No, I’m saying your glasses are broken. They’re not helping you see more clearly, they’re blurring reality

That’s why I called it a weird religion.

Imperialism isn’t some shadowy force. It’s just a bad thing being done to others out in the open. On its face, it’s unfair. You don’t have to prepare people to understand why it’s unfair, they just have to believe you when you point at it

Do you think China doesn’t do imperialism? Do you think the USSR was being benevolent when it did the same thing, just a little more fairly and a better message?

If you can understand these examples of imperialism, I’m willing to take back my claim that your glasses are broken

I bet I can describe the mechanisms of imperialism better than you, because I’m not weighed down by a weird religion

I just witnessed something strange while doing a job in the “global south”, and started reading. And kept reading. There was no analytical lens required. It’s all pretty naked and unapologetic

After WW2 the US came in with warships and made deals at gunpoint, but while also “offering” industrialization. Today, the IMF and the world Bank keep nations on debt treadmills to force austerity under threat of being removed from the global trade network, as their natural resources are drained away under those deals

It’s not complex. No further reading required to understand, further reading will just expand on that short paragraph I just wrote. No special analytical lens required to view it, it’s just the uncomfortable truth. It just gets worse as you dig into it

Yeah, I think I can just say yes

You can have causes. You can talk about politics

But if you’re not occasionally making a joke or responding to the puppy girls, why are you actually here?

The experience is very different. It’s like going to the club with a group of people

You’re going to have a lot more positive interactions if you choose wisely, and a lot more negative ones if you don’t. You’re still going to the same place, with all the same people, but it’ll hit different

You’re not categorizing genocides properly

The Uyghurs don’t have their own news agencies, and they’re not being splattered over the streets like Palestinians

It’s a cultural genocide, it was more like what the US did to the natives. Forced education, over surveillance and policing, forced marriages…

They’ve backed off on it, and it’s better than killing people… But it definitely isn’t good

Lmao, I deleted that part of my response, but real political movement don’t have reading lists

Throw out the imperial analysis. It’s not useful. It’s not some bold lens that sees through capitalism - it’s just the observations of a guy. Not an insightful guy like Marx, like… Just like a normal, average academic

You don’t need a fresh analytical lens to look through imperialism. It’s just history. It just happened. You can just study it, it’s not subtle or special

Well… I didn’t mean straight. You play a typing game for 20 minutes occasionally, honestly you could probably just do that every day for a week and pick it up

And while you are proving my point perfectly, there’s advantages if you were to put in a little time… You make less typos and get better at power user features if you learn the positions

Marxism-Leninism posits that we should create a working class party, study the given conditions of the country we are in (history, contradictions, class struggle) in order to correctly identify the key issues to organize around. In doing so, the working class needs to gradually choose the vanguard party, meaning a vanguard party that fails to do so is no vanguard.

This. This right here. What is the vanguard party? Oh, it’s the party the workers rally behind! We’ll know it because the workers will rally behind it!

Marxism is a useful analytical framework to use when looking at capitalism and alternate systems

Ml is a belief system full of holes plastered over by no true Scottman logic. No part of it is effective in the current day and age as political guidebook, we live in an entirely different era

Marxists do. Ml? It’s like… Unite the workers of the world by teaching then dielectrical materialism!

No… No. That’s not how reality works. You do have to restrict your ideology to reality, I don’t mind if your ideas spill over the sides, but they do have to exist in material reality

Nope, you sit down and learn it.

If you wanted to learn, I would find a typing game and keep playing until you can hit any key without looking. If you still weren’t learning, I’d put paper over your hands so you couldn’t look down and cheat

So if you want this skill, find a typing game and don’t cheat. It’s that simple… It doesn’t even take that long, maybe 10 hours total? Maybe even less

There’s diversity, where you have a lot of different types of people, and then there’s places with a high concentration of a minority group

The first one makes people less bigoted, because you can’t avoid dealing with people when they’re everywhere. Your not going to last long in NYC if you don’t want your food touched by them. Either you deal with it and get used to it, or you’ll find it hard to eat

The second one doesn’t force those normal human interactions. Instead, you have exposure. You see them around, but don’t have to treat them like people. You might not interact at all.

So every time you see them, it reinforces the racism

You see it all over the American South, people around the black communities aren’t less racist, they’re giga-racist

When shit hit the fan, they just super calmly looked around, and said “That’s a bit boring.”

Yeah, that could go badly… If people think you’re not taking their emergency seriously, and it turns out it’s not a quick fix, they’re probably not going to be very happy

I do find redirecting them calmly to be even more helpful. Just don’t let their panick infect you, and start working the problem normally

That usually calms people down instantly, because it skips the part where they have to convince you there’s a problem, instead you just skipped to giving them what they actually want

Early on I poked around ml, and it wasn’t so much hate but more like some really… interesting views on how to organize politically

It boiled down to “unite the workers of the world and seize the means of production”, but like… That was it. No answer to how to do that, or what to do next

The most annoying part was honestly just how hard some of them simp for China and Russia, sometimes even North Korea

That’s called tech illiteracy… It’s a bad thing

I’m saying it’s nice to think about how people could be better…

But office workers absolutely do not all know how to touch type. When you find yourself working at an office, your typing speed tends to get faster, but if you don’t already know how to touch type you just peck faster

It’s why I’m so militant about my young relatives learning it. It’s not that hard to learn, but you have to learn it before you actually need it or you never will

And everyone should understand basic science

But they don’t, do they?

My experience has been, I go to a random parking lot somewhere on Saturday morning, there’s like 15 stands selling huge fresh produce with prices like 4 for $1, and then there’s a guy with pigs selling entire fractions of animals for what I assume was a good price

I’ve heard of ones that sound more like county fairs with admission prices and massage booths and such… It kinda seems like at that point they’ve lost the plot

Maybe your farmers markets aren’t just simple direct sales. Do they have to pay real money to set up their stalls? Or worse, is there a bidding process?

Maybe someone is siphoning money there

Really? Sounds like a terrible farmer’s market, I’ve usually found much fresher food generally below grocery store prices, rarely higher. With the exception of chicken and eggs, but there’s reasons for that

Then don’t get Galaxy scale with it, I wasn’t. This has nothing to do with evolution, that’s a myth of capitalism. Capitalism developed organically, not naturally… There’s a huge difference

Throw 50 people into an empty resort for a week with nothing to do. What happens? They play games, they cook together, they go on hikes together, they start projects, they separate and return to the group as needed

This isn’t a hypothetical. Have you never experienced the natural human state? No multi day reunions or weddings? Or living on campus at University? Just any situation where money isn’t really involved and everyone is around with lots of free time

Woz would have been a billionaire if he didn’t sell his shares, which is my entire point. Good billionaires would’ve cashed out long before reaching that crazy level of hoard