While it may seem to be a smart money move, it can result in a costly productivity and innovation lag for the economy.

Lmaoooo

“I know you want to make things last and have a habitable planet to live on rather than destroying it in the name of short-term profit gains, but… have you thought about the economy?!? DID YOU CONSULT THE ECONOMY BEFORE YOU CONSIDERED TRYING TO LIVE SUSTAINABLY.”

Sounds like something like:

“Reddit is too much of an echo chamber, I’m leaving.”

later

“I realized the problem. It’s not that Reddit was an echo chamber. It’s that it wasn’t my personal echo chamber.”

I would compare it to climate change. It’s not a thing you see happen all at once. In fact, you can go years without seeing (much) direct impact to you. “Oh, the weather is bad this year, how strange, but it has been bad in the past, right? Oh, the prices are going up, but inflation has long been a thing, right?”

But if it passes tipping points, like the transition of water going over into the boiling state, more drastic shit can start occurring in a short space of time. What that entails is difficult to say because capitalism is already a self-centered house of cards and it doesn’t have loyalty to any one nation-state. But I am hopeful that China and others like them have the power to prevent it from morphing into full on barbarism; not in a direct intervention way, at least not to the imperial core itself, but they can (and already are to some extent) helping the imperialized peoples have an alternative. So while the imperial west is shifting more toward fascistic barbarism in order to compensate for collapsing capitalist bubbles, the anti-imperialist regions are shifting toward building an alternative world order, one that is not dependent on that bubble and one which has some sustainability baked in.

I fully expect the empire to be vicious even as it declines, but the will to be vicious alone does not enable its viciousness and every time it overextends and damages its own brittle, unsustainable logistics, it makes its viciousness a little bit harder to successfully carry out in the future. A lot of the harm it’s still able to do probably comes from inertia, but it sucks at maintenance, so that can only last for so long.

And it can be interesting to learn such things. I phrased it as I did to emphasize that liberation comes first; not with intent to shut down curiosity or investigation.

What’s your opinion on religion?

Largely irrelevant to what we get into here. At some point, I became conscious of how prominent western atheism gets used as another variation of racism and imperialism. So I try to look at the religions of colonized and imperialized peoples differently than I would the religions of the colonizer, for example. In other words, I say it is largely irrelevant because I’m not going to reject an anti-imperialist struggle because of its religiosity, but neither am I going to especially support it if it’s not. Liberation comes first and the form of religion is also impacted by the rest of society and politics, so a colonial society is going to warp religious practice and beliefs toward something more sociopathic than a liberated communal society.

I arrived at atheism through growing up USian catholic and gradually coming to reject it, and that is mainly where my knowledgeable criticisms of religion are confined to (that and western christianity more generally). I have retained some of the pro-social components of the religious mindset of caring about what happens to others, but I reject the gross the limitations of its solutions and find that many of its adherents seem less than committed to its pro-social teachings. Typically, its solutions amount to charity and individual piousness, which is obviously nonsense in practice. The catholic church demonstrated how pathetic of a conception of morality that is with the sexual abuse scandals of its own priests. They have since adopted more strict measures in their organization to try to prevent a repeat, but as far as I know, they still tend to preach the same individualistic, charity-based nonsense. For all the christians in the west fantasize about being persecuted, they sure do a great job of toeing the status quo line rather than challenging it on a systemic level with their teachings.

But it was not a dissatisfaction with religion alone that led me to atheism. The whole christian conception of an “all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving” being is riddled with excuses in order to justify how a being like this simultaneously exists, yet also doesn’t step in and stop atrocities from happening. The most common of these excuses is the “free will” argument that doing so would undermine people’s “free will”. But one human being senselessly murdering another also undermines that other human being’s “free will”, doesn’t it? And human societies generally criminalize and prosecute murder. They also generally have emergency services that try to resuscitate and rescue people who are in danger, rather than leaving them to the “free will” of their choices. This conception of a god essentially makes god look less moral than even some of the most imperialist, capitalist societies; that it can intervene in an instant, effortlessly, to end enormous amounts of trauma, suffering, and neglect, and does not do so.

However, this is not how all religions view god and some of them have multiple gods, so that’s why I emphasize that it is mainly a criticism of western christianity. I do not pretend to have studied most religions and so I try not to weigh in on them in this regard. And especially if they are a religion specific to colonized/imperialized peoples, I am extra wary of weighing in because doing so critically could easily take on the character of western Chauvinism and colonial racism.

I’m glad it could help in that way. Tbh, I get a bit self-conscious complaining about this kind of thing. Even though I don’t usually find that kind of thing funny even in an ironic way, I generally try to assume good faith that people are, like, righteously angry and going for catharsis or things such as that and don’t want to chastise them over trying to process their feelings and deal with the horrors of the world. But I also get concerned if it looks like it’s edging into territory of, “What if we were the baddies? Haha jk, unless…”

I would say it’s one thing to have a silly looking image and it’s another to explicitly state that it would be funny if they nuked a particular country. But this is the problem of irony poisoning. Stuff that may have only ever started out as over the top jokes can reach a point it starts sounding a bit too serious and sincere.

I wouldn’t want to put this behavior label on hexbear as a generality. It reads like sociopathic revenge fantasy under the guise of anti-imperialism. Something that China’s policy behaves nothing like btw, so it’s all the more weird fantasizing about China acting petty and vengeful for laughs.

How does this have so many upvotes? What exactly is funny about nuking an entire country?

Fair enough.

I read through, but am not finding any detail info on what kind of workers these were that were fired. The wording is:

Today, we will begin reducing our workforce by more than 13,000 employees across the organization, and significantly reduce our outsourced and other outside labor expenses.

But I’m not sure if that means some of what counts as the 13k are outsourced and/or contract workers, or if that’s in addition to the 13k.

That said, I’m doubtful that most or all are engineer types, especially the more smug ones. The most experienced, which are also the most well-off financially and can contribute to them being the most smug politically, are also the most valuable and it’s why they get paid the class-consciousness-distorting money. It’s the ones on the lower rungs, including non-engineers in CS roles and the like, who are going to most easily have a business case made for firing them.

I did not know that, but either way, what I meant by “started small” is more that Amazon was an operation he started with others. I remember researching in the past that he got significant financial help with it and that most, if not all, of the programming was done by others (I specifically remember researching it to debunk the pro-billionaire mythos that he bootstrapped his way to the top). But it did technically start out as a small business and then grow. As opposed to, like, if he’d simply been handed control over an existing family company or set up for a role in a major company through family connections and education.

Thanks for the replies. Don’t have followup to add for all of them, but I am reading it all and digesting. My general takeaway so far (welcome to further correction/commentary) is:

“Keep class interests in mind, but be careful of oversimplifying where people land in it and what that means for them, especially if they are a group that is closer to proletariat than to capitalist.”

Hmm, that makes sense to me.

Yeah, I think it’s more clear when you put it that way. I may not have a clear enough understanding of the layers of class dynamics. But I keep coming back to a point about small businesses and how they play into things, and trying to crystallize it more so. I notice there’s this narrative (not so much in our kind of circles, but more in people who are dissatisfied with capitalism to some degree and may not have much political clarity beyond that) of “supporting small businesses” and such as that, but it doesn’t seem to take into account what the interests of a small business are and how they can develop; instead, it often seems to treat them as a static form that will remain small and unmarred by the machinations of conglomerate level capital.

So would someone like Jeff Bezos be an example of that “luck” since he started out small? Or would he be more of a cross between “new money” and “old money”, since he also got financial help to do it?

That seems like (I am not entirely sure) the kind of distinction you’re talking about, is the difference of capital that comes from “old money” (power passed down) versus “new money” (a breakthrough pf petite bourgeoisie to bourgeoisie), with the first one being the norm and the second one being the oddity because of class antagonisms/interests largely keeping petite bourgeoisie from moving upward in class.

The last couple sentences of its output shifting to corporate sycophantic tripe is pure pain.

Why should anyone expect China to turn into interventionist-style diplomacy, USA-style but communist?

It does seem like this is essentially what some people want China to be, without considering the resulting ramifications or required logistics. Whether we like it or not, that does not appear to be the path they have planned for and they do appear to be big on planning, so why would they throw away plans and try to rush into a different direction that they haven’t planned for? It’s their careful planning and manufacturing positioning that has made them so powerful to begin with; this within a globally anti-communist, capitalist world order led by the western empire. They’ve been building and transitioning for decades. They don’t benefit from destruction in the way that imperialism and capitalist led order does. Capitalism and imperialism can work together to level a whole region and then swoop in to profit off of rebuilding it and create tendrils of control in that rebuilding process, and the west has done this before. China’s socialist mode rejects such a process, instead trying to form mutually beneficial ties, so they don’t have a motive to court hot war the way imperialist nations do.

In other words, what I’m trying to get at is part of the reason the US is willing to act “interventionist” in the first place is because it can profit off of doing so, even if the process to get there involves millions of deaths and infrastructure in ruins. Socialist projects are going to be much more reluctant for the common humane cause reason that they don’t want more death and destruction.

Still, China has intervened before in history when the conflict was close enough, in Korea. But that was also a much closer (geographically) existential threat. Trying to intervene more directly in Palestine might win them praise from the same kind of people who praise Che Guevara and reject Fidel Castro, but I don’t think they are positioned well at this stage to accomplish much in that form. They don’t have hundreds of military bases from which to stage global interventionist operations. They could do more in the form of cutting trade ties, but this practice also means isolating themselves more in trade and manufacturing power, which is the main form of leverage they have in anti-imperialism outside of being ready for hot war, if it comes to that.

Like say they cut all trade ties with israel. Okay, but the US is what’s funding israel, so shouldn’t they cut trade ties with the US too? And what of the EU NATO members who also play a part in it? Should they cut trade ties with them as well? What about all of the comprador states that serve the western empire? Where does it end? China decades ago chose the path of “dealing with the devil” (roughly speaking) in order to shift the global balance of power and so far it seems to be working. It doesn’t mean they directly support what imperialism is doing. It means they’re working through the contradictions of engaging with global capitalism while trying to build local socialism, in order to shift the form of the world order away from empire. Until the empire has declined sufficiently that is less of an existential military threat, I don’t see how they can logistically do much intervening beyond diplomacy without isolating themselves.

I don’t expect this to be a permanent state for them to be in. It’s all about transition and it’s just nightmarish that things have escalated against Palestine while the multi-polar world order is still finding its feet. As I write this, I am thinking it is possible that this is the very rising shift the zionists fear and this is part of why they’re trying to escalate, but they are overextending even as they genocide and court wars in the rest of the region; they displayed this when they picked a direct fight with Iran. A multi-polar world order led by a communist vanguard party government cannot, in the long-term, accommodate a lawless colonial project, whose existence is fixated on endless wars and expansion.

I am touched, thank you. I could not manage it without the good example and learning help from others over the years. ❤️

Socialism is not, as a practice, for the purpose of supporting imperialism or genocide.

That said, I think I see what’s going on. There is probably a better primer on dialectics someone could provide, but this is what I have on hand to recommend, so here it is: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_17.htm

Here is the conclusion from it:

We may now say a few words to sum up. The law of contradiction in things, that is, the law of the unity of opposites, is the fundamental law of nature and of society and therefore also the fundamental law of thought. It stands opposed to the metaphysical world outlook. It represents a great revolution in the history of human knowledge. According to dialectical materialism, contradiction is present in all processes of objectively existing things and of subjective thought and permeates all these processes from beginning to end; this is the universality and absoluteness of contradiction. Each contradiction and each of its aspects have their respective characteristics; this is the particularity and relativity of contradiction. In given conditions, opposites possess identity, and consequently can coexist in a single entity and can transform themselves into each other; this again is the particularity and relativity of contradiction. But the struggle of opposites is ceaseless, it goes on both when the opposites are coexisting and when they are transforming themselves into each other, and becomes especially conspicuous when they are transforming themselves into one another; this again is the universality and absoluteness of contradiction. In studying the particularity and relativity of contradiction, we must give attention to the distinction between the principal contradiction and the non-principal contradictions and to the distinction between the principal aspect and the non-principal aspect of a contradiction; in studying the universality of contradiction and the struggle of opposites in contradiction, we must give attention to the distinction between the different forms of struggle. Otherwise we shall make mistakes. If, through study, we achieve a real understanding of the essentials explained above, we shall be able to demolish dogmatist ideas which are contrary to the basic principles of Marxism-Leninism and detrimental to our revolutionary cause, and our comrades with practical experience will be able to organize their experience into principles and avoid repeating empiricist errors. These are a few simple conclusions from our study of the law of contradiction.

You might be inclined to think I’m trying to “make excuses” somehow taking the conversation in this direction. Why I’m taking it in this direction is you seem to be operating on a binary train of thought that goes something like: if there is any perceived/alleged contradiction between one thing and another, then one or the other must be wholly thrown out. With dialectics, we work out how to navigate the contradictions inherent in things in order to develop toward something better.

Idealism might say we can overcome this with sheer willpower and conviction instead, and bypass the need to engage with contradictions. But the evidence would indicate that doesn’t work, especially at scale, and people largely need to be organized in relation to their conditions in order to develop into a different form, which then changes their conditions and also changes the organization and so on.

If you’d like, you are welcome to dislike me and think that I, like you speak about China, am not doing enough for the most victimized in the world. But I will still try to make this point about process and development.