Dinh AaronMk

#Freekekistan

The American Spring: An Alternate Present RP

I'll take dibs on the Great Lakes region.

Just lemme get shit in order and maybe I'll have something before work.

Aaron's dog adventures

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Seriously what the fuck, why. I just wanted to go to sleep, why I chase you with a towel for thirty minutes. I just wanted to go to sleep.

How *I* See Communism: A Discussion of Spamtastic Proportions

Just saying, "You didn't build that." Yeah, I get it, we should be careful about how we assign credit for all these wonderful things, but at the same time, the argument that capitalism has NOTHING to do with all these wonderful things is wholly unsupportable. Especially in light of all those command-economies in industrialized nations that failed miserably. Hypothetically, sure, we coulda got here without it in a thought experiment -- but we're here, and capitalism got us here.

@mdk

SPAM! in SPACE!

>[AaronMK]: [write the manifesto of Space Anarcho-Communism and neatly send it off to the baby-headed god sun as a gift]

How *I* See Communism: A Discussion of Spamtastic Proportions

Basque finally surrendered its last arms, and Spain is cool now I guess, but for the record, Spanish revolutionaries didn't stay cool forever. Granted, all I really learned of the Spanish Civil War came from Pan's Labyrinth, and at least in that depiction the government wasn't exactly cool either. I can find absolutely nothing negative to post about the Zapatistas, and as much as I generally appreciate Kurdish efforts to blast away at nasty people in the middle east, apparently lots of Kurdish groups are themselves terror networks and it's goddamn impossible for me to separate all the who's from all the other who's over yonder. Confuzzling. Anyway. I only commented to throw some more gas on that 'revolution fetish' catchphrase I pseudo-invented in the previous post, primarily because romanticizing the nobility of any one particular quasi-terrorist struggle is inherently dangerous. I'm sure Spanish anarchocommunists were generally sweet from (at a minimum) a few perspectives -- just saying.

@mdk

One man's terror group is another person's freedom fighters. This is the entire notion of insurgency, what matters is degree of insurgency. Are you bombing targets associated to the state and going on a guerrilla campaign against assets that serve to safeguard the power that be in that you're hitting the military and police in that they put themselves in the way of the government so considered detached from street-level reality as your group believes, in the vein as Basque, Catalonian, or Irish insurgency?

Or are we bombing everything because literally everything not you is literally the enemy like ISIS?

Yeah Yugoslavia didn't really, ah, break that whole genocidal mold we were worrying about, in the end.... But you're certainly (implicitly?) correct that it's pretty unfair to lay THIS PARTICULAR mass-slaughter wholly at the feet of communism.

@mdk

It's so of hard to go about things when specific cases aren't used. Though I also don't want to sound like I'm someone to try and defend the Holocaust, because I don't. But in most situations as I have learned about them it's less active malevolence on the part of the state (unless we're discussing someone like the Tatars, then there was a targeted effort there). In most cases it's inactive ability of bloated government being too incapable of acting in the interests of oversight against itself because there's no over-sight mechanism. But I while I'll admit Stalin's Holdomor and Mao's mass famines during the Great Leap Forward did exist, they're not exactly anything that wouldn't have happened if the basic ideology of the state was any different. If the Communist Party of China was a new phase in Chinese dynastic heritage with the same modernization vision then it would have been just as likely they would have fucked up.

Much in the same amorphous sense Captialism and factors associated have created its own disasters through willful ignorance.

NOTABLY: cities run by leftists are also the ones falling apart and/or literally shooting themselves and/or burning themselves down while packed into a warehouse because they can't afford their own inflated rent and/or rioting about the damage in the city while damaging their city. Texas, Salt Lake City, Colorado Springs.... they're doing just fine. Which of course begs the (admittedly pretty partisan) question, why the fuck would we listen to the other guy here? Ya know? I mean that's harsh, yeah, but.... come on now. The world's orange-est capitalist took power 100 days ago and the industry in these old manufacturing towns has been on a non-stop skyrocket ever since, slowing only when rumors began to swirl that he was't going to deregulate quite as much as people thought he might. Who left who behind again? The Rust Belt made their opinions on the matter quite clear, much to the chagrin of -- well, basically everybody else in the world. My own stated perspective aside, I'm taking their word for it.

@mdk

I live near one of those major industrial American, rust belt cities.

I haven't seen shit.

But here's the thing: the American economy has been on track for growth for the passed couple years. Irregardless of Trump, the activity we're seeing right now has had its roots back long before him.



Trump likes to brag too about obliging companies to not go overseas, but we have to really consider that such decisions in such industries are not ever snap decisions. They take several years to consider, so if they agreed to pull out of going to Mexico they probably had already been reconsidering or weren't wholly dead set on it. And even in the case of the Ford deal nothing would have changed anyways since it was only one line moving somewhere and it wasn't even decided yet where it would go, and per the plant in Kentucky the line workers would have just started work on the Escape which had come to more-or-less fully replace the previous model.

But this doesn't change the nature of the Auto Industry, workers are used to regular lay-offs for model year changes. Saying you convinced Ford or GM to hire on a thousand new workers isn't a big victory when you step and consider they would have hired those same thousand hands once the changes had been made and those people laid off come back from an effective vacation.

Or any number of things in-between, or nothing. Teach a man to fish and he'll drink on weekends, give a man a living basic income and he'll eat forever. Give a man a 105" UHDTV and he'll forget he's supposed to eat. Inequality only matters in a context of scarcity. You walk past some untold number of Starbucks mugs every day, and even if you're not currently holding a starbucks mug yourself, it's simply not a big deal -- of course, if you're on a life raft in the middle of the ocean and the other guy is holding a snicker's bar, that's worth killing for.

The point being this: in a distant future where work is no longer required for production, even first-world problems are (logically and presumably) as rare as an actual genocide. Case in point -- nobody goes to war for control of emojis. You can already have as many emojis as you need, want, or accidentally utilize. Scarcity of emojis does not exist. The concept of struggling over them is ludicrous (at least it should be, I'm sure there's a guy). In the future we're talking about, basically everything is as readily available as emojis. I'll grant you that capitalism isn't prepared to deal with that -- sure. Communism DAMNED SURE isn't ready either; nobody is. It just so happens that Capitalism is taking us there, and for the life of me I can't think of a reason we should stop. Shit man that's gonna be awesome.

....and I started going forwards and realized you addressed some of that, but fuckit, we're doing long srs posts in spam now, this am me srs face.

@mdk

As I'm sure I already pointed out before, this too is the goal of communism. The difference being when its achieved I'm not paying Applebucks to get an Applecoffee, or that I need a basic income anyways to get what's needed because the system has already been altered where every means of production is now the public property and if there's any one thing I want I can get it. What's different is how the approach is made.

Marxists (or in this case, Marxist-Leninists) would argue there needs to be a strong state to oversee the change from A to B while Anarcho-Communists argue there needs to be immediate change from A to B since the transitional period is irrelevant. Where-as Market Communists would suggest that in order to effectively shift to communism we need to - for a while - play nice in the global market place because there is at the moment still capitalist countries that can derail the revolution in much the same way Napoleon derailed the Revolution and when he got deposed Europe just replaced the entire French power structure with a king (to then depose).

...but like, why? We're in the garden of Eden, arguing over who gets to name the apple. Just fucking take some, have a bushel, call them Krauttestes if you want.

@mdk

Because it shouldn't be Steve Job's property if he isn't laboring to actually grow the apple, and if in the future is laboring to grow the apple then it stands that no one should own the apple.

Fucking eat the apple and stop worrying about spooks, you'll feel better.

I absolutely get what you're saying -- it's just that this is so radically and empirically inferior to this. And I'm not, like, super patient about the gradually-improved-over-time process for like my actual limbs. I say that with the utmost respect and appreciation for all you small-arms dealers out there -- you're doing an awesome thing, and I hope someone's paying you lots of money to do it. Just.... you know. We've had, what, all of human history to figure out prosthetics? Then in the last fifteen years we started throwing actual money at it, and went from hooks and strings to fucking Evangelion in a decade. As the interested party, I'm going with money on this one.

@mdk

By market rules the most accesible product on the market is the most succesful. There's a reason Apple's iPhone actually doesn't lead the smart phone revolution despite being in some ways the superior product because it's such a carefully crafted self contained environment. But it's the Android and phones like it because they used open source Linex as its operating platform and didn't spend so much money for people to stare at paper on polished wooden tables in highly polished fiber-glass office-labs while sipping twenty-dollar mocha-capacinos. Android just did it and it's a tool that works well enough, can be used as a future platform for other shit, and is cheaper than the iShit.

I mean compare it to the similar period east/west counterparts. Capitalism generated wealth and Meemaw got to eat Chef Boyardi from her microwave oven. Communism generated poverty and Babushka got buried in a mass grave with political dissidents (assuming she hadn't been executed by the state for wearing glasses).

@mdk

Can I get a helicopter ride?

Dysfunctional is a strong word. For all we know, American politics is just boring (preposterous suggestion after last year, I know). Nonparticipation is only an issue if it's compulsory, and in the US it's only compulsory in the case of convicted felons. I'd hardly call that a crisis. In short: let's not spend too much effort trying to straighten the horns on a bull here. Maybe they SHOULD be curved.

@mdk

Last I checked folks like Jefferson wanted more people to be involved because if there weren't more people involved then the system isn't valid.

He may have told slaves and women to fuck off, but at the least he wasn't saying the bankers and speculators should be the only ones to be involved.

[/quote]
I'm jumbled a bit. Sounds like what you're saying is essentially that the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots. My meme-level response is that Communism doesn't equal liberty and AntiFa ain't patriots -- flesh that out in your mind, what I'm driving at is Franklin, Jefferson, Washington, et al agonized over the decision to go to war with England -- not out of cowardice or their inability to be effective, but out of wisdom. More frequently than the proponents of glorious revolution would care to admit, the goons running around cracking skulls are just that -- goons.
[/quote]

what I'm driving at is Franklin, Jefferson, Washington, et al agonized over the decision to go to war with England

This sounds like you're implying that the Founding Fathers were of one mind and that George Washington totally wasn't impatient to get the ball rolling and that the Peace Delegate should really stop beating their meat over appeals to King George to save them from Parliament. Or at the least in opposition to the Stamp Act. They didn't send a strongly worded letter. They fucking committed what we would happily call terrorism today.



The Olive Branch petition wasn't really unanimously regarded as a positive move by anyone. There was plenty support against it and cynical attitudes against it doing any good, particularly by John Adams. And Thomas Jefferson had written the original draft so offensively it had to be changed before sending it off.

Oi, politidorks, hit me up with some nuanced articles you've been reading lately.

A: Paying for clicks isn't a viable business model. It would be a financial loss. If this was not the case, the internet would be a financial perpetual motion machine and none of us would ever have to work again.

@Vilageidiotx

While true, one of the guys I work with at work was telling me about an app that at the least pays you to watch ads. Something like so many ads is so many cents. But if you run it long enough you can rack up a lot of money, and the Beer Money Reddit has threads for schemes to milk such services to get extra dosh for little effort.

Basically you end up running the app on multiple (probably cheap as fuck smartphones) and put them on a table and every so many minutes you come back and hit the "I'm still watching" button before walking away.

question for the british folk

Isn't that Turkish pizza?

Goddamn, I need to make my way back to Europe soon.

@Taaj

Why go to Europe for the food when you can learn to cook it yourself?

How *I* See Communism: A Discussion of Spamtastic Proportions

@Dinh AaronMk This message you relayed is about someone who is in a political minority ranting that the majority of society doesn't agree with them. It is not the case that everyone in Britain in 1992 wanted Neil Kinnock to win and Major pulled through only from system inertia. The policies of John Major, as disdainfully stale as a young socialist of the time might have found them, were the ideas favoured by the British electorate over any other ideas expressed.

The elite did not kill socialism because they feared it. The people killed socialism because they were against it. All genuine socialists of today, at least in the West, are necessarily in the vein of Blanqui, wanting to enforce the workers' liberation upon them whether they'd like it or not. It is true that democracy cannot be relied upon to produce socialism: not because of the irrevocability of the existing system, but because there is no democratic will for socialism.

@The Nexerus

Yet looking at the table political involvement did drop very significantly after his election. Which isn't so much a "the socialists lost, boo-hoo". They had already lost when Margret Thatcher was elected. That was the point in the Election Cycle when the strength and solidarity of British Labor had faded away because of generational distance between the generation that had grown up during the Depression and London Blitz and the generation that was voting then. The power structure that had given the UK the NHS and clobbered Churchill's government after the war.

From the greater conversation I pulled it from, that election would have been the point the post-Soviet, neo-liberal dream was still high. But then produced apathy.

@Dinh AaronMk

Isn't the Australian statistic skewed because there is a penalty for NOT voting there? It's better to merely vote anything than have " a fine and potentially a day in court." I'm sure we could higher the voting population in the US if we said you have a fine/jail time if you don't vote.

@Nytem4re

It's one of the interesting metrics to be sure, but given that every other country I listed still has a higher turnout rate on some level additionally suggests that with or without a threat of going to court a majority of the population is still going to the polls, either because the candidates up for grabs feel they matter more and their view is more represented, or because it's easier than going in on a Tuesday afternoon.

Hell, to add more to the list, German rate of participation was at 71% in 2013, Austria was at 74%, Dutch turnout for 2012 was much the same rate and was last election as high as 80%.

We have an involvement issue, plain and simple.

How *I* See Communism: A Discussion of Spamtastic Proportions

I'm going to use this post as an opportunity to post some shit I found browsing /leftypol/ and found a thread that so far isn't sectarian shit-throwing (so far). And there was a post that inspired me to double check and cross reference with the earlier graph of UK election turnouts. I'll copy-pasta the posts here up until the one that discusses a particular UK election and let it hang, or go one after.

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"The thing that initially got me into leftism, more than anything else, was a weird sense of a future lost. That sense has become much more acute as time went on - definitively, I'd say it petered out in the 1980s as the social democratic consensus collapsed, but as time has gone on the situation has only become more severe - in the 90s there were still some scarce promises for the future, or at least some vision of it via the internet, perhaps caused by the misguided euphoria of the collapse of the USSR. In the popular imagination you could see a United States of Europe, and so on. Now? Everything seems locked into the present. Sure, we've got an abundance of nostalgia, but there's little attempt to actually articulate the present in the manner we've seen from the past. Perhaps it's too awful for us to comprehend? Or perhaps simply too dull.
It's very strange. This runs through all sorts of fields, from architecture to politics to the bizarre question of what the Zeitgeist is. The sheen has even come off third-way managerialism, now there's nothing but dismay. And Trump, the human spectacle.
So I dug back into social democracy to see how I could recover the future, and instead found that capitalism cannot be recovered. But it brings me to my primary question: Do you feel it too? The haunting resonance of futures that simply never came. (I believe this is called "hauntology") For me, I feel it most profoundly as a haunting by the 1970s. The loathed middle-child between the 60s and the 80s is the one I find myself most drawn to spend time with. It's not a deep nostalgia, or an idealisation of the period - the 1970s were miserable - yet they hang over me, the last decade before the year-zero of neoliberalism, the last decade with some vision of the future. Apollo, Concorde. Some vision of science as an engine of progress. To try and put a point on it, perhaps the longing is not for the 1970s, but for the post-1970s promised by the 1970s. Then there's our sense of time being warped - the 80s much closer to now than the 60s felt in the 80s, even though they were now much longer ago… Neoliberalism has driven all of the senses crazy. The end of history does nothing but confuse.
(Mark Fisher's stuff really kickstarted my desire to articulate this feeling, both Capitalist Realism, his blog and Ghosts of my Life. Adam Curtis also seems to get into the same general area, that sense of lost postwar-modernism. Still, much of it goes over my head. Intrinsically I think it's linked to the style of postwar Britain, a sort of utopian, dystopian horror in the way Scarfolk parodies, but I can't see why the rest of the world shouldn't also be haunted by these lost futures.)
I'm sure I had this neatly folded into an essay question, but basically it's just a request for exposition of anything you think is vaguely related, stories, your own thoughts or whatever. I'm fascinated by it, particularly from a perspective that goes outside my own lukewarm social-democratic "roots"."

"There's some of what you talk about for me too op, but since I'm a millenial what haunts me are the 90's, not really the 90's per se, but a vague undefined time between the 90's and the early 00's, a time without broadband internet, social networks etc.
I do not wish to go into details, but my childhood and adolescence were rather dull, I think Fisher talks about it, about how the new generations don't know what it is like to be bored, things are boring, but you're never bored. My nostalgia is for a time period in which you could spend an entire afternoon playing vydia, not just without being disturbed by the outside world, but also being rather content. Again, I do not wish to go back to such a life, 90% of the time it was drudgery and boredoom, but it's strange how the memory of it continues to haunt me, now I find videogames pointless and spend my days on leftist websites and reading more leftist books that I can process, this brings me no joy or satisfaction, but I cannot stop, it is as if I know I have to absorb as much theory as possible for the harsh times ahead.
Have you read book related? It is inspired by Fisher and goes into the same themes."

"I'm familiar with the feeling of the 90s as well. (To some degree I think it's actually more tangible, as I'm also a millennial but the wonders of charity shops and grandparents mean that much of the things I was seeing in the early 2000s on VHS were from the mid-90s.) It sort of hovers around - when I'm bigger, that is, when I'm a teenager of some unclear age (Probably 17. Sony marketing executives identified it as the age everyone wants to be - 10 year olds can't wait for it and 25 year olds want to be 17 again.) then I'm going to own a Nokia 3310, play around on dial-up internet on a Toshiba Tecra running Windows 95-8, and so on. No worries that age 17 is in the increasingly distant past - I'm not bigger yet. If I was, I'd have those, have done those things. Sure, I physically own them now, but that's neither here nor there… I think on the 70s, it's perhaps rooted in the very palpable unease of the era. Hammer Horror and disaster films. Hauntology feels like such an appropriate term because there's something generally off about it - which Scarfolk nails. You could genuinely believe there were witches lurking down the road in (this "remembered" version of) the 70s. Perhaps it's partially linked to early consumerism. The Uncanny valley. This is modern society, this is not quite modern society.
The vidya point is quite interesting. It is a perverse situation, that now one has access to nearly the entire library of everything up to about the PS2 for free, but in turn finds each game less enjoyable and has less to play when constrained to perhaps 20-30 games at home. These are more difficult to relate to politically, though. Weirdly, what I associate with the late 90s technologically is the mid-90s - the early world wide web is that of John Smith or perhaps even of Election 92*, that conspicuous absence from most official histories - not Tony Blair. Talk about futures lost…
I've not read the book, I'm currently working through When the lights went out, a history of Britain in the seventies. I will look into it though. (Vaporwave has always slightly fascinated me, since at once it seems to be ironic and completely comprehensible as a thing about consumerism. Like vodka, consumable both straight or with the awkward burning sensation dulled by a coca cola logo.)
*There's something fascinating about that actually - the introduction, etc, seem so totally set up for a Labour government. Give it a watch: youtube.com/watch?v=QY8MxR1yRnE It's the first election of a new decade a very shiny looking set… and then John Major wins. Bang. Every time I watch it, it never fails to excite - the same is true of all of them (I think it's the tune) but underlying election 92 there's a constant feeling that somehow, somewhere This time Kinnock will win or the SNP will have their breakthrough and be Free by 93 - but never. Nope. We live in the John Major world. I've heard it hypothesised, though I forget the source, that this moment was so depressing that it explains why people like Cameron and Miliband got ahead - the true political talent in waiting of their age just plain gave up on politics, so we're stuck with the wonks who kept at it. I'm sure particularly of Miliband/Balls (though it could've been Cameron, who was helping the Tories in election 92.) someone said "They are of their generation, but not representative of their generation" or something to that extent."

[This WEBM was posted in conjunction with the following post]
">Sure, we've got an abundance of nostalgia, but there's little attempt to actually articulate the present in the manner we've seen from the past. Perhaps it's too awful for us to comprehend? Or perhaps simply too dull.
You mentioned Adam Curtis. He hypothesizes that we lack the kind of Absolute Idea that drove history, so it's a case of plus ça change, plus ça meme chose, you know? sniffs, rubs nose History hasn't ended, we're just in a weird cultural period where neoliberal Capital promised us a bright future if we defeated "communism" yet undermines it at every turn while selling us back its image. From the US to Russia we can find a latent psychosis and alienation that seems inescapable without drugging yourself literally or metaphorically by drinking various brands of Kool Aid ideology. But much of it is an illusion. Negating current social relations remains possible, the difficulty is realizing that and keeping your head together, because it seems so unlikely.
Trump is just a US Berlusconi btw. Zizek had him figured out long ago."

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This thread is spooky as fuck, and not in a Stirner way either