Who cares? There’s no categorical imperative, only class war

It’s good, it’s def on the list. You’ll be surprised by how moderate-seeming of Reforms it actually calls for, while being a revolutionary program.

Also read "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Wage Labor and Capital, and Critique of the Gotha Program. State and Revolution by Lenin and Reform or Revolution by Luxemburg are other great foundational works.

This is a good theory foundation to begin reading socialist history books: Wretched of the Earth, Black Reconstruction in America, Hammer and Hoe, Black Jacobins, History of the German Revolution, History of the Russian Revolution, etc.,

Also big recommendation for Ten Days that Shook the World by Jack Reed, it’s legit one of the most exciting books you’ll ever come across. It’s better than any action fiction book, and it’s just straight journalism of the actual October Russian revolution.

If you like podcasts, Mike Duncan’s Revolutions podcast is pretty good, his last season on the Russian revolution is a good primer for the years prior to the 1917 revolutions, and the first fiveish episodes are pretty good historical and theoretical primers on various revolutionary movements and theorists. Season 10 episodes 2 and 3 are about Marx and Engels specifically, and I know lots of people who had their eyes opened to M&E by these episodes. I think Duncan ends the series on a sour note wrt Lenin that lacks real complexity and depth, but those early episodes are pretty good as an entry-point to Marx&Engels and socialist theory.

Oh that’s nice then

I wish people would talk to me instead of just down voting or vaguemoting.

That they would get dehumanized and treated the way they/other men treat gays and women.

Why sad though?

Socialism, AI way scaled down more of a niche tool, data centers turned into hydroponics farms

Feminism is a social movement, made up of the practical activity of people in solidarity with each other. While centering and amplifying the voices and experiences of women and other victims of chauvinism is absolutely essential, remember that there is an incredible need to organize. Movements need people to take notes, make phone calls, promote campaigns, educate, show up to events, share our own experiences where people we care about were victims of patriarchy, and much much more.

Feminism isn’t just an idea, and patriarchy victimizes men as well as women, though obviously in drastically different ways and to drastically different degrees. Ideas don’t make up social movements, people do. Ideas help us name the world/the problem, which is the first step of revolution, but actual abolition of social structures takes work. Leaving all that work to the victims of patriarchy actually reinforces patriarchy.

Patriarchy and other consequences of class hierarchy are defeated by the contradictions that they create in society. A man who devotes himself to the abolition of male dominant society is the embodiment of such a contradiction. That’s what we are, don’t over think it. Just roll up our sleeves, listen and take good notes, offer to help organize and always center the voices and experiences of the victims of patriarchy.

Idk you’re basically asking people to think in a way that they really don’t process info. Its akin to being like “in order to understand my point you have to complete this trigonometry problem” and they’re just gonna go, “nah” and then revert to their heuristic.

They might like Facebook, or really rely on google. So all you can do is talk a little bit about alternatives. Since all these companies spy and steal data, they are speaking from a place of like resignation. Asking to stop using any service is kind of a maximum demand, not in essence (I actually don’t believe in min/max political demands) but in affect. Its like, to stop using google would be a major change, require some intimidating technical expertise (are you gonna offer IT support for their Grapheme phone/Linux Mint computer?) and then all the other services are just gonna steal their data anyways. Leaving Facebook is scary and hard, its like an addiction. And like all addictions you can fully know that something is wrong, and still be afraid or fail to quit it. There has to be a breaking point and you’re not gonna be able to offer that in one conversation.

The better strategy is to try and find common ground on problems that people are concerned about, like data centers, and then offer actions or political leadership. If we really care about an issue, then the best method I have found is to schedule one on ones and try and draw people into work. If you want to teach then you need a theory of pedagogy and the idea that good ideas can replace bad ideas is fundamentally broken.

Yes. For one, the older they get the more independent they get. When they’re little its like you gotta lug around like 2 large bags and a playpen if you wanna just like go to someone’s house. Eventually you don’t need the playpen, then two bags becomes one bag, then the large bag becomes a small bag and then they can just carry their own little backpack if they need any personal items.

In a couple years, prob when he’s between 4 and 5, if you need to go anywhere, you can just be like “let’s go!” And he will put on his shoes, put on his coat, run out to the car, open the door, jump in his carseat, buckle his seatbelt, and be ready. This is very fun.

If he is a 2 year old boy, there’s a good chance he will still be in diapers, so not changing diapers is a big QOL improvement.

2 yo can be very challenging. Take him to the park where he can run off all that energy. He will chill out. My oldest son was extremely challenging when he was that age. He was impulsive, destructive, unpredictable. If he wasn’t in the room with you he was painting the carpet with nail polish. If we invited people over for dinner, he would grab whatever was laying out on the dinner table and break it. He quick grabbed cellphones and immediately dropped them in classes of water, he would grab your glasses off your face and just break them in half. He destroyed multiple baby gates within seconds. But I just took him to the park in the morning, let him run, tried not to be too hard on him despite being sometimes incredibly frustrated. Told him I loved him every day, sang him to sleep. He chilled out, and now he’s a hard working, committed young man. He’s still a pain in the ass, but he’s a good guy, I love him and trust him.

It gets easier but it gets more complicated. Some of the issues that can come up around age 11-13 are not easy. But its also my favorite age, because they become like self aware in a way that they weren’t before. They develop little identities, but they’re still kids. But this process, esp around other kids going through it can be really difficult. Teenage years can be difficult, even if they’re not rebellious and chaotic, they become very self absorbed and it feels like they’re slipping away. This also changes with time, and it has its own rewards watching them mature into young adults.

Parenting never gets easy, but those young years when they are so dependent on us are the most like labor intensive, and the labor is very like “make sure you have all of the 500 things you need for them in order to leave the house.” Make time for your self and your partnership if there is still a partner in the picture. Ask for help if possible from relatives. Don’t lose yourself and don’t let your partner (if there is one) lose themselves either. Strive for balance over happiness. The happiness will come if there’s balance, and it gets easier to find balance as they become more independent. But ironically, with independence comes strong ambivalence, not necessarily like happiness.

Hang in there dad, you got this

Good talking yo ya! Sorry if I came in a little hot on my first comment :)

Thanks for responding, reading your other comment, I can see there is likely a lot of agreement. I do tend to harp on “the way we define people in society” because I think it is fundamental to leftist theory of change. Education is prob the largest part of what I’ve worked on, when compared to other comrades I tend to be very pedagogical rather than political. Def the biggest challenge is getting people out of their heads and thinking critically, about themselves and their conditions, then taking that critical thought and turning it into critical action.

However I’ve def encountered lots of funny behavior from “leaders” of movements, some especially nasty cases in progressive groups, but even in good leftist groups there can be a very “my way is the right way” emphasis. Fortunately, its basically always possible to struggle for more and better democratic input from members. The way in which we go about it matters, and I’ve seen that wielded cynically as well, but if an org is truly democratic if people can speak up and share their experiences, it has a balancing, instructing effect on the discourse. And on the other side, bureaucracy is death.

I’ve also met lots of people who will walk up to us in a protest like “I totally support what you’re doing” but if you ask them about their own politics they have a hard time describing it. But the fact that there is so much agreement that “the vibe is off” that it is moving people to action, putting hours lives into situations where we can act and learn. The people who are leaders today were baby leftists in 2020, each iteration we keep creating more and more engagement with socialism and social transformation. Its exciting, but the more these ideas move from idealism to, basically the only way we can protect the people we love and care about, the more there is to do.

Glad you’re out here with us!

The flaw in your logic, is that you are arguing for a kind of essentialism in human beings. You say

The only thing that has a prayer of keeping anything in check is a citizenry that stays aware, mistrusts whatever the government is, understands the cycle, and continuously fights for rights by making it a credible threat that the people WILL revolt unless the leaders do the right thing.

As if these changes in society would not mark a radical difference in the composition and structure of society. You go on to speak to your skepticism that the mechanisms of control exerted over the masses will ever be overcome. And I admit, they are very scary and concerning. But there is no theory of change in what you are describing. The world is made of people, but the people you describe are still an abstraction. You aren’t considering how the system that the capitalists are constructing is already changing people. you are assuming that the conditions that the ruling classes are imposing on the masses will work as expected to repress the masses. But their repression changes society. Changed society creates changed people. Changed people change society.

Despite 109 years (since the Balfour declaration) of coordination and action among the ruling class for the creation of a state to destabilize the middle east for resources, and a near global imperialist consensus for the creation and “right to exist” for Israel, support for them has never been lower.

In 2008 the global economy crashed. The culprits were widely known, the whole political and media apparatus justified the bail outs, while the people were against it. Deep recessions hit every sector. It took 4 years to manage a large but individualistic and disorganized protest movement against it. Since then, we have seen many more mass protest movements, George Floyd 2020, Pro Palestine student encampments, and now protests against ICE. Each iteration, more organized, more resilient. The DSA, a group of only about 6000 members from the 80’s - 2010s, has now grown to 120k members, the largest socialist org in American history. Its worthy of criticism and is lacking in many crucial areas, for example the labor movement is significantly weaker than it was in the 30’s. But in January, the ICE OUT strikes in Minneapolis was a bona fide general strike. It was brief, and doesn’t compare to the general strikes of '32 - '34 where the city of Minneapolis was basically taken over by communist teamsters. But its significant and legitimate.

If people aren’t willing to keep fighting for justice and they stay complacent ALL systems trend towards corruption.

I mean this in the most gracious way possible, but this is a bit of a self report. People are willing to keep fighting for social justice, in larger numbers than we’ve seen in 100 years. Education and awareness is better and more coordinated, organization is better, politics are clearer. There are still major challenges, around race and gender especially, but 4th wave feminism has changed the discourse irreversibly, 2020 protests were the largest and most diverse protests ever, although fairly rational demands like “defund” are getting killed in the discourse, and trans people and gender theory are here to stay. There will be repression, but the more repression they cause, the more people organize against it.

The fact is, the system is not rational, and the people running it are running it based on their own class interests. Those interests are opposed to our interests. Capitalism is the most unstable system ever conceived. In a way, that is how it is able to spread and subsume, it destabilizes old structures and transforms them into racist, imperialist profit motive. But now it is destabilizing itself in its search for profit. The liberal period is over and we are entering a period of direct domination and resistance. As there is more and more to organize against, we will forge the social structures that create the future society.

This is a much better view of history than “the cunning will always rise up.” We could use you in helping to ensure that doesn’t happen. Democracy, real mass democracy, is the only defense we have. Don’t sit on the sidelines and poo poo about doomed preconceptions, your perspectives could help the movement rather than carry water for the imperialists

The plot to Infinite Jest

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ab5WvwfLuLM

This is a decision made by the pregnant person, informed by her/their doctor. I can also see her/their family having some input in informing the pregnant person’s decision, to the extent that they are not being coerced by their family.

As far as outside agents, such as ourselves, are involved, pregnancy is a medical issue. This is the only responsible way for society to handle these questions. Society is able to provide support for parents, esp those who are caretakers of children with severe disabilities, and we can improve education and access to contraceptives. But it is irresponsible and unethical to become involved in the medical decisions of others under any circumstances.

If we really care about unborn children we should care doubly about born children and the families who take on the responsibility of ensuring those disabled individuals are able to experience love and joy. Trying to collapse ethics and morals into pure individual choice is a scam.

I have a voice that declares something as fact. Then I have a voice that is skeptical. Then I have another voice that is skeptical of the skeptic. Finally I have a voice that wants more info/evidence. I do not make it through all four voices with every thought, and the first voice fucking hates me

Thanks!

I didn’t mean it to be condescending, you said you’d never seen it, so I said it. It was kind of a joking, cheeky way. I didn’t mean it like you’re stupid or incapable of understanding it. It was a failed attempt at a joke, and once I saw the down votes I realized the joke didn’t land.

No I didn’t back it up but that ship has sailed. I dont really care to prove to you my position now, I’d rather just apologize for how my comment came off.

Hi, read the next sentence:

quantum computing is also a grift