Welcome again to everybody! Make yourself at home, and help with the dishes. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is our weekly discussion thread.
🇵🇸From the River to the Sea Palestine Shall be Free!
Today I kept thinking about the utter fucking waste the capitalist system is. In terms of natural resources but also in terms of human resources.
Like, tens of thousands of people are unemployed in this country and many of them can and will work in some form or another. They get harassed continually about finding a job and the have to fill their time doing shit temp jobs that pay very little, creating profit for someone else while barely getting by and falling into an endless cycle of unemployment.
And then there are millions of people in The West stuck in some shitty wage slave job just because it costs money to exist. And then I haven't even started about actual slaves in the third world who get exploited to the max.
Imagine how much we could do if we could all get along and if money wasn't the single most important thing in life.
I often think that too, as well as the millions of people who are employed in valueless industries, sort of like David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs thesis.
It's not just the reserve army of labour that's wasted potential, it's the people in weapons manufacturing, corporate legal and finance, advertising, lobbying, etc. Many make very high salaries, and yet they produce nothing that an honest society would call valuable.
We could achieve so much if our priorities were set properly. People have achieved so much in AES states, past and present. That thought is what keeps me going.
I think about this constantly. The magnitude of societal progress hamstrung by placing the profit motive above all will only truly be understood once we transition toward an international socialism. The human potential that's wasted away in finance, law and order, the military industrial complex, the gig economy, etc, etc. All of these industries are full of proletariat that could be pushing society forward.
The PRC is showing us that even when hindered by imperialist aggression, socialist production is far superior to capitalist production. This is why America is so afraid of China. They don't have a counter because capitalism doesn't offer one. They only have 1 button to push and that button is war.
I fucking hate just how desensitized I've become to videos of dying kids the past 3 weeks.
It's difficult trying to stay in the loop while also preserving sanity.
I don't share all the triggering material for the respect of my Palestinian friends who actually have family in Gaza. But god damn do I just want to rub everyone else's face in it.
The fact that anyone can still think the accusations about Xinjiang are real now that they're seeing what a real genocide looks like - and how hard it is to keep a lid on solid evidence from escaping in this modern era - is wild to me.
Had one of the best interviews in my time as a wage slave last week and really felt like I hit it out of the park. They said I'd know on Friday. Well here it is Monday and still donno. Should I keep holding out or just blow my brains out now get it over with?
On a more cheerful note, I'm finally starting my dive into non-ML leftist theory and started Anarchy Works by peter Gelderloos and it's been a pretty enjoyable read. The format is basically Idea, historical example, and synthesis of ideas with praxis for each chapter. But it's clear and easy to digest. I'm 1/4 in and started Saturday and that with barely any time to read and I'm not a fast reader normally.
I'm pretty sure I'm definitely not an anarchist but I like that I am developing a fuller understanding of the concepts. I do like the idea of little pocket anarchist communities popping up all the time tho because even if they never last, it does show that humans can still be communal for at least a moment.
Might take a sidestreet after this book and read up on syndicalism since that's also piqued my interest recently.
She seems to spend lots of time thinking about whether people are pedos or “dangerous people.” She reported her coworker and feels very happy likening it to how a cop feels arresting people. Her ideology is very contradictory. I’ve posted about her before.
Invented a tart recipe in my head a few weeks ago and just absolutely no-scoped the motherfucker tonight. It was a pear-frangipane tart with the tart crust flavored with herbal liquer, the frangipane flavored with orange blossom water, and the pears' main flavor of ouzo.
It was my bf's birthday dinner I made it for. He invited all of his lovers over and it gave me a bit of (maybe this is the word?) schaudenfreude that my dish was the best received of all of them.
Still not super into poly, but it has been a big learning experience.
I was looking through the flags of the SSRs. It's a collection that spans from beautiful to horrendous, imo. Georgia is cool because it kind of hurts my eyes to look at, but in a good way, I think. Waves on flags looks pretty good. Some of my favourite are in the "other republics" section, Bhukharan and Transcaucasia.
How do you go about doing these? Do you convert the PDF with something like Calibre then read it through to fix the typos, etc, and add tags (html tags)?
In this case I used OCRMyPDF to get text out of the PDF (Calibre doesn't do that), and then I'll create an empty EPUB in Calibre and import the text slowly, going through it with the PDF open to ensure it is correct, then finally add tags.
If you want to, do help, it's a tiny project of mine, very... creatively... called "Comrades Library" and I'm just trying to create EPUBs of stuff, so there will always be something on the backlog. Maos Five Essays is currently the only one my list.
Man, I thought my dried magic mushrooms would be ruined after sitting in my shed for three years.
I made a lemon tek shot with around 3.5 grams of the shrooms and held my nose while drinking the nasty sludge. I love mushrooms, but god damn i hate the taste.
I plopped down in the bed, turned off the lights and put on some music while waiting to see if anything would happen.
For the first ten minutes, all i could feel was a tingling sensation in my teeth and I bounce my feet to the music.
Then, suddenly, my vision got filled with millions of brightly colored ribbons of light that exploded like fireworks in my head and formed immense landscapes of sparkling rays of color that created constantly changing patterns that danced and changed with the music.
I lost myself entirely and became a being of pure light and merged with the eternal waves of dancing lights and ribbons.
Everything that made up me disappeared and I was one with the beautiful cosmic explosions of pure color. No worries, no cares, just vibing with the infinite universe and drifting around endless worlds filled with bright, dancing colors.
As the trip faded, I fell asleep for 14 hours and woke up at 18:00, cooked some food and wondering how much I've fucked up my sleep schedule now.