Keven posted:

SMALT is a joke name.

you know what else is a joke name? Keven.

toyotathon posted:

yeah i think that's right about the third world paying for women's liberation, but i don't think the material condition will last. i'm reading these old books right now, written in the 1910s-- one's Things That Are Usually Wrong by Professor Sweet, and Lathe Design (forget the author), both published by Lindsay. they're basically books of mistakes and hard-won wisdom of the cutting-edge machine design of the late 19th century. machine design back then required no less brainpower than say, today's chemical vapor deposition to make chips and artificial diamonds, or distillation column simulation and optimization. it was still extremely time-consuming and difficult to do a dynamics (or even statics) analysis of a lathe spindle, to figure out proper spacing of bearings and lands, to design the bed parabolically according to newton's laws. it required incredible cleverness to make surfaces planar to a ten-thousandth of an inch, and to do it by hand.

like my point is, there has always been a cutting edge of technology, there has always been profit and competitive advantage in allowing women to learn and take part, so what was the material condition then that overrode it? i think that the major thing is that the bourgeoisie of that era saw the profit in expanding the domestic labor pool and forcing women to be full-time biological human factories, and today the material condition is to prefer expanding the labor pool by proletarianizing the countryside of the third world and pushing women into factories there. using the already-grown humans. if that's correct though (let's ignore the ecological part), once the world is proletarianized then it will be profitable again to grow as many new workers as possible. it will never stop being more profitable to have 50 available jobs in a factory and 100, 200, 400 hungry workers outside vying for them. and it'll be a long time before women stop being the only thing that can grow more workers. the pro-natalism of capitalism just is a fundamental feature of it and we're in a brief historical break, where the luxury of merely working a shit office job is available to women, instead of risking their lives making more workers. then the capitalists revert to form. i dunno what do you think?

i change my mind and i think you're right.

i will say that i don't think changing course and re-instituting a regime of women as full-time baby factories and all the old oppressive systems that involves is capable of contributing meaningfully to profitability these days. that is, there would seem to be a diminishing return in your formulation of hungry workers vs. productive ones--past a certain a point dead labor contributes more to instability and crisis than what it could be reasonably expected to return to capitalists, right? and to some extent this ratio is rapidly flying out of manageable margins already by technological development and increased worker efficiency, which might explain, e.g., declining birthrates in the first world. but it occurs to me that capitalists are unlikely to appreciate this dynamic, and more likely to just cede everything to the fascists while locking themselves away in coporate arcologies guarded by private mercenaries, and america's fascists like nothing more than to blame women for everything so maybe you're right that some kind of full-scale misogynist backlash is in the cards for women some time soon

tpaine posted:

lmao anypony remember when aol accidentally released a bunch of search data and it had "Do N^%^$@$s have xray vision" and such in it

i was more suspicious when they wouldn't reveal the answer