The Local Population In Countries That Export Bananas Typically Eat Different Varieties Grown Primarily

Unless I'm mistaken, Russia's demands have been self-evidently absurd, constituting effective defeat (ceding of the occupied territories/breakway republics, which have already been declared part of the Russian Federation) and regime change ("demilitarization", "de-Nazification"). If Russia finds American demands for regime change unappealing, they may end the war at any time by simply withdrawing to their pre-February 2022 borders.

Additionally, why should we be required to be chartiable/discerning towards Russian state speech, while Russia is allowed to assume the worst of US/NATO's intentions? American calls for Russian regime change are "referendums on its continued existence", whereas Russian calls for Ukranian regime change are merely "bluster".

Both sides are blustering of course, but the difference is that whereas the US (no matter how bloodthirsty our politicians' speeches may get) is not going to put troops on the ground in Ukraine to try and overthrow Putin, Putin's promises to sieze Kiev are actually possible and probable due to the hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers trying to achieve that goal at this moment- all the more reason to take him at face value and assume that his motives are what he says they are!

jacobin.com

The State of Ukrainian Democracy Is Not Strong

One year after Russia’s invasion, Ukraine is backsliding away from democratic freedoms and liberal pluralism.

a very harrowing article. i had not realised just how far authoritarian tendencies in ukraine had progressed under zelensky over the course of the war: dissent and freedom of the press have been massively curtailed, opposition parties banned, and bills introduced to suppress religious freedom. accusations of treason are bandied about for the mere voicing of dissent, and due process for those accused is routinely curtailed (both within and without the official justice system). perhaps most stomach-churning was hearing that chesno, an ngo currently running a blacklist of alleged traitors, received 42% of its funding in 2021 from ned and ndi (at us taxpayer expense)

i strongly recommend reading this for anyone inclined to simplify the war into a contest between liberal democracy to the west and autocratic authoritarianism to the east

There's always violence. We could just sieze control of the plants and factories and voluntarily scale back our consumption, production, and pollution over the next decade until CO2 levels stabilized. We don't need to sit here helplessly waiting for the fruits of our own labor to kill us all. Bonus points if we can support people in other countries doing similar things.

it’s crazy that im alive to witness major effects of climate change. like it always seemed super vague and it was always ‘the polar bears won’t have anywhere to live’ but this shit is going to fuck everything up bigtime.

I'm not sure why anyone would seriously mourn the death of Ted Kazcynski, when both a) his basic critique of technology is stupidly, fundamentally flawed to anyone who thinks about it for five minutes and b) plenty of morally palatable and effective enviormentalist protestors exist. But nobody's making any "Jessica Reznicek did nothing wrong" memes.

A quick Google would seem to indicate that Napoleon also:

-Forbid Jews from migrating within France

-Heavily restricted their ability to engage in moneylending

-Cancelled all debt owed to Jewish lenders

-Forced them to adopt surnames

-Conscripted them into the army

All of which are far more anti-Semitic than the modern policy of building a welfare state and offering people the choice to leave their religious communities.

Now I'll freely admit that I'm ignorant of Napoleon beyond some broad strokes. I would assume that, as a European gentile in the eighteenth century, he had antisemitic sentiments. But like, this seems insane:

Letting Jews out of the ghettos and removing the barriers to their participation in broader society is roughly the exact opposite of antisemitism, surely. If this is an accurate summary of Napoleon's policy towards the Jews then he was in fact a great champion of Jewish freedom, and a model for gentiles to follow rather than a cautionary tale.

I'm not a native to the rationalist part of the internet, but it seems like that idea's gotten a lot more popular since Scott Alexander created his idea of the Archipelago. It strikes me as the kind of "liberal defeatist" politics that a lot of rationalists seem to share: we should tolerate difference and let people choose their communities, but universal values don't exist or are impossible/not worth it to establish, so the best we can do is create as many cultural islands as possible and let God/Moloch/citizen choice sort it out.

OK, why do so many political and fiction writers seem enamored with this idea of breaking the world into little micro-statelets?  I think the idea is that it’s nice to have your own law shared with people who agree with you, it seems like a massive punt on the actual political problems of the day unless you live in total isolation from others.

I see this shit and I can’t help but wonder if these people think of law on purely an aesthetic level or something.

As someone working at a university my two cents is that the primary goal of a university is to get lots of state and federal grants and build lots of labs and hire lots of brilliant researchers and make lots of money and intellectual property so they can hire more researchers and get more grants and build more labs.

Education of the general populace is a desirable but more or less secondary byproduct. There's a reason the lectures are free online but the research papers (also funded by your taxes) are locked behind a paywall.

how am i seeing communists earnestly argue that the function of the university (in capitalist society!) is to educate people

So from OP's perspective, democracy is perfectly compatible with a class society that enables unelected managers the ability to totally control all (or nearly all) media through ownership in what is more or less a state media system, but democracy is threatened only when those managers start trying to actively and obviously crack down on messages they don't like, rather than passively controlling the narrative by choosing which stories reach publication.

Besides, Bolsanaro has praised Brazil's military dictatorship and spoken highly of torture, and he also has encouraged militia violence against criminals or suspected criminals, but I guess snobby cultural gatekeeping is worse than continuing to rape the Amazon.

i’ve said it before but today i’ve been reflecting on it again.

one huge factor in bolsonaro’s election was the decentralization of media. haddad’s campaign outspent his by an order of magnitude and had way more legally mandated free tv exposure.

bolsonaro’s electorate was formed on twitter, facebook, youtube and whatsapp messenger, while the mainstream media continued to maintain that he was unacceptable.

this suggests to me that whatever ideological homeostasis that existed was maintained by media gatekeepers. and as they become increasingly unable to perform said gatekeeping, we see more and more pressure, particularly coming from the left, for social media platforms to step in and moderate their content.

take a moment, especially if this make you uncomfortable, to reflect on what the meaning of democracy is.

I understand the point this person is trying to make, but Star Wars has always been mass-market safe entertainment. Tom Shone in his book Blockbuster described how A New Hope was largely successful because it appealed to so many people- the Germans could pretend the Empire was British, the British could pretend it was German, and the French pretended it was the Americans. Luke is an uncomplicated everyone that any viewer can relate to. Etc.

And the new Star Wars movies absolutely have an ideology, but its the (badly integrated) ideology of #Resistance liberalism instead of Lucas' milquetoast liberalism.

i think the key difference between george lucas’s star wars and disney’s star wars is that lucas is a man with an ideology. someone with a point of view, and all that entails. which comes with ideas of revolution, anti-imperialism, challenging the status quo, cultural appropriation and racist stereotypes. complex and contradictory ideas because that’s how artists are: complex and complicated people. disney is not. disney is a corporation. a corporation can’t have ideology, because ideology defeats the purpose of profit. and when the only thing you do is to turn on the movie manufacturing machine before you sit down and plan what ideas are you trying to convey to the audience, then your results are going to be washed out corporate garbage. and because when you’re a giant corporation who only cares about selling to the widest audience possible, you can’t take sides. you can’t decide on an idea. because you want to sell your product to people who are on the entire political spectrum. which results in movies without ideology, without purpose, without soul.

"Importantly, the market and private property by themselves cannot prevent the total depletion of the commons. In fact, the depletion of the commons follows inexorably from the distributed actions of agents following profit and loss signals. It is only when private property is circumvented, where information not revealed by prices or profit and loss signals is taken into account, that sustainable use of common resources becomes possible."

Communism is when you do a lot of unpaid overtime and are expected to be grateful for the privilege, apparently.

There were many incredibly hardworking peasants and workers in the USSR who achieved astonishing things in service of the revolution, but the fact that they had to make such extraordinary sacrifices is itself a tragedy, and should not be celebrated.

The individual referred to in OP's post was actually named Nikolai Ostrovsky (Pavel Korchagin was the main character of his fictionalized autobiography). He lived a short life full of hardship and sacrifice and died at 32. I think the best way to honor his memory would be to create a world in which such sacrifices are no longer necessary.

wait till i tell "i don't dream of labor" crowd about pavel korchagin who became soviet national role model for basically working himself to multiple disabilities to save town from freezing in the winter during russian civil class war. he wrote autobiographical novel while already blind for which he became famous. and in it there was a scene where anyone who refused to work in those terrible conditions were asked to give up their communist card. because you can't claim to call yourself a communist without being ready to put in as much work as you can. and that wasn't just him ussr was able to withstand these critical first years thanks to selfless underpayed work put by it's people towards rebuilding country's wealth. getting rid of feodal lords and capitalists was enough motivation imagine that! the fact so many people who call themselves communists on here seem to be proud of flaunting their individualism and complete lack of proletarian morals is an insult to all revolutionary workers of the past. go call yourselves libertarians or something.