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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • A comparison of the writings of Chancellor Fortescue and Thomas More reveals the gulf between the 15th and 16th century. As Thornton rightly has it, the English working class was precipitated without any transition from its golden into its iron age. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch27.htm

    The serf, in the period of serfdom, raised himself to membership in the commune, just as the petty bourgeois, under the yoke of the feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois. The modern labourer, on the contrary, instead of rising with the process of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm

    What makes Marxism communist is structurally you are more brutally exploited than a serf. A lord who kills his serfs stops being a lord, a boss who kills his employees is hiring. That nature of the exploitation left open an opportunity for a minority bourgeoisie to form and replace the lords last time, but this time capitalism doesn’t allow room for that. It flattens everything into one homogenized capitalist class and one homogenized working class, so the only possible revolution is those two switching places. If Marx believed you were freer or more powerful than a serf he wouldn’t be communist, he would be looking for which faction of workers was going to break out into a middle revolutionary class and replace capitalism with their own system of exploitation.




  • Leaves out the one catastrophic demand that the US actually cares about

    (D) taking appropriate steps to return to United States citizens (and entities which are 50 percent or more beneficially owned by United States citizens) property taken by the Cuban Government from such citizens and entities on or after January 1, 1959, or to provide equitable compensation to such citizens and entities for such property;

    “At the beginning of 1959 United States companies owned about 40 percent of the Cuban sugar lands - almost all the cattle ranches - 90 percent of the mines and mineral concessions - 80 percent of the utilities - and practically all the oil industry - and supplied two-thirds of Cuba’s imports. … The symbol of this shortsighted attitude is now on display in a Havana museum. It is a solid gold telephone presented to Batista by the American-owned Cuban telephone company.” - JFK


  • Black beard guy is a Kick streamer called Destiny who was banned from Twitch for asking redneck militias to mow down BLM protesters because he thought BLM was hurting Biden’s poll numbers.

    Blonde beard guy is Owen Shroyer who works for Alex Jones and went to prison for January 6th.

    Uncensored America is a litigation troll that gets student Republicans to invite them to hold a debate, and then announces they’re inviting PR disasters like these two so they can sue the university if they try to back out.


  • The second one is more like what the original razed 17th century mosque looked like. Deng was the one who gave orders to open fire in Shadian, he’s not good guy liberal here. Mao’s strategy was to yell at people to be atheist. Deng’s strategy was a religious red light district. Keep it alienated from secular society, make the mosques look like they were air-dropped from Saudi Arabia instead of having been there for 500 years, and give people the choice to be religious or Chinese but not both.

    Starting before Xi China realized that wasn’t working, especially in Xinjiang, so the new strategy was to integrate. That means less of Deng’s “laugh at this weird foreign religion” architecture and more of “respect China’s history of patriots who are Chinese first and Muslim second.”




  • If you don’t get the historical or political reason why something is the way it is then it seems “natural” by default. China never had a several millennia empire unless you think Europe is also a several millennia empire. The modern concept of Han is the same thing you’re doing when you say “fucking Saxons”. The Saxons didn’t do anything, the imperial system and opposition to it is racialized. From the 1600s-1900s Han wasn’t the dominant group in China, the Qing dynasty had a Manchu identity, and they executed people for expressing Han culture. Opposition to oppression and corruption and European imperial influence was racialized as Han nationalism.

    CCP politics straddles an anti-colonial idea of Chinese identity where the diaspora of people shipped around European empires to build railroads or farm plantations are still Chinese, and then also a geographic identity that all those millennia of different systems whether Mongol or Manchu or Han or split up into 100 different states are all equally Chinese.





  • Accurate. No extra bucket, alleged “non-voters” guy isn’t actually refusing to grab one, he just looks smug and isn’t praising the Democrats. Dems aren’t doing enough, boat’s still going to sink. Democrats decided to bring two buckets instead of getting rid of the drill or the Republican. If “non-voters” guy stopped balancing the weight and came over to pat the Dems on the back like they want him to, they would just slide to the right and push their end of the boat under without having to wait for the hole to do it.


  • Same Marx letter: “While the workingmen, the true political powers of the North, allowed slavery to defile their own republic, while before the Negro, mastered and sold without his concurrence, they boasted it the highest prerogative of the white-skinned laborer to sell himself and choose his own master, they were unable to attain the true freedom of labor, or to support their European brethren in their struggle for emancipation; but this barrier to progress has been swept off by the red sea of civil war.”

    Unfortunately it wasn’t actually swept off, instead of “at least we aren’t slaves” it’s “at least we aren’t the periphery” that became the boasted prerogative making core country labor feel like it has more investment in the system and more to lose than it actually does, and keeping them demanding anti-immigration and anti-trade and bombs to maintain hegemony.


  • The Space Shuttle was also a private company. United Space Alliance LLC owned the Space Shuttles, United Launch Alliance LLC owns the military rockets, Deep Space Transport LLC owns the SLS rocket.

    “Privatized” space just means instead of the government hiring Boeing or Lockheed to design a rocket according to their requirements, picking contractors to build it, and creating an LLC owned by all the contractors to pay them, Jeff Bezos hires ex-Boeing and Lockheed employees to build a rocket to his requirements, and then sues the government until they agree to pay him to launch it.