What the fuck are you talking about about? He literally broke up the rail strike, invested in hydrogen infrastructure (a type of fuel that isn’t green and pretty much everyone has commerically abandoned) instead of building actual infrastructure such as trains or affordable housing, and only pardoned people with federal weed offenses, which accounts for less than 1% of all weed related convictions.

I’d argue that he has been worse for domestic politics because people have literally stopped paying attention to the bad shit the American government does domestically as naturally as breathing. He has increased the funding of the border from Trump, lost access to abortion for millions of women, opened up more oil drilling permits across the U.S. and has repeatedly fumbled on trans rights and COVID policy. Nothing has actually changed policy-wise, just optics.

I don’t think Trump would have cut funding to Israel, but that doesn’t mean I have to vote for either genocidal removed.

Look, not disagreeing, but if you want be disrespectful to the suit, go shirtless and cut off the sleeves, this is just lazy tech bro shit.

Correct, and it is because of that revolution that they entered the industrial age in control of their means of production and are now at the forefront of industry. Much like many largely nationalist revolutions before and after it, only this one occured under the banner of a Marxist party, rather than strictly national bourgeoisie. Similar revolutions occured across Asia, South America, and the Middle East, but in none were the contradictions quite as sharp as Vietnam, China, and Korea, which is where the nationalist militias of peasants were at the forefront of armed struggle and a Communist party came into state power.

Marx didn’t consider European peasants to have revolutionary potential based on their reaction to the French Revolution. He largely did not deal with the class characteristics of Asia, which was much to his detriment, but he also didn’t have a lot to go off of for them historically. It’s not that Marx was wrong about them, Marx simply didn’t address them. Near the end of his life, he certainly considered most nationalistic struggles against empire to be revolutionary regardless of class characteristic, a trait that would be carried over into Marxist-Leninism.

Socialism has largely stalled at social democracy in individual pre-industrial countries, unless they have then proceeded to rapidly industrialize. The only place where it is making significant material progress is that which has largely turned the power of the state towards the facilitation of the global market and stayed out of global affairs (I.e. China, Vietnam). While it certainly is AES, it is in fact following a more strictly economical orthodox historical Marxist path than previous iterations of ML or MLM thought.

Essentially, Marx is and was right, the problem is how can we get the places where the radicalized populations are also the industrial proletariat, essentially how do we solve Lenin’s problem of the core and periphery. And in that column, since the collapse of the USSR, we have yet to actually see the real success of socialism and communism, a world not dominated by capitalist markets, and for that to truly happen, the global industrial proletariat has to become organized. Unfortunately, Trotsky was right (even if his other ideas, if implemented would have been suicidal for the USSR at the time).

Socialists have won great victories, the fact that 40 hour work week is even pretended to be standardized is a great victory for socialists, but the spoils continue to go towards the liberals, because progress is not going to be a straight line, but a constant struggle. What we do, for sure, know is that despite liberal pleading, this is not the best possible world, better and more humane outcomes and ways of organizing capital and labour are absolutely possible.

Yeah primaries are certainly not the answer. I was specifically talking about local elections shit, but even that doesn’t work most of the time, these last couple of times I’ve had two complete shitbirds to vote for (even the so called ‘progressive’ candidate is a complete mess) and the progressive one shits the bed in the primaries and the establishment Dem candidate shits the bed in the general.

Yeah, saying that about Marxist-Leninism in particular is pretty wild, given that the amount of deviations that are possible within ML thought because of it’s fairly organic nature. Not that tax bracket stuff is not a severe deviation from theory.

Yes, America is a two party fascist state. It genuinely does not matter who I vote for for President, fascism is the only outcome. I can, occasionally, minimize the levels of fascism close to me when certain candidates win primaries near me, even though that is also pretty minimal, but it does have much more of a real impact than voting for President. Biden, in particular, has shown absolutely zero indications that he is better than Trump in policy.

What is it with the white T-shirt and dress jacket? Why does anyone wear it, it makes you look like shit.

I only disagree in so far as to the people participating in that culture it absolutely dominates their life and world view, and does represent a variety of cultural affiliations, and they all share the same trait of being too online. I have absolutely met hippy-chick girl bosses. For me, most of these attitudes are simultaneous and reactionary to each other, and both represent capitalist ideology, even if manosphere trends more regressionary.

It’s hard to describe if you haven’t encountered it irl, but it is basically the lib version of the ‘trad-wife’ and usually I find it occurs in women who are ex-christians (at least in the ones who have bothered to talk about it). My assumption is that they want to be protected by a man and grew up with that being their interest, but they also want to ‘be free’, so the next best thing they can do is antagonize people at the bar so some man can step in and ‘protect them’. It’s a weird reoccurring thing and the only reason I know about it is because usually I am the one that they want to protect them even though I only met them an hour ago and I agree with the other party that they are being an asshole. The GGG attitude is far more prevalent, but I have run into this particular phenomena at least six or seven times, enough to recognize it almost on sight at this point. It absolutely stems from online ‘trad-wife’ rhetoric, just translated to the weird a-political bar culture.

Edit: Just to be clear, Trad-wife is also toxic, but I rarely run into that at a bar.

2nd Edit: And this is also besides the multitude of toxic behaviors that are shared between the genders at bars.

3rd edit: I get what you are saying, but as a man who happens to spend most of his time talking to both genders in bars, trust me, it is there, even among people who reject it. You probably just don’t know the language to recognize it when it is occuring. Especially when I hear some of the advice that women give each other concerning men, much of it feels designed to cause more problems. But idk, my opinion is that most people are making things way more complicated than they have to because they are bored and like to play and most problems occur when one party doesn’t understand the game that the other one is playing. As long as people are respecting personal boundaries at the bar, I could care less.

4th and final edit because I genuinely do not like talking about this: I will concede that perhaps it is not specifically a mentality, but more of a series of toxic behaviors that I notice. Perhaps they are completely unrelated, I’m not an anthropologist on this by any means.

I firmly disagree with that. Toxic feminine discourse is just as prevalent for young women it’s just that because of the shrinking categories of masculinity (basically down to be rich or be buff or both because it is about an air of protection), there is a wider range of ‘acceptable’ feminine behavior. And that is besides the point that if you are a woman and you choose to default towards perceived masculine behavior that is socially acceptable outside of the the most conservative circles. And as you say, because of this freedom most women are either radlibs or libs.

That said, there are two forms of generally feminine toxicity that I see from online that are translated into bar culture. The first is generally libertarian feminism, or ‘girl boss’ mentality, who are incredibly destructive to anyone around them for the sake of personal gain, but generally fight their own battles. The second is the opposite which is a ‘helpless’ mentality where they either act like they can’t do anything or shouldn’t have to do anything, or literally go out of their way to antagonize others so that way they have to be constantly ‘saved’. And these behaviors span both avowedly liberal and conservative women because the vast majority in the U.S. do not have an actually ideologically consistent political worldview, so attempting to assign them one is a fool’s errand. They are all libs insofar as they are picking and choosing from the buffet of ideology.

It has been awhile but I will take a crack at it.

So Jevons is the guy who first indicated the idea of Austrian economics or marginal economic theory, depending on who you ask. Jevons basically says that things are worth what people will pay for them, basically, it doesn’t matter how much labor is put into an item, what matters is the subjective value and availability of that item. Basically, what Jevons says is that ‘price is value’, a very different distinction than what had been made before and reduction of theory, (which is why it is called ‘a revolution’). And he isn’t exactly wrong, but for wrong reasons.

For example, Jevons says that it is because of the marginally reducing utility (lessening use-value) of a singular items as there are more items that determine the items value and therefore it’s price. A man rich in diamonds but starved of water would happily exchange his diamonds for far less than the labor cost to create those diamonds, for example, because those diamonds have lessing marginal utility. However, he also posits that sometimes the more of something there is, the higher the demand actually goes because the utility has been marginalized by use (something that we can see with induced traffic, more lanes equals more traffic).

The problem of course here, is that while that is correct, it is not a holistic example, nor does it actually address Adam Smith’s LTV. Basically, what the LTV says is that if you cannot make the price of something match the social utility value, then an activity ceases. If the diamonds cannot at least provide enough to feed, water and house the workers, then people will not mine diamonds. Basically, it is likely that people aren’t actually taking into account all the labor that it takes to get the water to the diamond guy. In the same way, when previous luxuries become available to the public, they quickly attain a social utility value, thus explaining why demand remains constant or increases despite supply increase. It is a sign of what does and does not have social utility, regardless of price.

Edit: This can also be explained by capitalism’s need to generate profit and increasing returns, spending money to induce demand so their product attains an appearance of social utility, which is the big difference between Jevons and Marx, Marx believes that induced demand is false demands for false needs (in particular the need to generate an ever increasing profit), where true social utility needs will become apparent after the political revolution and the overthrow of capitalist domination of nature and the market, while Jevons treats all needs, induced or not, as authentic.

I’ll have to reread some Jevons, it has been while.

2nd Edit: I’ve been thinking for a longtime that the problem with economic theory is in it’s categories. I think that instead of ‘micro’ and ‘macro’ it should be in terms of ‘scarce and not scarce’ I know there is an ‘economics of scarcity’ but it doesn’t seem to be pushed as one of the major schools in economic theory.

Look, you’re gonna have to do ‘Tomlinson Steelers’ now because everything on google is just Taylor Tomlinson, who is some new soy (no offense to the beans) comedian on late-night.

It is truly incredible that these people have not only not read Marx, but also not read any Adam Smith or David Ricardo (even though they likely view Adam Smith as their ‘more scientifically correct ancestor like Newton or Darwin’), so they have absolutely no conception that Marx is literally just expanding on both Smith and Ricardo’s theories and works, testing their claims with newly available statistical economic data (that was collected because of initiatives by Smith and Ricardo but never actually followed up on because that is never how economic planning actually works in western democracies, nobody actually looks at real economic statistics outside of academia or bureaucratic functionaries, they simply publish them when they are in their favor) and expanding on their claims, taking them to their logical conclusions.

It’s so infuriating to see them posit that something like the Labor Theory of Value is horseshit because it is from Marx when the Labor Theory of Value is not originally a Marxist claim, it is far older than that, but it was most explicitly a claim by Adam Smith that Marx then went to great lengths to provide evidence for and demonstrate how the value applied by labor affects commodity pricing of supply and demand based on it’s ‘usefulness’. AND THIS IS LITERALLY ON THE WIKIPEDIA PAGE ‘LABOR THEORY OF VALUE’.

And that said, nowhere in Marx does he ever actually say ‘Labor Theory of Value’ because this is just his ‘Theory of Value’, which happens to center on labor because it is the only way that he was able to make sense of things like the gold inflationary crisis in Spain, or how cheap products from India could be priced despite their demand and distance (remember this is just prior to mass industrialization in Britain). From there he was able to extrapolate what was causing these events that contradicted a purely ‘supply and demand’ based system to create a model of exploitative economic relationships that actually run society, in direct contrast to the popular British utilitarian rhetoric at the time, which was about ‘providing moral value (read now as jobs) to indolent and uncultured savages’.

As @[email protected] pointed out, these neoliberals are quite literally the using the exact same appeal as those old British utilitarians, literally dressing up old unscientific and racist ideas in new clothing and attempting to pass them off as ‘more modern’ than Marxist economics.

Pro or anti Tomlinson?

Wow, I didn’t realize that old racist stuff was woke.

Ah yes, the complains about the decadence of the proles while taking three European vacations a year guy.

Ah, that explains the whole copaganda angle.

CW Sexual Assault

The highways weren’t just magically placed there by the grace of God, they were built and expanded by the government using eminent domain. A highspeed rail system could be built using the same legal precedents, and would likely keep the highways from having to be expanded (ever).

What you are saying is that we could never build a new system in the same way that we built the old system, which is patently false, which is still different from your claim that China can avoid red-tape when the U.S. does not which is also false. The U.S. picks and chooses when it decides to uphold ‘private property’ because it only cares about the private property of those that buy the political system, it demonstrably does not care about general private property rights of those that inconvenience whatever the agenda is. Which means that the agenda COULD be High Speed rail, and it is not ‘the law’ or ‘the government’ getting in the way but private companies.

Also, for someone with a tenuous grasp on legal reality, I don’t think you should be discussing the realities of rail-based civil engineering. Highways aren’t particularly known for being good to work with on complex landscapes.

I am saying that the literal incentives of a profit-driven capitalist economy will always inevitably degrade the commodity process, incentivizing profit generation and rent seeking over industrialization and economizing commodity processes. It has nothing to do with ‘corruption’, ‘power’ or ‘politicians’, nor did I ever indicate that is what we were talking about. It is the system working as intended.

The entirety of Europe had the industrial capacity and know-how to transition towards both High Speed Rail and entire light rail system in the 80’s and 90’s, even after the chaos of the collapse of the USSR. It’s honestly shocking that they didn’t given the seriousness that the 80’s oil crisis caused, but I have to assume at this point they were banking on the balkanization of Russia and were basically doing a test run in the former Yugoslavia.

The problem is that the whole of elite European liberal intellectualism is completely wound up in essentially emulating what they perceive to be “American freedom”, you’ll still run into this with exchange students all the time. The problem is that ‘American freedom’ will ultimately completely destroy your infrastructural integrity and thus degrade your industrial capacity.