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  • Online debate tribunes are cool as fuck and I love that my organisation has one. I don't have enough energy to contribute to the discussion on a national scale, but it's fantastic to be able to read so many writings from comrades in order to better refine the line both at the base and at the top. Democratic centralism is the best organisational methodology even in the slogan: "freedom of criticism, unity of action".

  • My mind is stuck on the mafia/mob metaphor for the US (well maybe more just literal than metaphor in some cases) and lately I've been thinking about it in relation to what people call "enshittification". The dynamic where a startup gets some nice "friendly" capital injections to build, build, build and grow, grow, grow, and then eventually there comes a part where the investors want a return and the product gets made more predatory and user-unfriendly in a desperate bid to make it especially profitable.

    So it's sorta like "hey, we're here to help" later "we're gonna break your legs if you don't have something to show for it"

    But a lot of the leg-breaking gets offloaded to the customer, for whom this dynamic is mostly invisible as a process and they just see the bait of "cool product" without the strings attached; the "get their hooks in you and get you dependent on it before they start trying to extract as much profit from you as possible." And once the customer actually sees it, it's too late, they're already personally attached and have to hurt themselves by leaving or hurt themselves by putting up with it.

    And this is just like... most of the US tech world? Shit's sickening.

    • I see it more as a subsidy, the startup with more capital manages to kill its competition (if any) due to them being subsidized by venture capitalists and can operate with negative margins, and they turn predatory once they have aquired a monopoly share.

      You know how they complain about "ccp subsidies", well venture capitalists are pretty much doing exactly that.

      • Most of that makes sense to me, though I'd think the nature of a socialist government giving a subsidy is going to be pretty different than venture capitalists, since the socialist government will not be wanting to extract value for a minority ruling class. That's where the mafia analogy more comes in for me, is the nature of it not having any kind of intrinsically supportive motive in the capitalist case; there's a "catch" and someone is probably going to suffer at some point to fulfill that. Whereas with the socialist structure subsidy comparison, if there were any "catch", it would be more like "this better bring value to society" or "this better not be trying to bring down our socialist government". So while the impact in a competitive space might be similar, the outcome should be pretty different for the customer / end user / whatever you want to call them.

        I'd also say the socialist case is more incidentally competitive, in that it bypasses the problems of capitalist funding precisely because it's willing to do things for the sake of something other than profit (operating at a "loss" isn't necessarily perceived as a "loss"). Versus the capitalist, such behavior can only ever be considered temporarily valuable for the longer term payout.

  • Trump: "uh so biden managed to unite china, dprk, russia and iran?, watch me doing something more difficult and unite quisling korea, japan and china! Im built different"

  • Found this thing called the Tim Dillon podcast, and he's a typical Imperialist conservative. I only clicked his video because I saw him criticiszing the recent deportations of protesting students and honestly made some good points...then he started to clarify that he doesn't buy any of the "gobbledyremoved" about Palestinean land being stolen or colonization, or just thought they were being silly. Just completely undercutting everything he said before. I rememebered that a lot of conservatives will always hate Muslims and indigenous people more than they hate bending the knee to another country.

  • Working on egocide

    • Ecocide?

      • Egocide, killing ego.

        Unfortunately I have depression and was debilitated by it (on and off and on again) for lack of better words about a year, its all quite sad if you let it be. BUT, for lack of better words my ego just has to die for me to move on to the next stage in life, and as a process it's actually going quite well which I am glad about. I've been working on this process for a while and I'm proud of myself. I'm trying again and I've got a stupid grin on my face doing it. Couple really scary things I have to face soon, so I'll have to keep braving the storm but until then, its just egocide I have to worry about.

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