quarrk [he/him]

@ quarrk @hexbear.net

Posts

76
Comments

475
Joined

4 yr. ago

Work email signature material

1w ago

Please give the gold medals to the robbers.

They took their (probably) 2nd passports

1w ago

Homeland Security Spying on Reddit Users

I stick with the default assumption of psyop re: all reporting about what the ruling class believes. Corporate media exists to confuse the public. Remember how everyone gave Reagan and Bush Jr infinite leeway because they were perceived as dumb. Neither of them was dumb — Michael Parenti made this point in one of his popular videos about Reagan, that actually Reagan was very competent, just a little slower than he was in his youth.

Anyway the idea that the ruling class is scared is immaterial until proven by their actions.

1w ago

How do I read? [Serious]

Have you ever gone camping/off-grid for an extended time, with nothing to do but read or play cards? It’s not hard to read in those environments because your brain has recalibrated its dopamine expectation.

The problem is almost entirely situational. You don’t need to love books more, you need better “attention hygiene.” What do you do when you aren’t reading, what effect does that have on your attention? In what physical space are you trying to read - is a computer or TV nearby? Go to the quiet area in the library with your phone shut off in your bag, and start reading.

I no longer own a TV or any gaming console, and the effect on my mental health has been great. My thinking has slowed down.

I recommend buying auxiliary devices like e-readers and e-ink writing/note-taking devices. They don’t have all the dopamine-triggering animations of a smartphone. The pace is slower, that is healthy for your brain. Any time you want to read a PDF, transfer it to your e-reader, even if you technically could read it from your phone.

2w ago

What really is the difference between liberals and fascists?

This focus on autarky as the essential factor is a bit idealist, no offense. But you also laid out the correct material basis for the historical (accidental) tendency toward autarky in fascist states.

Autarky is not an end in itself for fascism. It is only a means for the consolidation of power to one section of the capitalist class. It is not a question of bourgeois ideological struggle nor of solidarity.

The distinct functions of capital laid out in Capital show the necessary division of the bourgeoisie into distinct sub-classes, corresponding to the various forms of surplus-value (rent, profit, interest, ... others?). At all times there is a divergence in the particular interests of each of these sub-classes. This contradiction manifests itself in a crisis due to any number of reasons, one of which could be a general fall in the rate of profit. But absent a crisis, what you described as "class solidarity" is not class consciousness in any meaningful sense, but merely the automatic result of their mutual self-interest in appropriating a portion of the total surplus-value. There is no necessity that any sub-class of capital believes in bourgeois solidarity.

2w ago

Homeland Security Spying on Reddit Users

I don’t think they are scared. They are emboldened and feeling like they don’t have to be as careful because the American population is completely submissive and disorganized. A scared government would be making concessions and doing damage control to quell an uprising.

2w ago

r/communism rule "No non-Marxists" changed to "No non-Maoists"

The “communist” subs on Reddit have been moderated by sectarian losers for years. There are some good posts by casual participants, so there is some utility to those spaces, but it’s entirely hamstrung by those in charge

2w ago

When your empire is definitely not eating itself

A Trump University would fit right into the current climate. Probably would not be invented from whole cloth, but rather an existing university would rebrand, with a sycophantic board of trustees that goes along with whatever reforms are demanded by Trump folks.

Liberty University already kinda fills this role, but not officially.

2w ago

The Sick-ooooooos

It’s an Albany expression

2w ago

Epstein re-radicalized my teenager

2w ago

Professional sport should be abolished

Foreskin-care routine.

2w ago

PSL hurts our movement

This isn’t directed at you personally, your comment just animated some thoughts in me.

I think the phrase critical support has outlived its usefulness, if it ever had any in the English language. The problem is it wrongly centers ideology instead of the material obstacles to the worker’s revolution.

What was originally meant by critical support is that the essential question is whether an action or policy materially advances the revolution. And since we live in reality, the subjects enacting those advances will be imperfect; they will be fraught with contradictions. The critical part means to critically consider the whole dynamic before deciding on a policy. But the western liberal, habitually adopting the colonizer’s penchant to correct “primitive” cultures, jumps at the opportunity to publicly criticize, in an ultraleftist manner, the ideology of those who they (now reluctantly) support.

The point isn’t to criticize while supporting, but to criticize internally as a means of evaluating policies.

Critical support can mean supporting e.g. social-democratic organizations if, after careful analysis of the entire situation, they further the revolution.

For much of the global south, the primary contradiction is not the wage relation. The primary contradiction is imperialism. Hence many socialist revolutions say little about capital, and much more about national sovereignty. But if one appraises those movements on the basis of Capital Volume 1, one might conclude that they are too conciliatory toward capital and too nationalistic. That would be a wrong application of critical support.

2w ago

PSL hurts our movement

This feels like a Kelly comic with all the labels

Opaque Funding

2w ago

why do I keep doing this????

More than once (if that) per night is not normal. You should see a doctor if you have the means.

2w ago

why do I keep doing this????

I relate hard to this. While I still do it on occasion, it burned me enough times that I’m basically too traumatized to do it anymore. Too many rough days where I fuck up everything due to exhaustion.

One strategy has been rewarding myself for waking up early with a nice pastry or preferred caffeinated beverage on the way to work. Or just the small contentment of reading casually before I go in, instead of rushing until I run out the door.

Basically, if my mornings suck, then I’m going to stay up to “procrastinate” the morning, illogical as that is. So the strategy is to make the mornings (more) pleasant.

Another thing is no eating within 3 hours before bedtime. I find that digestion keeps me up longer and disrupts my sleep if I do doze off. The empty stomach in the morning also wakes me up consistently, like a built-in timer. If I’m up past midnight, I will be starving and night-eat which compounds the whole problem.

2w ago

VIRGIL MENTIONED THIS IS NOT A DRILL

2w ago

█ █ █ █ ⠀ █ █ █ █

This would go hard as an album cover “Unlisted”

2w ago

So.... abstract expressionism was funded and pushed by the CIA, under a shell company CCF, thru grants to the MoMa

Postmodern is a famously nebulous term anyway, so I admit I went on a bit of a rant

that can’t be refuted without more specificity (i.e. particular thinkers) and I’m not really prepared to argue my point in detail.

I tend to agree with how Rockhill describes it the CIA’s backing of various postmodern thinkers: it is more about giving extra influence to ideas that otherwise don’t have the same organic influence. It doesn’t mean every thing about what they thought is untrue or not worth considering. But it is still true that the CIA picked these ideas for a reason, the purpose of undermining the systematic and scientific approach of Marxism, which cannot be beat on its own terms.

I would connect the subjectivist tendency also to the subjective theories of value associated with the Austrian school of economics, which essentially started the neoclassical economics paradigm that is still taught in many western universities today. To them, the value of a product of labor is not objective and has only an ephemeral existence. It is no coincidence that these theories kicked off in the 1890s, less than a decade after Marx’s death. Marxism is very difficult to beat head-on.

2w ago

YouTube is doing A/B testing of the Subscriptions feed