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I like the example of a clay ball and car/bicycle wheel/rim, as it’s easy to understand. For instance, a clay ball has little value on its own. But by removing some clay from the centre to turn it into a bowl or cup, it becomes more valuable, even though there is less clay. Same with a wheel rim. A solid block of steel doesn’t have much value beyond its raw material. But by shaping it into a circle and removing material from the centre to create spokes, it now becomes light enough to be a wheel, and is more valuable, despite there being less steel. The formal laws of logic would state that the more of something you have, the more valuable it is. But here the opposite is true, by having less of something, we have made it more valuable. How can this be, it’s a contradiction! However, the contradiction is synthesised by understanding that the labour to remove material from the object in a specific way, so that the object can be used to complete specific tasks, has drastically increased the use value of the object, to the point that is is much more valuable than the raw material it is made out of. The lack of material in certain locations actually makes it very valuable. That is dialectics.

This is paraphrased from an explanation of Zhongyong Dialectics that I saw a few years ago. I hope I didn’t screw it up too much.

What does “winning the war” look like to you?

Can’t join NATO with an existing territorial dispute. “Agreeing and joining NATO anyways” would be an official admission by the Ukrainian government that the territories currently held by Russia are not part of Ukraine anymore.

I hate them too. If the VR/AR headsets like the Apple vision pro ever become a popular thing, I hope someone creates a real world Adblock that blocks out billboard advertising using the AR capabilities. It would be the only good thing to come out of such a scenario.

While I agree that the ANC has deserved to lose an election for a while, one must be very careful here. Without any viable opposition party ( the DA is not considered a viable opposition party by the majority of South Africans, as seen by them failing to grow their voter base this election), the “big tent” ANC is splitting along racial, ethnic, cultural, and religious lines, in a reactionary manner. Jacob Zuma’s MK party is the most obvious example of this, their manifesto calls for scrapping the constitution.

They will lose their majority. Votes are 99% counted and the ANC is barely above 40% of the vote. The ANC have screwed themselves with rampant corruption and a failure to deliver government services reliably, the most obvious example being the rolling electricity blackouts (loadshedding) that South Africans regularly experience. Having no electricity for 8+ hours a day at worst due to government incompetence, corruption, and austerity is not workable.

Someone that lives a comfortable life in a first world country got offended and removed the post, that’s all there is to it. There’s nothing “tankie” about the meme

So cute, you want to join an adult conversation. Come on pal, let’s see your work. Gotta back up your claims with evidence if you want to continue sitting at the adult table.

This was you two hours ago. I thought you wanted an “adult conversation” with “evidence”? I provided that.

Okay then, why is the solution of making sleeping outdoors illegal bring debated by the highest court in the land? Why is the supreme court of the US even entertaining such an unethical proposition? Doing so is just the US abdicating responsibility for it’s people, and intensifying and welcoming inequality. Why not debate starting housing programmes for people instead, so that people do not have to sleep outside in the first place?

Okay then. What solution do even the most egalitarian or radical progressives/liberals, who you call the “adults”, have to solve capitalism’s contradictions and crises, with capitalism’s inherent unequal division of private property, leading to rising inequality and homelessness, being one of them? Because everything I’ve heard from just sounds like they are talking around the problem and avoiding the elephant in the room, the capitalistic system. In fact, many progressives when talking about issues such as homelessness, do not challenge the notion of private property and accept the inequality inherent to such a system, and then explain it away through bogus reasoning. I do not think that this way of avoiding about talking about how the modern capitalistic system works is adult behaviour. In fact, I’d say that it is childish behaviour, and does not deserve to be called progressive. The right wing being more brazen with it’s lack of ethics does not excuse the failure of liberals to address current issues.

The contemporary version of bourgeois emancipating reason, egalitarian liberalism, made fashionable by an insistent media popularization, provides nothing new because it remains prisoner of the liberty, equality, and property triplet. Challenged by the conflict between liberty and equality, which the unequal division of property necessarily implies, so-called egalitarian liberalism is only very moderately egalitarian. Inequality is accepted and legitimized by a feat of acrobatics, which borrows its pseudo concept of “endowments” from popular economics. Egalitarian liberalism offers a highly platitudinous observation: individuals (society being the sum of individuals) are endowed with diverse standings in life (some are powerful heads of enterprise, others have nothing). These unequal endowments, nevertheless, remain legitimate as long as they are the product, inherited obviously, of the work and the savings of ancestors. So one is asked to go back in history to the mythical day of the original social contract made between equals, who later became unequal because they really desired it, as evidenced by the inequality of the sacrifices to which they consented. I do not think that this way of avoiding the questions of the specificity of capitalism even deserves to be considered elegant.

• Samir Amin, Eurocentrism

Gotta praise the honesty here.

Going to be honest back when I was in high school we drew penises on the fields in the dew/frost. It was an all boys school so yeah.

Will Ukraine ever actually get the F-16s? Russian air defences have been preparing for their arrival. Would be ironic if all that work was done for nothing.

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The .opus audio format. People need to stop ripping everything to MP3, it’s inefficient and a flawed compression format. Opus is better than it and AAC.

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It’s an American obsession.

Are you just going to pretend that there is no racism anywhere else? It was the Europeans that colonised half the planet and invented the concept of “whiteness”, and proceeded to divide and carve Africa up. Are you just going to pretend that this action has had no influence on modern European ideas around race and class? And I haven’t even mentioned the Roma people. Or the ongoing genocide in Palestine, which has a racial component. Or the rise of Hinduistic fascism in India. Or the issues around race in my own country in South Africa. Racism is a global issue.

Personally I see most of these prejudicial issues being an exclusively American problem that has been exported abroad

Have you forgotten who colonised most of the world, including America? This is in no way an American centric issue. Racism exists in most countries on earth.

A lot more tourism to Cuba from the US.