quarrk [he/him]

A channel I subscribe to just posted an explainer on spin, for anyone interested

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYeRS5a3HbE

This is the other side of the iron curtain my friend

I continue walking because I don’t want to normalize a mindset that pedestrians need to beg to use public paths. It should be drivers that feel mildly uncomfortable moving huge equipment through areas designed for pedestrian use.

In games you are petty-bourgeois and own your labor products.

In practice, no. In theory, liberals believe in the free market while the socdems do not. But both will defend the market as such, which is why socdems are ineffectual and easily duped by bourgeois interests.

“Hey, sorry to bother you, was just wondering if you were dead. Please call back at your earliest convenience.”

You should have GPS without any service at all. You might need data for the map to load, depends on the app. If you’re lucky and the app automatically cached it when you had signal, or you manually downloaded the offline map, then you could navigate home in airplane mode.

All of this is moot because I think I remember reading the rest of this story. The hiker wasn’t really lost, they simply went on a hike without telling anyone, and ignored calls during that time because they were trying to unplug.

liberal

Don’t stop there… commit fully to the dark side

yup. Human nature as an absolute and static thing is garbage philosophy. Marx had it right in Theses on Feuerbach and Capital. https://www.marxists.org/archive/fromm/works/1961/man/ch04.htm

[T]he human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.

Competition even in theory:

I won the competition, now buy my linen at 10x its value. Btw it costs 1,000 years of the average salary to start up a competing business, good luck lol

Everyone I like is communist

First step is abolishing wage labor and private property. Transitional political forms take on some form of direct democracy, probably something similar to soviet councils.

Whataboutism is a meaningless brainworm which the user invokes in order to ignore their own cognitive dissonance and inconsistent standards. You cry “whataboutism” when @very_poggers_gay@hexbear.net was correct to point out your own double standard. “All of this sounds at odds with representative democracy” implies that you believe genuine democracy is something we currently stand to lose.

What you need to understand is that Marxists are not interested in imposing utopian futures on the world. “What do you have in its place?” is the wrong question. Better questions: What currently prevents genuine democracy? What are the material conditions which both produce and maintain it? Then you get to work on changing those material conditions and removing the real basis which produces the problems.

With modern technology I wonder how necessary representative style governments really are. Electronic voting already exists and works quite well, and is probably the most secure form of voting as long as it can be audited. Of course, at some point administration has to come down to individuals, but as long as those individuals are held accountable in some way then it seems that the actual democratic step (i.e. voting on policy) need not be mediated through representatives as is oft repeated to justify the status quo.

You might have been referring to this with republicanism, but there are different types of representation, too. Parliamentary democracies are not obligated to obey the wishes of their subjects, whereas soviet (council) democracies are a form of direct democracy, where representatives are merely delegates and are obligated to obey/communicate the wishes of their subjects. In my comment above I had in mind the parliamentary type, since that is the kind in which there is a buffer between citizens and political institutions which is used by the bourgeoisie to suppress changes which would undermine capital.

Politics and economics are not independent of each other One explanation

Representative “democracy” alienates the common man from the political process while maintaining a semblance of democracy. For this reason it is the ideal political form for capitalism, an economic system which alienates power from the masses and concentrates it in the hands of a few.

Class interests are the primary axis on which all political activity turns. Getting the working class to does not help them, it helps those in power.

activity = (forProfit) ? “Work” : “Hobby”

What we saw as Reddit at its best was, from a capitalist’s perspective, Reddit at its worst.

And capitalists will allow this “at its worst” phase in order to capture the market, before squeezing it. This pattern is consistent in many industries.