https://wplace.live/?lat=44.583394003976125&lng=-160.436162109375&zoom=12.149103120116408

Need urgent assistance against them.

Here’s our template: https://www.reddit.com/r/WplaceChina/comments/1tghz4b/we_have_made_a_new_template_for_the_chinese_part/

(Sure this isn’t praxis, just think of it like a video game)

You've probably heard of the Butterfly Effect, but if you haven't, it's basically the idea that one small thing can lead to a whole cascading chain of events and this is usually talked about in the context of a person's life to sound profound, or play with concepts of time travel, or ruminate on regret, or celebrate how amazing it is that one little thing made such a big thing happen.

This way of thinking tends to make a person's life trajectory sound extremely brittle and I'm going to attempt to show a bit what's wrong with it and how it hides behind Great Man Theory - the idea that history is primarily defined by the movements of "great people", usually men (side eye at patriarchy), who had some kind of dramatic impact that changed the course of history.

So what do these do have to do with each other? What they have in common is that they attribute outsized influence to things that don't deserve it and they reduce lots of complex dynamics (such as gradual transition from one state to another, quantitative to qualitative; negation, how the caterpillar negates itself to become a cocoon and the cocoon negates itself to become a butterfly and so on) and turn it into a laser focusing on a singular factor or decision.

I'm far from an expert on dialectical materialism, but I feel confident in saying that neither Great Man Theory nor the Butterfly Effect (at least in its colloquial use) hold up to it.

Let's consider an example, first we'll look at it the way the butterfly effect narrative might write it.

A person, we'll call him John Butterfly, graduates high school and he is deciding where to go to university. A chance conversation with a stranger steers him toward studying abroad and he goes with this idea. In this other country, he meets a person who he becomes romantically entangled with. This person knows an expert in the field that John Butterfly is planning to study in. The expert helps him learn better and has a great opportunity for him after he graduates university. He eventually gets married to the person he hit it off with, gets a great job due to the connection, and goes on to win awards and have many babies. And look at that, baby of John Butterfly. You only exist because John Butterfly just happened to talk to that stranger and just happened to decide to go study abroad. Everything after that sort of just fell into place, like it was pre-determined. Isn't life profound and strange.

Now let's look at it with another lens.

John Butterfly graduates high school and is deciding where to go to university. He is socially positioned such that he was able to go to high school and graduate, and there are options when it comes to university. He lives in a place where studying abroad is something people talk about and tends to be an option, at least to some degree, and stacking factors up to that point, ones he may not consciously be paying attention to, lead to him feeling more interested in getting far away from home than sticking around. Maybe he has a shitty family life or he has an especially adventurous spirit and developed an interest in other cultures as he grew. Anyway, he's already open to the idea when it's brought up to him because of factors in progress at that stage. For some reason, we decided to mark history as beginning when he met a stranger and decided to study abroad. Not sure why. He's been around for over eighteen years. Civilization has been around for much longer than that, though western civilization has yet to appear.

Anyway, the class/caste of capitalism and modern programs of cultural exchange have already set the stage for him to do something like this. It's expected that some people will study abroad. Further, some people will meet a person who goes on to be their sweetheart in university. Some will also divorce them later, or meet many who they go through and never settle down. These are normal but also not inevitable. Some of it's luck, which is a thing capitalism sorta brings with it. Capitalism has big casino vibes and like a casino, it's the house who wins in the end. John Butterfly is less a profound story about little decisions and more of a success story for capitalism to hold up and say "See, it works! But how does it work? It's a mystery. Life is so mysterious, wow."

It's not so mysterious. He got some nepotism style help from the connection. I forgot to mention he's actually an alcoholic at the end of this and the awards are something he displays in his overpriced house at dinner parties. Most of his kids haven't called him in a while.

You see after it was going so well, he tripped on a banana peel and got hooked on opioids. Then he turned to alcohol. He near went bankrupt from the medical bills, in spite of having more money than a lot of people do. Must be the butterfly effect again. Not the medical system that is squeezing him or the doctors who prescribed him addicting medicine because of capitalist pressures behind it. Not the companies that spend millions or billions on alcohol ads and stores. And the banana peel, well that was an unexplainable weather event. It was actually blown in by a hurricane, so not humanity's fault. I mean, the hurricane was happening this particular time because of climate change, but that's not real anyway, right.

I don't know quite how I got into extreme sarcasm mode, but hopefully I am making the point, a little bit. Our lives are complicated, the systems going on around us are even more complicated, and the butterfly effect trivializes and ignores all of that so it can individualize and create an arbitrary snapshot of when history began and ended. Much like John Great Man's contributions to history. How he invented the windmill by staring at branches moving in the wind for thousands of hours and sustaining himself on pettiness, while ignoring pleading insistence that he feed himself.

Dialectical (and historical) materialism shows this to be folly. Many things considered random or weird can instead be traced back to long-running material factors, combined with the superstructure society side of things, and the inner world factor of individuals acting upon it.

I think a good question in the face of a fantastical butterfly effect chain is, "Why was this possible in the first place? What was going on in the larger world that made this possible? This story that is made up of such seemingly profound change, where 'one action' could dramatically change the course of events?"

Cause damn, if changing the course of events was that simple, I'd just find the right hat to put on and set off the end of colonialism, ya know.

Ukraine’s new Commander-in-Chief, Mykhailo Drapaty gave an interview to Ukraїner W in 2023, where he stated that the residents of Donbass are "envious and lazy migrants and criminals, who don't want to work". He also said that Ukraine should've put more effort to "ukrainize" them because they are a "Soviet Union's burp".

"Criminals, migrants, and unconscious people,” he said, describing his attitude to Donbass residents. "They want handouts, they’re envious and don’t want to work at all. I used to think this was a myth, but no, it’s the truth."

"Donetsk and Lugansk, unfortunately, have historically been populated mostly by migrants and criminal elements, who are very present. That's why the population is so unaware. As for the Ukrainianization of the population, it probably received little attention. And there we have the result."

An absurd lie about people whose families spent generations working in coal mines, steel mills and heavy industry — some of the hardest and most dangerous jobs in the region.

In 2013, the Donetsk and Lugansk regions, collectively known as the Donbass, accounted for nearly 16% of Ukraine's GDP, second only to Kiev. The Donbass's share of industrial output sold was 27.3%, higher than any other region in the country.

He also said that the residents of Russia are "a nation that has no right to exist".

Drapty himself took part in the terrorising of Donbass in 2014, notably Mariupol, although not only, and has continued to this day.

The official representative of the UN Secretary General Stephane Dujarric did not answer the journalists' question about the statement of the new Commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Mikhail Drapaty about the residents of Donbass.

The press secretary, as they say, "moved off the topic," stating that the UN Secretary-General adheres to "clear principles" in matters of "territorial integrity."

"We have read this interview. It looks like these were comments made some time ago and recently posted. Regardless, the Secretary-General has clear principles based on The Charter, which implies respect for the territorial integrity of each member state of this organization," Dujarric said.

Is that good

panda bear

I was wondering how many people have seen this? I know about it since 2024. In 2001, Fox News of all outlets talked about a well detailed look at Israeli espionage in the United States.

Israeli companies like Amdocs due working with other phone computers was able to monitor almost every American phone call. Also, Comverse Infosys, a Israeli company that provides wiretapping equipment for law enforcement is able to monitor American federal law enforcement and local law enforcement wiretaps.

This information "fell into the hands" of criminals including a 1997 drug trafficking in LA and Israeli organized crime.

Other things mentioned Israeli Art Students that penetrated military bases, federal agencies, secret offices, and private homes of government personnel.

Israel was withholding knowledge about 9/11.

At least 60 young Israeli Jews were arrested since September 11,2001.

The arrest of Israelis at mall kiosks via Puzzle Car and Zoom Copter toys (Israelis even more recently have been arrested at mall kiosks through companies like Seacret, most of them enter the United States illegally, a fact conservatives never bring up.)

Deactivating my account soon.

Send a DM if you want.

Cheers.

Welcome again to everybody. Make yourselves at home. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is the weekly discussion thread.

☭ Matrix homeserver and space
☭ Theory discussion group on /c/theory@lemmygrad.ml
☭ Find theory on ProleWiki, marxists.org, Anna's Archive

“We, the Jews of Iran, are Iranian Jews, not "Jewish Iranians". We have a 2,500 year old history. Our path is separated from the Zionists”

The Grayzone's Max Blumenthal visits a neighborhood in Eastern Tehran, Iran bombarded with 8 missiles launched by the US-Israeli coalition on March 9, 2026. There, he met local residents who witnessed what they described as a major atrocity in which dozens of civilians were killed, and many wounded, while scores of families were left homeless.

Above the door of an apartment building which was completely destroyed by the bombing, a local painted the phrase, "Proof of American crimes."

From author's telegram

The world’s eyes are on Lionel Messi, as Argentina will face Spain in the World Cup Final. The diminutive superstar has gained a massive following across the planet, not least in Israel, thanks to his numerous business and security connections with the Apartheid State. From being the face of an Israeli A.I. company led and run by Israeli spies, entrusting his private security to a team of Israel secret agents, I explore the reasons why Benjamin Netanyahu considers him to be his favorite football player.

Article is called: Best Wordle alternatives and Wordle clones by Tom's Guide.

Anyway, from the list, you can see examples of Wordle clones.

I am trying to see if I can enhance my Spanish learning by playing these games.

I want to try it out.

(Never actually played Worlde before but I don't think it's for me tbh)

Anyway, hopefully it'll also do history or psychology themes, idk

I guess also themes that are commonplace or every day (since I have to speak the language daily lol)

The Problem

Christian individualist culture is something that impacts the west and in ways that go beyond whether a person is even Christian, or believes in a god or gods at all. It is possible, in other words, to think and act like a Christian without ascribing to Christian scriptures or going to church. Individualism is intertwined with the modern, western Christian view, to the extent that it can be genuinely difficult to see Christianity as separate from individualism.

In practice, Christian individualist thought looks something like the following: The purpose of mortal life is be tested by various challenges and trials, and come out the other side having shown that you are a morally upstanding individual, at which point you are "saved" and get to spend an eternity in bliss, in an afterlife. If you fail at this, you become "damned" and have to spend an eternity in torture, in an afterlife.

In the abstract, one might be tempted to think this point of view is a net good for the world. People believing that they need to be moral, in order to get the good outcome, or else they will be severely punished. Observation of human behavior and dialectical materialism alone could tell us how this is bunk, that material conditions are sometimes going to make it very hard for people to willpower their way into being a "good person" and that people are more moral when their needs are met, rather than when they fear punishment.

But even with that aside, it still has problems. The Christian individualist view of being saved or damned steers people toward a kind of self-obsessed view of their own existence. Instead of being taught to look at problems holistically and look at responsibility as a collective duty, people are taught to look at problems in relation to how they impact their personal standing as good or evil and look at responsibility as a matter of gauging accurately whether they needed to cleanse themself of impure association with, or participation in, something damning.

It might sound harsh, but it's almost a kind of narcissism of the soul. The fate of the individual soul is positioned as the all-important preoccupation. In the context of capitalism, this can be expressed in tricky ways, such as a rich person giving to charity. This process of large scale charity can also be a form of tax breaks and soft power in institutions that receive the charitable donations, but nevertheless, it's a great fit for the Christian individualist mold. The capitalist can feel like they are tipping the scales toward "saved", without fundamentally changing anything about the power dynamic at scale, nor changing their priorities away from personal enrichment.

And the media apparatus promoting Christian individualism can use this to validate the capitalist as a generous and overall "good" figure, for reasons like this. In other words, they take advantage of the binary framework of good and evil, using it to bludgeon people with simplistic narratives in which an otherwise exploiting person/entity flips states into being a force for good, through sheer weight of "good person deeds."

Charity and other such "harm reduction" measures are not inherently bad--they can sometimes be life-saving in the short-term--but they also aren't a solution to systemic problems and it is systemic problems that individualism is wholly incapable of addressing. The Christian individualist framework allows people to feel like they are being "good" without ever challenging an exploitative system and targeting systemic problems.

The Solution?

It is difficult to say precisely what the solution looks like, but it surely needs to be collective in nature, not individualist. However, achieving this is not as simple as saying "Christian thought is more communal now." It is dealing with an embedded culture revolving around whether a given individual is good or bad; whether a given individual is saved or damned. If we were to naively say that, in the true believer Christian context, the priority becomes to "save as many as possible", this could lead to all kinds of distortions about forcing people to live certain ways "because X way of living will save them and Y way of living will damn them". And at that point, we're more just talking about a theocracy instead of collectivism.

So, reaching collectivism instead means grounding it in something more earthly. Trying to get closer to "heaven on earth" and dismantling hellish things on earth, which is a collective goal of "saving" as many people as possible, but now in a more literal sense of saving them on Earth rather than saving them hopefully for the afterlife. If there is a collective goal to literally save, then it starts looking more like governance that ends exploitation, that prioritizes human needs, that tries to liberate peoples from hellish conditions on Earth. It starts to look more like communism.

If "good" behavior is not about ticking personal boxes in the hope you "make it" to heaven, but is instead about a collective responsibility to hold each other accountable and also uplift one another, the narcissism and neuroticism is reversed. If my failure is partly your failure and vice-versa, then being "saved" is no longer a personal, individualist trial. It is instead more like a trial of a whole society, a people, even the whole species. And overcoming those trials, no matter how many generations it takes, means creating something a lot closer to heaven on Earth. If we can build a heaven here, then what need do we have to spend a lifetime self-obsessing, for a chance at some possible heaven after?

whoooooooosh