TIL. Somehow, I never realized yerba mate has caffeine. I’ll have to try some eventually.

How exactly do you expect a country of any significant size to effectively enact communism without anything resembling a state apparatus?

Necessary, yes. Furthering our knowledge of the cosmos is a worthwhile pursuit for its own sake. That being said, the sudden focus on NASA is pure political distraction, a clumsy attempt to foment nationalism that isn’t going to be as effective as its architects were hoping.

I too hate this trend. A robotic voice answering the phone didn’t bother me, but now some companies have replaced those with AI systems and I find myself becoming frustrated and angry much more quickly with the latter.

It drives me up the walls when people tell me they’re using AI to write their emails now. If you thought USians were stupid already, give it a few more years of AI usage! You can just see people’s eyes glassing over when you try to discuss anything of import. We’ve seen AI-induced psychosis, but I predict we’ll see a rise in dementia rates if we don’t put an end to this.

Edited to add: after some reflection, I think what makes me so angry is the apparent assumption by whatever megacorp implements these that I, their customer, am stupid enough to be fooled or influenced positively by this. It’s condescending.

He should ask the last group of countries that strove to be neutral between the USA and a second large power how well that worked for them.

To describe the American justice system as “imperfect” is something of a massive understatement. Who is actually bound by the law? Any allowance of set monetary penalties shows that the laws exist to bind workers, not owners. If a $500 fine is enough to bankrupt a worker, but is pocket change for the owner, then can that really be called ‘justice’?

And who is the law enforced against? People of color, and workers, predominantly. In some parts of the USA, a poor black man can wind up serving a life sentence for selling some marijuana, a crime most people would agree does not merit that punishment, while a rich white man can defraud millions of their life’s savings and not serve a day in prison. That injustice is structural; it’s not an accident.

And if a man commits no crime, that is no guarantee he will not be convicted of one, as we have seen time and time again. For-profit prisons have need of their enslaved workforce, and the system will provide them. As we’re constantly saying on here, the purpose of a system is what it does, not what it claims to do.

Anyone in upper management or in an executive role, cops, and HR personnel.

Even while I was still a clueless lib, when I saw insurance companies sponsoring the DNC, I knew we’d never get publicly-funded healthcare.

If the reduced usage isn’t offset by the burning oilfields, at least.

Politics isn’t a sport, and the political compass shit is just the sorting hat for (Western) Poli Sci majors.

I am a Marxist-Leninist with a lot left to learn (and read). I was a sort of ultra-left “Marxist” (firmly in compatible left territory) until I started lurking on here and reading comments by Cowbee and other comrades.

What is to be done? Same as it ever was, build the party of the working class. For a global revolution to even be possible, the empire must sufficiently collapse. A year ago, I would’ve said it might’ve taken another few decades to really get going, but it seems we’ve left the decades where weeks happen and entered the weeks where decades happen. Let’s just say I’ll be really curious to see what happens when gas tops $10/gallon on average in the USA.

Agreed. PCs will wind up being for power users only, both due to cost and the decline in tech literacy.

But also, Nvidia is already salivating at the idea of people streaming games from what amounts to glorified chromebooks. Whether those are actually running a Google OS or a Microsoft one doesn’t ultimately matter - the point is that they will be locked into a walled garden with minimally-powerful hardware. Can such a device even really be considered a PC anymore?

All idealism regardless of type can be summed up in one belief: that it is not possible to improve the world. Materialism, on the other hand, posits that it is possible. Is it any wonder that Capital goes to such lengths to keep materialist thought out of its public discourse? The worker who believes they cannot improve their lot poses little threat to Capital.

I suspect the involvement of the CIA or some of their rogue assets, either mobsters or gusanos. He was allegedly warming towards Cuba, and I think that may have been part of the motivation. Blowback Season 2 made a pretty convincing argument for that scenario.

man pointing at butterfly Is this Butlerian Jihad?

My “favorite war” is class war. 🙃

Yeah. I am fairly confident more of those “injuries” were fatal than the US/Israel want to admit, and I also doubt they have as many confirmed kills as they are claiming.

It’s going to have to hit $5/gallon in the Midwest and Southern US before we really see much reaction from the USians, and it would have to be sustained. There will be plenty of grumbling before we hit that point, but no action. That’s my prediction anyway.

Of course. I wasn’t suggesting otherwise. I just hope CIA propaganda loses any appeal it may have outside of the imperial core. As for inside the core, it’s hard for me not to feel ‘doomer’ about the state of the working class. I think there would have to be a sudden, extreme change in material conditions before the working class would start to ‘wake up’ en masse here.

I’m impressed. The US legal system is incredibly anemic when it comes to punishing corporations for violating workers’ rights. I hope we really can achieve a multipolar world, one where a standard like this is upheld to emulate, and not the rotten neoliberal legal morass of the West.