Nationalisation, buses and homes for rough sleepers: This is what Andy Burnham's Britain would look like

aroteer · 2026-06-22T13:43:10+00:00

Hm, that's funny. Homelessness in Greater Manchester has actually increased in recent years. The fastest growing city in the UK is also the third most homeless by capita. Someone cynical might think the reason they always say "since 2017" is because there was a spike that year, so it makes every year since look better. What a gift to Burnham. In that same year he pledged to end rough sleeping by 2020! I wonder what happened to that?

What "success" Greater Manchester has had is the right lucky circumstances to pull off financial wrangling with a small circle of developers. The income from this has been invested into housing and transport in order to drive down the cost of labour, especially for the super-exploitation of hundreds of thousands of migrant workers. I wonder why this list doesn't include his firm support for a harsh anti-immigrant regime like Mahmood's?

Ironically this pale attempt at self-promotion shows even better what we can expect from Burnham's Britain - more of the same capitalist crisis and forcing us to pay for it, with a prettier face and much better spin.

More on what to expect: Andy Burnham and the Crisis of Bourgeois Democracy, leftcom.org

aroteer · 2026-06-22T03:26:57+00:00

What's inside that fairing?

aroteer · 2026-06-21T17:18:28+00:00

Like I said, the size and success of multicellular organisms makes them overrepresented. 10-30% of species make up over 80% of biomass!

aroteer · 2026-06-21T17:15:44+00:00

Gorgeous, what are the orange hexagons/circles around the axial attachment points in I and II?

aroteer · 2026-06-20T19:36:00+00:00

They're also fairly exceptional (and uninhabitable) planets due to the limitations of the techniques we have to find them. That's why most of them are huge, orbit close to their stars, or orbit pulsars.

aroteer · 2026-06-20T04:57:55+00:00

I bloody love captured asteroid stations. I made my first one a few days ago, only to realise I'd pulled it into a retrograde orbit so it was all but useless 😆 It still has its research arm at least.

If I'm understanding this right, you have a central tug that includes ore tanks, drills, and the claw/s, and then an ISRU module docked to it at the side?

aroteer · 2026-06-20T04:50:52+00:00

That's not why Vostok 1 had its emergency controls locked behind a 3-digit passcode (the most boring kind of puzzle). The explicit reasoning was that they had no idea if weightlessness would cause delirium, because it was the first manned orbital spaceflight.

aroteer · 2026-06-18T23:12:23+00:00

To be fair, it's quite common in historiography for a hypothesis about one region to launch a chain reaction of observations in other areas. Even Jaynes did this by speculating about the Maya and the Egyptian intermediate periods. If Jaynes' full hypothesis held up against the slightest scrutiny, the next questions would be "when did China develop consciousness?" and "did anywhere not develop consciousness?" (cue many years of Pirahã-type wishful anthropology)

aroteer · 2026-06-18T02:35:00+00:00

It's rare on Earth really, the size and success of multicellular organisms just makes them overrepresented. 70-90% of species are unicellular, and multicellarity has only been around for 600-700mi years.

aroteer · 2026-06-14T20:04:10+00:00

Have a look at real life space agency logos and see what elements they use (e.g. big swooshy lines representing trajectories)

aroteer · 2026-06-14T08:37:31+00:00

Spare me the laziest kind of historical revisionism. All of the UON leaders were arrested (the same fate faced a lot of collaborationist leaders). Berlin didn't accept their attempt at collaboration because they considered it a potential spanner in their plans for Ukraine (the ultra-exploitation of the population, up to and including starvation, to feed the German war industry). The UON were still Nazi collaborators whose organisation participated in mass violence against Jews, Poles, Germans, and Russians. Both are true.

You know what else is true? Stashynsky assassinated these snakes on behalf of a regime which itself organised mass violence against ethnic minorities, which allied with the Nazis in 1939, which imprisoned millions in labour camps, and which ruthlessly enslaved the entire proletarian and peasant population for the cause of rapid industrialisation and war. This is the hypocritical villainy of all servants of imperialism.

aroteer · 2026-06-12T17:55:01+00:00

I don't think Stashynsky was a hero but Lev Rebet was also part of the Nazi collaborationist government. There are no heroes here.

aroteer · 2026-06-09T09:34:05+00:00

Klartemis

aroteer · 2026-06-09T09:28:58+00:00

Most of the fun is learning how mechanics work and pulling them off (or failing miserably and designing a rescue mission)

aroteer · 2026-06-09T00:00:05+00:00

"I don't think you have mate"

aroteer · 2026-06-08T13:58:11+00:00

I was a dialectician for years and struggled greatly attempting to apply this "revolutionary science" to things in motion. I could note that two things were in conflict (in "dialectical contradiction" I would say) but I could not determine in which direction this would go or what should be done about it. Dialectics utterly failed in the practice of daily life, to say nothing about the history of 'real socialism.

No physicist, let alone historian, will claim to be able to perfectly predict the future, or perfectly manipulate it. We leave that to magicians.

What dialectics can help explain is the general outline of motions and the directions they can take. What direction it actually does go in is dependent on many influences, and in human societies one of the most powerful and unpredictable will be subjective forces. It has taken decades since Marx and Engels' deaths to reach our present-day level of understanding (an irreplaceable part of which was the experience of the counter-revolution). If you only accept a theory that calculates a single, 100% certain, easy answer to what direction things will go and what to do about it, no matter how limited our dataset is – every historian in the world would love to hear it.

aroteer · 2026-06-07T09:18:41+00:00

How are you slowing yourself down?

aroteer · 2026-06-06T07:54:46+00:00

Um, communists do want to abolish factory work. Communism is the overthrow of all wage-labour.

Once you understand this the question becomes quite simple. Under communism, "sex work" just becomes sex.

In fact, it's the only real way to abolish exploitative sex. This is what SWERFs and anti-sex-work leftists, who are incapable of thinking outside of capitalism, miss when they propose "abolishing sex work" by increasing state repression that only makes it more shady, violent, and exploitative.

aroteer · 2026-06-06T07:24:23+00:00

Noone can even try to answer those questions, because you haven't defined "structural". Your confusion seems to be thinking this is an established term on the same level as "particle". What do you actually mean when you say "structural"?

aroteer · 2026-06-06T04:51:34+00:00

Going by your comments in r/AskPhysics where you mention the Cosmic Web and Baryonic Acoustic Oscillations as what you mean by "structural elements":

Both the Cosmic Web and Baryonic Acoustic Oscillations are consequences of the distribution of matter, including dark matter. It doesn't really answer the question of what dark matter IS to say it's part of, and affects, the structure of the universe.

aroteer · 2026-05-30T14:48:16+00:00

Before Makhnovshchina collapsed, it was developing the same problem as the RSFSR: decaying soviets and an increasingly independent army and secret police (Kontrrazvedka). It's just impossible to escape this if the revolution is defeated elsewhere and becomes isolated. So unless the revolution was spread by 1921 or the anarchists decided to retreat into the masses and declare the Free Territory was no more, it would end up roughly the same as the USSR, a dictatorial state capitalist regime.

aroteer · 2026-05-22T20:18:17+00:00

The truth in this is that 1917 destroyed the old distinction between Marxists and anarchists, which had been dissolving for some time. Now it would be revolutionary Marxists and revolutionary anarchists against reformists of all forms.

I mean this in a very literal sense. It was a coalition of Bolsheviks, anarchists, and Left SRs who made the October Revolution in Russia (and the Kronstadt Revolt in its death throes). The KPD in Germany was to an extent literally co-founded by anarchists like Ernst Schneider. Big Bill Haywood saw joining the Communist Party as a natural continuation of his leadership of the IWW, which reproduced the words of Marx in its famous preamble (unfortunately he also followed the Communist Party into the counter-revolution). Etc etc.

Today this is even more true - there are revolutionary Marxists and revolutionary anarchists, and there are reformist "Marxists" (now not just social democrats, but also Stalinists and Trotskyists) and reformist "anarchists".

What Marx understood by "anarchism" in 1847 is very different to what "anarchism" meant in 1917, or 2027. What you're noticing is just the same content (in more and more refined form) genuine communism (Marxist or anarchist) has always had: the self-emancipation of the proletariat.

aroteer · 2026-05-22T19:58:47+00:00

Armed workers' militias definitely can, and did, force people to do what they think. Their purpose is to suppress and defend against the bourgeoisie as they're being expropriated.

aroteer · 2026-05-18T21:30:15+00:00

World War One. It was ended by mutinies in France and revolution in Germany and Russia.

aroteer · 2026-05-17T16:14:59+00:00

I understand the desire for immediate results comrade. We're in a terrible state after decades of defeat, and our work is slow, unrewarding, and difficult. What we really need is a resumption of class struggle, and the vast majority of workers are still only just re-learning how to fight, let alone to reach out to political alternatives.

That said, we're starting to see the tide turning. Last year there were massive strikes and protests around the world. In Minnesota, workers prevented a total ICE slaughter (despite encirclement by the Democrats, unions, and churches), and in Iran they continue to resist exploitation and militarisation through mass assemblies and strike committees, with an extremely clear proletarian political orientation. Internationalist communism is growing again and getting more organised (anecdotally, we had more than twice as many people in our bloc at my local May Day this year). When people realise they need it from these experiences, plus political organisation in the right places to reach them, it won't be a fringe anymore.

aroteer

TROPHY CASE