TreadOnMe [none/use name]

Russia already had a majority control over Ukrainian oil interests because they have the bargaining power of being (and this is still true btw, during wartime) Ukriane’s main supplier of natural gas. They could have, and it probably would have been smarter economically, for them to, bargain with the Ukrainian government, trading the political rights of the Donbass for control over the oil. But that is not what this war is about. This war is primarily about NATO, geo-political control, and the fact that it would have been massively unpopular and incredibly disruptive for Russia to give up the Donbass, and what they were doing was not a long-term solution as long as Ukraine continues to arm themselves and politically bang the drum for a full-scale invasion. Whether or not that invasion was imminent in 2022 is unclear, as the Kiev government was completely taken by surprise by the Russian invasion, but also had been making huge rhetorical speeches about retaking the Donbass regions. It’s very unclear at the moment, and history may or may not provide clarification.

You aren’t incorrect that capital is concentrated in the hands of a national bourgeoisie, but that an imperialist economic model does not strictly make. As @panopticon@hexbear.net pointed out, being imperialist is about separating a ‘core’ from a ‘periphery’ and treating them as exclusive zones for exploitation. The development of Crimea for the last decade has shown that that isn’t what Russia does in areas they annex, they are simply incorporated into the ‘core’. Now we can argue about if their exploitation of the Chechens is imperialism, but even then, Russia is almost always trying to be an honest broker in their deals (with the continued natural gas trading to Ukriane is evidence for). They are capitalists and exploiters of their own people, but imperialists is abit of a stretch, from a Marxist-Leninist definition.

‘Collectivism’, even by the AIER’s flimsy ass stupid and reductionist definition has had widespread popularity and reach for far longer than just 1917, but go off champ, keep demonstrating your historical illiteracy.

It’s going to be very funny if Russia wins the war but their country gets economically fucked because they didn’t gulag the neo-libs.

So does liberal capitalism. Literally read anything by Peter Singer and he will wax on for pages and pages about how we should be donating to famie relief before at the very end (and it is in every single one of his works and literally on his website) saying that actually population control will have a higher marginal utility than famine relief so really we should be making sure the poors don’t breed. Just disgusting stuff.

My favorite thing is that this is literally how so many cities in the U.S. operate, with tons of empty buildings and their cities are still covered in garbage.

I want to emphasize that Russia is not concerned with Anglo propoganda, they are primarily and only concerned with reaching out to the third world, China, and their own populace. Maybe if you speak Russian or another Slavic language you will receive propoganda, but the amount of propoganda that Russia sends English speakers is negligible and to pretend that it is at all a factor in online English discourse is literally reiterating completely debunked Russia-gate propoganda. You are literally more likely to unknowingly run into Scientology propoganda than you are Russian propaganda. This is the ravings of someone who’s so far in the Kool-Aid they are seeing red everywhere.

Yeah, as a long time Venezuela watcher, I in general, agree with this take, the PSUV has been really doing an internal neoliberalism due to the embargo, in part to get the embargo lifted, and in part because they simply don’t want to or don’t think they have to support the social programs in order to get elected since they are effectively the only game in town since the Guiado attempt. The social program rollbacks have been massively unpopular, but there is really no outlet for it outside of the PCV, but honestly, trying to drive it underground is a huge waste of resources and probably a miscalculation on their part. We’ll see what happens and if they can figure out a way to square it with Cuba, but alienating your only real ally (no matter how weak) in the region is a really bad move.

I think my favorite part of this is that you can’t have ‘grocery-bagging’ and ‘spandex wearing’. Those are two completely different types of cyclist in my experience.

Yeah, business schools are a whole different matter. I struggle to even call them schools because the ‘better’ they are, the less the students actually understand about business.

Interesting. I pretty much agree with all of this, though not as aggressively. I mean, there is a very good reason that I chose not to pursue (despite having the recs and qualifications for) a doctorate in anthropology, because pretty much all of it felt like complete horseshit, particularly if you have lived, worked and read Marx and all of those descended from that dialectical materialist mileau.

God if you think the anthropology department is bad, you should read the scholarly dog shit that comes out of communications departments. I was told once that I wrote a exemplar paper for a class, I think it was on art criticism. I was absolutely black-out drunk and do not remember writing at least half of it, and upon re-reading it, it was some of the most pretentious bullshit I have ever written and really made me despondent that this was considered the best paper I had ever written, but I was already in my senior year and all of my scholarship stuff was tied up in this very stupid degree, so I finished it anyways.

Thank you for all these recommendations though, I will absolutely look into them when I get a chance. I am actually going back to school for a hard science degree soon, funded by my manufacturing career, but I will absolutely buy and read your recommendations.

Look, you can’t place the blame solely on the ‘post-modernists’ for this, the ‘post-modernists’ were usually very very particular in their critiques of the historical development of ‘scientific’ practices and ‘rationalist’ principles.

If anything, most of the post-modernist theorists would see this as a full retreat into a form of commercialized simulacra, a full embrace of protagonist agency story-board logic attempting to fit itself within a post-producer rationalist framework that can only function in terms of either individual consumer paradigm, or as a mass marketing paradigm, where consumption is identity and thus criticism of consumption and product is a criticism of identity, when neither is the reality of the matter. Basically, instead of the post-modernist point that truth and identity are vast, complex and difficult to truly grasp, saying “Criticism of astrology is a form of misogyny.” is a whole modernist reduction of identity as consumption, a reversal on Marx’s modernist reduction of identity as production. For them, they are equally problematic, but for different reasons.

Ah Christ, I hope they saw this coming and are ready for it. Either way this is going to be a blood-bath.

You are mistaking ‘worker power’ with ‘monetary compensation’. The abuses within Hollywood run incredibly deep, it’s assumed in the industry that you will be sexually harassed at some point on set, and there is nothing you can actually do about it and keep your job, particularly if that person is a lead. There is a magnitude of power discrepancy that an increased paycheck and additional residuals cannot cover. Most of these writers are economically precarious, and it is their economic precarity that is causing them to strike against management. When they were not economically precarious, they did not strike against management nor raise any real fuss over these abuses. They want to be on the gravy train, they don’t want the gravy train to stop working because it is fundamentally unethical. Which I sympathize with, getting a good-paying job is hard, but keeping it is a nightmare.

I really recommend you listen to the QAnonAnonymous episode, I think it is 143 on Jim Caviezel, and realize that it is literally just the tip of the iceberg for the show business industry.

That being said, it fundamentally doesn’t matter what I think about any of this. The WGA will fight their hearts out for whatever demands they want and we will see what the consequences of that fight actually are, critical support regardless.

The last writer’s strike did not, so I don’t know why you would assume this one would.

This is the way dialectics works, they are at once opposed and supportive, with the balance drawing from context. I’ll walk you through the thought process.

I’ll start with the idea of ‘social revolution’, where one class upsets and grabs the balance of ownership of the means of production from another class. This is not a social revolution. Nothing is fundamentally changing about the power dynamics of the situation, the union is the union, the corporation is the corporation. This is not ‘more worker power’ because the workers are not seizing ownership, they are asking for a larger slice of the pie and residuals. So that leaves us with two questions. What does that mean and does that make it bad?

What it means is that assuming that because the workers are going to have a larger share of the pie they will be subject to less constraints is a false equivocation. It may happen, but the likelihood is low. And we can even verify this from their demands, none of which are asking for greater creative control, or democratic control over production scheduling. There is nothing here that removes the abuse from the sets, it simply makes it tolerable through greater payoff.

So does that make it bad? Well, depends on what your goal is politically. If you are seeking harm reduction, then no, it is not bad, people getting paid for their work is good. On the other hand, if you think the entire edifice is corrupt and cannot be redeemed, then all this does is reinforce the socio-political structure through payments, which are still far under the value that is being created. Upton Sinclair described it thusly, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” It is bad because it is buying off the tension, again, not removing the shit, but sprinkling sugar on top to make it palatable.

To me, Hollywood and professional writing in general is a cesspit that excuses some of the most heinous abuses and, tragically, mostly doesn’t even produce anything worthwhile because of it. The vast majority of these cultural products will be memory-holed within the next three years, maybe to be brought up again in seven years by the YouTube review raccoons that paw through and monetize the detritus.

Essentially, it is a good that they are striking, but to make it really good, an unequivocal good, they should be demanding more. Why cause such a fuss if you aren’t going to actually go for it and try to fix the problems at the root of the industry? Otherwise we will just be back here again in another decade (or less at this rate), fighting over the payment of the creation of even shittier cultural products.

This is why I am split on the writer’s strike. Like, on the one hand labor organization is good, but on the other hand, most ‘official writing’ is completely dogshit, and even when it is good it is clearly constrained by production. Like, I get they are underpaid, but the reason why people don’t last in the industry is because of the abuse most people have to go through, that completely saps any life out of the creative process, reduces art to ‘jobbing’. But whatever, we gotta get our slop.

My sister has complained that ‘You are only right 80% of the time when it comes to this stuff.’ to which my general response is ‘That’s still eight times better than everyone else is.’

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Lucky 38 isn’t a dungeon though, again in a traditional sense, it’s a ‘tower’. If he was at the bottom of a Vault, researching those things, it would maybe have a better one-to-one. I agree on the nuclear weapons, though again, he isn’t researching them, he just doesn’t have the means to use them.

The traditional lich story-line in DnD (to the degree any of these OG DnD monsters had traditional story lines) is that either the land is being polluted by something the lich is doing in his dungeon (though even that is normally sorcerer territory, as they are likely tampering with the ‘source’ of magic), or the lich has some ancient magical artifact that the adventurers must grab, either for personal gain or as a sort of macguffin for whatever the main quest-line is. The point is, the lich is evil, but it is usually the PCs who are bothering the lich. In modern DnD though, you are correct, liches are usually the ‘big bad’ that affects the whole story line.

Edit: my memory of the canon (and the Wikipedia confirms this, though the wiki isn’t always correct) is that House was simply dormant until the NCR arrived, seeing them as providing enough level of security to the region to reveal himself so he could search for the Platinum Chip. He always has the securitrons, but his hold over the three families is very recent. He’s a true capitalist technocrat more than any other thing, both expecting the NCR to do the lions share of defense while continually undermining their state-building efforts in the region.

I mean, he wasn’t happy about it. He more or less saw the Russian revolution as the last stop off the train before it ran itself towards oblivion (he was kind of a mix of Marx and Proudhon in that way), because he thought that if Tsarist Russia had it’s traditional boot off of Germany, the German proletariat would become the real vanguard of the revolution, which could then take on the real enemy (the British). And then when that didn’t happen (failed) in 1918 and then again in 1923 (right before he died) he generally became much more pessimistic about seeing a way off the tracks, and it is this line of thinking that was most influential to Stalin, because while he believed Lenin’s theories and observations, because of the success of their revolution he also believed that with organization and sacrifice, they could still get off the tracks. And so they did, for a time, but they didn’t quite forsee the U.S. becoming what it became (even though Marx in his later letters to Engels did predict that if anywhere was the last place to experience a profit decline crisis it would be the U.S. because of how large and relatively uninhabited it is).