EffortPostMcGee [any]

Cuz it sounded like you were saying the settler-colonial question has been settled and doesn’t matter anymore

I don’t really know how you read that in my reply when I even said “…I don’t dispute the existence of a labor-aristocracy and it being the difficult obstacle to overcome still…” in the last paragraph of the original reply.

Not to be combative, but that basically sides you with the MAGAcommunist.

Okay, well I’m glad that you’ve jumped to this conclusion as a result of not fully reading what I wrote, but yeah, I don’t think Jackson Hinkle and his ilk are very smart people with a lot of interesting things to say. I believe that Settlerism is a fundamental contradiction and needs to be reckoned with if we want to have any serious discussion of discussing revolution and capitalism in particular in the United States. I really know what else to say to that.

What, exactly, did you disagree with?

I think this is the misunderstanding though. I didn’t disagree with you. Like, I don’t intend to be lecturing here, but when high school/freshman college students consider the “perfect sphere rolling across a frictionless surface” the point of doing so is because they haven’t developed enough knowledge of physics to be able to analyze more complex physical dynamics, in other words, because the discussion of physics of such a scenario is incredibly theoretical and simple. But everything said about such a hypothetical is entirely correct and applies downstream when considering perfect spheres rolling across surfaces with friction, and imperfect spheres rolling across frictionless surfaces, and then what needs to be developed for these students to be able to analyze this is a more complicated understanding of physics. Apologies for the analogy but I hope we can see where I’m going here?

I want to now keep in mind this part of the reply:

Bourgeoisified workers are not frictionless spheres in a vacuum on a perfectly flat plane, they’re like, probably at least 20% of the US workforce.

as I respond to what we might disagree with (and more specifically, to say what I’m trying to say more in a more plane fashion).

I think that, as United States hegemony, and respectively, the capitalist system of the United States dies, that members of the labor aristocracy will continue to become proletarianized and ergo have the potential to become revolutionary anti-capitalists. Granted, this is like classic Marx and Engels levels of analysis, but this is alluded to in the Manifesto and then later developed further in developed a bit in Das Kapital.

Okay great, so if you agree with me on that, then, while at the moment, as you say probably 20% of the population exists as members of the labor aristocracy, then, your analysis is correct, right now and the nature of settler colonialism makes it the primary obstacle of concern in developing revolutionary socialism in a settler colonial state.

But I think that it is increasingly become less and less correct; as I allude to in my original reply, financial capital is consuming the wealth of the labor aristocracy in an effort to stay alive at the moment. In which case, given, I don’t know, say 10 - 15 years, I think that the present situation will develop in an entirely new and unexpected direction with the potential for this fundamental contradiction to not be able to be fully explained by Sakai-style-capital-S Settlerism anymore at the level of just principally the class of US Laborers.

So now, as a reply to the original post, and a point made by a few other replies, my argument is that settler colonialism is going to continue to erode as the primary contradiction and become simply one of the many primary contradictions, and I hope that clears up what I was and am trying to say.

I don’t think you needed a more extreme example and I’m not really sure what this question is aiming to achieve. This is like asking “did Frontiersmen in the United States have the same class interests as the Native Americans that they were slaughtering for sport?” To which the answer is clearly no.

Your reply reads as combative to me, by the way, due to the way you’ve instantly decided to purity test me on the issue of Israel-Palestine. I’ve been a vocal critic of the apartheid state of Israel in real life for over 12 years. So can you please explain to me why you’ve decided to pursue this question?

I made my reply to say that doing the mind game of “pick a hypothetical worker” isn’t a very good form of analysis in the United States because this hypothetical worker increasingly doesn’t exist and more than that, is incomplete when we are talking about settler colonialism. I mean, this hypothetical example could’ve actually applied to a Native American person, who, even if they are in a compradore relationship with settler-colonialism, has a fundamentally different relationship to it than an actual descendant of settlers.

So let us imagine a hypothetical worker. They went to college on the GI Bill and have clear path of advancement in their career, they have retirement savings in the stock market and savings in the bank, they have a home which is accruing value in the real estate market, and they keep up with their credit and debts and bills because of that well paying job. Their kids can grow up to be real estate agents, investment bankers, and corporate executives.

To me this seems like the equivalent of saying “imagine a perfectly spherical ball rolling across a smooth frictionless surface” in terms of picking a member of the “bourgeouified portion of the working class”. Note that, I’m going to refer to the “bourgeouified portion of the working class” as being members of the “labor aristocracy” for this reply. That may lead to some disagreement, but from my understanding both of what labor aristocracy means and of your post, this is essentially what we are talking about.

• Going to university on the GI Bill could be a veteran or it could be a spouse or child of a veteran, so this complicates the analysis slightly. Especially because not every household of this demographic is the idyllic leave-it-to-beaver family with kids that are like “Gee golly mom/dad, it sure was swell that you killed all those people overseas when you were in the Army”, even if they do directly benefit from their parent doing that. Plus, the existence of anti-imperialist and/or socialist veterans implies, to me at least, that even amongst this demographic, there must be something which could interest this worker in socialism.
• Barely any careers have a clear path of advancement anymore. I can’t even really think of more than 10, and even amongst those, not all of them would be jobs I would consider to be apart of the labor aristocracy.
• The portion of college graduates who can comfortably save and invest has gone down dramatically (see the next point).
• The portion of college graduates who are able to afford a home (which is accruing value) has gone down dramatically. I mean, the average age of first time home buyers increased from 35 to 38 in just this last year.
• It seems dubious that, even if you did find someone for whom all the above factors do hold, that they would assume that their child would be able to easily be successful in any of the types of career which do enjoy an elevated relationship over ordinary labor, especially in 2024/2025.

Above all of that, climate change affecting them or their children, decreasing standard of living and lowering life expectancy all still seem like plausible reasons for even this hypothetical worker to adopt socialist politics, even if it’s unlikely.

However, I don’t dispute the existence of a labor-aristocracy and it being the difficult obstacle to overcome still, especially when we consider the direct relationship members of the labor aristocracy have with settler-colonialism and imperialism in the US. I just think that as the contradictions inherent in capitalism continue to progress into their terminal phase, we’re going to see less and less of this type of worker because the US capitalist system is being forced to liquidate this exact kind of worker at the moment in order to stay alive. Consequently, I think that this type of analysis is becoming increasingly outdated at the moment.

Thanks for the clarification! In my mind, I sort of just think “metric first” so the topology induced by that metric is always just assumed, but that’s because I don’t ever work with non-metrizable spaces.

I’m not really confused about what you’re saying here exactly, and since the original post is deleted, I can’t really even see what was originally said, but I was confused about this:

(like the real number that that sequence converges to given the standard topology of the space of real numbers).

Why make mention of the standard topology here exactly? It’s not exactly clear to me why this has anything to do with what you two are discussing.

Yeah, I’ve seen it a couple of times online, like with these types of “vibes-based” music playlists, but otherwise you’re right, it’s hardly ever referred to as Persian, at least not in the video title; I imagine he probably has that impression due to whatever algorithm he has on YouTube/Other social media feeding him stuff like what I linked, but probably to an even greater degree, just because of how these algorithms function, but idk! Sorry for misunderstanding you!

I just graduated and most of the people I was going to school with agreed that, regardless of if we pay these loans or not, the crisis is so bad that they’ll have to forgive us all eventually anyway. So the only people even entertaining the idea of paying these things off are people with internships to ghoulish corporations or non-profits. Otherwise, we are all just acting like they simply ✨ do not exist ✨

If by “people”, do you mean the average everyday person in America? Then yeah I mean I can see what you’re saying, most people, in that sense, make no distinction between Middle Eastern identities.

But if you mean “people”, being the “people” producing hours long mixes on YouTube and Spotify, who are the ones making revisionist claims that the sounds people will hear are authentic to some ethnic identity, then I would like to offer a counterexample. Namely, there are channels with videos such as this one, which say things like,

Embark on a journey to the ancient city of “Uruk,” a legendary Sumerian city. In this track I’ve used the zither, oud, and ney flute, accompanied by the rhythmic beats of the riq and qanun, and of course, a chamber orchestra. Hopefully this track transports you to a bygone era of splendor and wisdom.

And of course this is just one example, but there are tons of other examples out there of this, some of which belong to the YouTube channel I’ve shared.

In your original comment, you say that you went to a random point in the video and that your impression was that his “Iranness is really shining through”. Now, this is just my assumption, but to me this read like that you are saying that your impression of him was that he is being culturally snobbish about Persian music, and idk, that seems kind of problematic to me because ethnic identity, music, and people being educated about both those things on the internet are very intertwined, and I think it’s kind of shitty to characterize him this way without seeing the video first, especially when the content of the video seeks to give some education about Persian music, and it’s impact culturally. Maybe you could elaborate more about what you meant by that?

And for the purposes of traversing our globe a 3rd dimension is unnecessary so why include that in your model?

How would you begin to describe points in the spaces we are discussing? I feel this is a fair question, because in an earlier reply you suggest to picking a point and walking there.

For the surface of a sphere, the most natural way many people would choose to do this would be using the tuples (x,y,z) in R³ and restricting this space to a subspace by the equation X² + Y² + Z² = r², were r is the radius of the sphere. Give a model which can describe points and lines on the surface of a sphere with less than 3 dimensions; i.e., define a space for the surface of a sphere with fewer than 3 dimensions.

The problems with trying to do this by defining a conformal map from 2 dimensional projective spaces to 3 dimensional surfaces is the reason whole books are written about projective geometry.

And even if, its blatantly obvious that the OOP is asking for a straight line in a 2d perspective, not on a map, but on the globe itself because any projection of a globe into a flat space will take the straightness out of a straight line.

This doesn’t make sense. Which projection? The natural one? Such a map is guaranteed to not be a bijection and is potentially not well-defined. Without a clear way of doing this map, you can’t say anything about what happens to lines under the image of such a map.

No we dont live in a 3d space. That’s a mathematical model used to model reality so as to be able to ignore details deemed unecessary for whatever the model is for. It’s a tool to approximate reality not reality itself.

I agree with this at least, I too am tired of the mathematical platonism dominating the public discourse.

How could we prove the Riemann Hypothesis?

I reject that framing.

I mean you can reject it all you want, it doesn’t change anything about what you actually said. I believe you when you say that you are “legitimately concerned about nuclear contamination…” in waterways and that you believe they are making a wrong risk assessment. But what you have done is lumped all nuclear fission energy sources into one category and then went “well all those scientists and engineers think this thing is safe, but I’m built different and I know they’re wrong.” You should seriously investigate why you think this is a rational method of analysis, or from what place this superior understanding you have comes from.

… these **roulette ** machines…

Things don’t just randomly happen and it is simply not materialist, in the mechanical materialist sense, to discuss these events in this way, moreover it is just not productive. You have a N = 0 sample size for this reactor, which makes this statement even more absurd. Furthermore, I shouldn’t have to tell you how unrigorous or unscientific lumping in things in some general and vague way to attack them is. This is a specific reactor with a specific design, iterating on other designs. You don’t need to be on the R&D team for this reactor to be able to say “well from what we have today, these reactors would need to be improved in such and such way if we want to deem them safe…”. I’m not even an expert in my academic field and even I do this sort of thing when reading papers in my field.

Another absurd statement is this next one:

No nation, engineering firm, or corporation is going to book smart out Murphy’s Law.

Murphy’s Law states that if anything can happen it will happen. It doesn’t work in the converse direction. So if it is simply not possible for this reactor to melt down then Murphy’s Law doesn’t magically make this happen. You don’t weigh up ways in which any of the modern reactors can fail and this is the crux of why I’m frustrated about reading your post.

Essentially I want you to justify these things your saying both because I don’t know how nuclear reactors work, and you seemingly want us to believe that you do, since you start off the original post trying to build your credibility. So use that to talk about this reactor from the perspective of how it is engineered or the theory surrounding this reactor and/or other designs similar to it or in the modern era. Otherwise you are using this simply as a cudgel to attack the work these people have done, and I cannot understand why you’d do this unless you think think that you simply just know better than these people, which I’m sorry to have to explain, is the criterion for what defines chauvinist thinking.

There is no need to get into a personal accusatory slander or sea lioning troll fest over this.

I have nothing against you personally. Calling out liberalism and reactionary thought is important to me, so I spend the time doing it when [I think] I see it and have the time to talk. I don’t really appreciate the attempt to belittle my concern over the reactionary content of your post as “accusatory slander” or a “sea lioning troll fest” and I think that speaks more to your sense of self-importance to think that you cannot be prone to reactionary thinking. For what it’s worth, I hope you’d call me out if I was being chauvinist or reactionary and I’d hope I have the perspective needed to learn from it.

As someone who grew up entirely in the US, had hardly zero contact with my German family members, and who fluently speaks, reads and writes German, I have to say your description of German people (on social media) agrees with a similar thing that I think every time I go read what is happening on “German” social media, namely, that some Germans have a very peculiar way of being smug and wrong, such that it is literally indescribable.

That’s why when people I know in the US tell me that they’d like to live in Germany because of how much more “radical” German politics are, it so directly contrasts with my own experience that my brain disassociates for the next 20 minutes to protect my Ego from having heard something so absurd.

So are you saying that in your opinion, all nuclear reactors, which includes this one developed by this team of researchers and engineers, are unsafe because you’ve seen the careless disposition of other people in the workplace(s) that you worked in? What exactly about this qualifies you to make all the other claims you’re making?

But, why has no one pointed out the obvious chauvinism or overt racism in your comment? You are saying that no nuclear reactor designed thus far has been safe, and therefore this one made in China must also be unsafe, or that these scientists and engineers in China must be lying or over hyping the claims they are making. Concerning the technical limitations you are trying to gesture at, you can only come to the conclusion you are coming to if you think that there is something about China, or Chinese people, that forbids it from doing science and engineering better than wherever you come from. Concerning the only thing of substance you make a claim of knowledge for, you are saying that there is something about China or Chinese workers that forbids them from actually giving a fuck about their jobs as nuclear reactor technicians, scientists, and engineers, such that they strictly could not design safer processes or conduct themselves in an appropriately professional way better than wherever you come from.

Moreover, I don’t really understand why you think other people should listen to your perspective on the matter when you have put basically 0 effort within your comment to give any real justification. Essentially you are saying “I worked with these things, so just simply trust me.”

The part I’ve just never understood is why that is a necessary position to hold for a ‘leftist’ political project to be not derided as incoherent/inconsistent, given by the fact that many/a majority of leftist political projects both contain non-vegan comrades that contribute/have contributed greatly to building left politics and of which those projects have not/ are not making veganism a large priority in their political project.

Do vegans here and in other leftist places claim that the lack of their sufficient account for these two components is a factor contributing to why they have failed? Furthermore, do they believe that if current AES projects were to make veganism a priority, that this would weaken the influence of bourgeois thought and strengthen the revolutions occurring there? If so, that’s fine by me for vegans to hold that position, I just don’t really see then what distinguishes that from the same kinds of arguments that Ultra’s and Maoist’s make about past/current socialist projects and why it’s just veganism that can’t be derided for doing it.

The lower strata of the middle class — the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants — all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which Modern Industry is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large capitalists, partly because their specialised skill is rendered worthless by new methods of production. Thus the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population.

It comes from the Manifesto, where Marx talks about how this represents the beginning of the movement towards class struggle. Still, it seems very prescient to what is happening in the west.

rest in piss bozo

CVN 71 is going to Bremerton for regularly scheduled maintenance: https://www.airpac.navy.mil/News/Article/2676116/uss-theodore-roosevelt-to-change-homeport-for-planned-maintenance-upgrades/

Not sure what CVN 72 is doing but they are in the US 3rd Fleet but their facebook page makes it seem like they’re just doing a training exercise probably to prepare for certification to deploy to the 3rd Fleet (the Pacific Fleet)

Yeah we definitely should isolate variables but you’ve nailed it one the head, once that is done we look at each one in concert with all the other social factors and figure it out comprehensively. Sorry to reply by basically just saying “yeah”

There’s many studies “proving” capitalism is the best system. Just because it’s in a study doesn’t mean it isn’t effected by the whole socio-political-economic context in which the study takes place. I don’t think there’s been any studies looking at the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th order effects of socialism but that didn’t dissuade you.

Yeah I think that this is a good point and I really needed to think about this when you pointed it out. I think for me at least there doesn’t seem to be a way to even really “study” this though. Plus I agree that anything that we would think would make progress for kids and their education should be investigated, but ultimately even if socialism fails, we will just simply move past that with whatever would come after it. However if we lose tons of knowledge on something that we could actually study before implementing… I guess I just see it as completely avoidable as opposed to knowing that socialism with always be smothered in the crib by capitalists and thus cannot be put under rigorous scrutiny to be judged on its merits until capitalism dies.

This entire educational system including homework, the “banking model of education”, is founded upon the idea that we can just force people to learn for ~10-20 years and then they’re good for the rest of their life when we should be restructuring society to provide the conditions for enthusiastic, life-long learning.

Super agree with this. I think there are lots of things we could be doing better, and all of them deserve to be looked at.