been thinking about DE, does anyone know if it runs well on Linux?

i’m not familiar w good critical refutation.

I don’t think capitalism can keep collapsing and reforming forever. Extinction is possible (nuclear war, maybe climate change), and different economic systems are possible. The key thing is that as long as there are contradictions, there will be change. Under capitalism the biggest one is within the mode of production: capitalists organize labor in a way which results in great inefficiency and suffering, and this produces a class of workers who are incentivized to change the system. The longer capitalism goes on, the larger and more definite the working class becomes, sharpening this contradiction. Eventually something has to release the pressure: socialist revolution (likely via a DoP, which will have its own contradictions to work through on the way to communism), or a reconfiguration of classes into some new arrangement which will result in a different kind of conflict than bourgeois-proletariat. Social upheaval can blow off steam without fundamentally changing class relations, but pressure will just keep building up and it’s unreasonable to expect infinite, e.g., BLM outbursts to never turn into something more. Nukes may kill us all at once, but I think it’s likely that even though climate crisis will cause vast devastation, this will increase class conflict and therefore opportunities to resolve these new contradictions.

the way I see it, all societies fall into

• some class is in control (nobility = feudalism, bourgeoisie = capitalism, workers = dictatorship of proletariat, etc). resolving contradictions can lead to communism
• there aren’t coherent classes. communism (primitive or otherwise)

the theory of marxism can be applied perfectly fine to indigenous societies. go down and see if there are classes and what they’re doing in the same way as e.g. Mao in Hunan. you may very well find that there is not a proletariat! marxism doesn’t say that there will always be a working class, just that capitalism builds one

Lenin said that communism won’t simply emerge spontaneously and that it needs to be agitated for by people and communist parties. If we believe that capitalism is a European ideology that emerged from the material conditions of Europe, then it’s antithesis communism should be the same, right?

Well communism isn’t gonna emerge with a snap of the fingers, but what is guaranteed as long as we have classes is that there are going to be people who figure out what’s going on. Those are the ones Lenin said must struggle in order to get to communism. Marxism was discovered in European context, but it applies just as well whenever you’ve got classes and I don’t see any reason why it won’t keep getting rediscovered in different contexts if the original strain goes extinct.

“Bernie is a cop” from khive is amazing

he took like 3 shots before getting pincushioned, he could have done that with a bolt-action rifle. the fact that it was an “assault weapon” didn’t help him much.

Outside of Pennsylvania, other states have successfully passed bans on assault weapons like automatic rifles.

Automatic rifles were effectively federally banned in 1986. Another gun article by an author who doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

The AR-15 is a common weapon of choice for mass shooters in the United States: the 2016 anti-LGBT Pulse nightclub shooting, the 2017 shooting on the Las Vegas Strip, and the mass shooting at the 2017 Sutherland Springs church massacre all involved this semiautomatic rifle.

This is because the AR-15 is the most common rifle, not because of any special deadliness. Literally a quarter of all firearms made each year are AR-15s. You have four choices when buying a firearm:

• AR platform (ubiquitous)
• AK platform (for combloc larpers, I say this lovingly)
• a 9mm pistol, likely a Glock
• oddball shit

People do mass shootings with guns they already own. Crooks used his dad’s rifle. Banning “assault rifles” (a nonsense category btw, it means a long list of particularly scary-looking semiautomatic rifles rather than any particular characteristic they share) would just mean that mass shootings are carried out with non-“assault” rifles. If you want to reduce mass shootings by bans, you gotta substantially reduce gun ownership in general. The only liberal plans to do this are ones that make gun ownership more expensive, allowing suburban fascists to keep their toys and criminalizing poor gas station clerks who can’t afford 16 hours of CCL training for the pistol they carry.

They are, or at least my org is. The thing is, everyone knows that Stein’s chance to win is about 0% at this point, so it’s hard to get the masses excited about what they see as a symbolic protest vote. One reason why the Bernie campaign had such energy was that a win felt like a real possibility. Without an immediate goal, what can we build a national workers’ party around? To me, it seems like the only path forward electorally is building a party through wins in local government. But that’s essentially what the Greens have been doing, and generally they haven’t been able to challenge the Dems.

I made it, nobody knows what democratic centralism means

yeah SWE is not science, we’re not discovering anything we’re just building

I think this is not true. When interviewed, people who have crossed over from ChemE/MechE/etc say it’s engineering. We just iterate a lot faster because compiling is cheap and most software failures are cheap.

I think we rely too much on stereotypical ideas of what “real engineers” are doing, which can’t be defined and generally don’t stand up to scrutiny. For instance, is designing a processor in VHDL computer engineering or merely programming?

That’s not “computer science”, you’re talking about programming or software engineering, which are workers building what computer scientists have figured out. There are very few computer scientists. They are basically specialized mathematicians. Think Dijkstra. Google has most of them chained up in a basement somewhere writing sharding algorithms or something. It’s confusing because many programmers get CS undergrad degrees, but they are starting to make “software engineering” degrees.

It’s true that CS doesn’t use the scientific method, but neither do library science, “scientific socialism”, etc. Popper isn’t the be-all end-all.

Well that’s just flat-out untrue, haven’t you ever heard “I’m as left as they come, but…”? All sorts of people think they’re leftists.

capitalist dictatorships that exist in […] Cuba

??? It’s a little removed but it’s certainly not a capitalist dictatorship.

Also it’s unusual for this sort of group to call for military defeat of Israel. I feel like normally these views on AES are combined with a statement that the only way to get a true lasting peace in the region is a socialist revolution within Israel.

edit: lol slur filter. Fine, call it deteriorated

you can still agitate, you gotta be approachable not hard to talk to people

It’s been a full year!

Has he done any good things? So far, the only positive thing I can say about him is he’s not Vallas.

In fact it’s quite possible he will hurt the labor movement. I’m not super familiar with CTU inner workings, but to an outsider it looks like the collaborationist “common good” bargaining process that CTU is signalling with him will probably conclude the cooptation and defanging of CORE. Workers shouldn’t pull their punches. Ask for what you need, and let them cut the damn police budget if the city “can’t afford” it.

He ran on progressive vibes but has done a bunch of bad stuff while in office: increased CPD budget, attempted to contract GardaWorld to put migrants in tents, etc. He got AFL-CIO and some other unions to pledge not to strike during the DNC. How has he helped labor?

Just want to point out that this is the rate among millennials who want to own a home but haven’t bought one yet, so it’s not important without knowing how many millennials rent. There’s only a few reasons to wait, so it makes sense for money to be a big one. The original source (note the 2019 date) phrases it like this:

Among millennial renters who plan to own a home, 70 percent are waiting because they cannot afford to buy, compared to just 33 percent to say they are not ready to settle into a more permanent lifestyle.

About 50% of millennials already own homes, and the survey found that 12% of the renters didn’t plan to own a home. 70% of 44%; this question found that at least 31% of millennials can’t afford a home.

I expected this to take itself too seriously due to the title but it was quite reasonable. #3 is the shakiest. Becoming an “organization of organizers” is not the same kind of thing as running electoral campaigns; what should the organizers do?

i like acidmarxism it’s quiet

Anybody know why? Are we getting more specific vocabulary, longer paragraphs, or simpler ideas?

You can’t just quote Marx and say “see he disagrees with you”

that aside, for this conversation to make sense you need to say which conception of “free will” you think is illusory. Sometimes people mean something like a spirit or soul expressing itself through your brain. Sure, that’s not real, Engels’ arguments against agnosticism apply. Some ideas are better. I personally don’t think that determinism is a useful tool to predict individual behavior since we can’t go back in time to prove it.