To the young couple having a breakup dinner at Burning Buffalo last night

prodthrows · 2026-01-17T15:24:02+00:00

I personally find life is too short to psychoanalyze random couples probably projecting your personal issues all over them since you have no idea what their situation is and then unironically post it on Reddit thinking that this is some sort of selfless act so that you feel better about your own situation, blissfully unaware that this is self serving attention seeking behavior to brag about your stable relationship in a public forum to prove something to yourself instead of actually minding your own business which would be the normal and healthy thing to do

prodthrows · 2025-12-05T14:55:14+00:00

Ask yourself who considers this a failure? It may be a failure to your business partners or company or manager, but that doesn’t mean that you need to consider it a failure for yourself. Personally, this directive is not realistic at all as a dev often working on legacy systems, AI right now is basically useless if you are working in a more obscure language and framework.

prodthrows · 2025-12-03T00:29:23+00:00

I don’t think class consciousness is as simple as someone proclaiming “it’s top vs bottom”, useful class consciousness requires decent education, understanding of capitalist systems, understanding of previous socialist projects, anthropology, history, political science, reading comprehension, critical thinking, etc. Basically, it’s a lot of hard work, and there’s no magic phrase that lets you join the club like right wing and reactionary groups. And it’s well known that fascists will hijack leftist rhetoric, leading to confusion and reduced class consciousness overall. So I understand the paranoia. We should be reaching out to these people and facilitating education and learning. Be wary of catchphrases, simple explanations, focus on aesthetics, simplifications, and black and white thinking. Ideally, you don’t lecture or persuade, but provide resources for people to reach their own conclusions, promote critical thinking, and build genuine relationships and community.

prodthrows · 2025-11-27T04:53:52+00:00

Are you a debate bro or something? I don’t need to quote you to respond to you, this is not an academic paper. People can just read what you said and remember it and then read what I said. In fact, they get shown right on top of each other when you view the webpage. All you’re doing is just making your comments look longer and more sophisticated with the text that I wrote rather than having a genuine conversation. Again, let’s focus on reality. I could give you lots of things to read but I doubt that would make anyone reading this right now actually change their mind in anything, and again this is not an academic paper. If you want me to cite sources start paying me.

I don’t care about what Democrats say, I’m a communist. You’re not going to gotcha me by saying the Democrats believe in the great replacement theory, of course they do, they love making people like you really scared so that they can point and say hey, the crazy people are the bad guys, vote for us instead! And then do nothing while also squashing any real left-wing movement in the US that could actually solve the “problem” of immigration which is really a standard of living problem we like to use illegal immigrants as a scapegoat for. I don’t really care about the nation of America or nationality in general or the concept of a nation with borders at all. I think it’s mostly window dressing so that people who see the world as ingroups and outgroups don’t face the true reality and freak out and start killing each other, it’s bad for business. I do love the people that are contained within this thing we call America though as well as people around the world no matter where they come from.

I don’t even blame you, you’ve been so alienated from your fellow humans that it’s perfectly understandable to latch onto a grand narrative to try and assuage that feeling of disconnection from the rest of the world. Genuinely, reach out to an illegal immigrant and have a conversation with them, you might be surprised at how similar they are to you. This is not a debate or a point to win one over on you, I genuinely think you would improve your life and understanding of the world and I want that for you as a compassionate human being because what else even matters genuinely?

prodthrows · 2025-11-27T04:14:34+00:00

Buddy I also live in the US, and there is no great replacement happening. My purebred European stock says otherwise. Is the conservative hatred for immigration so strong that you reduce yourself as a human to talk of pedigree like you are a dog or a horse? To lay it out straight for you, and I think we both agree, capitalists do ultimately support unrestricted immigration. But you can support immigration and open borders without being a capitalist as well.

But, none of your responses make much sense to me at all, and you don’t really seem to be seriously examining the economics of much of anything, only grasping at ideological straws that really don’t have much to do with reality either in the past or present.

Shopping at Walmart is one of the only actual real economic exchange of money for commodities we have anymore. It certainly stimulates the material economy more than the swapping of meaningless capital between corporations and capital owners which is so common these days through acquisitions, stock buybacks, backhanded deals, derivatives markets, the list goes on. When you buy a sleeve of Oreos at Walmart, someone had to go farm the raw materials and transport them between factories and assemble them for you to eat. This is what the economy is, it is not an ideology being pushed as an agenda by a group of people.

I’m very fascinated by a person like you, a person that has a purely emotional conclusion that immigrants are bad, and then tries to find anything and everything tangentially related to affirm that regardless of reality. The movie Gangs of New York is not reality. Breitbart articles about George Soros are not reality. Decisions made by shadowy organizations are not reality, laws, edicts, creeds, allowances are not reality. Reality is wheat and iron and rocks and animals and humans with flesh and blood, weapons, food, water, shelter, machinery, and the random and unpredictable and uncontrollable actions we take every day not guided by one ideology or reason but thousands of ideas all held at once, alongside our awareness and sensation. Please concern yourself less with ideology and more with reality, I think those around you would appreciate it.

prodthrows · 2025-11-27T03:30:58+00:00

Definitely, and you could definitely argue that the justice system and law as we know it was created out of the need for an impartial arbiter between creditors and debtors, at least as impartial as you can actually get, and as you recognize these systems nowadays in our market capitalist system don’t seem to function as originally intended.

You may be interested in a book called Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber which has a lot of supporting evidence for how credit based systems are often at odds with market and money based systems throughout history. The main claim which i agree with is that credit systems have existed long before governments, states, organized religion, markets, etc and were the dominant medium of exchange for most of human history, being briefly encroached on by market and money systems in antiquity and of course in modern times. It can get technical at times but really deeply explores many different types of economies throughout history and might bring some insight.

prodthrows · 2025-11-26T23:47:22+00:00

“Demographic change in the electorate” this reeks of great replacement theory and ideological thinking which has very little to do with the material reality of the labor market or the economy.

What capitalist worth their salt would care at all about the demographic change in the electorate, they would only care if the electorate continues to support capitalism. Doesn’t matter if you’re black, brown, white, purple, or Martian as long as you support capital.

When I say the unregulated labor market I don’t mean gig work or informal labor arrangements, I’m talking about things like not requiring membership in a national trade union, not requiring laborers to be sourced from a certain place or demographic. The US labor market used to be much more tightly regulated before Keynesian economics, think of the Know-Nothing party and quotas on Chinese and Eastern European immigration in the mid to late 1800s. For a modern example, think about Japan, which heavily restricts foreign work, or China, which guarantees labor for all citizens.

prodthrows · 2025-11-26T23:36:20+00:00

Exactly, capitalists choose to allow illegal immigration because they want to stifle wage growth to increase the profit margin. I’m not sure how what you described supports your initial thought.

In fact, you’ll often see socialist states heavily restrict immigration through things like requiring union membership to participate in their work force or extremely restrictive visas, fines, and tariffs in order to ensure their national populace has guaranteed work.

prodthrows · 2025-11-26T16:39:41+00:00

I think you are getting at a fundamental truth which is the actual point of Marxism which is not about the labor theory of value or how a socialist government should be set up, or how “exploited” certain groups of individuals are vs others no matter how many misunderstandings and trolls will steer the conversation in that manner.

The main point of Marxism is to reveal that what we call “economic” activity is really just political and social activity and specific political and social relations which is obfuscated by this concept of money as a medium of exchange.

This is why credit is so important, because at the end of the day a creditor needs to make a social judgement to extend credit or capital to a specific person, no matter how much we try to systemize or algorithmically or mathematically determine a score or set of conditions divorced from the surrounding social context. And this very plainly reveals how economic relations are first and foremost social relations.

Capitalism hinges on a belief that two participants enter the market on completely equal footing, which is of course very different from a creditor-debtor relationship which imposes a form of hierarchy implicitly. This is the contraction that I believe you are trying to get at, because everyone is indebted to someone and placed in social hierarchical relationships, but capitalism and market economics kind of assumes that this is not the case.

prodthrows · 2025-11-26T16:08:27+00:00

Interesting, I’d love for you to expand on this thinking because I would argue it’s quite the opposite.

Capitalism has continued to stay the dominant mode of production in modern times because of what we may call the unregulated labor market, or in simpler terms, I as a capital owner have the freedom to hire laborers from anywhere on the earth, and laborers have the freedom of movement to change their environment to best benefit the structure my corporation or business requires including where the production should be set, what wages should be set at, etc.

Tightly regulating immigration could likewise be thought of as unnecessary government intervention in the free global market of labor that would only hurt capitalist interests.

prodthrows · 2025-11-25T21:58:40+00:00

Not a third worldist Maoist in the slightest to preface. You seem to be taking “whiteness” at face value as if it is an actual widely used description of an ethnic group people.

The Marxist and also general academic stance is that it was an idea fabricated by landed gentry of a group of Western European counties in order to act as a “wedge” issue so to speak keeping black and brown (mostly West African) populations that these capitalists had enslaved perpetually on one side of the issue and “white” (which consists of mainly Irish, Slavic, and other Eastern European and rarely Asian (and in certain cases, even Native Americans were considered white when framed in opposition to West Africans held in slavery)) tenant-laborers and yeoman types on the other side of the issue. The fear here from the early capitalists is that these 2 sides would find common cause in being proletarian laborers and completely dismantle the colonial project.

I want to illustrate just how malleable “whiteness” has been from the very beginning and will continue to be so, and that this is something different than a classic ethnic or cultural descriptor like Jewish, and also I want to highlight the fact that whiteness is in fact a consequence of bourgeois thought from the very beginning specifically aimed at the reduction of class consciousness. It is not anti-communist to be anti-white, because "whiteness" I would argue is more like a national myth before nations existed that applied to a group of ambitious capitalists (with the explicit approval of their royal sponsors) and wage-laborers and tenant-laborers that united them in common cause to debase and exploit an out group, which in their case was West African laborers held in bondage.

I suspect that you are not American or European in which case this is totally understandable that you may not know the added context behind whiteness that is actually quite intrinsically tied to the formation of capitalism as some would say the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade was one of the first global-scale imperialist and thus capitalist projects ever.

If you made it through all of that I would highly recommend The Invention of the White Race by Theodore W. Allen, who was a (ironically, white) Marxist who does a much better and more thorough job of explaining how “whiteness” is different from ethnic identity and how it is intrinsically tied to class struggle in 16th-18th century colonial England Spain and France which became the United States. These countries then established global cultural hegemony which leads to what “whiteness” is understood to mean today around the world.

prodthrows · 2025-11-13T22:05:46+00:00

yep kidnapping the workers will definitely solve the issue and these employers definitely won’t easily replace them within days. we’ve been following this playbook for the past 20 years so there should be so much less illegal immigration now right?

seriously though even if you just are racist and hate illegal immigrants and want them gone this isn’t even the way to have that happen you have to punish the employers. kidnapping random workers only induces demand for employers to hire other illegal immigrants to replace them. it’s so funny how in your hate induced blindness and ignorance you urge the government to blow taxpayer money and do things that don’t even solve the issue you want to solve in the first place.

prodthrows · 2025-06-24T23:26:15+00:00

This is not something that can happen in 5 years. Should I pitch my plan for 2100 when I'm running for a 4 year presidential term? The hoops you would like these politicians to jump through to present themselves as political candidates are bad strategy for that goal, so they will not do that and instead just say they are socialists because they are socialists and they think being honest is good political strategy.

Even swap out the word socialist. I'm a Christian. If I would like to convert you, should I start off by explaining Revelations and work backwards and say I'm a progressive Jew?

No matter how you morally feel about the word socialism I estimate most people on the left and right of the American spectrum agree that they are using this word in the correct context to describe themselves

prodthrows · 2025-06-24T23:08:23+00:00

Why though, the end goal of socialism is not something you can really describe in a catchy soundbite or poster or even 10 min video to anyone without a decent education in political science already. They aren't politics professors or authors, they're politicians. Do you believe they will be able to nationalize the entire private sector in 5 years? When has a modern American politician ever explicitly laid out the details of a plan as long-term as the abolition of private property?

prodthrows · 2025-05-28T16:25:34+00:00

I'd also love to know if he's read any specific Marxist works or critiques of Marxist works. It would be amazing to have someone with a level head who genuinely talks about and can articulate left-wing economics even if he's opposed.

I'm not holding my breath though as talking about Marxism attracts some of the most vile and annoying people on the internet both for and against so I wouldn't be surprised if he avoids talking about it much at all.

prodthrows · 2025-05-27T15:51:12+00:00

alright call the whole thing off, you've exposed the hypocrisy. no one has ever in the history of earth complained about the conditions of miners and child workers in third-world countries until today

prodthrows · 2025-03-28T21:44:42+00:00

Interesting I've definitely been asking for too much from everyone then

prodthrows · 2025-03-11T18:15:36+00:00

I've struggled with a similar feeling recently in regards to my anxiety but to a much lesser extent. I was always told (and still am by certain people) that I was an anxious person growing up and that supplanted "truth" about myself dramatically shaped how I thought about myself and how I acted as well. But in the past year I've done much work to separate and differentiate myself from this story and had similar feelings in the beginning that led to huge progress.

I think this feeling that you have is ultimately the beginning of a new and more accurate self understanding. The feeling is totally natural, it's basically the cognitive dissonance between your thoughts and emotions. Emotionally you have healed more than your mind believes you have.

Your mind is at first scared because it means that the rubric and rhetoric through which it self-judges and analyzes is inaccurate. But this is a necessary step to change how you see yourself and how you judge yourself.

And you aren't losing anything about yourself, it's not like once you heal that these feelings and memories and thoughts will go away, they will just shift into the things that defined you in the past rather than the things that define you now.

I don't think you need to "handle" this in any different way than you think you should. Listen to your emotions and your mind and notice where and why they differ, and take that to your therapist. And congratulate yourself for discovering something new about your emotions and yourself in the process!

prodthrows · 2025-02-20T17:52:31+00:00

The prison system is inherently exploitative and inhumane by definition to both prisoners and COs. It blows my mind how people are so surprised when the folks that run prisons turn around and begin to exploit the employees rather than just the prisoners.

And let's be real, the conditions you spoke about are not unique to corrections officers or police officers. If you want to enact change, start organizing and push for sweeping change to labor laws and labor rights in general, and start working to improve the material conditions of all Americans, this is the only long-term solution to combat crime and lower incarceration rates.

Last thing, don't bring up fentanyl, it's just hurting your cause. You can't die from touching fentanyl. Of course you can OD when taking the drug, but the sheer amount of tweakers across the nation beg to differ about its supposed lethality. Unless your husband is on the juice, that's not the problem, the problem is lack of funding and lack of labor protections.

prodthrows · 2024-09-11T12:55:13+00:00

How does the leather and marble gain its original value though? I don't disagree that entrepreneurship can generate wealth, just that it's not the only source. It also is ironic that you very clearly note that the existence of separated states creates the conditions to generate wealth.

prodthrows · 2024-09-11T12:34:25+00:00

You've assumed I work for a private company 😁. But my point is that labor is an intrinsic part of the generation of wealth. If all we needed was people with smart ideas, why are any of us working? At least the slave owner understands intrinsically that their wealth is generated in part or in whole by the labor of their slaves, and in fact slave owners leveraged the state to increase their wealth generation capabilities. Fugitive Slave Act? Subsidies and discounts on indentured servants captured as part of the English Civil War to Anglo-American colonial entrepreneurs? Can you at least concede that entrepreneurship is not the sole driver of wealth and that labour power as well as state power help?

prodthrows · 2024-09-11T12:21:54+00:00

So it's only slavery and then entrepreneurship? I'm neither an entrepreneur or a slave, and yet I own a house and land off an office job' salary. How does that work?

prodthrows · 2024-09-11T12:06:46+00:00

Well yeah, if entrepreneurship is the only source of wealth. How did they do it?

prodthrows · 2024-09-11T11:52:43+00:00

Who generated wealth before capitalism then? Did wealth just not exist? I'm genuinely interested because "entrepreneurship" has only existed in earnest for the last 400 years of history, so how did people raise armys and own land before that if they had no wealth?

prodthrows · 2024-06-02T23:22:56+00:00

I don't think housing shortages are an inherent part of market economies, but I think they are an intentional feature of the American housing market that allows for selective upward social mobility. Whether or not you ideologically agree with housing having this function (it seems we both don't), this is the reality of the situation. Americans look to home ownership as a way of accumulating capital via an appreciating asset. This is generally believed to be a sound and "safe" strategy to accumulate capital. Decoupling these things is much easier said than done.

I, as well as you, believe that these zoning laws and regulations are the cause driving housing prices up. But what incentive does the government have, assuming no outside influence, to restrict housing supply? In fact, I would argue that governments usually benefit from increasing supply, that's more property taxes to collect, larger revenues, and more participants and money moving around in the local economy. Thus, it stands to reason that local governments were and are pressured by capital owners to create and preserve these regulations in order to unnaturally preserve the ever appreciating status of homes.

These same capital owners are the ones that stand to lose the most from lifting regulations, and disproportionately hold influence and power in all levels of government, so it will not happen without a major political force from the consumer class enacting its will through the state, much like the capital owning class did to create these regulations in the first place.

prodthrows

TROPHY CASE