Yeah, one of the major reasons the Soviet leadership failed too

The word colony comes from the Latin word colonia. I guess you could say the Romans were “European colonizers” but their socioeconomic systems were fundamentally different from modern Europe.

There’s something called an environmental Kuznets curve that suggests that a population will sacrifice environmental health to industrial degradation in favor of per capita income up to a point, after which they are affluent enough to care, and after this environmental health improves. China seems to be at the inflection point.

I didn’t mean you specifically but I’m so glad that happened! I’ve recently left the US but while there I was active with DSA, labor organizing, and a local urbanist collective. My biggest gripe with the American left was always their insistence on throwing their weight behind this or that Democrat. Maybe now it will finally be clear that mass mobilization is the only way forward. We did this in the 1930s and we can do it again today.

Please actually do this. Not on the internet. Join a local activist chapter. Go to the meetings. Use your speaking voice. Contrary to what politicians and corporations tell you, it is possible to organize society in a way that does not result in oligarchy.

I bought one from Aventon. It was easy to repair and didn’t require anything special.

What is wrong with it? I’ve been using it for years and it does what it’s supposed to do.

The Bush administration pioneered the theory of the unitary executive, which is the idea that the president can do anything because he is the president. They’re the ones who kicked over the guardrails, they just did it in the context of an endless war that they started. For more on this I recommend Sheldon Wolin’s work.

Chomsky’s stroke came at a really critical time and we could use a successor to point out how idiotic the whole movement is.

The idea that LLMs are anywhere close to having the general intelligence needed to comprehend this kind of statement is ludicrous.

Legitimately curious about the stockings. I get all the other jokes in this thread but that one went over my head.

Literally children who want big loud vroom vroom trucks with lots of chrome.

They are usually uneducated and poor with trauma in their backgrounds. They have no idea what they’re signing up for.