“And now that we no longer have to fear popular revolts, we can crank up exploitation on the workers so they can’t afford consumer goods anymore.”

Really sawing off the branch they’re sitting on, huh?

Right, they go home when the elections are over. They put in a lot of work to get out the vote, but they don’t maintain their organizing to then do anything else. They just wait for the next election. I guess you could call this “electoral militancy” but a militancy that is demobilized most of the time is hardly militant at all.

There’s more parallels when you consider Tolkien was writing a critique of industrialization. Evil wasn’t just represented by the One Ring, but also mining too greedily and too deep, cutting down all the trees, poisoning all the water, etc etc.

There’s smoke rising from Isengard these days because they fired the coal plants back up.

Foundational childhood memory right there.

I think it’s more like the carnivore diet thing. There’s really influencers peddling this shit, but none of them actually do it.

I’m happy for her. She gets her bag and she doesn’t have to be around Charlie anymore.

I don’t know if we should call them “militants” if they’re not organized and able to discipline their elected. These armchair militants are just posting. This isn’t a failure of individual judgement, but it is a failure of the collective judgement of organizers who think they can just go home once elections are over. The only way entryism can work (if it can work) is if there’s a body that exists to correct innevitable rightist deviations from electeds fed into the bourgeois party.

To be called militants they need to turn social media, group chats, and private conversations into action.

I think that might have been a bear.

I would, because I don’t think this current body will last much longer.

If they replaced him who knows how long he’d be around?!

We still have people out in the fields picking vegetables. It’s not a solved problem.

It’s more labor intensive, especially for corn. You can’t just run a big harvester over the field, someone has to go out and pick it.

I think it’s as simple as projecting their guilt to tear down the person making them feel guilty.

Feeling guilty is hard. Feeling angry is easy and fun!

It’s not even eating itself, no one benefits from this even in the short-term. There’s zero benefit, there’s no point.

It’s more like the empire is just sawing off its own limbs because they’re woke.

And just like tulips, when the bubble pops the overly specialized hardware for chatbots will be mostly useless. Just tons of stranded assets with no where else to go. At least data centers will make really cool paintball arenas and indoor skate parks.

We have solved the contradictions of capitalism by making workers into consumers, which means we are free to exploit the workers harder and harder until they can no longer consume.

🤡

It might not be the lighting, he just fucked up his camera settings.

China’s the only country Israel can’t blackmail?

As far as I can tell it’s not “especially” weapons export, it’s exclusively weapons export. European arms embargoes are good, but China seems to have gone farther here and stands alone in willing to do a larger general ban. According to the article it’s not just one company, China has declared that Israel is a “red zone” for investors and have prohibited any investment. Though, sure, this might actually just be something being made up for the lawsuit.

The pragmatic choice would be to continue investing in Israel, which is why everyone else still does it.

Why isn’t anyone else making this pragmatic choice?

“It’s bad on purpose, isn’t it sooo subversive?”