Federation has been great for me developing better internet habits. Since every other post is directly or indirectly about federation, I spend less time scrolling though this site. Which is good, I’m still here quite a bit I really needed to cut back.

(Just a clarification comrade - and I could be wrong, I’m doing this from memory - but I think the 100 million number is genocide across all of the western hemisphere from 1492. The figure I’ve seen for just what was contained the present USA is around 10 million. Doesn’t make it any less evil of course, death to America, but just wanted to clarify that for posterity)

Exactly. We should not take this at face value.

I attended a Christian university in the early 00s. Obviously not a representative sample size but guys around me used the f-word slur like it was going out of style. And while a bunch of white Christian college guys are gonna use that word a lot more, it’s use was still fairly common among other people I knew.

Mostly correct but I want to point that China does depend on the US for food. I mean I’m sure it’s something the CPC thinks about a lot and I assume they have a plan to reduce dependency but at the moment they import quite a bit of food from the US.

Marx never sat in a self-driving car

Marx, like every other person alive when he was, probably never thought about a self-driving car because regular-ass cars hadn’t been invented yet.

But you know what Marx thought (and wrote) about a lot? Technology. In the first volume of Capital, he outlines how the very technologies we develop are part of the superstructure and reflect the needs of the current mode of production. In his excellent podcast series Reading Capital With Comrades, Derek Ford uses the white noise machine as an example. The capitalist economy doesn’t really care about noise pollution any more than it cares about air and water pollution so workers are forced to just deal with it. We also have a premium on sleep because we all get worked to death and capitalism loves to take ever increasing amounts of our waking hours. So along comes the white noise machine. Something that, instead of solving the problems of noise and letting workers get more sleep, just allows them to cope with the situation and get to work.

So in that sense, the self-driving car is absolutely an innovation of capitalism. It doesn’t solve the problem of us destroying ever more land so everyone above a certain income level can have a quarter-acre of land and a “house” made of particle board and oil-based products. It doesn’t put automation to uses that allow for more productivity in the service of human flourishing. Nope. In fact, I guarantee you once self-driving cars become ubiquitous white collar workers will be expected to work the same number of hours in the office AND in the car to and from the office on top of that; and blue collar workers will have to watch ads or something. They’re not actually going to improve the quality of life, they will actually make things worse but more profitable for capital as they will be able to take over even more of our waking hours.

Marx saw that under socialism (and only under socialism), technology and automation could be unleashed to enhance our lives by making us more productive and thus allowing us to work less. Hell, even Keynes figured we’d have 20 hour work weeks by now. But what Keynes didn’t understand and Marx did is that only if the workers control the advancement of tech, can it be used to make our lives better.

If you gave people the choice of either working 5 hours and taking a bus, or working 10 hours but getting a heckin’ cool Muskmobile death trap, who would choose the latter other than the most bazinga-brained labor aristocrats who would rather die than sit next to a worker on public transportation?

I’m vegan, and things are still a million times better here (and in IRL leftist space) than it is in the real world.

I think another factor is these people have spent most of their leftist lives mostly isolated from actual “real world” leftists. If you’re a Marxist professor or writer in the 70s, who are you gonna be interacting with other than maybe other Marxist academics. When you let your views percolate in your brain (or only interacting with other egghead leftists), you end up being unable to grow and change.

Like, I really don’t think myself or most leftists who grow up in the internet will get like this when we’re in our 80s. We joke about touching grass, but the truth is being able to interact with other regular leftists from across the world on a place like Hexbear really does keep the brain worms in check, I believe.

This bozo voted against a law that would raise the age a minor could marry someone over 21 from 15 to 17. So he thinks a 15 year old should legally be allowed to marry like some 40 year old (not that 17 is much better).

This whole insistence a lot of conservatives have that children should be allowed to marry adults is of course reprehensible... but also just bizarre to me. Like, I grew up deep in conservative, fundamentalist evangelical culture. And the idea of teenagers getting married would have been appalling to everyone I know. But I also grew up in the suburbs of a big city. Who is actually for this? Is this some rural cultural thing?

As a fellow white guy, if I would dare to quote Malcolm X, I would be for damn sure that I wasn't using his quote in a context that would go against everything he actually stood for.

I have a half-baked idea of using Che to push kids left in the way chuds use Teddy Roosevelt or Marcus Aurelius. Seriously, reading about Che it's almost like he's some fictional character come to life.

And I've always wanted to do some drunk hexbear posting, just never got around to it.

“So, let me get this straight. You live in your momma’s basement, but you got a Coach purse,”

This person does not really exist outside of Dave Ramsay's head. He takes two different, unrelated data points ("young people are driving luxury good growth" and "more young people are living together") and tries to mash them together like a kid trying to mash together a Duplo and a Lego. It doesn't occur to him that there can be wealth disparities within Gen Z; that the wealthier end are buying Coach purses while a very large other group is living at home.

And fuck this guy, like most "investment advisors" this guy doesn't actually know jack shit about things but he has to pretend he does so he sounds like a "trusted financial advisor". Nearly every investment advisor is a glorified car salesman.