Dirt_Possum [she/her, undecided]

Xi Jinping has said before that Latin American-style “welfare state” will only encourage the people to turn lazy

If anyone is curious, here (below the spoiler tag) is an excerpt from the piece linked above, machine translated by Firefox, starting with Xi’s unfortunate, disappointing statement about “welfare” and “lazy people.” Still very illuminating regarding the perspective of China’s leadership. That it’s mostly rooted in material reality, that alone is refreshing in contrast to reading anything put out by western heads of state. Compare it to Trump’s latest public disclosure.

Correctly understand and grasp the major theoretical and practical problems of China’s development:

This was simply untrue for the Soviet Union or China.

What about Vietnam? It may not have been quite 20% of the population (or more, as was the case in Korea) but still enough for everyone to have a relative murdered by the US and in even more recent of memory than for Korea. I honestly don’t know, this is not so much a challenge as a question, but my understanding is that most Vietnamese are now rather ambivalent or even friendly with respect to their feelings about the US despite that. Of course there are other major differences between Vietnam and North Korea besides their educational systems, but surely what @Z_Poster365@hexbear.net is saying plays a major role as well.

Add in the usual suspects of liberal traitors and mentally colonized individuals and you now have a strata of USphilic people who will be baited by the US.

Doesn’t that largely fall under the umbrella of “a good education system and strong socialist public life” though?

It’s all part the same spectrum, a continuum of exploitation and domination.

Guess I need to read up on what happened.

What is the healthcare in China like? It may not be true universal healthcare, but surely it’s nothing like the “die of poverty from crippling medical debt before the terminal cancer kills you” style of US healthcare?

I know it’s bad for our mental health to engage on , but I always admire the few remaining brave comrades who go there and make the libs shit themselves.

Thank you for your service.

I don’t see the purpose of televangelism. (except grifting believers for money)

Then you do see the purpose.

Really the only hope you have of convincing someone to take your religion seriously that isn’t fear or violence is directly connecting to them

Disagree. Maybe if you widen how you define fear and violence far enough it’s sort of true, but I still don’t think that is accurate. For example you can use a person’s lost sense of belonging to a community (and there’s no need for it to be direct), or their flawed ideas about morality and its decay in a crumbling world, or even the promise that if they believe in the right magic things that they too will be blessed with health and happiness, or less altruistically, with wealth and superiority. There are countless ways to convince someone (particularly a person in a position to be vulnerable to it) to take your religion seriously between violence and direct connection, it’s all a matter of knowing how to play to a person’s specific wants and needs.

At best, these guys are only for people who already believe, and then they can just go to church and get a more personal experience there.

These televangelists are “for” anyone who will give them money. Already believing in the broader mythology that the televangelists are specifically using as the basis for the grift definitely helps, but the background societal acceptance of Christianity as the default American belief system is plenty enough to hook even some people who never even gave it much thought, especially if they’re caught at a time of intense hardship or vulnerability. I’m sure it’s easier and more common for people who have already bought into the “son of God sacrificed himself for our sins but came back to life and rose into heaven” but it can also include anyone in an emotionally vulnerable state where they’re desperate to glom onto something that promises to improve their lives or lessen their suffering.

It’s a different landscape now than it was 30 or 40 years ago especially given the internet, so I think it’s easier now to be shocked that anyone would buy into this obvious grift. But look at all the other obvious grifts people buy into that we talk about here all the time, most of them now using the medium of the internet in place of the television medium of televangelists. From qanon to blue maga, from NFTs to AI fixing everyhing, from economic mobility under capitalism to worship of manchild billionaires. The internet exponentially increased the televangelist’s competition for the attention of desperate and credulous people. But it used to be one of the most common and lucrative social grifts when channel-surfing was the most common way for people to connect to the broader world (or mistakenly think they were).

I guess televangelism is really just exploiting popular religion

Televangelism is popular religion. Maybe the following is a fine line and mostly what you meant anyway but I do think there is an important distinction. Televangelism is exploiting people by using the same old trappings of religion, but that is itself not an exploitation of religion. Is Scientology a religion or is it an “exploitation” of some kind of “real” religion? Are the Moonies exploiting religion, or are they another religion that exploits people?

Honestly, I thought he had already sold every square inch of nationalized Argentinian assets along with every inch of copper wiring in their walls to the US years ago.

Whats MOFI mobile wifi?

Sort of but there’s more to it. Like you, I can just use my phone as a hotspot and use its data plan for my internet access but there are of course strict limits to that. After so many GB (which I use in 2 days on a monthly allotment), I get throttled even with an “unlimited” data plan. The way I understand it is that carriers sell business level LTE/5g plans to companies that they won’t sell to individuals, plans that actually are unlimited without data cap throttling. So companies sprang up that buy these business plans from the carriers and then resell them to individuals, almost always in rural areas who have no access to broadband.

The main thing I expect is the sim card you put in the router that allows you access, but I think the router is specialized too? Like my MOFI router supposedly switches between carriers depending on which ones are the least congested and best reception. What matters to me is that it’s actual access without throttling. Before, I couldn’t watch more than 2 movies in a month or download a ps4 game. Now it’s like I’m a normal person with real internet access. Well aside from the latency. So I don’t know, maybe I can get my own MOFI router and just pay the rural internet access company for the sim card, but I haven’t seen much about people doing that which is why I was asking.

What about if your only internet access is satellite (unusable) or MOFI?

I think you might be a little off here. I really appreciate that you brought up Ernst Mandel’s and Fredric Jameson’s works, but I have to disagree about them not intending the word “late” to mean “closer to the terminal end.” Without going and spending a bunch of time digging for quotes, it seemed pretty clear to me that they were referring to the concept that there are certain stages to capitalism (as already noted both Marx and Lenin discussed) and not using the word just to mean “the most recent” not to mention that would be an odd way to phrase it. I also agree with you that Michael Hudson (and slightly more tangentially Edward Said) have further developed the concept of modern imperialism beyond Lenin’s analysis, but that said, Lenin’s conception of imperialism was not at all vulgar, not even in comparison to modern Marxists additions to it. Have you read Lenin’s work on imperialism? He specifically developed it beyond the idea of “naked territory grabbing and domination” of old school colonialism to mean what it means today, including how Hudson mean and use it.

Capitalism will not die of its own accord, it must be killed.

Distinction without a difference. Capitalism will be killed because of its own inherent contradictions which make its killing an inevitability.

Good for us, bad for all the regular people who were getting exposed to far left ideas on their r/all feed.

No they didn’t. They just needed some little thing to get upset about to justify purging us. We were getting too popular and the great NATOification of all social media had to be complete.

I think that is a valid concern and analysis, but I also think it has a lot to do with where in the hierarchy of the organization an individual is. As with labor aristocracy in the proletariat, there are those whose class interests will still align with the capitalists, but the low-level street gangs don’t really fall into that kind of category and the majority of the people comprising the larger organizations are still working class grunts, doing what they can to eke out a living. Part of the problem is the broad meaning of “gang,” and the use of “criminal” as a catch-all for anyone who is operating outside bourgeois law. If we’re talking about the giant cartels and the people who run them, they are just another part of the capitalist machine, filling a particular niche in the corporate ecosystem and even serving a particular political purpose for the capitalist class as a whole. Of course they will follow the money. Even though smaller local gangs may end up ultimately working for the cartels out of necessity, just as regular workers need to sell their labor to “legitimate” capital, they can’t be lumped in as part of the same class as the cartel management. Like came_apart_at_Kmart was saying (or asking)

a lot of “gangs” in the US originate from minority ethnic community defence organizations, to push back against particularly egregious mistreatment by the hegemonic political project

That’s close to being the definition of the kind of people who are ripe for radicalization. So when we hear the line “organized crime is likely to follow the money” we still have to ask “who exactly are we talking about within ‘organized crime’?”

I still remember a thread where someone was talking about the revolutionary potential of modern lumpen making “lumpenproletariat” not a great class distinction, and one of the top comments was some snide “Lumpen drug runners aren’t gunna’ help us do communism, dude.” Oh really? Why not? Seems like the people forced out of any “legal” means of selling their labor to survive would be primed for revolution. To me a lot of that thread read like hexbears with unexamined classism and even unintentional and unexamined racism. So-called “gang-affiliated” “criminals” are more often just members of ad-hoc organizations within marginalized communities struggling to survive within a system that wants to see them be literal slaves or cease to exist. Liberals spit on these “gang members” meanwhile white supremacist gangs are called “cops” and liberals honor them at every opportunity and expect complete deference to them. Most “gangs” may not be at all Marxist yet, but they have extremely high revolutionary potential.

Pretty sure it’s not only legal but a well known matter of course in the US.

Hasn’t everyone played Telling L!es?

For what it’s worth from a lurker, I completely agree that it seems much more like there’s a bloomerism problem than a doomerism problem. From what I can see as I read through nearly every comment in these megathreads is that people are doing their best to do some material analysis with what will always be incomplete information. I appreciate seeing conflicting perspectives because I always end up having my own limited conceptions of the situation challenged. In this case, the conflicting perspective is whether Iran abiding by this ceasefire was a massive misstep or a positive and necessary strategic move. I am afraid it seems a lot more like a mistake to me, even a failure of the resistance, but I could be wrong and I would love it if it turns out I am.

But then I come across these comments complaining about all the “doomerism” and it’s like wtf? I don’t see “doomerism” I see justifiable frustration, anger, disappointment, even fear about how events are unfolding along with valid criticism of the decisions that these circumstances resulted from. Posting these criticisms is not an act of surrender or total despair to the point of “giving up,” and they also don’t degrade the discussion, they add to it just as constructively as any optimistic comments, so long as both are rooted in material reality that none of us have the full picture of.

On the other hand when people talk as though we all just need to have faith in Iran, that seems to me the kind of idealism that we should avoid and much more of a potential problem than expressing valid concerns that may sound pessimistic. None of these comments, no matter how critical or frustrated, or how congratulatory and optimistic, have even a grain of material influence on the outcome of what’s being discussed. Neither do our predictions, whether they turn out to be correct or not, we just need to reflect on them in any case to try to learn from how those predictions compared to what actually happened.

Isn’t stronger than ever, even after the supposed boycott a couple years ago? Since everything is so filled with AI bots now, I guess it’s hard to tell, but I thought reddit was still the place everyone went to ask a question and be answered by a swarm of insufferable nerds. If it really is dying, that’s wonderful news.

Oh fuck it’s worse than I would have imagined. I really liked her too, but not anymore. She’s just as repugnant as Rapaport, who she is apparently now friends with again and takes the blame for being a bad tenant when he was her landlord.

Here’s Natasha Lyonne impersonating Rapaport on SNL.

Lyonne is so awesome. Fuck, I hope she’s not a zionist.