But the UN exists in a very different context than parliament, and China denouncing the UN would neither smash nor replace it.

The UN has contained proletarian states since its founding, in which the USSR played a major role. What has given the UN its bourgeois character has not been its form as a suprastate apparatus, but its content of bourgeois states. As the content and character of not just the UN but of the world have been determined by hegemonic imperialism, it is this hegemony that must be dismantled in order to make conditions capable of sustaining international revolutionary solidarity instead of crushing and subverting it.

Why would I laugh? My impression is that that the UN has remained a terrain of struggle, even as that struggle was marginalized under US hegemony.

The PRC has consistently outlined what kind of international order they are trying to build to replace the imperialist world order, and how they intend to build it: namely, an international order based on mutual sovereignty rather than hegemony, with a materialist framework for human rights rather than a culturalist one. As US hegemony crumbles, I can’t think of any good reason to abandon the ground that it’s ceding in the UN.

Least orientalist Brit lmao

It seems like a drastically more fun and interesting time than Disney Place, even if it’s a bit too lax on influencers holding phones

a vast oppressive conspiracy that sustains the existence of Israel

It’s not a good answer to the question, “What is imperialism,” but I can’t deny it has a certain charm

I’m disappointed to see apologia here for this particular, concrete implementation of deprescribing. Nothing good will come from this.

To me it seems intuitive that pathologies are generally not universal conditions of a universal human mind but are historically situated like the rest of subjective experience, and that the DSM is a deeply political text - and that changes not one goddamn thing about the fact that this deprescribing is yet another weaponization of the US medical system as-fucking-always.

Of all the times and places to philososophize about how some imaginary, better version of US healthcare with no connection to reality would involve fewer medications, this is among of the most foolish, or else the most violently bigoted. As we dismantle the remnants of our welfare state, am I going to see some on here equivocating about how, since it was a liberal welfare state, its dissolution might actually be a good thing for the people losing food and housing?

Yes.

I’d speculate that it’s not a dogwhistle, but rather a signifier of a constellation of ideological positions that are getting worse and worse under sharpening contradictions. For as long as I’ve been using the Web, I’ve been sympathetic to the idea that the less it’s subject to the incentives of capitalism, the better for virtually everyone - same goes for software development. A crucial problem, of course, is that you can’t just carve out a space to be exempt from a system of unparalleled expansion and extraction, so eventually you have to either acknowledge that capitalism itself is the problem with tech under capitalism, or you’re forced to retreat into idealism.

You know Haiku OS? I’ve always thought it was neat. Unfortunately, here’s a thread of Haiku users being so detached from reality that they’re unironically calling mild restrictions on their LLM bickering “fascism” and “a gulag,” complete with invocations of a “right of reply” and a user asserting that LLMs are the kind of AI that sci-fi promised.

It is a really good essay, and I think it’s a substantial contribution to political education in its particular context. The Black Myths Podcast also interviewed Gabriel Rockhill a couple of weeks ago on the subject of how he sees Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism applying to the question of organizing in the US, and it’s the only discussion of its kind that I’ve heard with a focus on the present-day US. It dovetails seamlessly with the practical applications of Nonviolence is Violence Too’s focus on situating non/sacrificially-violent struggle dialectically in its materially violent context.

Everyone involved in that interview struck me as uncommonly focused on the question of “What is to be done,” and imo that’s been characteristic of their work.

[…] Philip Luck, who studies global supply chains at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“The Entity List is like whack-a-mole and you’ve got to ‌keep whacking ⁠the moles,” Luck said, referring to an arcade game.

Unfortunately, this is the kind of article NYT publishes in order to maintain the credibility they need for their regular use of strategically-timed disinformation.

Citations Needed: The Call to Boycott—and Delegitimize—the New York Times

Tough call. I’d say Too Black.

Calling it a waste misses the point like calling a mass shooting a waste of bullets. Yeah it’s a bad use for bullets, but that’s because it’s a heinous act of terroristic mass violence, not because it wasn’t profitable.

Thanks for linking to it! Like a much-needed wash, I found relief I didn’t entirely know my brain needed in reading Boer’s straightforward synthesis of the history and theory of Dialectical and Historical Materialism as it applies to the particular experience of China.

[…] the goal, which, unless we are not both communists, is to end the rule of markets over the world […]

I shared that perspective until it was brought to my attention that capitalism is not synonymous with a market economy. In case you’re interested, I’ll excerpt the most relevant chapter of the book that brought it to my attention, but otherwise I’ll cut straight to the Marx of it and note that he examines the configuration of precapitalist market economies in both slave and feudal societies in Capital vol. 3.

I listened to several interviews with Rockhill too - I was eager to learn more while I waited for a non-PDF version of the book. The ones I heard were good but mostly covered the same ground as each other. A couple of weeks ago, though, The Black Myths Podcast released a very different, praxis-focused interview with him.

https://blackmyths.libsyn.com/myth-all-marxisms-are-created-equal-w-gabriel-rockhill

The hosts ask how he sees his findings applying to the concrete practice of organizing in the US, and his answer surprised me. He notes that the compatible left was always meant to be a temporary concession by the bourgeoisie, with the ultimate goal being to remove any and all space for Marxism. In the context of the stated goal for his work being to help reorient the Western left against imperialism, his thesis in short is that in many instances this goal will require tactically working to defend elements of the compatible left from attacks by the right.

He said it might be a tough pill to swallow, and for me it was. At first I thought he had to be wrong, because it sounded like he was suggesting we undialectically try to push history backward. But situating it in the context of rapidly changing material conditions, I’ve started to think he’s right. Anticommunism can no longer rely on perverting people’s evaluation of real material conditions to sustain its legitimacy, increasingly leading to the failure of mechanisms used to harness compatible left sentiments toward imperialist ends.

Not that I think telling a group of 9 European socialists “read these 2 books” would help here, but a while back I decided to read Socialism with Chinese Characteristics by Roland Boer because I had so many questions about how China could rely on a market economy for decades and remain a socialist project, or else how they could maintain the trajectories they’ve maintained without being a socialist project, and I was sick of getting longwinded non-answers from sources outside China. It not only answered all of my questions except for their international strategy (which could be read clearly between the lines imo, in light of their sovereignty-focused foreign policy), but it also expanded my understanding of dialectics.

Then Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism by Gabriel Rockhill came out, providing a materialist analysis of the political economy of knowledge production, circulation, and consumption in the context of a global war waged by the US-led West against communism. It gives concrete examples of how psychological war accompanies material war, and how the US in particular has relied on psychological war to an outstanding degree since its founding as a settler-colonial oligarchy which took exceptional measures against democracy while advancing a narrative that it is exceptionally democratic. It traces that line through to the US framing its imperialist campaign against self-determination as protecting the world’s freedom from imperial domination.

That background and more is used to firmly plant the feet of the book’s focus on a material base, oriented directly against the idealism of “anti-anti-imperialist” Western Marxist traditions. It goes on to extensively detail the organizational and funding structures of the clandestine bourgeois/state campaign to ideologically “turn the world upside down”, including monopolizing Marxist discourse in the West and beyond with myriad pseudomarxist positions that all happen to Freely agree that the only thing worse than capitalism is actually-existing socialism.

In the context of that global campaign, I feel much more certain about what I initially thought I could read between the lines of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics: that a main pillar of China’s international strategy is to use material means to turn the world right-side up. No matter how certain I am that the values produced by capitalism are misanthropic, and that the floor of economic security matters infinitely more than the ceiling of excessive consumption, that certainty exists in the material vacuum of abstract philosophy. Capitalist values, on the other hand, have been projected onto the world with the full material force of global hegemony, such that they have been made tactically important to the strategic goal of building socialism. It is not enough to act on sound principles; those principles must constantly be dialectically applied to the conditions of an interconnected and everchanging world.

It’s not simply that China is “better than us at capitalism,” as I often hear. Instead, China is demonstrating that socialism is more capable than capitalism of fulfilling even the warped values imposed on the world by capitalists. Of course material security for everyone remains of the utmost importance, but China has never abandoned that. In fact, it’s the core of their model for human rights - a model they’ve been incomparably more honest, consistent, and successful in enacting than the West has with its abstract model. I used to wonder how China could focus on building something instead of fighting fires as the world burned, but now I see they were building a firebreak.

The moment where Kreia takes you aside to say, ‘Did you just give that beggar money?! Why do you hate him?’ is insufferable.

Which pales in comparison to the narrative reinforcing her argument - iirc - with the beggar you just gave money to getting mugged and hurt because you gave them money.

It’s niche but Kittens Game

Competent incremental resource management game, which takes a weird turn at the very end to endorse Fascism by name