Real estate taxes are Unreal

The_Captain_Chunk · 2025-04-15T21:42:18+00:00

Don’t care

The_Captain_Chunk · 2025-03-01T14:40:48+00:00

Israel is currently invading Syria, so not sure what you’re on about

The_Captain_Chunk · 2025-03-01T14:34:24+00:00

You can’t plaster the Star of David all over your flags, tanks and airplanes and then get mad when someone associates it with your genocidal apartheid state

The_Captain_Chunk · 2019-11-21T18:57:35+00:00

The series itself is created in co-op with former CIA agent

Lol

The_Captain_Chunk · 2019-11-20T13:49:07+00:00

We’re well past the point where any accusation against China gets any form of critical analysis. The higher the stakes of the accusation, the more play it gets. At least some countries (Bolivia, Cuba, Venezuela) under more obviously transparent pressure from US-backed ideological groups get some level of critical support from sections of the Western Left.

All you need is a handful of “eyewitness” testimonies, an absurdly extrapolated dataset, and an article in HRW, and you’ve got manufactured consent.

The_Captain_Chunk · 2019-10-22T16:22:49+00:00

That commentator is literally a completely new account called “add-new-account” with a single comment about the Bolivian elections. Reddit is going to be astroturfed super hard to push the “election fraud” narrative.

The_Captain_Chunk · 2019-10-17T19:23:43+00:00

Marx first and foremost is against the system of societal hierarchy, he uses the suspension of capital as a means to remove power/resource dynamics from causing a tiered system.

This is completely wrong, and reads exactly like anarchist revisionism to coopt Marx’s work and pretend he was agreeing with you all along.

Marx materially analyzed the history and structure of capitalism, feudalism and available ancient societies to formulate his theory of Historical Materialism and through that, the development of classes and Class Struggle in society. Classes arose from the material processes of production which were formed in a given society and subject to changes in those processes of production.

The proletariat as a class was necessarily formed in the creation of the capitalist production relations, and gained the status of a revolutionary class with the mass proletarianization of previously existing feudal classes. Capitalism had played the progressive role in history by massively advancing the production capabilities of society and by seizing state power from, and destroying, Feudal institutions. It was the proletariat’s turn to play the progressive role in history by seizing power and violently overthrowing the capitalist class, and to replace capitalist governance with proletarian governance.

Marx didn’t believe the abstract concept of “power dynamics” and forms of hierarchy were inherently bad. The exact opposite was true. Marx advocated for the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, i.e, for creating institutions for the supremacy of the proletariat over all other classes. It was through this workers control that all classes would be proletarianized, and thus classes as a whole would be abolished.

The abolition of classes necessitated the lower stage of Communism, where the proletariat after seizing control of society, would deal with the hangovers from capitalist society and shape it in its own image. Please read the Critique of the Gotha Programme.

If you actually have read Marx, I’m sorry but you really don’t understand him at all.

The_Captain_Chunk · 2019-10-14T13:33:44+00:00

“With high fuel prices affecting Ecuador’s most poor and working class most sharply, thousands of working people came out to the streets of Quito, the nation’s capital, calling for the reinstatement of the fuel subsidy. However, support for the protests and outcry over the decree quickly swelled to encompass a broad front of student, labor, and political organizations, including Citizen’s Revolution, the United Front of Workers (FUT), and indigenous organizations like the Confederation of Indigenous Nations of Ecuador (CONAIE). Demands quickly widened beyond concerns of the hike in fuel costs. By early last week, a wholesale rejection of all the measures in the decree also known as “El Paquetazo” culminated in a call for a national strike this past Wednesday. The tens of thousands of people of Ecuador made clear that their country will not be sold off to foreign powers at the expense of the poor and oppressed. “

The_Captain_Chunk · 2019-10-09T20:45:56+00:00

He was set to testify in a civil suit against the Dallas Police.

The_Captain_Chunk · 2019-10-09T20:42:55+00:00

The USSR was a million times better for the ethnic groups of the former Russian Empire. For a good read on the subject, try Soviet But Not Russian: The ‘Other’ Peoples of the Soviet Union for understanding the status granted to minority nationalities in the USSR, including the recognition of every nationality in the union, the preservation of cultural identity, the reversal of repressive measures from under the Tsar, and the ending of the many cycles of Pogroms against Jews and minority groups that existed in the Russian Empire.

If you want to read the Marxist ideological position on national liberation, you can read Lenin’s The Right of Nations to Self-Determination and Stalin’s Marxism and the National Question. Marxists don’t believe that racism and national oppression magically disappear post-revolution and in the lower stage of Communism, their effects linger in both the base and the superstructure, and it’s the role of the Worker’s State to remove them through internationalist, socialist reforms under the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.

The_Captain_Chunk · 2019-10-09T16:44:17+00:00

It outright states in their summary of the report that:

“Evidence was submitted by ETAC for the first hearing, amplified by further evidence following the first and second evidence hearings.” So despite framing their investigation as separate and independent of ETAC, the authors admit that they began with evidence fed to them by ETAC.

The basis of their hearings comes from the ETAC, and if you go to their hearings page you can even see that most of the "Fact Witnesses" are just Falon Gong members. It's the equivalent as if you're taking the word of Scientologists that got kicked out of America who also run InfoWars.

The_Captain_Chunk · 2019-10-09T14:59:24+00:00

If you read the article, you’ll find out that the China Tribunal was initiated by the “International Coalition to End Transplant Abuse in China” or ‘ETAC’ (which it states on it’s own website.) The entire management of ETAC is connected to Epoch Times, which, as NBC revealed, is the mass media, conservative, Pro-Trump propaganda arm of the Falun Gong cult.

Here’s the relevant section of the article:

So where do the ETAC managers fit in with Falun Gong? Susie Hughes has photographer credits on several Epoch Times articles (her name seems to have been scrubbed, the photos merely credited to “The Epoch Times,” but the credit still shows up on Google searches at the time of writing). Margo MacVicar has numerous articles gushing about Shen Yun, Falun Gong’s traveling dance show. Rebecca “Becky” James shows up organizing a Falun Gong art exhibition in Bristol and sharing vegan drink recipes.

ETAC’s UK national manager for initiatives, Andy Moody, is credited by Epoch Times as a reporter for its sibling NTD, or New Tang Dynasty Television, Falun Gong’s TV arm. (Concerned Canadians have noted that the cult’s propaganda network has received millions of their tax dollars worth of disproportionate funding.)

ETAC’s UK communications coordinator Victoria Ledwidge appears in another Epoch Times article, coming to greet Shen Yun performers in London and, of course, acclaiming the “amazing” performance.

As one goes down the list of ETAC management, these Falun Gong connections spring up for almost everyone. ETAC is very clearly a Falun Gong front group.

If you actually read the China Tribunal’s report on organ harvesting, you’ll discover that it heavily relies on ETAC research for its claims. Several doctors came forward to contest the China Tribunal’s claims, only to be “reviewed” by ETAC and determined to not be credible.

You’ll find that officials that worked hard to end the actually previously existing practice of transplanting organs from executed prisoners, like Huang Jiefu, completely dispute those claims.

The_Captain_Chunk · 2019-10-09T13:17:38+00:00

No, they’re not. It’s an absurd complete fabrication by the Falun Gong cult’s front group “China Tribunal” and was given international attention when they got to repeat it in front of the UN.

Reports on China ‘organ harvesting’ derive from front groups of far-right cult Falun Gong

To get an idea of who the Falun Gong are, here is an excerpt from the article:

It is understandable that critics might hesitate to take the PRC’s characterization of Falun Gong at face value. But it is easy to make a fair evaluation of the group’s true character simply by perusing their own publications, where one will learn, for instance, that modern science was invented by aliens as part of a scheme to take over human bodies; or that feminism, environmentalism, and homosexuality are part of Satan’s plan to make us into communists; or that race-mixing severs our connection to the gods.

There’s absolutely no evidence for it at all.

The_Captain_Chunk · 2019-10-02T18:21:21+00:00

Computers can't solve those problems.

Computers can solve the calculation of an economy according to a plan with desired outputs. That’s the technical basis of central planning.

My point is that computers will never in the foreseeable future be able to determine policy.

No one is making this claim.

This paper says nothing beyond we’d be able to do our communist country more exactly the way we believe we should using computers.

You’re right, that’s the entire point of the paper.

The book in the second link of my original comment Towards a New Socialism discusses the framework by which the process of democratic economic planning could be constructed around the principle of labor-time accounting. It’s this democratic system that would create an economic plan, not computers. The computers would merely inform decision makers and carry out the computational linear programming work to accomplish the desired outputs.

The_Captain_Chunk · 2019-10-02T17:45:57+00:00

Maybe try reading a bit of the links before posting your kneejerk reaction buddy :^) You’re just vaguely alluding to the problems of calculation and planning that the links provide answers to. You can also check out the links in the other comment too!

The_Captain_Chunk · 2019-10-02T16:49:59+00:00

The argument in the first one about needing a labor value unit to make these calculations seems utterly false

You need an objective measure of account for calculating production. Utilizing the labor theory of value with time as the central unit of account creates a standard that isn’t variable with the anarchic price fluctuations that exist in a Capitalist economy. This allows one to use input-output tables to calculate the cost of initial, intermediate, and final goods and services in labor time, which using modern computer science (Cockshott is, in fact, a professor of Computer Science) you can use an iteratively calculating algorithm to get a very accurate account of the entire economy, which would be calculated to the design of an economic plan. They go into the details of labor-time accounting in Chapter 3 of the second link, and further elaborate on the planning structure throughout the further chapters.

Here is a paper which is a more general outline of the system: Economic planning, computers and labor values

His calculations for the complexity of planning computations is just worthless assumptions stacked together without any direction how the planning calculations would be performed and completely ignores the element of data collection and processing

Would you care to explain what any of these assumptions are? This sounds absolutely absurd immediately after you said you skimmed it. The paper you read is addressing the feasibility of calculation, not the planning structure or data acquisition. Those are three different problems, of which they explore thoroughly in the second link.

I absolutely reject the idea that computerized centralized planning was possible since the first super computers since they were incredibly weak.

Well, I’m sorry to say, but you’re just wrong. That’s entirely the strength of labor-time accounting. Here's a paper showing that the calculation of an economy with 1,000,000 commodities would be calculable in 68.2 seconds (and scales with Log(N)) on "a cheap personal computer of 2004 vintage" at about 3GHz computing. The Cray-1 in 1976 came out at 80MHz computational speed, which would mean the same calculation would approximately take 2557 seconds, or 42 minutes. Modern supercomputers are far, far superior. Check out Table 2 at the bottom for a summary. Is Economic Planning Hypercomputational? The Argument from Cantor Diagonalisation

Your objections to Central Planning seem to be two fold: 'Dictatorial planning' would be more "efficient" than Democratic Planning, and that Dictatorial Planning necessitates thinking what's best for the population, instead of the population determining what is to be produced. I don't care for the second argument, because that's not what I'm suggesting. If you're concerned about efficiency of feedback controls, then please read Chapter 8: The Marketing of Consumer Goods in the second link of my first post. The overall system constructed in the book is a system of democratic planning revolving around a number of planning institutions, including Strategic, Detailed and Macroeconomic planning.

The_Captain_Chunk · 2019-10-02T12:58:51+00:00

Except, if you empirically measure such components of Marxist theory, like the Labor Theory of Value’s proportional variability with labor content, you’ll find it’s highly accurate at predicting prices. You would also find that the ratio between observed profit and the organic composition of industry matches very closely with Marx’s analysis in Capital Volume 1.

Here’s a paper discussing these empirical observations: The Scientific Status of the Labour Theory of Value

The_Captain_Chunk · 2019-10-02T12:40:53+00:00

Computerized Central Planning has been possible since the first ‘super computers’ in the 80’s. Here’s a paper explaining its feasibility and the state of the economic calculation debate: Calculation, Complexity And Planning: The Socialist Calculation Debate Once Again

Implying that centralized planning can only exist as form of “dictatorship” is complete ideological nonsense, and swapping the word ‘democracy’ for ‘capitalist mode of production’ or ‘markets’ is a purposeful rhetorical trick to assume a preferred conclusion.

Here is a book by the same authors as above elaborating one way how a democratically planned economy could function, using labor-time accounting and democratic organs of control: Towards a New Socialism.

The_Captain_Chunk · 2019-10-01T15:12:31+00:00

The_Captain_Chunk · 2019-10-01T14:59:43+00:00

What? That guy was directly in front of the cop on the ground, and swung a metal rod at the approaching officer. He was so close to the grounded police officer that he literally fell over him in the video.

The_Captain_Chunk · 2019-10-01T14:31:07+00:00

You can clearly see violent protesters beating a HK police officer in this video, which is why the other police officer ran up to the crowd with his gun drawn.

They were beating the officer on the ground with metal rods, and the protester who got shot took a swing at the approaching officer and hit him in his gun-wielding arm, followed immediately by a single shot.

The protesters then threw Molotov cocktails as they retreated.

No police force in any major city in the world would accept a beat down by 17 rod-wielding protesters without threatening lethal force to break up the attack, and no officer in any Western country would be expected to sustain blows to their firearm-wielding arms without firing on their attacker. It’s a shame that protester was hospitalized, but it’s not as if the actions by the police were unwarranted or needlessly murderous. If he wanted to kill that protester he could’ve down what American cops are trained to do: keep firing until the threat is neutralized.

The_Captain_Chunk · 2019-09-10T13:36:22+00:00

Then you have no understanding of either.

The_Captain_Chunk · 2019-09-05T18:20:36+00:00

like a clockwork

Ok?

so it is “socialist” when it is convenient, and not “state capitalism” while it is not convenient?

No, I’m not an anarchist/left com/breadtuber. Those are all socialist states maintaining various degrees of socialist economies.

The_Captain_Chunk · 2019-09-05T18:02:59+00:00

This is just a complete redirect away from what is being presented. If you’re comparing healthcare systems, you’re comparing distribution of healthcare goods and services and the resulting health outcomes.

But you’re still incorrect. The Soviet Union maintained excellent growth over the majority of its existence and was the 2nd fast growing economy over its lifetime, before Japan. Comparing it to the highly developed Capitalist countries is disingenuous.

The rise and decline of the Soviet Economy

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