I hate it when that happens!

Why should China be advancing the socialist cause directly in whatever nation?

Why should China be socialist in the first place? Why not just go full cynicism and rig a capitalist system that directly benefits Xi and his allies?

“Because it’s the right thing to do and would greatly benefit a large number of people” is reason enough. You can argue over tactics, say that if overt support draws an even worse counterrevolution then a different tactic should be pursued, but you can’t argue over the morality.

I have a hypothesis that college can solve this problem by “inversing” lectures and homework.

edit: sounds like a lot of places do this already so that’s cool.

Have your students watch lectures and do reading on their own time. Hell, they can ask ChatGPT to summarize it for them if “it’s just a tool” and they want to use it! But everything that gets a grade should be done in class. You will write the essay by hand, you will do the math with no more powerful a calculator than a TI-83, you will give a presentation to show that you understand the material. Book is open, accommodations for special needs are available, and the teacher is here to help and give guidance and clarification, but internet connections are banned.

Buuuuut American colleges would never do this because ensuring that your graduates actually learn things was never the point.

After seeing this I was curious so I took a chunk of fanfiction that I wrote myself, then had ChatGPT write a second chapter, fed both into it, and it was extremely inaccurate. It rated my chapter at 20% AI and the ChatGPT chapter at 40%, which is a bit of a correlation but both the false positive and false negative rates are way too high to use this tool for anything.

their lack of vocal ideological support for communism on the world stage

This is the biggest caveat to China support for me, too. Like I’ve read and understand the arguments that if China were to support global socialist movements the way the USSR did, they would lose a lot of the leverage and power that they’ve accrued for themselves in the past couple of decades - but that doesn’t make it any easier to swallow them supporting right wing governments against socialist guerillas. If they’re not going to send PLA volunteers to aid the rebels then at the very least they should use their neutrality to play some wishy washy word games about how they can’t get involved!

Plus, I think there needs to be a reckoning with the fact that in every way that matters China is the largest power in the world right now. America’s hegemonic status has been broken for a long time and the rest of the world is just figuring it out, China might see it in its interest to keep the dollar as the world reserve currency or whatever but they absolutely have room to be making moves that advance the socialist cause.

the power received in victory includes the power to fuck things up

This is a great way to put it. A lot of the condemnation of socialist governments is specifically condemnation of the big programs they put into place to try and reverse the ongoing horrors of capitalism - success or failure, the socialist government fully owns the results of those programs, meanwhile since most of the horrors of capitalism are done in a kind of decentralized way, capitalist governments get to play the blame shifting game where the bad things that happen under their own rule are the result of forces beyond anyone’s control and the good things are totally the result of capitalism and would be impossible under any other system.

The white looks so good! The factory gave me the blacked out engine block for free even though I didn’t order it, presumably just because they knew how good it would look.

I’m her chauffeur for sure, today I’m taking her to the dog park.

I remember my mom used to have a miata, I loved that car and I’m still a big fan of them today although I don’t own one. Convertibles are just so cool - why shouldn’t you enjoy driving, at least a little bit, if you’re going to be forced to do it so much?

Wow my Database Management instructor really didn’t feel like showing up to work this week.

Our “lecture” is a youtube video essay on AI LLMs, and our “assignment” is to have a conversation about Database Management with ChatGPT. The assignment itself was written by ChatGPT.

There’s an extra credit which seems more interesting about AI LLM agents in database systems. Frankly I would have made that the main assignment for the week idk what I’m supposed to get out of this “have a conversation” bullshit.

Most of the assignments for this class so far have just been googling how to do things in PostgreSQL/MongoDB for an hour or so which has been easy as balls but at least that was hands on practice doing database stuff. This is just taking the piss.

bloomer: The Ministry for the Future

doomer: Mad Max

why am i watching thirty minutes youtube videos breaking down Dragon Ball fights punch by punch like they were real mma matches this is peak slop but i can’t stop myself

DORITOS

AND FRITOS

DORITOS

AND FRITOS

DORITOS

AND FRITOS

DORITOS

AND FRITOS

I SAID GIMME ALL OF THOSE FUCKING DORITOS AND FRITOS

It’s mid grade slop for children.

If OJ could get off, Luigi certainly can.

The thing that annoys me the most about star wars’ “deep lore” is that 99% of it is the most shallow and obvious shit imaginable. Greedo was a Rodian and a Bounty Hunter - so the Rodians are an entire alien species whose culture revolves around bounty hunting. Chewbacca was Han Solo’s friend and first mate - so every wookie you meet until the end of time is attached to some non-wookie by means of a life debt (which we will retroactively apply to chewie’s relationship to han as well). There was occasionally something interesting mixed in there, but almost all of it was sandblasted off in order to make the franchise as smooth around the edges as possible (a process that started with that fucking cgi cartoon long before the mouse bought the franchise).

Yeah that’s a very uncomfortable subplot of the film.

he was leading a reactionary insurrection against a land reform program.

I want to watch this movie so bad. There’s a certain romantic futility to the fuedal landlord class fighting against the rise of industrial capital, but in my ideal movie I would make it clear that everybody involved sucks by centering a former peasant who is abused by the samurai as a young man and then has to get a job in a factory which is somehow worse and then gets drafted into the army and just has a miserable time throughout the entire thing.

What’s wild about The Last Samurai is that it’s even more popular in Japan than in America. Reason being that it recounts a kind of national myth that a lot of Japanese people want to be true about the honorable Samurai who definitely didn’t use guns or own factories or treat their peasants like shit. I would be curious if a remake that accurately portrays the “fuedal landlords versus new money bourgeoisie” nature of the rebellion would do well with anyone beyond weirdo marxists like me.

oof tires are expensive