AnneVolin

joined 1 week ago
[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (3 children)

I think "Hasan exposes people to leftist ideas" is great and all, but your argument has the following lynch pin:

The right has a pipeline that’s working pretty damn well to slowly convert people from neocons to fascism, and it often starts with talking about their entertainment or being in the guise of entertainment itself (like with comedians, like Rogan, Crowder, etc).

This has a couple of parts we need to inspect:

  1. People need to "hear this stuff" -- which fine I agree with.
  2. "hearing stuff" on the left translates to the same outcomes that "hearing stuff" on the right does. -- This is where you lose me.

The Right has it easy. It's why they can be boring, lazy, stupid and evil. They have it easy because not only are they the status-quo, but their arguments have big salacious things they can point to. Capitalism exists, the US Empire exists, and people's suffering exist. The right doesn't actually need people to continue it's project in the same way the left needs people. The Right can sustain itself on morons running into walls until the whole system collapses under its own weight. There is a pinprick of sunlight between your average neocon and your average fascist. Hell there's only a 4ft window of sunlight between a liberal and a fascist. The last 2 libs that ran were hard to distinguish from fascists if you understand fascism (most people only understand the aesthetics of fascism and only in particular contexts). Fascism is easy because it's the logical ends of an already existing system of capitalism. All you have to do is give the morons something to do and let the system run, that's why culture war is great for the right. Fascism more or less exists as a real and in-power political force in most of the Western World.

The Left needs people to build an alternative, something that doesn't exist, something that works for everyone, something intelligent and intelligible. The only way to do this is to be armed with the knowledge of the past, cognizant enough to understand the landscape of the present, have enough foresight to visualize the future, planing capacity to deal with the logistics, and the resources to put it into motion.

"Roganism" will never deliver these things. In fact "Roganism" will simply get you a bunch of consumers. The only way that "Roganism" will prevail for the left is if we are already at war and we simply need bodies to take orders and to pull triggers.

Now Hasan isn't really responsible for any of this, he's an entertainer. He's a good entertainer, he has okay politics. But that's it, there's no there there beyond that.

Hasan makes $1.4 million a year about probably more now. If we pretend that everyone paying for that is "the left", we're doing the same type of spending as we criticize the DNC for. Hasan is our Beyonce concert, our Oprah interview, it's just spread out over the whole year. That didn't work for the Democrats. Meanwhile the Democrats also have it easy. 90% of what they want literally just exists as is. They can be losers forever if they wanted to, and they do.

The Democrats might be missing a "message" or "policy" or any desire to help people in any realistic way that isn't a spreadsheet, and it's stupid that they paid for Beyonce thinking it will get them over the line. Leftists don't have a unified platform and don't even have a machine, but it's smart that we "pay" for Hasan? That's really the argument that I'm reading from all this:

  1. Hasan streams
  2. Somebody thinks yeah medicare for all
  3. ??????
  4. ?????
  5. ?????
  6. politically viable leftism in the US

It's the same argument:

  1. Everyone has a brat summer
  2. Oprah fumbles Kamala thru a question
  3. Beyonce performs
  4. ????
  5. ????
  6. ????
  7. Democrats win.

I think one thing a lot of Westerners don't want to understand is that socialism necessitates the death of American media culture. That includes the Hasan path, because what is Hasan under socialism? The US overproduces media culture to the point where it's gig work, because of the same exact reason that "Roganism" works. Hasan's path under socialism is to either go back to an organization where he will be subjected to the same if not worse circumscription he had at TYT, pick another career or at best be the last of a dying breed. No socialist economy is actually going to be able to support the ecology of streamers needed to generate Hasans. Hasan likes what he does, when push comes to shove is he going to give it up for socialism? It's really easy to say that, it's another thing to actually do it. Given his personal consumption and what he talks about, I have my doubts that Hasan is going to tighten the Gucci belt for us.

A lot of Western socialists assume that the desired individualized labor mix of the population is a realistic goal. The idea that everyone does what they want to do is not real. Yes people will still want to do certain necessary jobs, but that doesn't mean enough people will want to do them to ensure social reproduction. We can talk about robots and magical maguffins till the cows come home, but in practice until those maguffins are created and function good enough humans will still have to do those jobs.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (1 children)

The left platform is explicit about its desire to make the retirement age 62. You have to be an absolute dummy to think that Macron would capitulate to that. It's against his entire function in government.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

I don't subscribe to the Intercept and read them all the time you can click out of their paywall.

Spoiler it's everyone's favorite whodunnit with Syrian chemical weapons.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 hours ago

"they're only prisoners of war if they're taken by governments recognized in the United Nations region, otherwise they're sparkling hostages" - US Department of State

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 hours ago

It depends on how the program works. If SteamOS works like Android then yeah we might be cooked on the hardware support. If SteamOS works like a normal linux distro/OS we'll get more support.

In practice this is a good thing because most of the parts of SteamOS are open source, meaning that as long as you don't have a device with a locked bootloader you'd be able to run comparable OS simply using all the software that's bundled in Steam OS.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 5 hours ago (4 children)

Listening to NPR this morning they made really heavy emphasis on HORSESHIT THEORY. They never actually admitted that after Macron called for snap elections and the center crumbled he went crying to the fascists to form a government. They talked around it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (3 children)

Haha. If this comment section is positive it proves nobody read the actual article.... because in the middle of it is a huge trigger for a certain kind of user around here lmao.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

Depends on caliber and propellant. The most quiet gun is a .22 slide lock with a silencer and subsonic ammo. Sounds almost like like a hammer punching through drywall.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (1 children)

Ukraine not publishing statistics and hiding the extent of their loss in the war is calculated and was calculated from the beginning this quite literally supported top to bottom by nationalists.

Nationalists have a brain disease. My Ukranian family literally took the party line to the point where they won't talk about the war, when we ask if they're okay and what's happening they give a vague noncommittal answer. They got mad at my parents for helping one of my cousin's wife and children to escape to Germany. They literally refused to talk to us when we saw on LiveMapUa that missiles hit their town and a substation was destroyed.

There's no spin needed. The nationalist among them don't have any other story to tell but the strongest ethnonationalist bullshit, they're the ones in charge and the ones that are prosecuting this war. They have the rest of them captive. That's why they shelled DNR into the ground before the war got hot.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

There are like 3-4 competing nationalist myths in Ukraine right now. The problem with ethnogenesis is that it isn't about the genesis of the state, it's about the genesis and literally lineage of a people which quite literally is insane and flat out wrong for most states unless most of the people lived on an island for millennia.

Even those that live on Islands have a really hard time, for example TERF Island doesn't really do well by it's indigenous populations in its current ethogenesis, it's mostly ruled by it's Norman and Angelo invaders and it's purely German monarchs.

The kid was probably taught that in school, I’ve seen Ukrainian professors say the same thing.

The kid was taught one of these myths likely by their uncle or family member. Ukrainians culturally have somewhat of an oral history due to language suppression, these oral histories are tested at Ukrainian universities, rather than created at the universities.

The reality of the Ukranian ethnogenesis is that it's inseparable from the Russian and Belarussian ones. They're all branches of the same tree, and people do a shit ton of copium when retelling this stuff to put an emphasis on their favorite grudge. Ethnogenesis stories are almost often lies so the need of the Ukrainian state and intelligentsia to create one is telling, they're effectively picking and choosing whatever happened on "the land" and shoving that into "the people".

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

If you're from the UK the situation is the same. The entire system came down on Corbyn, but there are very few places in the world right now where there are real leftist politics happening.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) (1 children)

Yeah this is a read on power that's made by babies and libs.

"They said the magic words that made the law spell work. Why can't you do that America???"

Yoon's coup failed because he failed to secure the centers of power (in SK this is literally the chaebol families) in his corner, not because the Parliament did a ritual.

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