GenZedong

A local council woman crashed an anti-AI data center event my comrades held. She showed up with body guards and basically disparaged the work that grassroots organizers have been doing to get data centers out of communities.

She opened by trying to intimidate our community by saying that the Federal government would end up labeling us terrorists because we're loud. She vaguely tried to connect us to people making threats against politicians across the country. Mind you, we aren't advocating any violence against people but that's how a sitting council member introduces herself to the community. She then tried to co-opt the energy in real time before she finished with her spiel.

And of course, this council member has done a PR interview with the corporation thats supposed to build out the data center. It was absurd to watch happen in real time. Data centers are really being treated like political battle grounds here in the US.

I was thinking about AI recently. It's really easy to imagine a dystopian future with Robocop-style bots and intense surveillance but I don't think it's gonna be so easy to ditch the proletariat as a class .

Like, robot cops (not necessarily humanoid) would need batteries in order to be mobile. They would need to recharge every so often and a battery would be a really weak spot.

I think physical labor is gonna be done by human hands for a long time. Intellectual labor might be easier to replace.

Can we start telling people that Ayn Rand was a Soviet deep cover agent who was so good at parody they sent her to the west to publish PsyOps that deepened the contradictions of capitalism? We could blame it on trotsky and say he called it operation "Accelerationism in one Country."

If you Google 'I am alone with a Moroccan' in Dutch AI will immediately give you the police contact info but let's pretend it is normal

Cool thing about sign language is how much it reflects culture (so does every language, but I think it's more obvious in SL).

Like, sign for transgender in Brazilian Sign Language is "break chain" or "self change" (roughly), which I think it's awesome.

I have seen a pattern (or not, I don't know), that a lot of male communists tend to prefer having facial hair to being clean shaven (myself included). Maybe just seeing a pattern where there isn't one, or maybe it's a new phenomenon.

Social media has been a disaster for a lot of people's trust in the media. Of course stuff like (geo)politics and crime and the likes you need to be aware of bias.

But some things the media has no reason to lie about. A slightly venomous spider is making its round in The Netherlands and some news outlet reported to be cautious if you see it in your home. The comments: 'no, it doesn't exist. Fake news'.

My guys, just... no.

Good afternoon

In The Netherlands we saw the ICE and thought we could do better so state TV made a TV series sanitizing Frontex

Happy week everyone! Every week is a good week to study political economy and history!

Sometimes I try to ground myself by imagining the irrelevance I have within the universe. Voyager 1 just reached 1 light day away from Earth. It is the most distant human-made object out there. 25 billion kilometers from Earth.

Our milky way has a diameter of 100 thousand light years. To give you an idea: Voyager 1 was launched nearly 49 years ago in 1977. At its current pace it would need nearly 1.8 billion years to cross just our galaxy. And there are 2 trillion galaxies out there as per our calculations, which are flawed as well.

Was reading up on the term Hikikomori on wikipedia just cause that was the first result that came up in search and noticed how it mentioned neoliberalism like once and other than that it had this tone of like "this is such a hard problem, there are various factors involved."

Reformists always act like these things are super hard to figure out, but somehow fail to compare the system of power to societies where the issue doesn't tend to occur. That's the actually weird phenomenon, the feigned ignorance of anything that exists outside the status quo, not some people ending up as dependent recluses because capitalist society literally does not want to have a place for everyone and introduces scarcity on purpose; the fact that the daily operations of capitalism do not miss the presence of these people is a feature, not a bug. And in not missing them, it becomes very easy for them to exist apart from society. Society is not even meeting them halfway. Capitalists build a society based on "winners" and "losers", where "winner" is synonymous with material success/power and "loser" is synonymous with material failure/isolation, and then act confused that some people exist in the "loser" category. As if they didn't build the system to create and reproduce that dynamic.

But they need the feigned confusion because admitting that society is rigged to screw over a bunch of people means it also isn't the fault of the people being screwed over. As long as they keep the confusion narrative going, they can point and say "I guess it's a you problem."

is juche anti-materialist?

Well, my unemployment is coming to an end. Maybe holiday is a better term because I wasn't facing the danger of starvation or being homeless but technically I was unemployed for a few months. Nearly four months ago I was sitting at my desk and had enough. I stormed up to my boss his office and just said that I was quitting. Didn't really have a plan.

I tried to go on a literal pilgrimage to Santiago but after some weeks of walking I didn't like it so I went home. Took some more trips left and right on my own to figure things out. Maybe the entire journey of it all was the pilgrimage I was looking for.

I will have a blue collar job again after nearly a decade of working in an office. Curious to see how it goes.

east is a podcast youtube channel is suspended

ran by Iranian ml their podcast on apple podcasts is still up though

A far right party opened their own school in The Netherlands today. Got 200k government support because 'freedom of education'. They have a poster of Dutch colonies because they are proud of Dutch colonialism. One of their teachers was caught sending antisemitic messages on WhatsApp some time ago.

Currently a whopping number of four children attend the school. They need like 100+ more in a few years to keep getting subsidies.

We lost three in our tiny village in as many days. Make the most of what and who you have.

I'm grateful I have this community and got to mind travel a little while with you fine people.

I feel like Askreddit is mainly used for AI data collection nowadays

Have a wonderful week everyone!

As always, communism will win.

Good morning

Good morning

I hope you all have a nice week :D

Good afternoon

What are some good substacks/medium pages. I just moved into a new apartment and the internet isn't up yet (I have to pay for it) and i can't watch youtube videos (it will deplete my phone data too much) so I want to do some reading

has anyone read anything written by J Arch Getty, particularly The Road To Terror

He is still critical of Stalin. Getty is referenced a fair amount by pro-Stalin scholars like Grover Furr

found this rec on

https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueAnon/s/AbOo7GVhZC

Sure! I love this history.

Fitzpatrick and Getty are both "liberal" historians. I know Fitzpatrick came from a family of fellow travellers however. Her book *On Stalin's Team* is a great overview of the people who made up Stalin's inner circle from the 1920's up until his death. Some v amusing and heartwarming anecdotes in this one. Her book *Everyday Stalinism* is good as well.

J Arch Getty has written extensively on the great purge and was one of the first historians in the West to question the absurdly high death tolls. His book *The Road to Terror* is the "revisionist" take on the purge which emphasises the from below and mass participatory elements. He is still critical of Stalin, however. Getty is referenced a fair amount by pro-Stalin scholars like Grover Furr lmao.

Another book I'm currently reading is Terry Martin's *Affirmative Action Empire* about Soviet nationalities policy. It's great thus far.

Other historians to check out: Ronald Suny, Stephen Cohen, and Lars Lih. Have also heard good things about David Priestland's work. Orlando Figes and Stephen Kotkin have shitty politics but their work is decent as well.

I get lots of good recs from this substack: https://thestalinera.substack.com/. It's fairly pro-Stalin / pro-Soviet but grounded in the actual, verifiable history. The author is quite critical of Losurdo actually, who he sees as trying to hard to reconcile Stalinism with Dengism.