I have zero proof but for a long time now youtube has just felt vaguely psyopped to me. The avalanche of far-right and manosphere content with zero pushback, the automated removal of even the most decorous pro-palestinian or leftist speech while seething bigotry somehow gets through, the opaque proprietary algorithms that run the site without accountability or oversight. We already know that most of these sites actively collaborate with US intelligence, we know about the NSA backdoors. It just feels off to me. Maybe I'm coping
Try to explain it to a stranger who is not like you at all. Someone who has lived a different life.
It's not easy. That's because words are a poor substitute for empathy. If you really want to understand someone, you need to actually put in the cognitive effort to imagine how it feels to be them. Put yourself in their shoes. If you can't understand why it's different for a woman than for a man, it's because you've never put in any effort to imagine how it feels to be a woman.
Our words are not going to do that for you
I could sit here and list all the things that men do to women. Or I could say, "living in a sexist society as a woman is dehumanizing, much like living in a racist society as a racial minority is dehumanizing, and when a man or a white person gloats at you and acts superior, like you're nothing, like you're a piece of dirt, that gets under your skin in a way that the reverse wouldn't, because of the context, because the society that you live in and the things you have experienced."
But if you don't put in any effort to actually imagine the reality of what I'm saying, those are just words.
It's not a debate, we're not going to logic our way to an answer here. This is an exercise in empathy. You either put in the cognitive effort to actually imagine what it's like, to actually put yourself in someone else's shoes, or we're describing color to the blind.
I've been trying to figure out the core belief of civility libs
My current guess is something like misanthropy or subconscious classism. I think they're scared of mass insurrection because they look down on the mass public. I feel like I often hear them voice sweeping negative opinions about human nature, like "people are stupid," "people are gullible," "people are greedy." My hunch is that this sentiment can be challenged and corrected, if their personality isn't too malignant and they don't have some innate need to feel better than other people.
I think the average Trump supporter is reachable—and if you have the resources of a government, as you seem to be imagining, I think they are reachable at scale. This is the 21st century, at this point the experts know how to influence people. Generations of marketers, academics, and psyops specialists have studied this problem. The knowledge is out there. If the CIA can spin up a color revolution, we can reeducate chuds.
But this all assumes a peacetime scenario where a communist government presides over a large population of chuds lol. Idk if that would happen in real life. Others can weigh in, I have no idea.
“We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat,” announced Reagan advisor Roger A. Freeman during a press conference on Oct. 29, 1970. Freeman, an economics professor at Stanford, was also an advisor to President Richard Nixon. “We have to be selective on who we allow to go through [higher education],” Freeman added.
Except there were widespread riots in the civil rights era, violent unrest was a major factor behind the civil rights act. They’re trapped in the version of the civil rights era that we learn about in high school.
Some brief background on the labor theory of value (LTV):
The LTV says that the price of a product mainly reflects the cost of the labor that went into it. For example, you buy a toaster. Workers had to assemble the toaster, drive it to the store, mine the iron to make the metal parts, drill the petroleum to make the plastic parts (and fuel the trucks, and power the electric grid), and so on, across the supply chain. If you follow this logic out, the production cost is labor all the way down.
Because companies compete to sell the cheapest toaster, the price of a toaster will be close to the cost of making the toaster. And because that cost is mostly labor cost, the price therefore reflects the labor that goes into the product. If you want to charge much more than that, you'd better work on your branding and/or find ways to make your toaster unique so it has its own little market niche where there's less competition.
You might be thinking, "wait, doesn't price come from supply and demand?" Not primarily. Supply and demand are a red herring. On short time scales, if there's a toaster shortage, the toaster companies might price gouge a bit, but eventually the market adjusts, demand goes back down or production rises. As long as there's sufficient competition, prices ultimately fluctuate around an equilibrium that is pegged to production cost.
The name of the game, in consumer capitalism—after you suppress wages as much as possible—is to get around competition so you can charge more. Hype up your brand image. Make your product unique. Sell in places others don't sell. Stores have endless variety because variety means no one exactly competes with anyone else and everyone can charge a little more. Up to a point.
Summary of Cockshott's analysis defending the LTV, as I understand it
What Cockshott did was add up everything that went into a bunch of products: all the labor that went in, all the oil, all the electricity, all the wood, etc. Note that this was across the entire supply chain. That means there's inherent redundancy: labor includes labor to drill oil, produce electricity, and chop wood, for example. Labor input and oil input are not independent variables. This will become important in a second.
Cockshott found that price correlated with labor more strongly than with any other input.
One of many reasons why the medium article is full of shit
Remember how labor input and oil input are not independent variables?
Here's what the Medium guy says:
This [Cockshott's analysis] is quite an unusual method: typically when statisticians want to test one cause against another, they don’t correlate them one by one. Instead, they use multiple regression analysis or some other method that includes all variables at once. Cockshott’s approach is a bit like if those who studied wages and education correlated the two, then separately correlated wages with gender, then age, then parental education, and concluded from the largest correlation that said variable was the key determinant of wages compared to the others. Spot the problem?
Multiple regression only works for independent variables. Production inputs are not independent variables, everything is related to everything else. A supply chain that uses more labor probably also uses more oil and electricity. For that matter, the Medium guy even fucks up his own example: education and parental education are correlated.
Cockshott says as much here, if I understand correctly:
He [Medium guy] critiques us for looking at the correlation between price and electricity steel etcetera content separately saying we should have measured them at the same time using a multiple regression. He seems to have again overlooked the fact that when we’re looking at steel content, when we’re looking at oil content or labour content we have in all cases followed back the production processes in terms of all the inputs, we decompose them into either their labour content, their steel content or their electricity content etc. So, when we give these different correlations, we are giving the correlations considering all the inputs so can’t sensibly do a multi factorial regression here when you have already taken them into account in the respective Leontief inverses in each case.
I googled what a Leontief inverse is, and it's just a big matrix saying how much of which stuff went into which other stuff.
This comment is long enough so I'll stop here and go to bed.
The wife of slain health insurance CEO Brian Thompson said Wednesday that her husband had been getting threats before he was gunned down in Midtown Manhattan.
“There had been some threats,” Paulette Thompson told NBC News in her first comments since her husband was murdered early Wednesday.
“Basically, I don’t know, a lack of coverage?” she said, referring to her 50-year-old husband’s role as CEO of UnitedHealthcare’s insurance division.
U.S. sanctions have devastated the country. But the Maduro administration appears to have successfully weathered the worst of the storm. Stores are full again, inflation has been tamed, and Venezuela now produces 96% of the food it consumes. On top of that, Maduro’s signature housing policy, Misión Gran Vivienda Venezuela, just celebrated the building of its five-millionth apartment. “Venezuela is healing” is a common slogan across the country.
and on elections:
Many U.S. observers who spoke with MintPress were quick to compare the Venezuelan system favorably with their own. “I am actually kind of blown away by how advanced [the Venezuelan electoral system] is, particularly compared to the backward nature of the U.S., so I am completely impressed,” Jodi Dean, a professor and political scientist, said.
[...]
Elizabeth Burley, a representative of Unión de Vecinos, a Los Angeles tenants’ union, spent election day monitoring voting in La Guaira state and noted a number of superior features of Venezuelan democracy, including that the polling system is automated and completely consistent between localities. Furthermore, she said, Venezuelan elections are held on Sunday rather than midweek as they are in the U.S., allowing more people to participate. Burley noted that she was able to go inside stations and observe everything and that there were witnesses from both government and opposition parties present. Apart from a few verbal exchanges between left and right-wing voters, she said, events proceeded in a state of calm.
This list by dessalines might be a decent place to look for more information. It focuses on refuting attacks against Venezuela, but there should be some good information in the mix about what Maduro has done. The important context to keep in mind is that Venezuela is under more than 900 sanctions and other punitive measures, which have severely hampered the economy
no, handing the imperial core to the fascists will not help the global proletariat.
Before the imperial core can do anything good for the rest of the world, socialists need to be in charge of the imperial core. We get there by organizing workers here with the promise of improving their material conditions. Otherwise, we'll lack the numbers and class consciousness to overcome the crumbling empire's inevitable fascist death spasm.
I'm not reading all that lol
instead I'll just repost the timeless Michael Brooks response, "it's not a complex issue," where he switches the roles of Israelis and Palestinians
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62I61kBahNY&t=260s
figure it out, feddit