Chapotraphouse

The process of capitalism is 50 different companies making 8 different shampoos each consolidating down into 1 monopoly that makes everything that survives the market pressures.

At this point capitalism has efficiently discovered exactly which products are left over that people actually want and the company can be acceptably state-owned with zero issues as to product range.

Socialist use of markets should be to use them to produce this outcome with all consumer goods, do not fight the process of monopoly, instead allow it to take place then nationalise after the process has fully run its course.

Markets are really good at this shit. When a new product is invented markets should be used to carry out this process to turn that new product into 50 competing variants until the survivors of the market battle royale get to be the socialist products.

I have not actually thought this through at all I typed it as I thunk it. I'm hitting the post button and immediately going to bed.

from HSK 5 Chinese Listening Comprehensible Input/China's Political System | Talking China Learning Chinese 说中国学中文

I was curious to see how a Chinese national youtuber who teaches Mandarin would describe her country's political system for a foreign audience and, well, I guess I found out

can't decide if this would be more or less painful with a Soviet flag instead of the modern Russian tricolor

Actually, we support this, but we'll be more civil about it.

I want to experiment with making some stupid strong edibles & I can't find proper research on how much THC one can dissolve into oil before it's saturated and a waste of weed

Operator culture has always been reflective of frontier settler ideas. They’re the brave ones going where no other white man will, ‘collecting’ scalps; regular troops are the U.S. Cavalry at Wounded Knee, safe behind newfangled weapons. In the GWOT/latest US colonial war, operators are the vanguard of larger motions, tools for precise actions, and, wearing their beards, the pioneers.

The turn against their cowboy aesthetic might be arising due to ICE, but again the hogs who buy black rifle coffee shirt or whatever the fuck, they it need their private property protected. We’re at a juncture where it’s not settlers v. settled, where Tel Aviv psytrance ravers conflict with hardcore racist West Bank colonizers (both born in New Jersey). It’s American capital v. International capital, insofar as there is a difference, which there is now that U.S. decline is being felt by price sensors. The idea that settlers are attacking settlers to keep them in line, that’s a bit much for everyone down in the U.S. of A to comprehend.

This is a long story but please, read to the end and maybe you'll understand!!

When I was a young boy, no older than 6 or 7, my family had a beautiful Rough Collie. This dog was more intelligent than your average President and never got into trouble. A wealthy man in my neighborhood wanted our dog for farm purposes and my parents, being destitute at the time, sold her to him. Well, funnily enough, she was so loyal to me and the rest of the family that she traveled over 50 miles from the farm back to us. I'll never forget my dad saying "She's a real come-homer" and promising me he'd never give her away again.

We also had a few cats, I loved them as well but they were slovenly - especially Mustard. I mention this for contextual reasons that will become apparent later.

Well, one day, when I was playing in the woods near my house after a storm - I fell into an old abandoned well. I never knew it was there; it was covered with a piece of wood that had rotted over the years and couldn't bear the weight of my foot coming down on it.

I fell. Hard.

Because of the recent storm, the well was quite full of water. It was up to my chest and the walls were slick with moss & algae. I couldn't climb up and out of it. I thought I was doomed. I was in the woods, which my parents and siblings never went near; it was late in the afternoon, would soon become dark, and the water was cold.

Well, our cat Mustard - an orange stray who we rescued off our doorstep if you must know - must have been following me. I remember his smug face looking down into the well as I flailed in the water, trying to climb up.

"Mustard, go get help!!" I cried. Mustard just blinked at me and licked his paws before stretching, yawning, and turning around.

"He's gonna get help!" I thought, so happy we'd brought him into our home and fed him the finest trout - caught by me weekly from the stream that ran through the woods by our house.

I waited patiently for an hour. Two. By hour three, I was losing hope. Where was Mustard??

I had faith though. Mustard, part of the family, would save me!

The sun began to set and that was when I knew...Mustard had abandoned me. Was I going to die in this well? I hadn't even the strength to shout anymore, having spent my energy keeping my head above the water while trying to climb out of the well.

But then, I heard a mrooow! Mustard had come back! Excitedly, I looked up. What did I see? Mustard's asshole, leaning over the edge of the well. I was so shocked, I didn't even have time to react before a stream of piss came flying down into the well.

"Mustard...please!" I cried; dunking my head below the water to avoid his piss. At this, he scampered away. I waited another 30 minutes, hoping he'd bring back someone, anyone. Nothing. The moon was rising and I was getting cold.

Knowing it would be my last attempt, I tried floating on my back in the cramped well-bottom to conserve my dregs of energy. My mind raced - there was no way my parents would hear me, even if they started looking when I didn't show for dinner. What could I do?!

Then I thought of our dog. I let out a faint whistle and to my surprise, I heard a faint bark. It wasn't five minutes before I heard our dog charging through the woods, somehow knowing my exact path.

I'll never forget her face poking over the well, a clear expression of "what are you doing down there, abc?" on her face.

"L-lassie, go get help...please..." I whispered. She barked and turned to leave. To my surprise, she walked for a second out of my sight and came back to carefully drop down a warm thermos of hot chocolate down to me.

That hot chocolate tasted so good. It wasn't fifteen minutes before I heard my dad hollering at Lassie. She'd run up to him sitting down at the kitchen table, mad at his son for not showing up for dinner - he thought I was off kissing some girl - and grabbed him by the pants. She dragged him out the house and towards the woods, never relenting even though my Pa was a stern man who didn't brook any disobedience in his children or his pets. He told me he was swatting at her the entire time, up until they got to the tree-line, thinking she was rabid.

She dragged him all the way to the well and then ran back to the house, at full-tilt, to grab a bunch of bed-sheets. She knew I wasn't going to get out without something to climb. She was that smart.

It took another hour, an hour I wouldn't have survived without that hot chocolate, for my dad to tie the bedsheets together into a rope and lower it down to me. I climbed out, no longer a boy, but a man.

Lassie lived for another 10 years and rescued me from a number of precarious situations. From a swollen river, from the bottom of a cliff, and even from an active hostage situation.

Mustard? Mustard spent the next year faking injuries and framing Lassie for things he'd do. He knocked one of mother's pies off the counter and convinced her that it was Lassie's doing - she had to spend the night outside in the rain for that. I knew he was a rat, but my parents and Uncle didn't believe me. It wasn't until Mustard ran off with Mother's diamond necklace that they realized we'd been conned.

I'll never forget my Uncle, Petrie, saying "Animals aren't much different than humans. Some of 'em like Mustard take while others like Lassie give" and Lassie? She always gave. Day in and day out.

Mustard? He only took and took..

The Bluesky post by the cartoonist - https://bsky.app/profile/pantspants.bsky.social/post/3mu35qetqgc25

As a cis het 6’9” jacked human male who enjoys walks on the beach let me give you the top 2 ways men suck:

All in pursuit of creating the model poster. Disgusting.

, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home. His labor is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labor. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labor is shunned like the plague. External labor, labor in which man alienates himself, is a labor of self-sacrifice, of mortification. Lastly, the external character of labor for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own, but someone else’s, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another. Just as in religion the spontaneous activity of the human imagination, of the human brain and the human heart, operates on the individual independently of him – that is, operates as an alien, divine or diabolical activity – so is the worker’s activity not his spontaneous activity. It belongs to another; it is the loss of his self.

-Garfield

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUbEv1ApqJA

The languages I'm aware of (European ones) are all set up around the structure of talking about things, nouns, verbs, etc, and tenses that modify those things over time. Suzy and John go to the movies. Beans tasted good yesterday. Examples like that. But the concept of a "thing" is a non-dialectical framing, it's trying to take a snapshot of something away from the historical context it exists in, instead of looking at the totality.

For example, we could talk about a book, but the book is more than the paper and ink that it is printed on. There's the author, the machine that printed it, the publishing company, the trees the paper was gathered from, the ink, the language, the method of writing language, the readers who read the book, the whole history of fiction or non-fiction and the social context that creates those methods. The list goes on. Outside of the context of those other things that make up the totality of the book, the true nature of the book becomes difficult to understand. It would be incredibly difficult or even impossible to understand a book outside of any social context at all.

In a way we become alienated from the true properties of the book, the context of the book, not just in the sense of alienation during sale of commodities, but in the sense that by trying to compartmentalize it into a "thing" that exists here and now, we lose connection with what the totality of that "thing" was, is, and will be, and the other things that cause that thing to exist as it is now that are connected to it.

Even writing about dialectical thinking is difficult and hard to make sense of because all of our framing and words and concepts we use are all about trying to put things into tidy little still-frame boxes that can be easily understood at a glance. I think this unironically contributes to the wall of text leftism memes because we have to take time to describe the context of the situation outside of the normal framing and word usage and teach and entire new way of thinking.

I think this is why we end up with a lot of "Is China socialist?" type questions and answers that just look at whether the thing right now fits some abstract definition. It's trying to put the thing into a nice little box that we can understand. And we do that naturally by just talking, by the way we naturally form our words and concepts that are guided by the system of language that we just happen to use.

What I'm trying to say is that the very languages we use predisposes people to think a certain way and to play with concepts in a certain way, and that way happens to align with a non-dialectical thought process and framing. Socialists have to fight an uphill battle to communicate what is often an entirely novel concept using a language that wasn't meant to frame it that way.

I don't think I have ever seen something so fucking horrifying. I'm drunk so my emotions are high but I think I am genuinely in shock.I see why the memory of glacial outburst floods have been preserved for so long. I cannot fathom the horror. I think I just watched hundreds of people instantly die. I don't have words to describe how I feel about this.

I know I'm preaching to the choir here but we need to do things I would be accused of fedposting for. The people responsible for climate change need judged by an unforgiving god. I've never been so genuinely horrified by a "natural" disaster in my life and I personal knew a family who drowned in the Texas floods a years ago.

I don't know how much longer I can wait for liberals figure shit out. I don't want to do a fucking adventurism, I know that it is harmful, but I can't keep just observing

https://theonion.com/church-organ/

so IDK if it'll be eligible now and honestly, at least one of the signatories promised me his real name was Martin Pibb so I'm hoping I can keep that one.

So much for the tolerant left

Can't believe we lost them both in under 24 hours fuck.