jansenist_drugstore posted:how about heretic crew
"that campanella, what a fighter..." - real quote by my high school history teacher (who is also cathleft)
tears posted:hermetic crew
finally, my peop- oh. *hangs head and sadly trudges away, dumping "hermit crew" placard*
ialdabaoth posted:i just started to listen to an audiobook of the three-body problem courtesy of a v kind poster, and i already feel less like driving into a ditch
It’s interesting if you ignore the Cultural Revolution parts
Some ppl on this forum are good at owning, but none of you are as good as Marx, who constantly owned, on every page. Still the most impressive thing I have ever read.
In the most advanced industrial countries we have subdued the forces of nature and pressed them into the service of mankind; we have thereby infinitely multiplied production, so that a child now produces more than a hundred adults previously did. And what is the result? Increasing overwork and increasing misery of the masses, and every ten years a great collapse. Darwin did not know what a bitter satire he wrote on mankind, and especially on his countrymen, when he showed that free competition, the struggle for existence, which the economists celebrate as the highest historical achievement, is the normal state of the animal kingdom.
Lysenko posted:
this is the real page 420 shit i signed up for
Lysenko posted:
neat fact: tommasso campanella's name was on the alexander garden obelisk. until 2013 when The Fuckers made it a romanov monument again
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-watts.html
They remember last August's riot as an outburst, a seizure. Yet what, from the realistic viewpoint of Watts, was so abnormal? "Man's got his foot on your neck," said one guy who was there, "sooner or later you going to stop asking him to take it off." The violence it took to get that foot to ease up even the little it did was no surprise. Many had predicted it. Once it got going, its basic objective--to beat the Black and White police--seemed a reasonable one, and was gained the minute The Man had to send troops in. Everybody seems to have known it. There is hardly a person in watts now who finds it painful to talk about, or who regrets that it happened--unless he lost somebody.
But in the white culture outside, in that creepy world full of pre-cardiac Mustang drivers who scream insults at one another only when the windows are up; of large corporations where Niceguymanship is the standing order regardless of whose executive back one may be endeavoring to stab; of an enormous priest caste of shrinks who counsel moderation and compromise as the answer to all forms of hassle; among so much well-behaved unreality, it is next to impossible to understand how Watts may truly feel about violence. In terms of strict reality, violence may be a means to getting money, for example, no more dishonest than collecting exorbitant carrying charges from a customer on relief, as white merchants here still do. Far from a sickness, violence may be an attempt to communicate, or to be who you really are.
dimashq posted:ialdabaoth posted:i just started to listen to an audiobook of the three-body problem courtesy of a v kind poster, and i already feel less like driving into a ditch
It’s interesting if you ignore the Cultural Revolution parts
this is a spoiler for the entire damn trilogy but
Edited by shriekingviolet ()
thirdplace posted:dimashq posted:ialdabaoth posted:i just started to listen to an audiobook of the three-body problem courtesy of a v kind poster, and i already feel less like driving into a ditch
It’s interesting if you ignore the Cultural Revolution parts
this is a spoiler for the entire damn trilogy but
Spoiler!
Oh that’s right haha, that became apparent by the end of the first novel and it made me mad lol
I remember scavenging on the beach of a sludgy river called the Tajo Luz, me and my cousins. My brother was too young, still slung across my mother’s back. She walked ahead of us, scraping at the beach with a homemade rake, uncovering bits of discarded junk.
Farther up the beach, where the sand turned to scrub, a flash of movement caught my eye. I climbed the shallow dunes. Nestled at the top was a twisted mat of plastic ties, broken twigs, aluminum shavings, and synthetic fibers. A baby pigeon rested there, half in and half out of the nest. One wing lay outstretched, flapping uselessly. I took the poor little creature into my hands.
“It’s all right,” I murmured. I ran my finger over its quivering head. Its heart fluttered against my palm.
I slid down the dune and ran to catch up with my mother. I was barefoot, but the rough ruins of the beach hardly bothered me anymore. My feet were dirty, calloused things, hunks of sturdy meat.
“Mama!” I called. She turned, her dark hair blowing back over her shoulder. The sun rose behind her, thick and runny as fresh egg yolk.
“Mama,” I said, holding up the injured bird. “It’s hurt. Can we help it?”
“Let’s get that home,” she said, and she smoothed the hair from my face. It reminded me of how I had stroked the bird’s tiny head.
I beamed at her.
We took the baby bird home along with six mollusks, some copper wire, and a meter-long metal hunk that bore the faded gray circles of the NorRus logo.
I slept that night next to the baby bird. In the morning, my mother boiled off the bird’s feathers and cooked it whole. I’d like to tell you I had no stomach for it. But if you think for a minute I didn’t want to shove that weary bird down my gullet despite having sung it to sleep the night before, then you have never been hungry.
My mother ate the bird herself, to ensure she made enough milk for my brother. I sat across from her on the floor and watched her consume the entire fledgling in three crunchy bites.
I didn’t cry until she left to greet my father, just home from an expedition to the dumps of medical waste outside the nearby military training academy. Until Teni needed more pilots for the war with Mars, years later, we were nobodies. Ghouls. Just like everyone else there.
I clutched my knees to my chest and cried because I was so hungry. I cried because I wanted the pain to end.
https://www.workers.org/2019/05/30/why-the-imperialists-hate-huawei/
red_dread posted:reading the cutting edge of marxist political economy
https://www.workers.org/2019/05/30/why-the-imperialists-hate-huawei/
I don't even understand why they mention the internal structure of Huawei when they later point out that it is meaningless. Would have been worse of they hadn't and reverted to a Proudhonist understanding of capitalism against "markets" as neutral. Which is de-facto what supporters of China end up advocating when they take neoclassical ideas about market efficiency and gdp growth/poverty reduction figures at their face.
I think the party is lost, the Trotskyist policy of supporting things you hate isn't sustainable but they can't seem to commit to the idea that China is socialist, in this piece they use a bunch of words that don't mean anything to avoid committment like "chemically pure socialism" or "socialism with Chinese characteristics." As long as the party keeps growing it can survive with the mix of Marcyism and internet Marxism-Leninism that currently fights for an internal voice. It won't last forever though. At least it gives them a niche, I don't know if the WWP was involved in the defense of the Venezuelan embassy but social democrats will never do those things no matter how many members they have. On that note I read this reflection of DSA members on supporting Bernie
https://newleftreview.org/issues/II116/articles/dsa-members-america-s-new-left
Some of it is left-liberals slowly relearning the lessons of the past 150 years but so much of it sounds like what the WWP/PSL say that I am skeptical any amount of discussion will make the DSA anything other than an organization for internet radical petty-bourgeois (self-admitted in this piece).
thirdplace posted:also a couple months back I recommended The Stars Are Legion by K Hurley because it was really good, even if none of you so much as upvoted me for it because you are all swine, ignorant of the pearls I cast upon you.
i did not like the title but now i am reading it and it's good.
But I suggest again everyone here read Black Easter if they haven't. It's short and good.
The carrot for tHE r H i z z o n E is, in Black Easter, Ronald Reagan gets killed by demons in 1968 as a proof-of-concept demo.
red_dread posted:chemically pure socialism
Edited by neckwattle ()