Dimashq posted:I decided to take Arabic at my university this semester and the class is filled with wannabe State Department lackeys and future US non-profit workers (and one post-colonial religion grad student lol). You might have heard of our textbook, al-Kitaab, a book that is decidedly written specifically for these types of individuals which became evident immediately because literally on page 2 in Chapter 1 is a vocabulary list including "United Nations". Not complaining, but the cherry on top for this whole situation is that the class takes place in our university's ROTC building giving it all a shady, eerie feeling. The classroom has a bookshelf filled with infantry manuals and operational strategy books and there's even a table filled with toy green soldiers, presumably for teaching future marines how to most efficiently maneuver in the field and maybe even perpetrate a proper Mai Lai. It's filled with sand.
The teacher is pretty cool though.
arabic seems like a cool language to know
blinkandwheeze posted:my critique is that the workers' party of belgium never established militant revolutionary struggle in any meaningful sense so appealing to their experience or line as any kind of practical authority is ridiculous. there's no reason to levy a particular critique against martens or the line of his party in particular because simply identifying their stage of development is sufficient
for what it's worth i will qualify that this isn't singling out martens in particular, this applies to very nearly any of the figures of 20th century marxist-leninist organisation in the west. it is completely absurd to inherit these past organisational traditions and lines because they all almost universally failed to develop to the point of revolutionary struggle. urbandale or any other random psl member (or poster on this forum) know effectively as much as the highest leadership of western european marxist-leninist parties when it comes to the question of how to develop militant struggle in the core, i.e. basically nothing
i don't know where your accusations of putting words in your mouth or whatever are coming from. i am simply arguing against the fact you cited a western marxist-leninist as an authority on organisational development, which you clearly did, something i consider absurd
belgend posted:i also don't understand how people here are thinking the psl was in the wrong for softlocking urban for - according to urban's own posts - just up and leaving a congress where he was a delegate at. that's not demcen gone mad like how tears and apparently other people here have experienced demcen in the past. that's just a procedure
if a years deep high ranking member going for a smoke break is seen as equivalent to a walkout in protest worthy of softblocking then it is a stupid procedure for idiots
wHAT AN AMAZING POST
Genios Revolutionary Armed Strugglers of the Rhizzone dot Net: I THINK THE FUCK NOT!!!!
e: i dont personally disagree i broke from the party by stepping out, i think the issue is more the penalty for doing so and the failure of the party to censure or discipline anyone who had been hanging out in the lobby/landing/outside all day
Edited by JohnBeige ()
Crow posted:Idiot local communists involved in the org: Yea urbandale was fucking up
Genios Revolutionary Armed Strugglers of the Rhizzone dot Net: I THINK THE FUCK NOT!!!!
how is kicking out a years deep high ranking member for taking a smoke break during a meeting, even after they conducted self-criticism, a reasonable process
JohnBeige posted:the failure of the party to censure or discipline anyone who had been hanging out in the lobby/landing/outside all day
im going to start collecting things like this for my book, "absurdism in communist organising"
toyotathon posted:human gene editing for security applications
could you post or pm links?
Gssh posted:toyotathon posted:human gene editing for security applications
could you post or pm links?
nice try KGB
toyotathon posted:hung out in a park w/ my laptop watching the moon rise and fixed a project problem that'd been fuckin with me for days. took a huge sigh of relief, and a couple popped over and handed me a plate of tacos from their party, the ppl behind me put on kendrick. i'll always know who my people are, fuck the tech aristocracy and fuck their mixers.
what do you do?
i miss tacos
You think about all the shit amerikkka has researched and stored away in a labyrinth of rooms underground in DARPA's basement, called "Pandora's Box" by some clever asshole working there back in the sixties.
room 24302-A has a freezer full of 15 different, but similar, virus specimens that are capable of causing the human liver to release toxins that slowly breaks down its host's flesh. 25091 has a variety of mammal specific mind altering substances, including an unnamed compound that causes koalas to masturbate to exhaustion. Go up one floor to U3 you'll find room 32001 which contains a neat compound that turns a significant amount of zooplankton specie's waste into a bright red color - other than the likely possibility of turning all of the world's seawater red, it doesn't do much else
Taking up a considerably large corner of level U-5 there is a server farm that is actively tracking every single foreign satellite with an accuracy of 1.15 ms. And if you go down the road to the CIA offices, they have their own room which contains a small server farm along with the necessary procedure to fire the entire inventory of ASAT's and probably destroying 89-91% of all non US controlled satellites.
Christian, a freshly minted MIT grad, was excited to start working for DARPA. It didn't take long before he was given an informal lecture about all the monstrous research being conducted there. It was simple: "it's in the name of defense, it won't take long before our enemies discover the same stuff, and we gotta make sure we know how to stop it". That made sense to Christian. although...months later.. he did once think to himself "what if something bad happens and America devolves into something nasty, what if this stuff gets in the wrong hands?". He looked outside his office window and saw the american flag proudly waving on its mast.. Then he turned towards the photo of his wife and newly born child. Shook his head. "no. america is great. that could never happen"
maybe my paranoia is taking the best of me and my small org is actually more humane in its treatment
Sorry. Seriously.
tears posted:the scattered remenants of humanity grubbing in the irradiated dirt to survive, worshiping a 10000 year old clock built by jeff bezos, founder of popular shopping website amazon . com
artist rendition
it's funny, i drove out here and that's obviously useful to have stuff, but it's so expensive keeping the car gassed up and having to keep moving it's parking location. luckily, i know that commercial parking lots can issue tickets, but unless they send bill collectors at you, you can safely ignore them. supposedly wal-mart lets you park overnight at their lots, so i've been sleeping in the back, so i'm obviously better off than most, but i can't just walk around and see things like when i was backpacking in europe.
basically i'm just commenting on the inanities of capitalist life and musing about how much easier if we just had a good supply of housing and distributing them in a fair and equitable way.
levoydpage posted:
the dx7 is a nice touch
John Oliver has a new thing complaining about the confederacy and it's shitty but he does have a part worth noticing where he goes through the symbols of America. After pointing out that the statue of liberty = we love freedom, his replacements are a bunch of harmless liberal symbols that can be googled by the audience. Northern liberalism is so fragile that any celebration of reconstruction and its actual heroes or criticism of the North would be impossible because of the subsequent betrayal of the northern bourgeoisie and its role as the main advocate of scientific racism and segregation doesn't fit into the North/South division. Of course some Southern liberals reverse this and celebrate a kitsch Dollywood version of slavery and the civil war but the actual essence of the South is neoliberalism through and through, those are only a few hegemonic media voices and don't speak for the true Trump masses.
This also means California is the worst place on Earth because rather than disavowal and then ironic celebration of settlerism in the South or absolute forgetting in the North, California has a Disneyfied version of both. They are neither at the center of new South neoliberalism nor inheritors of old American bourgeois power but the decadent escapees of both. Settler occupation of Mexico and internment of Asians is of course unspeakable but liberalism is only a cynical underpinning to new age hippy remains of the 70s or tech "r/askgaybros." Now that I live here I see the true face of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg as uniquely Californian (that they are expats is necessary). Want to go back to Florida lol, at least people like tpaine are possible there because the face of capitalism is so visible.
troolari posted:sorry i missed all the demcem drama surrounding you, johnbeige. that sounds horrible abuse, an unnecessary purge in your case, we are only establishing demcem slowly but surely which i as a high-ranking local member have approved but also am curious if this could be used against my panic disorder instances, not that i need to be treated like a fucking special snowflake but incase of real life trivialities keeping me from destressing myself between attending atleast biweekly meetings between therapy and assisted housing shit. i need to take breathing excercises in crowds of comrades and short-acting meds and cigarettes. luckily cigarette breaks are designated and ive been trying to market myself as somekind of an open channel to the unwashed mentally ill masses but its still kinda hard to be open about that.
maybe my paranoia is taking the best of me and my small org is actually more humane in its treatment
its probably fine. as long as all parties are discussing things with each other without interruptions, most conflicts are eliminated as assumptions are struck. internal education on disability and accessibility is incredibly needed on the left, and goes a long way to establishing a framework for members to think of other peoples actions inside and outside of organizing spaces. demcen is great, it just requires two-way communication.
babyhueypnewton posted:The South is the center of American life because it pioneered sunbelt corporate ideology: racially-blind multiculturalism,
