darkcalling

@ darkcalling @lemmygrad.ml

Posts

16
Comments

71
Joined

6 yr. ago

7d ago

Russia to demand legal codification of NATO’s non-expansion eastward
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10

darkcalling @lemmygrad.ml 7d ago

And in response the US will have its proxies Britain, France, etc step up a naval blockade of Russian oil and cargo hoping to break Russia's will and economy and force them to accept unfavorable terms.

4w ago

Joining Lemmygrad

Correct. Feel free to subscribe to their communities as well if you'd like so you can see that content. Their news community in particular is quite active.

4w ago

Welcome comrade. Yes we definitely have a strong difference of opinion there. Many of them I think see women's bodies as kind of treats that they're entitled to access to, thus making up justifications for exploitation with intellectual pretensions. They also had a crypto-zionist on their admin team for a while so they've had some problems. Lot of good people there and generally good but definitely some spots that they really have problems in so hopefully you'll enjoy your time here.

3mo ago

It's been about a year since I've been able to use Lemmygrad

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darkcalling @lemmygrad.ml 3mo ago

Welcome back comrade, glad you're here.

3mo ago

What to Make of Companies like Valve?

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darkcalling @lemmygrad.ml 3mo ago

While I do understand that private businesses are inherently exploitative and as a communist I seek to abolish such structures in favor of communal structures, am I wrong or misled to see companies like Valve Software as a major step up in comparison to others like Microsoft, Apple and the like?

Not entirely wrong. For sake of argument I won't address the actual shortcomings of Valve in practice as others already have here. I'll take it that for some reason Valve is actually a great company, Gabe is some great man with a progressive vision, etc, etc for the sake of argument.

There have always been within capitalism elements, even capitalists who have done progressive things or gone against the worst impulses of capitalism in their time for various reasons including genuine personal belief and conviction as well as marketing and carving out a niche. The problem is such sentiment is never widespread, often has some sort of contradiction or caveat to it (something bad they do despite overall being so much better than anyone around them by contrast), and rarely lasts much beyond the lifetime and/or control of the particular people pushing it (Gabe and others at Valve who work there but have significant control of what they and the company do).

So to be even a liberal capitalist who thinks that the Gabe/Valve way is the way to some form of ethical capitalism is to ignore history. It is to wishfully say well we just need more ethical, progressive people leading companies when the system itself disincentivizes this at any scale and indeed when it is as hardened and calcified as capitalism with as many old money types who have so much capital and so much push in the system of capitalism that while you can stand out of their way and do your thing up to a certain size you can't push them around, dislodge them, or dislodge how they're engineering the overall structure and you remain a fluke.

Capitalism is the way it is for a reason. It inevitably moves in this given direction and you can't stop it. It is its nature.

You mention China. China is different because they control the larger apparatus, they have a dictatorship over the capitalists and can use coercion and violence against them (and understand violence here doesn't just mean beating them with a truncheon it also means the violence of the state, they can harass them legally, intimidate them, make their lives uncomfortable and unpleasant in ways that involve no physical blows) if they step too far out of line and the capitalists know and are constrained by this though some still push (Jack Ma) and have to be checked and put back in their place.

4mo ago

Nvidia's Jensen Huang: 'China is going to win the AI race,'

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darkcalling @lemmygrad.ml 4mo ago

"So anyways, if you want any chance of stopping that please deposit at least 1 if not several trillion dollars in that bin over there marked Nvidia"

4mo ago

Vent: I hate sex industry apologia so so much

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darkcalling @lemmygrad.ml 4mo ago

What gets me is it's that Simpsons meme with principal Skinner standing by the fence wondering if he could be wrong, then saying no it's the children who are wrong.

But instead it's western arm-chair "leftists" without a revolution, without revolutionary practice and theory doing the same thing and saying no it's the in-power, successful revolutionary communist party (all of them) that are wrong! It's the Marxists who fought and died bitterly who are wrong. It's the Marxists who have a degree in Marxism from within a country under the control of a communist party who are wrong! I an enlightened western consooomer who grew up with a brain addled with liberalism and a consumption drive and a desperate need to justify my moral righteousness compared to those non-westerners know better.

It's just so comical if it wasn't sad and depressing.

4mo ago

Half a million young Californians aren’t in school or work. Most are men

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darkcalling @lemmygrad.ml 4mo ago

Free college. Counseling. Community focused outreach and events to encourage socialization. Jobs programs that meet people, determine their skills, either refer them to further education if that's what suits them or refer them to a selection of jobs.

4mo ago

Does anyone else got a headache everyday?

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darkcalling @lemmygrad.ml 4mo ago

In addition to trying to eliminate sources you could see about trying to flush your sinuses.

There are two basic ways to approach this:

Sinus/nasal rinse or irrigation. You have to be careful here as using straight tap water can kill you due to pathogens and amoeba and such present that when inhaled deep into your nose can go straight to the brain. Either use the spray bottle nasal rinses from the store (tend to be best as they have some saline so don't dry things out or sting much) or at least distilled water or water brought to a rolling boil for 5 solid minutes then cooled to room temperature and used same day to avoid giving time for anything to grow that might occur if you store it for days. But the idea is you flush/rinse your sinus cavities by forcing clean, sterile water up into them and getting the gunk out which can relieve pressure. Nettipots are one way of doing this but they have store sold spray bottles as well. In either case you put it in one nostril, concentrate, inhale and push the water up in there.
Spicy foods. You may have noticed in the past a time where you ate something so spicy that you got a nasal drip. Well it's possible to eat quite spicy foods in reasonable quantities and cause your sinuses to clear a bit. If you like spicy foods this may be an additional option. You'll be teary-eyed and miserable for some minutes but it can work. It isn't just spicy foods, some intense mustards, horseradish, wasabi, etc can have similar sinus opening effects on many people if of the right potency.

And of course if you can see a doctor about this you can ask them. Steroidal nasal sprays often work, Flonase is the brand name but you can get it prescription generic for $5 usually which is cheaper than OTC.

4mo ago

Vent: I hate sex industry apologia so so much

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darkcalling @lemmygrad.ml 4mo ago

Yeah and its incredible they've made it a global rule on hexbear you must adhere to saying sex work is good and should be upheld for all time as a wonderful thing or else you're a SWERF and liable for banning. Call themselves non-sectarian yet uphold a rule that goes against common sense and goes against the actual enacted policy and theory of every AES state in history and yet say they welcome Marxists (who accept this kind of perversion of theory by of all people the revolution-less, failure-ridden, navel-gazing, arm-chair western "left" who somehow know better on this than actual practitioners of workers' states). Same site that had a zionist admin btw who was only recently kicked out. Admits they have a misogyny problem yet let a few apologists sob into existence a ban on positions contrary to being pro-sex-work. The truth is there are a lot of male chauvinists there and they want their treats including their treats of access to women's bodies for pay.

One quip I love directed towards anarchists on this is that anarchists are people who abhor the idea of paying rent for a building yet would gladly justify renting a woman.

Their argument that sex work is just another kind of labor quickly falls apart. People might resent for example having a job doing data entry and being assigned to spend 10 minutes a day cleaning the bathroom or say it's beneath them but no one is getting sued for it or coming home with trauma or having their coworkers treat them like a piece of meat as a result. Yet even in bourgeois liberal society your boss for good reason cannot assign you the duty of giving him oral sex as "just another part of your job" if you're a woman because it's workplace sexual harassment, it creates an unsafe, misogynistic, horrifying environment for women.

5mo ago

What makes our debunking of Atrocity Propaganda narratives different from "denialism?

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darkcalling @lemmygrad.ml 5mo ago

What makes RationalWiki's debunking of satanic child abuse networks run out of pizza parlors different from denialism? What makes their debunking of any particular alleged outrageous atrocity that the reactionaries invent different from denialism? What makes their refutation of reactionary claims that abortion is mass murder different from denialism?

6mo ago

Oh the humanity!

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darkcalling @lemmygrad.ml 6mo ago

Don't use discord. Also I find it hard to believe all of that could have possibly fit on bullets.

6mo ago

Charlie Kirk Shooting Suspect Info Released

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darkcalling @lemmygrad.ml 6mo ago

They're going to go hard after furries and gay people as being violent because of that ill advised joke message on the first round as soon as they figure out where it's from. The gamer stuff will be ignored or only brought up briefly as "games cause violence but the real violence is the left, etc, etc", the anti-fascist song will be used to establish he was antifa (lol), and the last message will again circle around to gays and furries being threats and now they must be deplatformed, surveilled, and intimidated. Though all this will be overshadowed by the larger message of the left woke mob is murdering the right and must be fought in the streets.

Sooo

Is our hosting situation good? I know hexbear is down right now yet again. I'm curious how resilient HB, Grad, and other left lemmy instances hosting is to political pressure of the kind that could be coming. It's not full batten down the hatches weather yet but there's clearly a storm on the horizon and the wise would start stocking up on tarp, boards, and nails to secure things.

6mo ago

'We have him' - Charlie Kirk murder suspect caught with help of family member

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darkcalling @lemmygrad.ml 6mo ago

Who? Proof? Any evidence at all.

Just making them this vague boogeyman we assign blame to is not a good look.

6mo ago

I'm doing my part!

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darkcalling @lemmygrad.ml 6mo ago

Crawling into a hole and moping about how he'll NEVER get a military parade anywhere near that good. Deep down really upset about it as it's one of his great wants in life to put on his generalismo outfit, sit at the grandstand and impress his cool strong male friends with how great his military guys are and have them fawning over it and him.

7mo ago

Does anyone know where Raekosao is?

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darkcalling @lemmygrad.ml 7mo ago

It may not be a city but maybe a geographic feature. Like mountains, hills, valleys, even the curve of a river, etc have names sometimes and that may have been one of them. At least I'm going off my understanding of naming as a westerner as those seem to be rules found all over the globe.

Considerations:

It's possible the name was misspelled or lost in translation or the modern translation is different.
It's also possible it's an old name and the area has since been given a new one. (Consider also it may have been a name used only by locals at the time or by the Chinese but not Koreans)
It's also possible there is no name anymore because there's nothing there anymore so the name is lost.
It could be a combination of these things.

The clue is I suppose it's something that can be reached from the Yalu river left at late evening time by morning via whatever conveyance they were using (walking, trucks, etc). I would see if you could find a copy of this in Chinese and see what the original language characters say there (deepl can help translating).

7mo ago

US intelligence uses Microsoft Exchange zero-day vulnerabilities to attack Chinese military-industrial enterprise's email servers

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darkcalling @lemmygrad.ml 7mo ago

Stop using Microshit products China. Anything critical, really anything, but especially anything government or military related should be run on hardened systems. Anything public-facing like email servers that unlike say a Windows 10 desktop cannot be really locked down or secured via other systems should be something other than Microsoft. I really hope China still extensively keeps secrets exclusively on paper as that's the only way to stay safe at the level of exposure they have to western tech from the empire of hackers that is the west.

7mo ago

US intelligence uses Microsoft Exchange zero-day vulnerabilities to attack Chinese military-industrial enterprise's email servers

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darkcalling @lemmygrad.ml 7mo ago

This is why Chinese software and hardware is a threat to western national security. If they can't learn of and make use of vulnerabilities before they're patched how can this evil empire of hackers and criminals continue to dominate?

7mo ago

Minors are now killing themselves in order to "respawn" in Roblox

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darkcalling @lemmygrad.ml 7mo ago

I mean this isn't the right way to frame things. The right way is this is a distraction from the actual problem which is child sexual grooming on roblox being an epidemic. This or making a child kill themselves "for satan", either way the pretext is just a sensational distraction from the actual problem.

The child grooming potential from roblox despite their moderation and heavy censorship systems is due to capitalism. It is due to capitalism because it is a monetized game. The monetization provides an incentive to lure children to predators who are willing to pay for game-bucks for them and encourages the children to meet them, to talk to them, to stick around and be groomed by them, to do sexual things for money for them, and to enable the children to be potentially blackmailed by those acts if that wasn't enough into further acts.

Roblox itself is the disease with its disgusting monetization system which creates this world where any child predator with a few hundred or thousand dollars to blow can get children who just want some shiny game things their minds have been groomed by corporations to crave even at the expense of their safety to cooperate with, even seek out predators.

Frankly, ban children from playing games with monetization systems like that and lootboxes. Or ban the games from using them if they target or are found to have a large population of under 18 players they can't get rid of. Roblox is a pedophile corporation. One of many. It grooms children, it exploits children, it opens them up to further predation and profits off it.

8mo ago

I don't understand the appeal of "multipolarity"

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darkcalling @lemmygrad.ml 8mo ago

What is to say that the anti-imperialist Russian Federation will not simply take the place of the United States upon its defeat?

Historical and material reality.

The US didn't appear as a magician on the scene out of nowhere. It invaded western Europe not to defeat Nazis but to ensure the survival of western European capital, under new management of course. With US troops and guns at their backs they were spared their people being liberated by socialism, in exchange fealty was given to the US.

Quite honestly the US is a product of and beneficiary of CENTURIES of European colonialism. Russia cannot reproduce that in a day or a decade.

The wealth, power, geopolitical control, cultural dominance and propaganda hegemony the US enjoys was built off those European empires, their looted wealth, and their influence. Was built off cooperation with the British who in the post-colonial moment of WW2 still had deep penetration of many societies, governments, etc.

Even assuming the US suffers a huge fall in a few years the lingering tendrils of its cultural influence and dominance will be fighting it out with Russian and Chinese influence for many years if not decades to come.

In other words Rome was not built in a day, the US did not morph magically into an omni-power empire in a year or a decade out of nowhere. And Russia cannot do the same.

Western Europe did not resist US imposition as it came as a rescue, they will likely resist joining with or being dominated by Russia to form a new bloc to subjugate the world.

One strong, all-powerful enemy or a bunch of enemies in disarray with shifting alliances, backstabbing, and various weaknesses and uncertainty. In the latter situation one can even bargain with imperial powers scrambling for influence a socialist in some cases because of their weakened state being but one of many smaller fish.