Orcocracy [comrade/them]

Trotskyists have the right idea about focusing so much on publishing and distributing their own newspapers. Unfortunately those papers are filled with unapproachable Trotskyist rants, usually about big global issues, and contain basically zero real journalism. A free leftist local newspaper with a website and a print copy handed out at a few busy transit stations every morning could, for example, actually send a reporter to report on local goings-on in the town hall and so on. Given how so many local news outlets have closed over the past couple of decades and left many towns and cities without any local news, the average person might actually want to read such a paper.

I’m reading this aloud while doing my very best George W Bush impression.

How did you hear about these many happy people who are using it regularly?

City hikes + street photography is a fun little hobby

Is having lots more green energy not a result?

Asking what’s the difference between a black stone and a black rock sounds like the setup for a bad joke.

The YouTube algorithm. Open a private window and start clicking on no-commentary playthough videos or some other innocuous stuff and then watch it start to put fascism in the recommendations.

I think we can all broadly sympathize with the complaints about politicking, but this rant also includes a lot of red flags. For example, saying that you have “never had any interest” in things like “being agreeable when you disagree” suggests that this person is just another one of the big ego assholes in the department, a full-of-themselves “rockstar academic” who can’t even be bothered with basic human kindness.

They better remember to put the wrist strap attachment thing on, otherwise the next hull breach might be caused by a flying joycon.

This map is going out of its way to draw lines along the pre-WW2 German borders including the bits Hitler annexed before the war.

You’ve heard of the slow food movement? Sarcasm aside, I am advocating for the slow dishwashing movement. I am 100% serious about this. Well, maybe 75%. Or 45%. I am somewhat serious about this.

My god you’re right. I’ve been wasting years of my life by leaving that one bowl with a bit of juice from some tomatoes at the bottom until later when I did the rest of the dishes. Think of how much I could have achieved in that time!

Hang on, if you’re washing dishes before you are done cooking and long before you even set the table or start eating anything, what exactly is it that you are washing? One big knife and a chopping board? How did this become the standard advice?

Also lots of academic books printed on paper about the internet and society in pretty much every university library on Earth.

This chart from the OECD (if you scroll down just a bit) lists out which countries paid companies (“job retention schemes”) and which had various direct pay-outs to the general public:

https://www.oecd.org/coronavirus/policy-responses/supporting-livelihoods-during-the-covid-19-crisis-closing-the-gaps-in-safety-nets-17cbb92d/

What is even is this chart? Lots of the countries had their own extra programmes and benefits in 2020 to the point where there was a growing body of “maybe we can just turn it into a UBI” discourse, even from many of our political masters. Well, until the billionaires and corporations who actually run our “democracies” said no. But this chart includes none of it. It’s worth remembering that for a brief time across much of the world a quite different economic system was almost spontaneously born from the sudden shock of changes in global material conditions, until the established powerful structures in society wrenched us back to the zombified corpse of neoliberal capitalism.

I don’t know if it even is “piracy” though. If you go to a library and ask to see today’s newspaper or borrow that latest bestseller and to make a few copies with your phone or the library photocopiers they will just let you do it. Sure you could subscribe for way too much money to various online services and do this at home, but libraries do indeed let you have this kind of shit for free. Some libraries even let you borrow console games for free too.

But that’s all physical media. All the rules about online digital media were written during the neoliberal period so digital copies of things are all extremely restrictive and locked down. Doing what would be considered totally normal and mundane just a couple of decades ago is now suddenly a radical act of “piracy”.

This might not even be a real phenomenon, never mind the supposed causes. Several of those charts are very unclear about any relationships between the pre-Mao and post-Deng “elites” or other supposedly similar situations in the other regions covered. The definition of who “elites” are is also wildly different throughout the thread and fluctuates from income percentiles to “intellectuals” to feudal soldiers and beyond. This whole thing is dressed up as hardcore logic brainscience but is filled with nothing but shitty infographics that don’t say what the tweets claim they do, compare poorly with each other, and are used to justify a conclusion that is fucking eugenics. I don’t think there’s actually anything here except for a big stinking pile of bullshit.