ComradeRat

Well yeah, but the isekaiee here is gonna have that problem regardless of what they eat, drink or where they live. I believe euergetes' point is less "the water is safe for you to drink with no ill effects" and more "the water is no more risky than anything else you'll find"

This is a misconception, in reality the drinking water is about as safe for you as the cider. Both are riskier than most first worlders are comfortable with

More evidence for the "this is a strategic maneuver, not a capitulation" pile, hopefully this is a sign of more good things to come

Overall an interesting point that could have been waaay shorter and better if instead of the digressions into kautsky, stalin and althusser etc he just went back to marx's 1840s article about prussian censorship and bureacracy, and in particular how the biggest issue with censorship is when/because the censor is a non-expert in the subject theyre censoring and the censoree is an expert in the subject, he could have made his point much quicker and more effectively

I agree most stuff is slop (as with most of the media produced in bourgeois society)

The issue i'm talking about is when instead of investigating the slop, its claims, criticising it, etc (as past marxists have), many online leftists beeline to google a reason not to do this work. "My google search said the author is a liberal bourgeois academic" should be the starting point of the investigation, but too often this is where peoples investigation ends, with an excuse not to read or criticise.

I will admit some people go after reading a bit "ok its definitely slop, i'll read something else instead" and this is fine, but ime the vast majority go "the thought leader said its slop, i dont have to read it" and go back on youtube or tiktok.

I slightly disagree on all history being entertainment, at least of some aspects of the 20th and maybe 19th centuries. Before then I agree that reading about it is generally for entertainment with no real applicability to the struggle.

But the 19th and 20th centuries laid the whole foundations for where we find ourselves today, which I find useful in agitation, particularly around the imperialist nature of NATO and the origins of world economy. Also the 1848 revolutions, paris commune, russian revolution and soviet project, chinese revolution and their projects, socialist revolutions and experiements' histories in general, are extremely useful and relevant to us as we look to replicate their successes and avoid their failures.

That isnt to say i think all histories of the 19th and 20th centuries are useful for the struggle; a lotta it is still entertainment stuff. But unlike the previous centuries, imo theres stuff in the 19th and 20th we still really gotta understand today to be effective revolutionaries

Tbh i think we're just totally absolutely fucked unless China or others use serious state assets to support us, because the sheer scale of coordination and necessary materiel to confront the bourgeoisie is just too great.

Tbf marx'a position in 1848-9 wasnt much different. He (and engels) argued proletarian revolution would require a napoleon-type world war between bourgeois revolutionary france and germany and britain+russia giving the proletariat of all european countries the opporunity to rise up. Marx's new years greeting in his newspaper for 1849 therefore hoped for a world war, which never came and so the various proletarian revolutions were strangled in their cradles

This convo is rly emblematic wirh what the article talks about "Stalinists" reaction to expressions of doubt in our (communists) likelihood of success success as reasons we'd want to betray communism (i really dont like the term "stalinist", but thats what the article uses so ig im using it here)

Criticism expressed too sharply can be seen as doubt, as vacillation in one's historical task, and then as sabotage. It is easy to see how the capacity for genuine critical and scientific discussion, when put under such pressures, becomes muted, if not impossible. What does one expect when the political whims of the party-state can run roughshod over the protestations of actual experienced technical bureaucrats for fear of being tried as saboteurs?

Dont have time to find the quote this second, but James Harris' The Great Urals has a great bit on this wrt ~~copper~~ coke production in the urals. If anyone is interested i'll find the actual excerpt, but tldr: local (bourgeois specialist) geologists said local ~~copper~~ coke was too shit for use in industry; local party arrested them for wrecking and hired other scientists who said the ~~copper~~ coke was fine; the ~~copper~~ coke was not fine and ~~millions~~ billions of rubles of machines were damaged by using sub par ~~copper~~ coke and the whole investment ended up failing

Edit: coked coal, not copper, billions not millions

Theres an annoying tendency in leftist circles to instead of reading a book and examining it themselves while being aware of the biases the author may has had, to instead go use whatever a google search has turned up as an excuse not to read. Investigation seems often limited to finding reasons not to investigate further

The conservatives are happy with him from what ive seen (since carney is self admittedly more consercative than doug ford)

I miss the blockchain and crypto, it was much funnier and less useful for reactionary propaganda than AI