I’m broke lol, I’m not about to throw cash at S4A if I can just pique their interest instead and get them to think they came up with the idea to narrate the article by themselves

I used to be a terrible mischief-maker in my younger days but, with maturity, I’ve channeled this urge into achieving win-win outcomes for everyone. I have confidence in myself to get this one over the line by leveraging just the right amount of influence at the right moment.

Oh you were thinking of paying haha? I’m just gonna try drawing their attention to the article in such a way that it will just make sense for them to want to narrate it. I got a strategy all planned out already, just gotta wait until an opportunity presents itself to me - likely in the next few weeks. Will keep you posted.

Hell yeah! I didn’t even think about why having anthologies would be a problem until I encountered your post so it’s been a good learning opportunity. It’s not so bad having an anthology because you can timestamp within a playlist but it just makes more sense to have them as separate books because it’s more user-friendly that way.

I’ll see if I can entice Socialism For All to narrate the Jones Manoel article. S4A is on an Anti-Trotskyist reading arc right now and Manoel’s article fits neatly into that scope, plus the article is short - I’d guess it’s well under 30 minutes of runtime for a narration so I feel like that might be enough to get it over the line. I’ll see if I can work some magic in the next few weeks.

Elementary Principles of Philosophy
How To Be A Good Communist

Alright, the only thing I haven’t done is Lavender & Red because I S4A is still in the process of recording that one. I’ll have to remember to finish the job once they have completed it but that aside your playlist is complete.

Wage Labor and Capital
Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

Getting there!

On Practice and Contradiction
Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Other ones are in the pipeline but I have to redownload them because I ran out of space on my harddrive and deleted some of the original files since I wasn’t expecting to need them again.

I’m tired of learning new things

What Is To Be Done?
Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism
State and Revolution

Okay I need to sleep

Btw I’m working on splitting the audiobooks at the moment. I’m gonna have to get to it tomorrow because Audacity wasn’t playing well with my computer.

I don’t know if you saw my edit, but I will try to squeeze it in!

Of course I didn’t see your edit. Do I strike you as one of those ?

Just kidding. About the hostile tone that is. I actually didn’t see it but that’s awesome thanks for letting me know. Also know that your comment inspired me to make this and submit it to the emoji comm lmao

For real, whenever I come across a baby leftist I have to restrain myself from acting like some sort of deranged person from a time travelling scifi movie who has come back to warn people about the dire reality of the future while I recite this article at them at a near-shouting volume.

Instead I’m like “Oh um, you know, uhhh… just be careful of the political organisations who sell you on this idea of them being the valiant underdog and how great everything could have been if only they weren’t robbed of their opportunity. You want to find an organisation that has a positive future perspective rather than just lamenting the past.”

I know that the character limit is tight but I just remembered that the short piece by Jones Manoel titled Western Marxism Loves Purity and Martyrdom, But Not Real Revolution could have saved me years wasted as an eclectic radical. I think it dovetails nicely after Left Communism but it’s updated and takes aim at people who idolise Che yet despise Castro and Stalin, that sort of thing.

I’d like to suggest it, if there’s room and you think it’s suitable. Also if you haven’t read it yet, goddamn you should because it’s really incisive.

Neocolonialism in the streets, social welfare in the sheets. Social democracy is neither democratic nor social (except if we’re talking about socialising the rampant exploitation of the developing world, I guess?)

I’m not the person who you responded to.

I’m talking about the targeting of ethnically Russian Ukrainians in the eastern part of Ukraine (the Donbas region.)

There has been attacks against these people going on since 2014. Thousands upon thousands have died and more have been wounded in this low-grade civil war that became the prelude to the war between Russia and Ukraine.

Here’s a western article filtered through western intelligence describing the situation with some glaring oversights, namely that there has been ultranationalist paramilitary forces operating in the Donbas (Azov, Right Sector, C14, National Militia, OUN et al.) with tacit approval from the Ukrainian government since 2014 and that civilian targets have been routinely been used by the military and the paramilitary groups.

Here’s a short article written by a former USAID officer (!) published by The Atlantic Council (!!) that describes the problem with far-right militias in Ukraine, just so there’s no accusations of bias from me in this discussion.

They’ve literally been targeting civilians who are of the “wrong” ethnicity for nearly a decade now. If that doesn’t count as an attempted genocide, I don’t know what would.

Also that’s some cheap framing of the discussion btw. Fascism isn’t “don’t play defence”. I take it that you have gotten your picture of fascism from a particular, well-known YouTube series. If so, that series is critically flawed and it does a bad job of defining fascism and how it functions. But that’s a different discussion altogether.

I tried to read this article but I teared up too much and I couldn’t see to be able to keep on reading.

If Yoko Ono were still alive she’d write an song with an odious, racially-charged comparison between Hillary and black people and everyone around the world would come together every year on November 9th to listen to this song and to mourn our collective loss.

If you want information about Tibet, let me know.

I am a westerner who was raised Tibetan Buddhist so I’m pretty familiar with Tibetan history and… it’s really not the country which gets painted as this peaceful utopia free from political intrigue or human rights abuses that was all about enacting and embodying compassion.

There’s contemporary examples of this, and perhaps the most obvious example is the Karmapa controversy (try figuring that little doozy on your own without being steeped in Tibetan history lol) which often overlooks significant issues such as the struggle over who would hold the seat of Rumtek monastery in Sikkim and lay claim to the considerable amount held in trust for the Karmapa (which featured a wealthy patron, at one point, stationing a small private military to prevent one of the Karmapas from entering the monastery) along with suspicious death of Jamgon Kongtrol Rinpoche and his delegation in a car accident when he was instructed to “test the brakes” on a newly serviced car (BMW? Mercedes? I forget…) or the historical significance of the then-Dalai Lama outlawing the recognition of the Tai Situpa lineage (and liquidating his monastic holdings and forcibly converting the Kagyu monks under his tutelage to the Gelug school) and the current Dalai Lama lifting this centuries-long ban and the implications this would have on the recognition of the current Karmapa(s).

Then there’s historical examples of this, like the famous example of the politically-influential polymath Lungshar, whose son was considered for being a reincarnation of the next Karmapa (this process of recognising reincarnations, strangely enough, tended to exclusively occur to children within wealthy and politically influential families such as Lungshar’s) who was sent as part of a delegation to Europe by the British who were courting Tibet at the time as they sought to expand their colonial holdings from India up into Tibet. Lungshar was smitten by western political systems and he sought to bring about reforms to democratise the Tibetan theocracy.

Unfortunately for Lungshar, his son died under suspicious circumstances around the time that his agenda for political reforms was running into direct opposition by the conservative political powerbrokers in Tibet (monks/lamas and aristocrats) and, in a surprising turn of events, Lungshar was “discovered” to have been practising black magic (they found a piece of paper with someone’s name on it inside his shoe which was considered black magic - this name happened to be of the aristocrat Timon who held high offices in the Tibetan theocracy and who happened to be a conservative and the main figure who openly opposed Lungshar’s reform agenda. How they knew to check Lungshar’s shoes is a matter for speculation…) and so, as punishment, Lungshar had his eyes gouged out on Timon’s order and Lungshar lost his political influence and the movement supporting the liberalisation of the Tibetan theocracy was effectively extinguished by this act.

There’s this extremely romanticised, idyllic notion that westerners tend to have about Tibet (and the fact that Avatar: The Last Airbender is something treasured by westerners rather than being looked at with a skeptical eye for all of its overt orientalism, to me, speaks volumes about just how canonised this notion is) but history paints a markedly different picture than the one we tend to have.

And occasionally the “We make the rules, you take the orders” rules-based order.

Bro, this war is totally different to every other war, bro!

Trust me, bro! I know we got duped into supporting:

The Korean War

The Vietnam War

The war in Iraq

The other war in Iraq

The war in Afghanistan

The war in the Philippines

The war in Guatemala

The war on Cuba

The war in Laos

The war in Cambodia

The war in Somalia

The war in Yemen

The war in Libya

The war in Grenada

The war in Yugoslavia

…but this time it’s an existential threat!! Trust me, bro!

Hey, it’s made a lot of money for the military-industrial complex too!

You can’t call it a wash like that when, back home, the almighty line is going up.

*brings up an odious historical comparison in a hamfisted attempt at an analogy*

*someone else brings up history relevant to the country in question*

“How dare you!?”

What ethnic cleansing?

Whoop, there it is! I’m quoting that for posterity before you delete this comment.

You’re literally denying an attempted genocide right now, y’know that?