Why does literally every single thing have to be a Business making money through Subscriptions now
This is literally a browser extension that lets you click and hold to preview a page in an overlay. Why does it need to be a business. Why does it need AI
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in reply to @masklayer's post:
hey, uh, I messed up in your comments. I'm sorry. I'll reply to myself below and attempt to clarify.
okay but really I can't remember the last time I actually read a book (let alone for enjoyment/fulfillment), and this question sucks but: how long/dense is (any part of) Das Kapital? Is it something I can try to read? (I have a STEM degree and I feel like I've alienated myself along the way to getting a piece of paper so I can pay a sham corporation money for the privilege of academia ruining my life) Like, I can't find info on how many pages it could be described as, and that's worrying because capitalism and my abysmal confidence in my ability to do Serious Reading. If this is too stupid a comment, I understand. Thank you.
Read Wage Labor and Capital. Its much easier to read and will help with the conceptualization of a lot of the ideas that get expanded upon in Capital.
Not a stupid comment! Lots of people are intimidated by this stuff.
(Also much, much, much shorter. Like a breezy 3 day read as opposed to a studious few months' read)
hey, I really fucking appreciate this. I feel so lost lately, and I really need something that I can pour my time and energy into that doesn't feel completely useless. so fucking tired of myself and others constantly saying, "it is what it is" about everything without acknowledging there's no physical/metaphysical force binding us to cyclical politics/philosophy (again I don't know shit about anything)
My pleasure!!
Stalin and Mao are the best entry points to marxism, imo, because both intentionally wrote to a broad audience, and their writing is clear and their language simple because of this. Dialectical and Historical Materialism and Combat Liberalism are some of my favorites. Individuals who come to the left from rightist perspectives (such as libertarianism), and have a focus on individual rights, tend to enjoy Lenin's State and Revolution, but Lenin tends to refer to contemporaneous events people and groups enough that you can end up doing a lot of off-the-page reading just to know what he's going on about.
uh...stalin? I know not much about him or Mao, but how is stalin a decent voice as a ruthless dictator?
I get that these perspectives can be potentially useful/insightful, but that feels to me like discounting the voices of people who, y'know, weren't ruthless dictators. I never got the impression that the phrase "dictatorship of the proletariat" meant that we had to look to actual dictators and their governmental structures?
The idea of Stalin being a rutheless dictator is much more common in the imperial core than the periphery and global south, where he is still celebrated as a hero of the oppressed.
if that's true, where can I read about that impression of him?
When I get home I'll dig up an old Time magazine from the period the US was collaborating with the USSR's war effort against nazi germany that depicts the common view of the day of Stalin.
More often than not, when inspecting the historical contemporaneous claims of such, it is the nazis and allies of the nazis complaining of his ruthlessness.
so he wasn't ruthless? is that what you're meaning to imply?
"The leaders come and go, but the people remain. Only the people are immortal, everything else is ephemeral. That is why it is necessary to appreciate the full value of the confidence of the people." Josef Stalin, a man who tried to retire from his post as General Secretary 3 times but was refused by the party on each occasion.
so cohost really doesn't seem to be built for reply chains like this, so I'm commenting here:
I get that history is a big messy knot that none of us have figured out, or ever will be able to. What I really REALLY don't get is giving credit to a guy, who at least to me, really feels like one of The Most Horrible Villains, even if I've been propagandized to hell and back (probably), like, what reason to I have to consider that he might have been good, when (from what I can tell), his ideas and approaches to governance fundamentally go against so much of what I've come to believe? Yeah, you could say I think "evil" is real, but it's not metaphysical or physical, it's human but it isn't inherent. "Disagreement", as much as western capitalism has utterly butchered its meaning and utility (hi I live in the US and it fucking sucks), is still a good thing, I think. The issue I see is when (read: all the time) such flimsy language is used to describe the horrid notion that ruthless partisan assaults on the concept of humanity pertaining to: public health practices, socioeconomic desolation, ultimate authority (there shouldn't be any), the level of "humanity" certain people possess, the idea that it's okay to treat people worse if they were born elsewhere, etc., is something that can be resolved through "debate" and a 4 year-old's understanding of "compromise". <--- THAT'S SO FUCKED UP AND I DON'T KNOW WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT. So...
You've hardly given me any reason to seriously consider that I might be utterly, completely, 100% Wrong about Stalin. I can not deny there's a chance that literally everything I've heard about him is a lie, but that's not enough for me to think, "oh, this is worthy of serious research". I don't want any dictators, anymore, ever. I don't want endless wars, conflict of scales I'm unable to comprehend in a lifetime's worth of time, this notion that we're all different and therefore alone. What does reading Stalin uncritically do for any of that? If there's something there, it has to be more than just vague language about my not understanding what is good about killing your political opponents and stifling the development of art and humanitarian study. Please?
so this comment chain turned into...something. I'm not proud of it, but I'm not certain I should delete my comments either. Maybe there's some sense in my grandstanding below, but I could not tell you if that's the case. I don't want to burden cohost (the one actually good social media site) with whatever you call this. I'm still mad about having to try to think critically about stalin (which should probably still be done for some aspects of communism, but like Hyper-Hypercritically (though I don't even know where I fit beyond that it's at least socialism-ish)). I want to be educated about the things I claim I believe and do something about it, but I don't want to throw out and burn my (perhaps flailing) attempts at developing some form of compassion. It didn't feel right, to me, to just keep the chain going here.