Welcome again to everybody. Take a seat make yourself at home, we are out of tea though. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is the weekly discussion thread.
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Please switch the star of David with the Israeli flag. Otherwise it looks like a NazBol meme.
The 6 pointed star has nothing to do with Judaism. It is not anywhere in the scriptures. It is just a artistic motif that is common in many cultures. It first became a Jewish political symbol in the 1300s when Charles IV let the Jewish community of Prague have their own flag.
In fact the first commandment explicitly forbids the creation of symbols to represent the faith. The 6 pointed star is a idol and as such use of it as a symbol of the faith is directly counter to Judaism.
📠 #talmudic #wisdom
however the message of the original comic is clearly not informed by theology
Moving on, I often feel like nuclear weapons were the worst invention ever created by humanity. Imagine in the post ww2 era there were no nuclear weapons. The US wouldn’t have a “win button” that held the entire world hostage. Maybe Stalin would have gotten to Paris.
Idk, it doesn’t really matter unless someone invents a time machine, but it feels like someone sent a bunch of teenagers into the woods with knives and bats, and then gave one of those kids a gun. None of of them are mature enough to handle that, and any mistake can cost a lot.
I think the fact that usa is insulated by thousands of Km of ocean is a bigger part of how it wins. I think nukes are a good thing. MAD kept the cold war from killing a billion people. Nukes are what stopped trump from restarting the Korean war. Over reliance on it’s nuclear blackmail is a big part of why usa is so screwed right now.
I think i get so incensed at some people, including comrades, because I hate when people use something being “hard” as an excuse to not do the work to actually think properly. [Materially it can be different. If you’re disabled then that’s a reasonable thing to say it’s hard to do physical things like protest]
“It’s hard for me to sympathize with x” or “well it’s hard for me to see it like that because y.” Well tough. That’s really all I have to say. If you want to have a huff and a puff about it then go calm down and think about it. If you actually have something logical to say then I’ll listen to it, but if all you have is Pathos then you have nothing at all
Edit: This isn’t related to something recent or anything. I was thinking about a conversation I had with a Chinese comrade a while back that bugged me
Just feeling things tonight, are simple music links allowed here?
mandstory
✊️
Yes music is allowed
Hello nerds
hope you all have a good next week
You too comrade!
I’ve been journaling semi-regulary since 2018. Used to do it daily, but now I only do it when I have something to actually write about (I just do free writing about anything that is on my mind). Anyone else journaling?
I do but not enough because I’m a lefty and hold my pen way too tightly so it hurts to write for long.
Keep your heads held high. Stay the course. One thing you have real control over are your own habits, decisions, and choices on a day to day basis. Be your favorite version of yourself.
As always, communism will win.
I have decided that after my pilgrimage I will return to The Netherlands to work and study. Unfortunately my hometown has no active commie party so I hope I can at least find a regional party to join, if any.
Its Nijmegen time let’s gooooo
It do be on my list
What made you decide to leave Antwerp?
Quitting my job made me realize I have been out of place here for a while. The big city life with constantly being surrounded by people and concrete and cars and whatnot is becoming a bit much. And then I found the BBL system in The Netherlands in which I can work for four days in my study field and go to school for one day and I figured it would be best to go back for now. Gonna study to become a gardener.
Autism Acceptance month. Please make sure you are accepted by a person with autism or suffer the consequences.
Am I allowed to accept myself?
That’s even more important
What’s the difference between socdem and demsoc?
My understanding is socdem are people who want capitalism with healthcare and demsoc are people who think you can vote your way to communism. In reality they are basically indistinguishable.
Bingo.
As a white man in the netherlands, it feels weird knowing that me feeling worse means that the resistance is doing well and the world is getting closer to being better.
I am especially worried because i simply don’t know how to prepare my GF and I for an economic crisis like this and i also don’t have the necessary analytical skills to not feel completely in the dark about the developments of geopolitics without relying on the analysis of the people posting on here.
A really weird mixture of hope towards someone sawing off the rotten branch that i am sitting on, while also not sure how to fall correctly so that i don’t hurt too much. Especially considering that i have exactly zero community here (my anhedonia makes it hard to make efforts towards friendships) and no one seems to have understood yet that there even is a crisis coming.
not sure how to fall correctly so that i don’t hurt too much.
Stockpile some dry foodstuffs. I wish I was joking but there’s a real potential for great depression type of food scarcity. 20% of the worlds fertilizer backed up in the strait and europe’s sanctions on Russia could make it a really rough situation in the near future.
A 25lb bag of dried beans and a roughly same sized bag of rice or quinoa will meet the protein needs of the average person for like 2 months if you use them right.
The future might be uncertain comrade, but that means potential for change aswell. We’ll probably never see a Red Western Europe as long as our continent is built on the exploitation of other peoples. But through their emancipation we can eventually build a brighter future for proletarians in our part of the world too!
Yeah, just hard to imagine me being part of that world while being incapable of actually caring about and celebrating progress due to my anhedonic issues. The world getting better will not make me feel better. This completely eliminates motivation from my equation and leaves me with cold hard logic, discipline and grit. Those things will only carry me so far and without my GF, i likely genuinely would not care about anything in this world and would have perished already.
I just wanted to post this somewhere, but It feels so weird now that my dad is gone, and weird that both my parents are now gone. I think the main thing I noticed is I’m no longer constantly fretting over my dad and his drinking anymore or living in that kind of environment, and I’m realizing how much living in that kind of space took away from me. It really wasn’t a good environment, how could it ever be.
That is some healthy introspection. Sounds like you are doing well. :)
Red Horizons: The New Scholarly Journal By Iskra Books
From Iskra Books: Iskra Books is excited to launch our new journal project - Red Horizons!
This scholarly, radical journal will be in the service of global liberation movements—a site for cutting-edge theory, translations, art, and poetry.
We’re accepting submissions until end of May, and publishing in September of this year. This journal will be published twice yearly. For more details, see https://www.iskrabooks.org/journal.
Send contributions to [email protected] for review. Procedures and details: https://www.iskrabooks.org/submissions.
Isn’t Young Stalin book super sus?
I wonder if there’s a more casual term for “labor aristocracy” than the “aristocracy” part. My understanding is it (tends to refer to) the position that the working class of the empire tends to be in, but it’s one of those words that’s a bit obscure. Maybe a casual way would be “the comfortable working class” or something - referring to those who, despite being working class, have enough financial padding and material comforts that doubting the system, much less thoughts of revolt, may never even occur to them.
What about westoid? Lol
Treatlerite
👆
I was more thinking of a descriptive term that would help people understand the context of it at a glance rather than an insult, but that is funny.
Since everyone in the west is Disney-brained, maybe something like storm-labour or storm-worker a-la storm trooper. Pawns of the empire.
For the heck of it, I asked an LLM to see what it could come up with. Here are its suggestions:
- The Laptop Class This is a very strong contender that has gained significant traction in recent years. It perfectly captures the modern reality of this group: their work is often non-manual, done remotely on a computer, and they enjoy a level of flexibility and cultural capital that sets them apart from traditional blue-collar or service workers. It implies a professional, often white-collar, identity that feels distinct from both the “boss” and the “worker on the factory floor.” It feels very current and immediately understandable.
- Yuppie This is a classic term from the 1980s (“Young Urban Professional”) that has endured. It focuses on the consumerist and aspirational aspects of the labor aristocracy. A “yuppie” is defined by their lifestyle—gym memberships, expensive coffee, organic food, travel—and their career focus. While it doesn’t explicitly mention a betrayal of the working class, it strongly implies a self-interested, upwardly mobile individual who is more concerned with personal success than collective action. It’s a bit dated but still widely recognized and has a casual, slightly critical edge.
- The Comfortably Numb This is a more cynical and highly descriptive phrase. It gets to the heart of the political function of the labor aristocracy. Their comfort—good salary, benefits, job security—makes them “numb” to the anxieties and struggles of the working poor and the precariat. It suggests a lack of urgency and a disconnection from the systemic issues affecting others. It’s less of a label for a person and more of a description of their state of being, making it a powerful, if slightly less casual, term.
- The C-Suite’s Pets This is a much more direct and confrontational term, borrowing from the original’s political sharpness. It’s provocative and frames the relationship in explicitly subservient terms. It implies that this group’s loyalty has been bought by corporate perks (high salaries, stock options, good healthcare) and that they act as a loyal, domesticated force for the interests of the “C-Suite” (executives). It’s great for a more radical or critical discussion but might be too aggressive for casual use.
The Laptop Class has a nice ring to it, I feel, but could be taken too literally by people. C-Suite’s Pets has me 💀
Edit: Wait, nah, I skimmed the article a bit, it seems iffy, removing it (Laptop Class seems to have some reactionary roots so ew).
Edit2: I prompted it about issues of reactionary connotations and it gave me a few more, one that I like: the gentrifier class.
