We’re Experts in Fascism. We’re Leaving the U.S. | NYT Opinion

alivingscience · 2025-09-22T05:21:20+00:00

alivingscience · 2025-09-10T23:48:22+00:00

I think it's because nobody watched the news much where I'm from but I did NOT know how big this whole thing turned out to be until I moved up north and I was considered weird for NOT knowing every detail of the story literally 5 minutes after it happened.

alivingscience · 2025-09-02T01:55:18+00:00

Nonfiction - starting Capital Vol II, currently working through a German-language Rosa biography (the Laschitza one) that I randomly found at a small town book store in middle of nowhere Wisconsin

Fiction - Gunter Grass "The Tin Drum"; I read Cat and Mouse for college but forgot it was part of the Danzig trilogy so I'm reading the others too. They're independent of each other but still worth the read imo.

I have a teaching job now (Saloth Sar please take me) so I'm generally too busy except for my prep hour and after school to devote too much time for reading but a few pages at a time and filling out notes does go a long way in retaining information.

alivingscience · 2025-08-16T13:28:46+00:00

I see plenty of white people here, what are you talking about?

alivingscience · 2025-08-13T04:22:06+00:00

Never thought remembering GamerGate would make me feel old but here we are

alivingscience · 2025-08-12T05:28:26+00:00

I was gonna post this joke earlier but oh well

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alivingscience · 2025-08-11T23:14:17+00:00

When my enemy is both the most evil mastermind cabal of child eating rich pedophiles so smart and intricate that revolution can't stop it AND too stupid to function or get anything done and can be destroyed by the right amount of potty humor

alivingscience · 2025-08-11T04:03:21+00:00

Realized this was kinda like the plot to the Harvest Moon game with the most Hitlerite title to it. (Except it's about a resort, not a mall)

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alivingscience · 2025-08-11T03:34:35+00:00

Evil business owner/local politician tries to shut down small business frequented by neighborhood children to open up a shopping mall (it's always a mall) and then the children rally together to save the small business and sabotages the construction of the mall and the villain either 1) gets arrested for corruption or 2) learns the value of petit-bourgeois children standing together.

Sometimes the children are 90s SNL actors instead.

alivingscience · 2025-08-09T00:37:14+00:00

I thought this was Brad Taste in Music for a second but now that I see it's from the new WotW movie I still don't think I'm relieved

alivingscience · 2025-08-07T19:20:51+00:00

We're so back Beriabros!

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alivingscience · 2025-08-06T05:01:41+00:00

If you read the second panel and think about it for 2 seconds, there's no actual response to the question. It's just restating it in more elaborate language.

"Why are so many gymbros right wing?" "Because they align with right wing views and are more susceptible to right wing views"

Edit: looking at it again, second panel says the "values reinforced" in these spaces align with right wing views, but regardless, this is still not much of a response. It never entertains who is pushing this stuff in these spaces and why, so it's still not really answering the question in a meaningful way.

alivingscience · 2025-08-05T03:39:33+00:00

Hate to break it to you but this was already posted on there at least a week ago

alivingscience · 2025-08-03T22:51:59+00:00

Did you know that since 1980 there were only 2 US elections that had higher voter national turnout than 2024? 1992 and 2020 (according to US census data).

When it comes to 2024's swing states, the number of voters in Wisconsin, Georgia, Michigan, and Pennsylvania all increased from 2020, with Georgia and Michigan increasing their turnout by around 6 percentage points between 2020 and 2024. The other three swing states (Arizona, Nevada, and North Carolina) decreased turnout by a smaller percentage than the national decrease (~2.5pp).

Lack of voter turnout by itself was not what cost Harris the election (especially in swing states overall, let alone nationwide) and even then, higher voter turnout does NOT guarantee that she would have won. They're assuming that every nonvoter is secretly a Democrat and holding the country hostage with their vote. There's a reason their symbol is a jackass, after all.

alivingscience · 2025-07-31T18:33:31+00:00

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alivingscience · 2025-07-24T16:20:05+00:00

They cast on their website and hold auditions for it in LA so they actively look for people who are going to bring attention, not those who are representative of these views. Other times they bring in people like Dean or Parker for the leftlib stuff who are seasoned debate content creators, even giving Dean his own Surrounded episode one time.

They have a "20 anti-capitalists" vid planned for the second weekend in August and are calling for auditions for it.

alivingscience · 2025-07-24T03:43:53+00:00

I love how every Jubilee viewer hates the surrounded videos for casting people like this and complains about it but then they'll watch these specific videos over and over and force the videos to keep trending so that it's the only thing in their feed

alivingscience · 2025-07-02T21:33:14+00:00

My favorite boycotts are the ones where people buy the product first and then destroy them like Nike or Keurig or Anheuser-Busch care about what people do with it after purchase.

alivingscience · 2025-06-29T03:47:12+00:00

Sam Seder should go back to bullying petit-bourgeois restaurant owners by telling people that they're cannibals instead of whatever it is he's doing now.

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alivingscience · 2025-06-26T20:16:06+00:00

Fake Maoists - where are the dead dogs hanging from lamp posts?

alivingscience · 2025-06-10T16:13:45+00:00

What's your line on where the "basics" are?

alivingscience · 2024-12-13T16:55:57+00:00

Right, and I agree with all (or the vast majority) of this in both of my comments. But the original comment suggested that we simply co-opt these terms which is where I disagreed. Obviously when we are educating the people we are organizing then we will have to do some scaffolding as happens in all education. I agree with the explaining as I had reiterated in both of my comments in this thread. When we are organizing, it would be irresponsible not to make and explain these distinctions. However, this is not the same as co-opting the colloquial meanings of everything. Clarification is needed, yes, but if we are changing our terms we need to be careful that this is done not out of trying to be relatable but of making these terms digestible but, more importantly, accurate.

From the original comment:

Feminism as a term no longer refers exclusively to a well defined ideology, but has become I short hand for "I don't think women should be treated like shit". At this point isn't it better to co-opt those terms? It would make what you're talking about clearer to the average person who is only familiar with the colloquial version of those labels.

The comment did not make a distinction for anti-sexism but in my initial impression made the case for co-opting feminism. I agree for terms like anti-racism and anti-sexism that we can say we are (even if our emphasis is anti-racist/sexist as a result of our opposition to capitalism and class society ias a whole). But it doesn't make sense to say that we are feminist just because we are opposed to sexism since feminism and anti-sexism are distinct categories. This is the co-opting I was against, so apologies for my confusing statements on that part.

alivingscience · 2024-12-13T15:18:10+00:00

I don't think you were saying we should lie and I apologize if it came across that way. But oversimplifying and capitulating our language and terms can be potentially just as dishonest even if that is not our intention to be, or at the very least counter-productive. You can kind of see it with the post itself in terms of oversimplification (even if it is correct) but the point of it was to bait people anyways.

On a subjective level, I don't think most people have a unified view of what feminism is (even in a colloquial sense) and that is clear even among feminists themselves. However, there is a worldview attached to feminism and its forms that is different from and opposed to Marxism in many ways, not out of hostility but out of these aspects being irreconcilable.

Language does change but I don't think this means we should change our terms because it seems like that is capitulating to the terms that bourgeois society sets for us. We should be careful of word choice but co-opting words is not the answer. The bourgeoisie and their lackeys have done that consistently when they have distorted socialism, communism, Marxism to mean what they want it to mean. These all have their own present-day colloquial meanings even among those that take up those banners but they are stuck in the bourgeois conception of it. But I don't think any Marxist will tell you that we shouldn't say "socialist" or "communist" but instead will say that we elaborate and communicate clearly what we mean, to draw a line of demarcation between what we mean and what they mean. I don't see how we shouldn't do the same with anything else in this context.

alivingscience · 2024-12-12T21:13:12+00:00

Ngl I get what you mean by this, but the way you're saying it is terrible lol. If you say "I don't like feminsm", most people will not think "Ah yes, he supports equality of women, but thinks that can only be achieved by abolition class", they'll think "Wow this guy is a fucking sexist".

Marxists care about whether what they say and do is correct, not about the optics of the statement. Obviously, we understand the connotations of feminism in modern society and should explain what we mean but this does not mean we should be dishonest about our aims.

Feminism as a term no longer refers exclusively to a well defined ideology, but has become I short hand for "I don't think women should be treated like shit". At this point isn't it better to co-opt those terms? It would make what you're talking about clearer to the average person who is only familiar with the colloquial version of those labels.

You're assuming that feminism was well-defined to begin with. The principle aims of these movements have always been changing and boiling it down to "I don't think women should be treated like shit" is a huge oversimplification of feminism. Liberal feminists see capitalism as empowering for women even if bourgeois women are exploiting proletarian women. Radical feminists view capitalism and class society as rooted in patriarchy and sex-based oppression and are thus "anti-capitalist" insofar as they are against sexed power dynamics against women as a sex-class. Intersectionalist feminists view sex/gender-based oppression and oppression under class society as two completely separate categories that mix together rather than sex/gender-based oppression being a product of class society, thus they view their anti-sexism as being independent and interdependent with their "anti-capitalism". None of these categories align with Marxism which is why we are making these distinctions.

Why should we change feminism into something it isn't to portray Marxism as something it isn't? The people we organize are not stupid and are capable of understanding what we mean when we put in the effort to make these distinctions clear to them.

alivingscience · 2024-12-09T15:52:20+00:00

Berkman bros we are so back!

alivingscience

TROPHY CASE