YuccaMan [he/him]

Bastards, the whole lot of them. My last job involved a lot of fairly delicate hands-on work, but you best believe they would’ve replaced us with machines or outsourced our work to gig workers if they could’ve.

I couldn’t say myself whether Domino’s is using those services, but I’m going to get on her about at least looking into it. I don’t think I’ll have to try hard. Way she talks, I think this might finally be the last straw.

My girlfriend works as a delivery driver for Pizza Hut, and her store just implemented an AI dispatch system that winds up sending a sizeable number of the store’s orders to DoorDash. This of course screws her and the other drivers out of tips.

I offer this information both as a concrete example of how AI under capitalism harms workers, but also to express how upset I am at how I’m unable to help her. I’ve brought up the subject of unionizing, but I don’t know that it’d help, or if she or her coworkers would even go for it. I’ve been trying to get her to jump ship for Domino’s, but apparently they have a similar system in their stores, though I don’t know if any of the locals have implemented it yet.

I understand why she doesn’t quit mind, she’s been doing it five years and it can be lucrative when business is up. But the shithead that run the company keep price gouging, and business has slowed down considerably as a result. That combined with this AI nonsense is a good argument for me pressing the issue again.

Yes, but is that necessary when we already have an established framework for class analysis? Age can be a useful intersectional category, but I don’t see that it has much use in this case.

My pleasure. I hope it wasn’t too rambling, my worst habit is to say in ten words what can be said with five.

If you’d like to know our reasons for doing that (or anyway, my reasons), they’re twofold. First, even with the rise of China and the seeming return of global multipolarity, western countries continue to dominate world affairs, militarily and economically. It’s simply a matter of scale; when they act up, it’s likely to effect the lives of millions of people around the world, directly or otherwise. Second, most of us are ourselves westerners, and of those I’m betting most of us are from the the US. As citizens of these places, our first responsibility is to point out our own nations’ crimes, both because of their widespread influence, and because of our proximity to them.

There’s also the matter of communist countries being the subject of a truly absurd amount of western propaganda. We feel the need to push back against certain narratives about the supposed crimes of communist countries because we know many of them to be exaggerated, misrepresented, and at times outright fabricated. Most of us are close students of history, some of us like myself are even academic historians, and it can be frustrating to provide reams of evidence for our claims (or more often, counter-claims) and be met with accusations of whataboutism, rather than earnest engagement. It’s why so many of us are quick to assume that the pushback we get is in bad faith, because it quite often is.

But anyway, I’m getting off track. Very few of us, I find, are unwilling to acknowledge the flaws, missteps, and yes, even crimes of actually existing socialist states, when they are well evidenced. For instance, I doubt many of us would defend the deportation of the Crimean Tatars, but we’re equally unwilling to accept the Holodomor as an example of deliberate ethnic genocide because the common narratives surrounding it rely on fabricated numbers, misrepresentations of Soviet state policy, and Nazi propaganda, to say nothing of their denial of professional historical consensus.

You can’t wipe your ass with $700, Jesus Christ

For real though. It’s hardly difficult to find a bunch of leftists arguing about China lmao

If you payed closer attention you’d notice that we have a range of opinions on China, and we don’t all think everything they do is correct. That’s what the term critical support means. It’s a recognition that even socialist states are imperfect, as the nation state as an institution is fundamentally imperfect and will always and everywhere undermine freedom to some degree. But a state which is undergoing the transition to socialism, particularly one that’s putting themselves in a position to undermine US imperial hegemony like China is, is well worth supporting, even as we acknowledge its flaws and contradictions.

What none of us will ever tolerate are accusations of genocide with one discredited religious fanatic as the source, or racist insults being hurled at their head of state, both things I’ve seen numerous times from users from other instances.

Try not being such a little panzy instead

Which would be nonsense even if the operation hadn’t been a debacle. Final reports on US and UK bombing campaigns after the war identified strikes on German transit infrastructure as having had the greatest meaningful impact on their military performance. This was corroborated by the Germans themselves I believe. Strikes on factories of any kind were seen as having only limited efficacy.

You’ve got nothing here dude, take the L. You’re clearly ignorant of what AES actually looks like historically, how it’s formed, how it responds to pressures and challenges. You’re just going by this vague, largely aesthetic conception of what socialism looks like, that you probably got from some youtuber that call themself a libertarian socialist or some other such incoherent shit, and you’re castigating a real socialist governmemt attempting to reckon with the real world because they haven’t waved a magic wand and enacted your asinine Disneyland version of socialism.