Maybe? Not sure actually. But if it’s about learning the language, here are a few decent ones:

• jugendinfo has short articles on many topics with easy language for a young, leftist target audience. Not sure who’s behind it, some Kurdish group probably. Lots of short daily news on various social media, only few select articles on the linked website.

• Activism Munich news, interviews and also lots of German translations from English sources. Anti-Imperialist. Also on YouTube and other social media.

• world socialist website it’s a trotskyist newspaper. But still decent takes on many issues.

• Junge Welt leftist daily newspaper.

• Meinungsfreiheit Palästina pro Palestine news on different social media

• Medico International a non profit for humanitarian aid, that also publishes a short monthly magazine. Surprisingly good articles sometimes.

Careful if you search for leftist news sites on your own: many supposedly leftist ones are “Antideutsch” meaning zionist, imperialist, pro NATO, pro Genocide.

It’s a math thing, more than a physics thing.

With Newtons law of gravity, there is a big, but seemingly solved problem that’s been known for a long time: things must not touch. Potential energy is calculated by dividing a term by the distance of two objects. You can’t devide by zero, so if the distance goes to zero, energy goes to infinity, which doesn’t make sense. The solution is to prevent the centers of mass of things from touching. This isn’t a problem, because in real life, masses aren’t points, but solid objects and the centers of mass are in the middle, so they can’t touch, because the outer parts collide first. And in simulations you can just make a rule that says no touching.

This kind of gap in a formula, where it stops being defined, is called a singularity in math. And to deal with them, you just have to know, when to expect them. For hundreds of years, people thought, collisions were the only singularities in Newtonian gravity. Easy to avoid, so not a problem. Now in this paper, they prove, that there are other, non-collission singularities and give an explicit example.

The arrangement in the picture has the middle mass going back and forth between the two binaries faster and faster and it reaches infinite speed in finite time. It basically leaves the universe, like a glitch in a video game. Also the reverse is allowed too: you just need the four masses from the two binary systems and there is nothing in Newtonian gravity that says a fifth mass can’t randomly appear from out of nowhere with infinite speed, slow down and settle between the too binaries.

Since only five masses were necessary to create this problematic constellation, it’s likely that there are many more possible.

Luckily, we have Einsteins theory of gravity now, so don’t have to worry about Newton too much. However, this does have its own, completely different kind of singularity, where the curvature of spacetime goes to infinity. People initially thought, that would be a problematic, unphysical behavior, like Newtons singularities, but it turns out that’s just a real thing that happens: black holes. Here the annoying singularities are mercifully shrouded in an event horizon, so at least we don’t have to look at them. Unless… But there is a solution for that too.

Now just add a second binary star system and you get infinite energy and momentum in finite time*:

*if Newtonian physics were true and stars and planets were points and everything was perfectly aligned

So sorry to read that. Every comrad deserves to have friends who would come over in times of need.

Me too, me too… Maybe I should just let that romantic ideal go though.

Mostly illiterate is practically true already for the U.S. with most adults reading skills worse than those of sixth graders.

Yes, compression algorithms work, because they are tied to a specific file format, that everyone knows exactly how to read. That’s not exactly the case with language, but it’s similar. We share context during the speech act, but often not enough for communication to work. Rather, the context is culturally and situationally embedded. What language does is not to communicate meaning by directly referencing the world (compressed or not), but to affect certain acts by it’s use in context. That’s why Wittgenstein, who came up with these ideas long before AI, sais, that human communication consists of moves in a shared language game. Another funny comic about this.

It helps to distinguish between personal belief and institutionalized religion.

I’m sympathetic to the existentialist ideas. That in a meaningless, absurd world (Camus), the struggle for meaning, despite knowing that it’s absurd, can at least help us to live authentic(De Beauvoir) and free (Satre) lives. And maybe even make our own kind of meaning.

Of course living authentically meant these philosophers were all active communists as was the person they admired the most for personifying existentialism better than them in her own life, Simon Weil.

Also, have you tried writing about your life? It’s called narrative writing and might make you feel even worse (yay!). At least initially. But the idea is to own your live as an author, even if it’s challenging. It’s a kind of framing technique. You’d be a bit like an existential hero. Those always suffer, but now it’s your story and at least you alone get to decide, how you tell and interpret it.

Yes, have you heard of Paulo Freires Pedagogy of the Oppressed? Some central points: liberation must come from the oppressed and not be imposed externally, rejecting internalized oppression is necessary to reclaim our humanity, awareness of economical contradictions in order to become active to change them, praxis as the combination of reflection and action. Also much more.

Since so many commenters can’t seem to imagine it: children don’t need punishment. I never got “disciplined” at home. No physical punishment, no time out. And I never hurt anybody, wasn’t a bully, always had a trusting relationship with my parents. Things weren’t perfect, far from it, but punishment or making children feel bad on purpose were not what was missing. Those have been scientifically proven to be counterproductive. To many people cling to them, because they’re what they experienced and they never learned how to actually talk to children instead and maybe even help them work through their emotions (actually that last part kind of was missing in my case, but that’s beside the point). That video posted in the other comment explains it well.

Okay, I’ll be the silent part

Juggling. I’d find some nice stones or pinecones and teach everyone how to juggle and do some tricks. I also know an ancient game you can play with stones or knuckle bones. And I know some songs. And stories. People in the stone age had lots of free time to pass, so all of these would come in handy.

Yes, I guess the economic reasons for patriarchy would still be there. Splitting productive wage labor from unpaid labor that reproduces the ability to work would still be helpful to capital.

Okay, I’m convinced. Let’s go ahead and turn everyone gay.

I think, Venice is still the only city literally charging an entrance fee. They do that, because they got more tourists, than the city could handle. But I think what you have heard might be about tourist taxes. Many cities charge those per night. But you won’t notice it directly, it’s just that, if you’re staying in a hotel, they’ll automatically add it to the price of the room.

I second Prague. It’s beautiful and worth it whether you come for the history or the culture or the atmosphere.

Even if everyone was suddenly turned gay, having grown up in a patriarchal society might still leave many cis men unable to express their emotions, form meaningful connections and do anything effective about their loneliness.

The Bretton Woods System failed 1971 and Nixon traveled to China 1972.

Not a complete answer, but a question like this shouldn’t forget the global context. As it is, the question implies, that the answer can only lie in the organization of national party politics or national economic politics. I agree, that these are important and this is still a great question. But missing the context would obviously be wrong.

developmental ability of capital

This is too abstract. It wasn’t just any capital, but huge amounts of US-Dollars from the global hegemon. They kept flowing in for decades in exchange for China saving US (and thereby global) capitalism after the gold standard failed. This was done by enabling the so called Walmart economy with “made in China”, the mountains of US national debt with China holding dollars and state bonds and indirectly the petro dollar system.

It’s a very different situation from the Soviet Union having to fight a cold war with the global empire to China becoming the main reason capitalism can live on and integrating into the world economic system as a vital part of it.

China continued to prop up global capitalism for decades. Every four to seven years a periodic crisis occurs and while production slumps in the imperial core, the continuous growth of China provides a solid rock for capital to lean on:

From 1989 to the 1990s, it fueled neoliberalism, allowing the outsourcing boom by becoming the low wage workshop of the world. We can’t talk about neo liberalism without talking about China. In 2001 China initiated a boom of foreign investment by joining the WTO and started to accumulate huge amounts of US-Dollars, propping up the national US economy and the global dollar system, by becoming the global engine of growth. When the whole system threatened to crash down burning, in the mortgage crisis of 2008/09, China alone acted anti-cyclical and initiated the largest ever stimulus program(relative to GDP). Commodity prices rebounded, saving many economies in Latin America and Africa (and Australia). Again during the COVID crisis, locking down hard and recovering quickly meant Chinas demand could rescue resource heavy economies.

Not making moral judgments here, just talking about economic facts. I’m all for multi-polarity, the fall of the US empire and also remain hopeful about the very peaceful, non hegemonic rise of the Chinese one. Also the main task of leftists in the imperial core is not to critique China, but to remember “the main enemy is at home”. To fight US and European imperialism where ever possible. But since this question was explicitly about comparing the Soviet Union with China, center of the discussion really should be the alignment with or against the global hegemon, who’s decisions have a big impact on who is allowed to rise and who isn’t.

I hope this discussion doesn’t devolve into normative arguments about whether this is seen as a betrayal (as maoists see it) or a brilliant (or the only viable) strategy. I find it more helpful to look at the big picture of the ebb and flow of capital and how it really is influenced by policy instead of the question what political leaders might have privately thought or intended.

At work: Leftist, with leftist friends who aren’t Marxists: Marxist, with Marxists: Marxist-Leninist.

Yes, definitely. It depends on the context when this one.