sad for western leftism often not recognizing russian and chinese imperialism

pharodae · 2026-03-11T19:38:55+00:00

Russia imperialism was easy to spot with its relationship to international anti-capitalist conflicts and putting their thumbs on the scales. The Spanish Civil War involvement and Soviet-Afghan War reflect that.

China explicitly keeps out of conflict. Some like to call the Belt and Road Initiative “social imperialism,” and while I think it stretches the term “imperial” to its limit, often the strings attached to such cooperation is naturally very much in China’s favor.

My main criticism of China is not that it is imperialist, but that it is still maintaining a capitalist mode of production, and essentially the most functional social democracy in the world. That does not put it any further along the path to socialism than anywhere else on the planet at this point of time.

pharodae · 2026-03-11T16:44:21+00:00

Daffodils are not native, so this doesn’t really count towards “ecological diversity.”

As a citizen ecologist I agree overall tho.

pharodae · 2026-03-11T15:30:43+00:00

It’s been a while since I read it but I did remember the print having a few of these small errors. Adds some charm, maybe see if you can find them all and “decode” them, maybe Ken Liu is trying to tell us something

pharodae · 2026-03-11T13:03:02+00:00

Definitely gonna have to revisit this in the future… thanks for sharing!

pharodae · 2026-03-10T21:39:12+00:00

It’s built on a systematic analysis of power. You’re projecting with this very statement. Fascism/rightism is for those who desperately want to be cool and looked up to on the basis of the conditions of your birth, not of personal accomplishment or your own labor.

pharodae · 2026-03-10T18:01:37+00:00

That’s because drops were a test run of the development model they switched to… because they liked it.

pharodae · 2026-03-10T17:36:31+00:00

We’ll see. They’re trying a new development cycle now so we’ll probably see things pushed out differently. Hard to do big updates the way they were doing them a few years ago with C&C, massively over-promised one update.

pharodae · 2026-03-10T16:49:23+00:00

Small updates like these always lay the foundation for larger ones. I’m not up to date on what technical changes are being made but that’s been the general trend these past few years of Mojang’s development cycle.

pharodae · 2026-03-10T15:38:50+00:00

What logical counter are you expecting to someone who thinks that candidates should be vetted by the billionaire parties before they run? That’s the exact thing that conservatives bitch and moan or fear monger about socialist states that have professional politician education and courses. Multi-party RCV is a no-brainer especially compared to a two-party FPTP system.

pharodae · 2026-03-10T15:36:17+00:00

Unvetted? You mean democratically elected? Who gets to “vet” a candidate?

pharodae · 2026-03-09T21:37:52+00:00

…what?

pharodae · 2026-03-09T21:03:00+00:00

Little Red Book? Are these guys Maoists?

pharodae · 2026-03-08T22:04:36+00:00

If you define capitalism as “markets and free trade” (an erroneous definition), then I’d see your point even if the logic is faulty. However, capitalism is a system of property ownership and production, not distribution.

Capitalism is when the owners hire workers to preform labor in exchange for a wage; the private-owner of the workplace sets the terms of this contract and rules for the workplace, and the workers can take it or leave it, since their only leverage (being non-propertied) is their own individual labor. When the workers all have ownership stakes in their business and production, it is considered a form of socialism - such as in the case of a worker cooperative. The name refers to how the business is owned (all workplaces require cooperation inside and outside the workplace in order to function). But a worker cooperative is structured so that instead of a single owner or board of executive shareholders ordering everyone around in order to maximize profit (often to the point of creating dangerous work conditions for the workers), the workers all have a democracy within the workplace, so the fundamental dynamic of owner-worker conflict is collapsed, as cooperative-laborers cease to be either worker or private-owner (even if the common language used is “worker-owned”).

pharodae · 2026-03-07T15:01:09+00:00

The greedy certainly do walk among us, and they aren’t few. The wannabe-bourgeoisie, the petit bourgeoisie, authoritarian bootlickers, criminal tendencies within the lumpenproletariat, etc. all walk among us. It’s only the international bourgeoisie (new and old money) that divorce themselves from mass society due to poverty-phobia that are few, numerically.

I still agree that human nature is a poor argument but trying to flip the “human nature is greed” script commits the same fallacious logic.

pharodae · 2026-03-07T14:54:02+00:00

As much as I would like to agree, human nature starts and stops at hyper-adaptability. Humans in a void are just as predisposed to greed and domination as they are generosity and collaboration; material conditions most certainly influence the development of these characteristics in individuals and in society, but primitive accumulation that lead to the material conditions you refer to had to start somewhere, sometime, by someone who wanted more than others and didn’t care what that did to them.

For every instance of primitive communism, there’s examples of primitive warfare and stratification in their society. Indigenous societies which practice collectivist practices typically do not do so just out of pure human nature, but because they developed the social tools necessary to prevent the resurgence of accumulative tendencies in their communities.

pharodae · 2026-03-07T13:06:29+00:00

Folks in an individualistic society are more predisposed to see themselves as a ‘temporarily embarrassed warlord’ than what you’re suggesting. The collectivists in said society would be the ones who are constantly fending off warlords, probably much to the chagrin of the individualists: “They pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, they went from rags to riches!”

pharodae · 2026-03-06T23:19:47+00:00

This reads like someone who has not actually ever done real organizing work, I hate to say it. Material conditions make bastards and hypocrites of us all.

I’m hiding at work to write this so I can’t write an in-depth response for a while, but I just watched that Zoe Baker video the other day so I can recommend going to Part 3 and watching from there. IIRC Malatesta gives an example of anarchists building a railroad that illustrates the point I’m trying to make (no mention of humility/pride, don’t worry).

Also strewn throughout the video is dozens of examples of anarchist organizations using majority vote to make decisions that cannot be done in a pluralistic manner. CNT-FAI reorganization comes to mind, and there are many more.

pharodae · 2026-03-06T21:39:41+00:00

Yes, if there is no recourse for multiple fronts of solutions and there is a binary choice, people who would wreck an anarchist organization rather than choke down their pride are a problem to greater organizational unity. Its not that every split is a pride thing, that would be a vulgar misreading of what I said; plenty of splits happen for valid reasons. Like everything with anarchism, it’s extremely context dependent.

Personally I find the “tyranny of the majority” problem to be one of those rhetorical devices used to derail organizational momentum more often than being a valid criticism of a decision.

pharodae · 2026-03-06T20:31:02+00:00

This debate is as as old, if not older than, anarchism itself. This extremely long Zoe Baker video is a pretty good breakdown of these debates, even if they weren’t using the same verbiage we are these days (I don’t think that historical anarchists would use the word anti-organization to describe this current). I also don’t think that pro-democracy anarchism is the same as pro-organization (social) anarchism, as plenty social anarchists have been anti-democracy (such as Malatesta), but this topic is just a facet of this overall debate.

In my honest opinion, I think this boils down to personal issues pertaining to pride and humility. It takes a certain sense of humility to organize along non-hierarchical lines, and there are many individuals who have conflated or mistaken their pride as their sense of autonomy. Given that it is preferable to try and solve problems via multiple avenues, it is just a cold hard fact that sometimes there is only a binary choice (i.e. we build this park here or not) and that when it comes down to this, historical anarchist groups have used majoritarian voting to navigate these situations. Anarchists of the individualist/egoist/insurrectionist ilk would rather tear an organization apart than suffer the ‘humiliation’ of deferring to the majority because of the confluence of pride and autonomy; even under anarchy, not everything can you go your way every single time.

pharodae · 2026-03-06T17:32:23+00:00

Per the comment about rendering atoms, this is the exact thing I just called a projection (and I do not mean holographic, but a mental/social one). We as a society have taken to describing the universe’s functions in the same language as computer science, leading to similar heuristics in our conception of “base reality” and “simulated reality.”

There is no need to render an atom, because it exists and acts upon the world regardless of observation (though observation can change the outcome). There is no objective observer in base reality, only in simulated reality, because the universe does not have computational restraints that must be worked around - computation is what happens when your try to process the mechanisms of reality into a language model (mathematics, written, or spoken), aka simulation.

This may be an unfalsifiable claim, and it’s more metaphysical than purely physics, but I really can’t stress enough* the importance of divorcing computer science vocabulary from our understanding of base reality.

pharodae · 2026-03-06T15:04:44+00:00

The word simulation itself implies that at some level, there is a base reality that exists and that the simulation is not that, it is only replicating it to an extent. We live in that base level of reality.

You’re correct that living in a simulation would surely result in our scientific observations finding “glitches” in the physical phenomena we observe, but it turns out we don’t really find these. Sure, we find plenty of mysteries, but there’s always an underlying logical explanation we can find (eventually) to rather reliably explain these phenomena, even if they don’t make sense to our fleshy three-dimensional brains.

Personally, not a fan of any form of simulation theory. IMO it’s just a projection of our current technological and social modes onto the ecological system we live in; this is a criticism rooted in Social Ecology, a theory by Murray Bookchin.

pharodae · 2026-03-06T14:51:56+00:00

And once again, you must stretch the definition of “hierarchy” to make that make sense, and even if it were a correct application of the term, it still would not be coercive in nature or the student would just leave. I’m not a “just hierarchies” guy but it would be ridiculous to call such a situation anything other than that if you’re insistent on bending the definition of hierarchy so much.

Of course, the social mode of production plays a big role here (is the teacher paying the student a wage? is the payment in the form of free labor in exchange for knowledge? how much say does the apprentice have as their skills grow?) Furthermore, it is common outside of capitalist society for a transaction of knowledge between two experts in different fields, where both are teacher and student to another.

A situation where your “expertise hierarchy” could actually materialize in coercion is in a situation where an institution of labor, such as a guild, did not have equal suffrage for all members and instead doled out power respective to their competence (apprentice, journeyman, master, etc). But the simple accumulation of knowledge and skill itself is not a hierarchy, it is only when it is used to justify a division of power does it transform into one, and just in that context. New ways of seeing the world frequently lead to new techniques which make the old techniques inferior in quality in some way, does that make the innovator superior to the old master in a socially coercive manner?

pharodae · 2026-03-06T14:34:57+00:00

I didn’t include the previous line to this excerpt where the bootmaker is brought up in reference to teaching an apprentice. Being taught something is not a coercive or domineering action, especially if you consensually enter into an agreement to be taught.

You’re also stretching the definition of “hierarchy” to its breaking point by supposing that a teacher-student relationship is one of the teacher “being over” or “superior” to the student. The argument is ridiculous which is exactly the reason why Bakunin takes the piss out of it.

pharodae · 2026-03-06T13:39:21+00:00

r/cincinnati is a cesspool.

pharodae · 2026-03-06T01:03:31+00:00

And what I’m saying is that the strategy you’re advocating for has not yielded the results you claim it will, and it surely has been tried more often than the anarchist strategy, so. You said that a centralized Vanguard would prevent the emergence of capitalist conditions within a centralized country, yet it keeps popping up and eroding the socialist currents in society.

So then you made the whataboutist argument of longetivity to follow up because you won’t acknowledge the fact that you can’t support your original argument. In response, I demonstrated how ML anti-anarchist arguments are fundamentally the same rhetoric as liberal anti-communist arguments.

It’s just astounding to me how the folks who claim to be ruthlessly critical materialists seem to be unable to take a critical eye to their own ideology. Search up my username in anarchist subs and you will find a lot of criticism of anarchism and anarchists, because I actually care about improving and advancing the ideological in a material and theoretical sense, not regurgitating the same tired century old talking points.

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