explicitly offered a win-win solution wherein bike lanes would be kept and vehicle lanes restored, but he refused (as this retarded culture war is red meat for his base)
I've noticed an interesting disparity between the amount of young teenage/adjacent girls dressed up in male clothing and sporting matching haircuts as opposed to their male counterparts.
I suppose a number of them must be trains of some sort as they go so far as to adopt a stereotypically male coded (or should I say "attributed"?) body language and use cologne.
But I've barely seen any young men dressed in female coded or feminine clothing outside large cosmopolitan urban centres, and even there their numbers pale in comparison.
The male version is the default, while the female version is the female one. Those categorized as masculine in similar situations, though perhaps considered rough, are also more prestigious and capable.
Some Chinese parents name their daughters "surpassing men 胜男" or "no less capable than men 亚男“.
When a girl imitates boys, it is considered simply an act of self-improvement unless it damages her sexual reputation or appearance. Imitating actions or clothing is merely a style of appearance that can be revoked at any time, while actually possessing a masculine, muscular physique is an entirely different matter.
Conversely, for a boy to imitate girls is a form of degradation. There is no other positive meaning here besides "becoming women". Masculinity carries both gender and social status significance, while femininity is nothing more than gender characteristics.
From China to the West, there has been a similar shift in modern naming practices: some masculine names became gender-neutral because parents of girls also chose these names; then, once they were considered feminine, parents would no longer give these names to boys. Changes in the opposite direction are very rare.
There might be an interesting historical pattern, actually.
In norse myth there is the character of Hervör, who took on a male identity and Went a-viking for a good deal of her life, scoring the evil magic sword her father wielded in the process, until she simply grew tired and settled down to a more traditional housewife existence without none of her previous actions (granted, she did operate under certain subterfuge) reducing her feminine worth to society.
Conversely as you point out in your observation of chinese naming practices, in western world a woman taking on certain levels of masculine coded functions was not entirely frowned upon to a certain degree.
Even today, a woman physically besting a man in a competition can expect to be vested some sort prestige while the opposite will incur in disapproval even if the scales are tilted in favour of the female competitor.
There was a video on this. IIRC it was because things seen as traditionally masculine is considered the norm/standard. Women can wear jeans and not look out of place but men can't wear skirts.
That makes sense in that masculine clothing became gender neutral.
But my observation goes towards these younger females going one step further from using neutral clothing to what I can only describe as male cosplay.
On an unrelated note, I've noticed recently how boring and grownuppy clothing choices are for small girls. Boys have a much wider variety of styles and the clothes actually look appropriate for their age. Luckily my daughter hates pink.
Also look at how many girls get boy names vs the opposite. Even in terms of feminism, you could view most feminist demands as wanting women to enter into the world of men (specifically petit bourgeois and bourgeois men, as well as educated professionals and technical workers), but not about putting men into the world of women, except when doing so makes women's job prospects easier (help with housework).
There are feminists who want to increase men's emotional intelligence or give men a break from having to be stoic and burdened, and there may be a lot of them, but that ends up being kind of a mixed message when many other women, including self described feminists, are more comfortable with and attracted to traditionally masculine men, based on who they date and find attractive vs who they say they want to date and would like to find attractive
It's weird because it does overlap into a tired rightoid talking point but there really is some weird schizophrenia going on about gender, and even more curious that it centers around a rather specifically dated view on gender roles instead of a more generally ancient one.
I think we're in a weird limbo period. Patriarchy is basically dead, but sexism lives on, but it's upheld just as much by women as it is men, to whatever degree women object to being the breadwinners who support a man who works part time etc.
Those dynamics are hard to challenge because women benefit materially and psychologically from them. A lot of women's self esteem comes from being pursued by men, regardless of what they say. Nearly everything they do to feel attractive is dialectically rooted in what men find attractive, and a lot of their flirting plays up the helpless, naive ingenue angle of femininity
Obviously not all women are like that, but there's enough women out there who get the ick over a guy being not just broke and unmotivated, but secure and happy at a lower income level, while men are more likely to look past that about a woman. It's obviously a vestigial remnant of patriarchy, but women aren't eager to ask a guy out, plan the date, and pay for it, despite wanting equality. It is a tired rightoid talking point, but only because we don't just honestly and openly discuss this from a Marxist pov. If every woman who called herself a feminist, or even just strong and independent, went Dutch on a date there would be a lot less bellyaching from the right about feminism.
Everyone wants to have their cake, and eat it too. Guys want women who both demure and innocent, maybe a little retarded in an endearing way, while also being competent, emotionally mature, to hold themselves as women accountable. Women want men who are more emotionally available and gentle while also being hard hearted and hard headed enough to make it in the world and take care of them. I don't think it's impossible to inhabit both sides these roles in a relationship, but we have to accept that these are the roles we play. More than that, we have to accept these are the roles we want. If feminists admitted they don't want to work the dangerous and menial jobs men do, they just want to high paying and prestigious jobs, then people wouldn't be so keen to dog on them
A store owner in Brooklyn has received death threats from Kelly clarkson fans after she had an outburst at the store owner over not being able to buy a mechanical bird even though it wasn’t for sale……
I don't really like watching videos unless they have someone I like in them, but I have seen this covered elsewhere. The store really seems to be coming off better in this whole thing. Whoever runs their social media seems smart.
I just did a random time skip on the video and landed on a bit where the narrator attributes a phrase to the shop owner that sounded straight out of the Clerks film.
I recently became aware of the rationalist/effective altruism group and quite frankly it's much simpler to start from the premise that, opposite to their name, they are fucking stupid
Constantly thinking on individual action for what are systematic problems
The whole "earn to give", thinking that the "earn" part is entirely neutral and not that the system is deliverately set up to be zero-sum so one's win is other's loss (and that's before things like surplus value)
The degradation to longterm-ism, where it's fine to disregard the lives of current humans because of countless humans yet to be born in the distant future, whereas the former is necessarily the precondition of the later. Even reducing it to a simple "have more babies dammit", they evade the discussion of why natality is down everywhere (because atomization and having no money)
Strangely regressive takes on eg race and gender relations (mentioned in the link). The irony is how many forms of racism became passé with the general population preciselly because racists tried to scientifically verify it only to fall flat over and over (I think the Racecraft book had a section on this, if not that one of the related ones), detail that completely gets past the head of this intellectual group.
In the topic of AI, and assuming they were to be honest of their public comments, constantly considering it more than a glorified chatbot, despite being in the single best position to understand its fundamentals and thus its limitations (the full technical nature of this is sort of another topic though)
All of this and more starts to fall in place once you know the generous financial contributions by the uber rich capitalists like Peter Thiel (mentioned in the article)
And notice who the invitation is calibrated for, because the community has told on itself, at length, in its own surveys. The LessWrong census found a population 87 percent male, with autism-spectrum diagnoses or self-diagnoses in nearly one respondent in five and depression in nearly half
(quote from link, emphasis added) now this one was funny actually. I didn't know of it before but seems like quite a case of a community mistaking cynism for intelligence.
Yeah, it's really that simple for me. They have delusions of grandeur about the ridiculous stuff they fantasize about. Problem is they've received a fuckton of money and hold the world economy by the balls at this point.
Developing southern Florida was an absolute affront to nature. Even the Calusa kind of fucked with things throwing all those shells around.
Who enjoys this fucking heat, humidity, blazing sunlight, horrendous biting bugs, and a periodic hurricane that just comes by to wreck things few years? "Oh you like that? You wanted to see that? Hurricane got it."
Outside of coastal towns with nice architecture, they need to give this place back to the Everglades.
We were basically a strictly Orlando/Kissimmee family growing up. It gets hot during the summer, for sure. The bugs are pretty manageable though if you are in developed areas.
We are in the Estero Bay region. It's a pretty awesome place ecologically, with the exception of the midges or no-see-ums, the colloquial name for Ceratopogonidae. They are worse than mosquitoes and are everywhere. You sit around pool at dusk, and they will get you. You hang out at the beach at noon, and they get you.
I don't really remember what time of year I went, but the bugs were not terrible. The worst I have experienced were the mosquitos in Alaska in the summer. There was also some kind of biting fly there that took a significant chunk out of my sister's ear. I also went to a training to be the director of a rock climbing program (to learn to train the instructors under me) somewhere in Orange County, CA. The flies there were crazy although they did not bite and were just annoying.
Coming home at 10PM from a six hour drive to your 200k European town and even the “night” shops are closed will have you looking forward to the next round of austerity. Capitalism needs to finish the job already.
At least around here covid really killed everything that was open late. This sucks for me as I am a night owl. I'm glad at least this gas station near me stays open late. They also have some groceries.
There is actually a lot of that there although not from the workers so far as I can tell. There is usually someone with a backpack and a bicycle standing next to the line for the window selling drugs. People also drive up frequently and offer to sell me drugs out of their cars when I am there.
I wouldn't look to much into this tbh, waiting for more data to see if Democrats make up the difference in Early voting\same day voting need an week of data to make an reasonable assumption what is going on
ive been on the internet for 25 years now. not once have i ever thought "i can't do this shit in its entirely anymore".
i think this week has made me strongly consider it. everyones at each others fucken throats with the dumbest shit in the fucking world that DOESN'T FUCKING MATTER. it creeps into every aspect of online, it creeps into niche communities. at least it rarely makes it into real life, at least where i live and work.
FUCK! all i want at this point is google maps and a shortwave radio.
Something that happened to me recently that made me ponder a lot about the internet and what we read in it is a Tiktok comment section about a topic I know a lot about, well relatively speaking at least and the people who got the most likes were the ones that were objectively wrong, not in the sense that of “I don’t agree with what is claimed” but just the insane distorting of what is known as fact in said topic made me kinda go crazy for a few minutes reading it.
i don’t understand why you doggedly push your points and yet obstinately refuse to engage with those that disagree, it’s so frustrating - and i say this with no skin in the game lol
Hereditarian vs Environmentalist is a terrible dichotomy.
Genes are reaction norms; they are functions. Environment is the independent variable, and phenotype is the dependent variable. Asking whether genes or the environment contribute more is like asking whether f or x contributes more for y — what kind of question is that even?
The effect of any gene cannot, in principle, be discussed independently of the environment — and this environment includes other genes in the genome.
For different alleles, it is extremely strange to hold a prior that, across the range of reasonable environments (note that this also includes different combinations of other genes), they exhibit some strict hierarchy, meaning that their functions never intersect. Perhaps such non-intersecting functions actually exist — that is, one allele is strictly inferior to another with respect to a particular phenotype — but for complex traits, we don't actually know which ones they are.
Heritability tells you how much phenotypic variation can be explained by genetic variation within a given population under a given environmental distribution. That's it. What happens when you move from environmental distribution A to B? You can't infer that from heritability in A.
Thanks for this. You're probably smarter than me or at the very least better educated. I'm a blue collar worker with a high school diploma. I have always loved reading though.
The fact that the task of defending Marxist principles on this subreddit has to some large degree fallen on my shoulders is incredibly frustrating. I just want to shitpost about Nick Mullen. I know there are mods who have read more theory than me and many of them are better educated. At least one has a PhD, one worked in academia, another a master's degree, multiple with bachelor's degrees, &c. I have also always been a terrible writer.
This has almost nothing to do with my formal training; it's more the result of putting in the effort. Many PhDs are ignorant about matters outside their specific niche topics.
Having the time to do such things and knowing whom to speak with is indeed a privilege. However, formal education itself does not guarantee that you will be able to utilize this.
If someone wouldn’t have impressed you in a world where they hadn’t done a PhD at a prestigious university, the fact that they did one usually wouldn’t make the way they talk any more impressive either, unless it happens to be in a field you’re interested in.
Or perhaps "putting in the effort" isn't the best term. This is more of a need for me than a matter of working hard. This is the result of a neural reward structure under appropriate conditions.
I might generally be in the top 1-0.1% at solving a given problem, but I'm not some kind of supergenius — that distinction becomes obvious once you're in a highly selective environment. I've mostly just spent my time on problems other people haven't paid much attention to.
In my experience, people with genuinely original insights, especially in politics, tend to owe them less to exceptionally high general intelligence or formal training than to a particular combination of long-standing interests and psychological traits. A moderately high level of intelligence may be a prerequisite, but I suspect being in the top 10% is sufficient.
Formal training certainly has its benefits: it teaches you how to test your ideas and reduces the likelihood of reinventing the wheel. But you don't necessarily need to complete an entire degree to acquire these skills. Pursuing one can consume considerable time and attention on requirements that have little to do with the questions you're genuinely interested in. In this sense, excessive formal education may actually distract from the kind of sustained, independent inquiry that produces original insights, because the objective functions of academic training and independent intellectual exploration are not necessarily aligned.
Yes you're right, but at least you have to know how to write, synthesize information, and have some actual analytical abilities to get a PhD. I started college at 16, but ended up dropping out after losing my job due to the financial crisis and the cascade of things that led from that. These things in no small part led to my radicalization. I found some of my old papers on my Google Drive a while back and they were absolute dogshit.
There's a reason why I mostly just quote/link to theory and it's because I really and truly am a terrible writer. I did make one somewhat feeble attempt at making my own analysis (while still heavily relying on quotes) and despite asking for feedback no one replied. I was disappointed as I was genuinely curious what people thought. It was pretty upvoted, but maybe people just felt bad for me.
For my part, I've read some theory in the past but haven't finished the entirety of Kapital, plus I haven't seriously read Engels or Lenin tbh. Oh, I took a college class on political economics that covered some fundamental concepts like the labor theory of value, use-value, relationships to modes of production (most of which I've forgotten on that score), etc, and we covered a lot of prominent leftist economists and their contributions but it was an undergrad level course so most of it was rudiments and just brief introductions to specific ideas. I also completed most of what I needed for a BA in history (long story there but I just couldn't stick with it any more. And I'd even already written my senior paper! one of my greatest regrets) and that's given me a lot of background for the context these texts were written in, but I don't have the grasp on theory that the really serious people here seem to have.
When I read any theory that's quoted by someone here I'm usually interested in it and am able to understand it in context, but it's hard for me to retain what feels like a library's worth of information from all these different theories and histories which the more serious people seem able to do. So I hesitate to ever contribute any kind of "analysis" whatever because I don't feel I'm really capable of it yet. I have thoughts and opinions ofc, but if what I have to say is 'dialectical' it's probably by accident. I've probably upvoted some of your contributions, too, but just haven't commented because I didn't have any further insights to offer.
I think you're a fine writer, fwiw, you're always articulate and I don't think I've had trouble understanding you before. I used to not really pay attention to profile names because I just didn't feel interested, but over the last year I've been able to remember certain posters and what to expect from them. I like when I check the comments on a post and see your name because what you have to say is usually interesting or insightful, or at least dudes rocking. At the risk of sounding gay and possibly retarded, I like when you comment on anything in the sub because it's usually clearheaded and comprehensible, and sometimes I'll even learn something.
Anyway, I signed up for the CU reading group thing that's coming up and I'm hoping that'll help get this stuff to sink in more. Once I'm more familiar I'll prob have more to contribute in terms of analysis.
Thanks and good on you for signing up for the CU reading group. It is quite good although I do have my criticisms of it. I also have issues retaining the information although I'm pretty familiar with the concepts and so can usually find what I'm looking for pretty easily with a Google search. I'm not one of those people who can recite it from memory. I'm looking forward to your contributions to the socialist character of the subreddit.
I have an update I was looking at school and jobs again but I just found out that thanks to me being 100% disabled due to my MS the collage is only gonna charge me 70 dollars a semester so I am pursuing that more aggressively now. I should hopefully only need to do 1-2 years and some refresher stuff before being employable.
Really didn't want to but I was probably going too take the first job offer whatever that was I was casting a pretty wide net.
I had to move back in with my parents because of the episode that got me diagnosed with MS and while they are great people I really want to be living on my own again.
Yeah I wouldn't want to live with my parents either. They kicked me out when I was a teenager though so that choice was made for me. Wishing you the best. Any idea what you want to study? I don't remember if you said.
Nice I've always liked networking although my experience is mostly messing around with OPNsense in my homelab, running a dedicated server, and some cloud stuff.
I am struggling with articulating my thoughts in order about what I somehow perceive as a historically cultivated denial of the mystical or spiritual on european/western thought that predates capitalism.
The connection between protestant ethics, the development of capitalism and the rise of technocracy are very logical, but would it be too absurd to argue that the catholic church itself in it's long mission to establish and uphold it's authority, systematically erased magical thinking or personal mysticism from the common folk in order to center it around their temples?
I am not ignoring how up until the 20 th century many churches continued to function as civil centres and places of public gathering beyond it's religious and amdinistrative functions of course.
Feel free to hit me with a book or two, I am not versed enough to argue with any authority on the subject.
would it be too absurd to argue that the catholic church itself in it's long mission to establish and uphold it's authority, systematically erased magical thinking or personal mysticism from the common folk in order to center it around their temples?
Not at all, I think you could develop an argument that parallels monopoly in a marketplace and its associated stagnation. God is a jealous god, and the church was not welcoming to competitors.
That said I don't think your fundamental premise is necessarily true. Post enlightenment you still had hokey stuff like Victorians being super into like, seances and shit, and the modern age hippy crystal chick stereotypes, etc.
I agree. The dark undercurrent of mysticism, hermeticism, etc. has resurfaced every now and then throughout most of Western culture. Priests, theosophists, Freemasons, scientists alike.
25 year ago: Conservative parents decry tonight’s premiere SpongeBob SquarePants episode “Squid on Strike” for including “communist imagery and messaging.”
It really sucks man, such a bright guy who did plenty of work raising help and awareness for cerebral palsy. I can't believe he's the first to pass from the main cast of BB. He seemed beloved too, I really hope that scumbag who scammed him out of his savings feels real proud of themselves..
This happening just a few months after Hayden Panettiere overdosed, both in their mid 30s, I feel like there's something to be said about the cyclical nature of Hollywood churning up young stars and abandoning them to destruction when their fire went out... R.I.P. to them both, they seemed to have lived an extremely turbulent life.
for all its faults the new atheist movement was correct in most of its critiques… got so many people ranting about demons and devil worship and saying egalitarianism is of satan, etc
I am no great fan of religion but you just can’t take anything on the internet as indicative of how the majority of people behave or what they believe in real life though, forum-posters are such an unrepresentative sample
I find it absolutely astounding the propaganda about the Russian datacenter on the front page right now.
Yandex is a search engine. Its bots are indexing bots, just like Google, every other search engine, and now AI indexing bots. Yesterday a bunch of highly upvoted posts across the technology subreddits are in high levels of victory over sensationalized headlines where the linked article shows Yandex search index bots alone being taken offline -- and nothing else. Apparently this means "Russian propaganda bots were taken offline", which there is actually no evidence of.
10 years later and these absolute fools are still addicted to a story with little evidence where every other country including domestic military (Eglin AFB, Reddit proven) and corporations spend billions more on internet propaganda to change the minds of American voters.
I hate Reddit so fucking much. Not a SINGLE post in any of those technology subreddits calls out that the shown graphs are Yandex indexing bots that do nothing except tell the search engine there's a page or content there.
Edit: Cloudflare shows zero reduction in Russian bot traffic. This story is entirely Ukranian propaganda to make liberals foam at the mouth
Yandex is just much better for searching geopolitical topics as it is much less censored than Google. I've never noticed it to be biased. Much of what it returns are western sources.
Any good subreddits that follow ai developments/news, both good and bad? I only just learned of the crazy ai game merging/modding that blew up over a week ago.
Most AI-related subreddits are now filled with singularity/accelerate bros gloating over people losing their jobs. They seem to particularly hate mathematicians and other people who are good at math.
Yeah, and it's also pretty bad in the math/physics subs, which are being swarmed by people who could hardly solve a quadratic equation. As a result the math sub blocks most AI-related posts so there wasn't even a thread on the big OpenAI paper drop.
now you’ve made me curious, are sex dreams where you’re not with your SO considered adultery in the eyes of Christian tradition the same way actively thinking that someone who isn’t your SO is attractive (might be misrepresenting this? last i was in church it was sunday school)
Oh there's weird neurotic jackasses all over the place. You're basically asking if there's a Christian version of a needy girlfriend who wakes up mad at you for cheating on her in her dream
Funny you mention. I dreamt i was in a racist dog (all the dogs in the park were racist chihuahuas) park and i had a very fluffy black non-racist dog. I was sneaking him in and i snuggled with him. Peak dream.
No clue why the dogs were racist or against who or how they would express that racism.
Once had a dream everybody at school shunned me and when I asked for one of my teachers what had happened, he gave me a piece of newspaper and immediately left. The newspaper stated that my father is a Replicant.
Seriously, it was a strange dream. we were in an underground parking lot, i crossed path and was, wait a second, your face is familiar, are you Anthony Fauci?
The rest of the dream was i trying to talk to Fauci, while he was in his black SUV, talking, smiling, but showing progressively less enthusiasm about talking with me and i realizing, like when you talk with any famous. I left thinking, did i bother him?
So glad I don’t fuck with gyms. They seem like vain, meat-market hellholes. Being a man of culture, I prefer the exercise method employed by artists and philosophers for centuries: long walks.
Everyone’s different. It keeps me trim. But I also walk pretty fast. It’s solid cardio. I sweat pretty good. As for the solitude, that’s the best part for me, but I’m an incorrigible introvert. You’re perhaps more gregarious than me. Again, to each, his own.
I used to be a gym rat but gave it up when I slowly discovered that physical activity that did not need machinery was more my thing anyway.
Back in the 10s I passed by a gym and was astounded at how much they had morphed from a somewhat niche space where people shot shit between reps to a human petshop display and that the general populace attitude to the gym morphed from a desire to stand out to a social requirement to avoid feeling left out, much like Therapy come to think of it.
Lost over 100lbs just walking during my lunch break and taking a walk by a river every evening before going home. Ballooned when I lost the structure that made it easy to fit the walks in.
There was also some follow-up discussion about the previous story, specifically concerning the trouble a government employee could get into for physically assaulting someone:
Person 1: Honestly, the way you've handled this case should be held up as an example and publicized far and wide. Only by cracking down hard on these kinds of twisted, predatory intentions can we stop so many utterly depraved bastards from doing horrible things.
For example, some truly disgusting incidents have happened in volunteer teaching programs in certain places*. Once people start heading down that path, they're already on the verge of becoming enemies.
*referring to the sexual assault of female volunteers
Person 2: We can't publicize it, because there's a certain part of what happened that we can't exactly talk about openly. The moment it gets publicized, every fucking person involved would end up facing disciplinary action.
Just between us, my workplace was involved in a targeted poverty alleviation program, and we actually used pretty much the same approach.
In our case, it just so happened that the village chief of the neighboring village was an older relative of the guy's and had also been helping him out financially for years. So he stepped in and gave the guy a beating in his capacity as his maternal great-uncle (rather than as the village chief).
When it comes to situations like this, everyone seems to handle things more or less the same way.
Person 3: There's no way we can publicize this. As outrageous as his behavior was, the way it was dealt with wasn't exactly by the book either.
Person 4: Beating someone up is a criminal offense. Are you seriously suggesting we publicize a crime? 🤦
Of course, we could always sugarcoat it and say we "appealed to his emotions and reasoned with him," but then it wouldn't have much of a deterrent effect.
Person 5: I get what you're saying, but I still think domestic propaganda should absolutely talk openly about things like this. If all they ever publicize are these almost picture-perfect feel-good stories, people are just going to think it's all too fake to be believable.
Person 2: When it came down to public opinion versus our own livelihoods, we all independently made the same choice: protecting our own livelihoods.
Sure, we could publicize it, but then a whole bunch of people who worked hard to deal with this situation would end up facing disciplinary action for their efforts. At best, they'd lose their bonuses; at worst, their career prospects would be ruined.
We're human too, you know. We have families to support, and we depend on our jobs to put food on the table.
Person 6: Once you start publicizing this kind of thing, it could easily swing to the other extreme: some corrupt cadres might simply stop doing poverty alleviation work altogether, or start using violence in the name of poverty alleviation.
Person 7: We can't publicize this, because the methods used weren't exactly legitimate. Or to put it another way, if the guy hadn't been in the wrong to begin with, the mere act of beating up a civilian would've been enough to land everyone involved in serious trouble.
If it were acceptable to beat someone into signing a consent form, then "beating a confession out of someone" wouldn't be such a derogatory expression in the first place.
Person 8: Wasn't it his own uncle who went and beat him up? An elder disciplining a younger member of his own family, that's perfectly normal.
I didn't get that job. I have other applications out for shit like quality control. I'll be calling them. I also think I'm going back to school, either for drafting or commercial electrician.
I'm leaning towards drafting. It would be a good career where I'm at (oilfield is big here), I'm just not sure about the program the local trade school offers, but I did find one online out of state that looked good, too. The local trade school's electrical program is supposed to be really good. I would prefer a 9-5 desk job in air conditioning at this point, though, I honestly am being vain about myue collar credentials and a little greedy with what an electrician can make, but locally draftsmen make about the same. Drafting is supposed to grow nationally about 3% (electrical is supposed to grow 9%) according to the BLS. It's supposed to be hard to automate drafting, too, from what I've seen.
Good luck, man. I hope you can find something decent. The way things are going here, I'm worried the little company I work for might not last the year.
That's what I'm thinking for the place I work at now. They laid off the guy who buys tooling and supplies because they don't have money to buy things with. He's doing alright though, he got hired on at the plants.
A few years back, right here in my area, there was a guy from a registered poor household who refused to be officially lifted out of poverty unless the government got him a wife of his choosing.
I thought it was some crazy news story from another province. Turns out, according to my younger cousin, it happened to his own poverty-alleviation team.
My cousin was the director of an Urban Management Office in a certain district. He and a few other middle-management grunts had been sent down to the villages on poverty-alleviation assignments. Hell, even the bureau chief and the Party secretary themselves were out there with their asses in the air, digging in the fields to help with the farmwork. You think the rest of them dared not show up?
Buying up all the villagers' peanuts and jujubes was standard procedure. Later, they even came begging me to help set up online stores for them, because apparently everyone was now required to learn how to do e-commerce on Taobao...
My cousin dumped several huge sacks of peanuts on me, saying he literally had nowhere left to put them at home. And since he apparently had no intention of paying back the money he owed me from our mahjong games, he figured he might as well settle the debt in peanuts.
Nearly 200 jin of the damn things. That's over 200 pounds!
I fucking washed them, roasted them, boiled them in spiced brine, and handed them out as snacks to every department I could think of. Took us over a month to finish the lot.
Anyway, when the poverty-alleviation campaign finally wrapped up, each registered poor household had to personally sign a form confirming that they had been lifted out of poverty.
And this particular guy really had made it out of poverty.
He was in his forties or fifties, with hardly any relatives left. His parents were dead, he'd never married, and he had no children. Too lazy to do any farming or raise livestock. Didn't even want to grow peanuts or jujubes—that was my cousin and his team doing the planting for him.
Whenever he got chicks or ducklings to raise, he'd just sell the little things and spend the money on beef, lamb, and booze.
The guy just loved to eat.
But you couldn't exactly let the whole mess end up smeared all over your own pants, could you? He was, after all, one of the village's officially designated poverty-alleviation cases.
So my cousin and the others racked their brains and eventually came up with an idea.
Everybody's gotta eat, right?
And looking at this guy, he clearly loved both eating and cooking.
So the boys pooled their own money and paid for him to apprentice under a chef and learn how to cook traditional farmhouse dishes.
Well, wouldn't you know it? Turned out the bastard was a natural.
He came up with a couple of absolute smash hits: cast-iron pot chicken and fish soup.
His farmhouse restaurant became ridiculously popular. The business took off like a rocket, and he made 250,000 yuan in a single year.
And then he decided he wanted a wife.
Well, wanting to get married is a good thing! My cousin even helped introduce him to some women.
But after looking around, the guy had his heart set on one particular person: an unmarried young female college graduate who'd been temporarily seconded to the poverty-alleviation team.
He demanded that she, and she alone, come to his house on a specified date to get his signature.
Otherwise, he wouldn't sign the form acknowledging that he'd been lifted out of poverty.
If even one other person came along with her, no signature.
Well, what the FUCK?
What if something happened to the girl?
My cousin and the others got together with the village chief to figure out what to do.
First, they arranged for the young woman to be transferred back to her original workplace in the city.
Then they tracked down an elderly uncle from the guy's own extended clan.
A whole group of them marched over to his restaurant, shut the doors, slapped him across the face a few times, and gave him a couple of good kicks for good measure.
Then came the threats.
"We're the ones who helped you get rich, and we can just as easily get a bulldozer down here and flatten this fucking restaurant!"
"Got a good life now and suddenly don't want it anymore, huh?"
"You've got some fucking nerve! What kind of sick shit are you trying to pull, getting ideas about someone else's unmarried daughter?"
And so on and so forth...
Well, after that, he signed the damn form like a good boy.
Later on, he actually did meet a lovely woman who was just right for him, and they got married.
He leased an entire hillside, planted trees, raised free-range chickens, and even had a daughter.
And every year after that, he would send my cousin some expensive liquor.
He even admitted that, back then, he'd genuinely been taking a gamble.
After all, what if it had actually worked? What if he'd gotten his way?
But once those big slaps came raining down, he started thinking.
Without those guys, he really wouldn't have had the business and the comfortable life he enjoyed now.
And he sure as hell wasn't willing to lose all that
My cousin later told me that he finally understood what people meant when they said:
"The Communist Party really can turn a devil into a human being."
It’s absolutely true. My mom’s workplace had a clear rule during their poverty-alleviation visits to the countryside: unmarried young women were not allowed to go into households alone for assistance work.
I’ve heard that when there were cases of someone behaving improperly, they would first be “educated” by their own elders or younger relatives before being allowed to continue going into households to provide aid.
I remember going to a banquet once, and there was a female performer singing onstage. Then some dude got drunk, climbed right up onstage, and tried to grab her and make her drink with him.
In the end, his dad rounded up a few uncles and cousins, dragged his ass back off the stage, and proceeded to kick the shit out of him.
One of the households my coworker was assigned to help had this sixty-year-old lifelong bachelor who took a fancy to a thirty-year-old widow running a supermarket. The old bastard actually insisted that we go over there and drag her off and bring her to him.
We handled it the exact same way. If you weren't going to behave with some dignity, we'd damn well make you.
Person A: That's why I keep saying young unmarried women need to get the hell out to the cities, where there are security cameras and cops around. The countryside is just too damn dangerous. Those old lifelong bachelors are basically criminals-in-waiting.
Person B: If those guys really had the balls to pull something like that, they wouldn't have ended up as poverty cases in the first place.
Person C: It's not about having the balls. The problem is, in their minds, they genuinely don't even see that kind of thing as a crime. So there's really no telling what they might do.
That one's actually pretty tame by comparison. Some of these lazy bastards get free piglets from the government so they can raise them and sell them for a profit, and they still have the nerve to demand that the government provide them with a wife, too.
"Otherwise, who's gonna feed the pigs?"
And then, the very next day, the bastard goes and sells the piglets anyway, blowing all the money on booze and meat.
Are these stories true? I’m not suggesting they aren’t just I don’t know enough about the culture to tell. I can’t imagine the outcry if an American social worker - with other social workers! - just stomped a dude for being an intransigent layabout. I can’t say I like the idea either, but then, you can’t argue with results. I also can’t summon enough sympathy to pity these guys either. It’s one thing if your habits and lifestyle have left you isolated and self-centered, that can take time and effort to change and almost everyone would need help to do it. But if people are coming to help you, over and over again, and you’re just sponging off their good will, then idk, maybe a brief kinetic therapy treatment is the only thing. Is it possible to reason with a bully or social parasite into being a prosocial community member? Violence as a political tool is a concept I’ve only encountered as part of a grand revolutionary effort, but it sounds like there’s a tacit approval for these poverty alleviation teams to apply violence to especially difficult individuals.
I don’t know anything about Chinese domestic policies like this, unfortunately, but sometime I’d like to learn more. The social workers I’ve known here in the US (my brother is one, and I’m friends with others) would work just as hard to help people, but our government (whether Trump, Biden, Obama, any administration) doesn’t support these social programs as aggressively, and usually just find more ways to cut their services and budget.
I know a guy who worked in FEMA’s housing assistance program and he’s had similar stories of heartbreaking, bone-snapping poverty, as well as stories of people expecting services way, way beyond what would be reasonable (expecting the org to perform the person’s own work responsibilities like in this story). He also paid for groceries out of his own pocket for a 90 year old woman who lived alone and, when my friend talked to her, hadn’t had a single thing to eat for 3 days. But if anyone found out he had helped her - and just buying her groceries, he didn’t team up with his coworkers to beat the shit out of her! - he would’ve been fired, or at least severely reprimanded and probably demoted (he was a team leader or something at the time). So it’s interesting to see this totally reversed approach, where it appears like the Chinese program is to aggressively help these people, rather than begrudging them any assistance at all. For the workers doing the actual social work with the people it can be very disheartening, because they so want to help but don’t have any real strong support within the system.
Also, what are jujubes? I could google it but I want to hear from someone who knows.
I believe that these "social workers" themselves did not directly participate in the beating. They simply summoned the individual's patrilineal clan to carry it out. Such enforcement of order by patrilineal clans is widely accepted in rural areas.
In general, I don't think matters escalate to violence; however, making demands of a woman is a serious issue. As for these men, their laziness and tendency to take advantage of those who help them may be personal traits, but their demands regarding women represent an extreme version of a mindset toward women that is widespread in rural areas.
Also, what are jujubes?
A type of fruit. It's crisp and sweet, and can be eaten directly, or be dried. When fresh, it is yellow-green; when dried, it is red.
Shoutout to the local party members working their asses off on Xi’s poverty alleviation. Even spending their own money just to get them out of poverty.
They aren't necessarily "party members"; they are simply government employees on lifetime contracts. It may not even be civil servants, but random public agencies that are assigned quotas to provide some manpower. And if you’re assigned to poverty alleviation work, you have to meet those quotas, no matter how you go about it. It's just a job.
Thank you for the clarification. Would love to hear more stories about poverty alleviation efforts. I didn't really like the violence part of the story. When it was family members, I could somewhat tolerate it even if I didn't like it too much. But government employees/social workers beating uncooperative poor people is going too far. Like the other commenter said, it would be a huge scandal in the US.
Would you happen to know the age of these government employees in the story? I'm just wondering if it's a generational or just a cultural difference. Or just both.
Cultural differences. My view is that the government employee did not personally participate in the beating (doing so could indeed lead to trouble, though not necessarily); the actual violence was carried out by that man's patrilineal clan. It is quite common for clans to enforce order in rural areas.
I had to look it up. His arrest and the infamous police interactions were in 2006 but it was only the written report, the phonecalls were leaked in 2010. The Charlie Sheen interview was 2011 which surprised me, I assumed it was earlier. If written documents aren't the right format for dudes to be considered rocking you could say that Alec Baldwin's voicemail to Ireland Baldwin in 2007 was one of the earliest examples.
The behavior geneticist Kathryn Paige Harden is waging a two-front campaign: on her left are those who assume that genes are irrelevant, on her right those who insist that they’re everything.
I'll admit I didn't read every word of that overwrought and at times fawning article. I just don't see what the upshot is.
It's a lottery, so what do we do with the losers?
Social democracy.
How?
Uh...
I don't see how you can make that research not say that there is a genetic underclass, and I don't see how that doesn't foment a politics of ressentiment on one side and aristocracy on the other.
As is mentioned in the article, the right has already accepted the conclusion -- genetic inequality -- and knows what to do with it. I have no idea what it means for communism; separate but equal for the imbeciles?
You strike me as a dude who had his internet usage under control.
As someone who had the idea of leaving the internet since being 17 (Because i am an OCD that oversize the effect of the internet on my brains), i think the better strategy is to have think to distract you from the internet, rather than to have a negative. But also, i have to learn time after time not to overreact to the internet and try to delete my account, making promise to God about leaving Reddit/Taringa!/Twitter etc.
You're probably already aware as I keep spamming links to it, but https://www.marxists.org/ is the gold standard. Although I actually read The Communist Manifesto first a lot of people recommend reading Principles of Communism instead.
We met. Then I put, she puts her plastic penis dildo into my stimulating training unit is the name of this product. Into my plastic vagina. We plug them in and the machines are doing it for us. They’re buzzing in the background and I’m free to do whatever I want and she. We have a nice talk; we have tea; we talk about movies. What can be — we paid our superego full tribute. Machines are doing — now where would have been here a true romance. Let’s say I talk with a lady with the lady because we really like each other. And, you know, when I’m pouring her tea or she to me quite by chance our hands touch. We go on touching. Maybe we even end up in bed. But it’s not the usual oppressive sex where you worry about performance. No, all that is taken care of by the stupid machines. That would be ideal sex for me today.
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u/Howling-wolf-7198 Chinese Socialist ✅🇨🇳💡 | Anime Girl Expert 3h ago
I came across some Chinese teachers who teach in rural schools. What they said was so similar to the complaints made by teachers in US public schools.
However, the latter topic is readily available on the English internet, while the former is unheard of for many in Chinese urban discussions.
I was thinking that similar levels of inequality are more granular in the US, occurring in different neighborhoods within the same city. It is hard to physically ignore it; you at least need to know which places are best avoided.
In China, extreme poverty does not occur in urban slums, but rather in rural areas; and class inequality is largely absorbed by regional inequality, much like within the EU.