Welcome again to everybody. Make yourselves at home. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is the weekly discussion thread.
☭ Matrix homeserver and space
☭ Theory discussion group on /c/theory@lemmygrad.ml
☭ Find theory on ProleWiki, marxists.org, Anna’s Archive
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https://lemmygrad.ml/post/12727124
Make sure to donate to Shiggy by buying a Nintendo Switch 2 today!
I’m going to by trying to install Linux on my second drive tomorrow. I’m a little nervous as I don’t really consider myself that good with computers.
It’s pretty easy. Your main issue, if you are installing alongside windows, is that windows is known to wipe out your linux drive after updates.
My advice is to stick with one OS per computer, but I know that is not feasible for some people so if you have to dual boot just try to keep backups of whatever you have because you can run into data loss from windows.
Wait, are you saying even if Windows and Linux are on separate drives, that can still happen?
AFAIK, windows updates won’t wipe your Linux partition, but it will override your bootloader. This makes it appear as if your Linux partition has been wiped, but it’s still there. You just need to repair the bootloader from a live CD/USB.
Has anyone here read Trump’s The Art of the Deal?
There will be a strike of the public transport in the Netherlands on september 9th, and the ferries in Amsterdam won’t be operable. So some restaurants and schools are going to have their own ferry service on that day. Fucking scabs.
Did you know striking workers used to form gangs to beat up scabs back in the day? Just saying out loud.
Can you imagine being a scab on a boat with that sort of energy around? I’d want a life jacket all day.
Haha, I was just thinking about blocking the scab ferries but that works too
For the first time in years I am looking forward to work again for the coming week. I seem to have found my place.
Good to hear, happy for you.
We should use another term for “red flag” (derogatory), as in “aspect of something or someone that warns you before you engage.”
Maybe “black flag”? Fascists use black a lot, and mythological sea pirates used it as well.
Of course black isn’t always the color of fascism, since Anarchists (who aren’t the armchair kind), and some Communist parties use the color in their flags. But red is also used by fascists sometimes and we don’t complain.
this is just a suggestion, but there’s still some problems. like, there’s already too many bad things associated with black in our languages. I don’t know if this would throw even more gasoline into the fire of racism.
I like the “That’s a red flag (not the good kind)” joke. When you use it in mixed company it makes people ask themselves what the good kind of red flag is.
I think red flags are fine as they are. Red is the primary colour for caution, warnings, danger alerts etc in our societies because it really catches your attention and has an energetic presence. Something similar to how blue and green are calming colours, red is all about fire, action and attention. I think it’s fair enough.
Yeah, it was a bad take. I agree with you.
it wouldn’t work because the colloquialism “red flag” refers to warning flags, not national or party flags and a red warning flag near universally means danger, which is the point
Brown flag. Brown is the color of nazism after all. Though also the color of soil, which is a based material. Hmmh maybe cyan flag, it sounds like cyanide and I don’t like that shade of blue.
What about navy blue? it’s the color of NATO, the color blue of United States’ flag, and the color of European Union.
come to think of it, the Fascist International is blue and the Communist International is red.
our world is a fucked up game of Red vs. Blue.
I mean blue is also a religious color associated with the virgin mary and also widespread in sahelian cultures due indigo and all that.
I question sometimes that there’s something I’m not getting when I see people do the internet thing of like “when we have the power, we will do XYZ violence [but it’s presented like a meme]” and this kind of thing gets upvoted. With very few exceptions, this kind of humor puts me on guard rather than amusing me and makes me more distrustful of the sort of people who are posting it and upvoting it. It makes me think the person thinks violence is funny (which means they’d have more in common with fash than communists), they think revolution is funny (which implies they either don’t understand the seriousness of revolution or don’t care about liberation), or they are actually serious and think violence is just this thing you do via a violence button when revolution happens with some toggle switches on who it’s done to.
It’s the kind of internet-centric posting that I think would alarm most people who don’t spend a lot of time on the internet because they would assume it’s completely unironic and serious. I try to take it with a grain of salt as being some level of weird internet irony attempted humor speak, but I also know that irony poisoning is a thing. I am also torn because I don’t want to be like “grr don’t you make jokes!” (Hell, I love to make jokes myself, even if it doesn’t show a lot here.) But at the same time, it’s like, humor carries ideology with it.
Edit: I’m having a deja vu moment like I’ve talked about this before. But I’m not sure. My brain is at least half fried right now.
It is kinda a red flag (not the good kind) but at the same time we also need to accept that none of us will live to see the perfection of the communist ideal. We all have reactionary brain worms that have thus far gone unexamined and if some people are hooked on the idea of revenge for the suffering they have endured I don’t really begrudge them. These people should not be put in charge of anything but they do have their use. Righteous anger and violence will be needed to guard against counter revolution.
Fair point.
People too online are whining about Magneto potentially being rewritten as a victim of ICE and not a holocaust survivor - As if he was not changed from romani to jewish in the 80s.
Sometimes I feel like this is hell. Not in a “I actually sincerely believe it is” kind of way (I don’t even really believe in hell in the religious sense), but more like I’m looking at how bad things are sometimes, how prolonged, and it’s hard not to go to a dark place sometimes.
I guess it’s one reason I’m inclined toward romanticizing early commune style of society. I know it had hardship, but god damn, at least you had community; like actually existing in the immediate real world community, not online posting or people who are a long drive away. Individualism segments everybody out like they’re an island of their own and then says “cope”.
I wish I could summon a black void, hold it up to liberals, and be like, “See this? This is what your liberal individualism is. This is the best case scenario of it. Emptiness.” Like what is fulfilling about “be yourself” if there’s no “us”? This is one of the things reformists either don’t understand, or do understand and ignore. Even if you somehow temporarily make “capitalism with better living conditions”, you haven’t addressed the pain of individualism, which works hand in hand with capitalism. We should be aspiring for people to be able to lead a good life, not a slightly less terrible than before life.
I would slightly correct you there that individualism is the cope people use to explain the atomisation that occurred under our stage of Capitalism- the era of the car (and therefore suburbia), mass media, entertainment direct in your living room, the welfare system and more ending the “old world” that connected capitalism to the past- the effective destruction of the family and “the community”.
Obviously this is a developing era so what is rising to replace the old system is new, frightening, going through growing pains and is struggling to assert itself.
Edit: Interestingly, I’m reading Hobsbawm’s Age of Extremes right now and he has the rather poignant observation that Really Existing Socialism was, in its maintenance of cultural norms and traditions, actually far more conservative than anything posited by liberals and conservatives in the capitalist world. No matter how much the liberal democracies wanted to conserve tradition, the capitalist economic system is the most destructive and dispassionate by far.
At September 5th UTC 00:03 AM, Lemmygrad was down again. I swear this is so close to 00:00 AM that it feels like the issue is connected to time.
Some tests:
- (23:48 UTC OK)
- (23:55 UTC OK)
- (23:59 UTC OK)
- (00:00)
- At 00:00 Lemmygrad returned an error
- I reloaded the page and it seems to be okay now (00:05)
- Favicon was gone before I reloaded the page for some days already. It came back.
- I’m still unable to see messages from some people. Like the people who commented on KrupskayaPraxis and Darkerseid. I haven’t seen anyone complaining about this issue, so I think it’s unrelated.
- (01:22) Seems like everything is alright. Either Lemmygrad errors were unrelated to time or admins have already fixed it.
So after years I decided to see what online dating is and got some apps. It is shit. These apps exist to make money, of course.
Years ago when I was still using them, I h a dozens of likes and matches within a few days. Now it is 4 across two apps. Not even a match. And I’m a decent looking guy with interests that don’t involve looking like a serial killer.
Capitalism has to ruin everything it seems lol. Actually getting matches isn’t in their best interest even if you pay them (which I don’t). Back to approaching people then, I guess.
Yeah, it’s pretty bad. Many of them are owned by the same parent company Match Group now and even the ones that aren’t still tend to do much the same design patterns. A near guaranteed one now from what I’ve seen is the apps expecting you to “verify” yourself, which means letting them scan your face to see if it matches your photos, and trusting they aren’t doing anything weird with that data. They claim this is to help with scams or whatever but I live in the US, I just assume at this point that data is being gathered for nefarious purposes.
Then there’s the people who are actually using the apps. I remember the time I got anywhere at all a year or two ago (which wasn’t much, because I’d rarely be able to get to the point of messaging back and forth), I managed to get to the point of messaging with like 2 people over months of nothing. Both times, when I tried to arrange a low pressure meetup so it wouldn’t end up as pen pal only, either I got ghosted or the attempts to plan it never went anywhere.
Installed the NoScroll app on my phone and completely blocked Instagram Reels with it. I was sick of wasting any more time on my phone
The anti-doomscrolling apps as of late are honestly the best invention of the 2020s (but also partly in response to the worst invention of the 2020s, that being genAI).
I am still getting used to the ones I have been trying out recently.
I was told that the Freedom app was the best one.
Frankly, I may pay a subscription if I have to, but we shall see.
I have entered the secret world of tradesmen. Multiple workers in their vans have waved at me or let me pass on my bike ride to work. I have received multiple sympathetic nods from fellow workers on the way home after a day of working your ass off.
It is tiring and energizing at the same time to dig a trench for 8 hours a day. At least I now know how to efficiently dig a trench.
Trades are lit
I know that leftists, especially in America, seem to look askance at them, partly because the trade unions can be very conservative.
But a lot of some great and very radical friends of mine are in the trades labor unions.
I want to go into them myself now that I am in Europe.
Also, in America, there are a lot of very radical trans organizers making big wins in the trades.
The Lemmygrad server seemed to be in a weird state during the previous few days. At first I couldn’t vote or comment, and then I couldn’t log in. I wasn’t the only one experiencing such issues.
Things seem fine now. Were there any posts/updates about it?
Were there any posts/updates about it?
Dunno, but I did see some weirdness as well. Times where it would sort of load if I clicked a page and then refreshed it. But usually couldn’t post during those periods, IIRC.
same. couldn’t find any updates either. is it possible to have lemmygrad updates outside lemmy?
I’ve been getting 502s in the app that I use (Summit) and images often not loading. About an hour ago I was seeing 502s. I checked in a browser and the site loaded, but not a single image.
I’ve also been having issues with votes and comments failing.
Yeah, I use the Summit app now.
There were times where it just didn’t work or certain things had trouble being posted.
Also, I had to close the app and then open it again because, after a few moments, it would be stuck constantly loading without actually, well, loading the page.
Same here. I actually got that experience this morning but I got this for the last two days now. I just assume it was some maintenance but not sure.
I really respect the admins here, no matter what, especially muad_dibber
I certainly hope everything is alright.
has anyone read this?
Yeah, it’s by China Mieville, a British Trotskyist and esteemed writer.
This book in particular is very… biased, from what I have heard.
Lots of focus on what Trotsky did and achieved. Other characters (not just Stalin but others that survived past the 1920s or past the 1930s) seem predictably sidelined or even castigated or belittled by the narrative.
It’s basically “narrative history” (by a speculative fiction author).
But I feel that it’s not the best book on the October revolution out there, from what others have told me.
However, as I have said, I have not read it and, of course, many of my friends who said this are now MLs.
So idk, I guess the bias goes both ways (yeah, yeah, I know, there’s no such thing as “unbiased,” I’m just explaining myself).
Are there any other books related to October revolution?
There are a few that are older.
I suppose the most famous one in English would be:
Ten Days That Shook The World by John Reed (himself a communist and considered an early founder of the CPUSA when it was just forming)
Oh, and you can throw in History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks)
Off the top of my head, tbh; there are more, including memoirs from that time.
Too bad! I actually love China Mievelle’s writing a lot. Will still read that book and also check the recs you mentioned
He’s a great author!
One of my friends in High School really loved him.
He wanted to read The Culture series since it is also written by a Trotskyist, I think.
I am also a big fan of Culture series. Iain M Banks is goated. In fact, I am currently reading Use of weapons (which is my second culture book)
Have no idea both these authors are trots though. Is that public knowledge though? I havent been able to find those associations
In late 2004, Banks joined a group of UK politicians and media figures campaigning to have Prime Minister Tony Blair impeached after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In protest, he cut up his passport and posted it to 10 Downing Street.
In 2010, Banks called for a cultural and educational boycott of Israel after the Gaza flotilla raid incident. In a letter to The Guardian newspaper, Banks said he had instructed his agent to turn down any further book translation deals with Israeli publishers:
