Yes. There are ninety nine people on one side of the fork in the tracks, and one hundred on the other. The track loops around after the people to the other side of the fork, so no matter which way the lever is set, one hundred ninety nine people will be crushed. Or you can pull them off the tracks and destroy the trolley.
Good that those things are taught in some places. I can only speak from my own experience in high school - we were required to have laptops for school but were never taught how to be safe online.
Europe does not in general have a cult problem, but US based cults are slowly expanding into Europe to grow and take advantage of people's general sense of a decreasing quality of life.
Some people put their whole lives on the internet and never once stop to think if it's a good idea. Then again, online safety and security are never taught or communicated, at least in the west, maybe by design.
Line goes up, board of directors happy. How, what, and why is irrelevant.
This old article (1974) from the US neoconservative outlet National Review made the rounds here a few months ago and speaks to the point of western misinformation. Even these diehard anti-communist neocons admit that the Chinese government and CPC were working with the Tibetan state throughout the 1950s to improve conditions for Tibetans, but US meddling forced more drastic action on the behalf of the CPC. The Dalai Lama has been in the pocket of the CIA ever since 1959, if not even before. A spiritual precedessor to Juan Guaidó, if you will.
https://shugdensociety.wordpress.com/2010/07/03/a-myth-foisted-on-the-western-world/
Just give the worker drones happy pills until they comply.
This is normal.
Controlling the narrative is just as (if not more) crucial for national security as aircraft carriers and troops.
Ok so they're not allowed to use Azure OpenAI, but there's certainly a secret Microsoft department called Thin-Blue-Line ClosedAI which provides support to cops using AI for facial recognition and pre-crime.
So they'll just start shoveling wood into coal power plants in 2030 and unfurl the "Mission Accomplished" banner.
Digital surveillance is omnipresent in the west. Apparently nobody cares.
From my reading Hudson's Superimperialism is an more an extension of Lenin's Imperialism, based on how material conditions had evolved over the interim fifty years and the lessons learned from (at initial publication) the first generation or so of US dollar hegemony. To simplify it maybe too much, it adds a monetary dimension to the already established framework of finance capital being the driving force behind imperialism.
Superimperialism is indeed the same English term often used for Kautsky's Überimperialismus hypothesis. Yet apart from the initial parallel of a global cartel, ie. dollar hegemony, I don't see much of Kautsky's ideas represented in Hudson's work, but I'm also not terribly familiar with überimperialism.
For an actual explanation for what happened in 1971, economically and monetarily at least, go ahead and read Michael Hudson's Superimperialism and Global Fracture. Superimperialism was so prescient at its original publishing that the US government itself used the book and the theory as a manual on how to be better superimperialists right back around 1971, and hired Hudson as a consultant.
I won't comment on the fascist economics presented in the linked website.
Still no worse than the worst of the male grifters.
Anti-German is one hundred percent an astroturfed cryptofascist thing.
"Imminent US collapse" articles incoming in... Oh nevermind...
I don't know of any links between Adrian Zenz and his ETIM buddies and Falun Gong aside from their mutual friends at Langley, but I may have missed something. In any case, libs never really dropped it (what we consider proof there isn't anything untoward going on is ignored and played off as "CCP propaganda"), it just kind of went to sleep once the situation in Ukraine flared up.
Remember ten years ago when massive German subsidies were the driving force behind the dropping price of solar panels globally, and western media made a fuss about it? Yeah, me neither.
The way China has been developing (in broad strokes: state supported import substitution and resource nationalism) is exactly the way western imperialist powers developed. Yes I'm ignoring the class characteristics of this development, these are crucial as well, but just in terms of development policy China is doing something very similar to what Britain and the US did in order to develop their productive forces.
TikTok is once again under public scrutiny, but a much bigger issue is being swept under the rug: that it is increasingly controlled by the US national security state.
Not sure if this one has been posted in the last few weeks, but this follows up previous MintPress reporting on the links between western TikTok and the US military-intelligence apparatus. It was probably clear to us from the beginning, but the crusade against TikTok has been an entirely cynical ploy for the empire to gain even more control over the internet.
Previous articles:
https://www.mintpressnews.com/tiktok-chinese-trojan-horse-run-by-state-department-officials/284353/
https://www.mintpressnews.com/nato-tiktok-pipeline-why-tiktok-employing-national-security-agents/280336/
Der Bundestag hat eine Änderung des Staatsangehörigkeitsrechts beschlossen. Einbürgerungen sollen künftig schneller möglich sein. Was genau ist noch geplant? Die Kernpunkte der Reform im Überblick.
German politicians have been discussing making applying for citizenship easier for a couple years now. Today the Bundestag (Parliament) approved the draft legislation, with two surprising new additions.
In applying for citizenship a person will now not only have to say they agree to and respect the German constitution (standard practice for gaining citizenship anywhere), an applicant will also have to agree to a statement "on Germany's special historical responsibility for the unjust Nazi rule and its consequences, especially for the protection of Jewish life." It's reasonable enough if taken literally, but we all know what this means in practice: Zionism is the law of the land. There could be an additional statement regarding the "illegalty of wars of aggression" required as well. If a person is found to have lied during the application or even behaves against such statements in the future, their newly gained German citizenship could be revoked.
To be fair, all of this is based on press reports and I haven't seen the law directly yet, so it may only be half as bad. But things are going in a really worrying direction.
I have been having such a difficult time getting a 2018 Dell Latitude 7930 to run any Linux distro stably. Maybe there is something obvious I am missing or maybe it really is dying hardware that's the root cause of the issue.
The silly thing is I had a stable install of openSUSE Tumbleweed running for a few months but because I made some poor choices on disk partition when I installed it I was eventually backed into a corner where I had to wipe the SSD and install from scratch.
I since then have tried Tumbleweed again as well as Ubuntu, Mint, and finally Manjaro to no avail. The Debian based distros completely freeze at some point, either immediately upon login and loading the desktop or when running apt update. Tumbleweed gets a kernel panic within an hour or so, even though I changed kernel options to a previous known-good config. Now after quite a frustrating time installing Manjaro it freezes within an hour as well and the diagnostic light code indicates a CPU issue.
Strangely enough none of these issues are apparent when running from a LiveUSB, but occur on two different M.2 SATA SSDs with proper installs.
At this point I don't really care which distro I use, as long as it doesn't crash constantly. Does anyone have any suggestions on other things I can try?
Edit: seems to be solved with the kernel options I already mentioned. For whatever reason it didn't work for the Tumbleweed reinstall but Manjaro has run for a couple days without crashing.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Intel_graphics#Crash/freeze_on_low_power_Intel_CPUs
Back in October I found a really cool book containing the speeches delivered during a Marxist theoretical conference hosted by the SED in the DDR in 1983. In the meantime I have started to transcribe some of these speeches with the intent of sharing them here and with the international community of working people. There are three speeches up at the moment and I am working on more. There are 140 in the volume so a complete digitization may take some time.
I plan to post my own thoughts on this site, as well as some more materials I have found. I may also consider cross-posts as well where appropriate.
I'll be in Berlin for a couple days soon and I'd like to see some DDR stuff while I'm there.
The DDR Museum looks interesting, even if it's just to look at the visual representations of everyday life while ignoring the lib remarks on Stasi oppression and whatnot.
Also happy DDR annexation celebration day. /s
I've been back into reading fiction over the last three years or so after a long time away. It's been really nice to slow down and read a book for entertainment rather than always going for a series or movie (when I'm not reading theory of course). For somewhat nostalgic reasons I'm missing some easy reading spy thriller type novels. There's plenty loaded with CIA/MI6 propaganda but I've had a hard time finding anything with similar pacing from outside of the imperial core. Most of the "best translated / English Chinese authors to read" lists are chock full of liberal emigrants and the like, which isn't a perspective I'm terribly interested in while reading for fun. I also enjoy sci fi, but there it seems to be a bit easier to find non western authors.
Does anyone have anything to recommend? Unfortunately it's gotta be available in English or maybe German at the moment.
A preprinted study by James Hansen and collaborators suggests that we've all but locked in 2°C warming by 2050. They go on to calculate a likely equilibrium warming of 10°C considering current GHG levels and known feedback loops.
I know we need to take this as yet another call to action, but at the same time I think so many of us feel absolutely paralyzed by the enormity and incomprehensibility of the situation.
I really stepped in it last night. My partner is livid with me for suggesting Stalin wasn't the evil dictator he's made out to be in the west. For a German who grew up with anti-communism and went to some very liberal universities for political science it was too much. They said something to the effect of "this feels exactly like if you said, oh Hitler wasn't that bad, he was actually a good guy." We're in the midst of planning our wedding and they were suddenly at the point of doubting that they know who I am and if this is a relationship they want to maintain.
We have a hard time discussing politics as it is. We are still not so great at interpreting the nuances of way each other speaks, and our background knowledge is very different. So we have to figure out what we do from here.
I can't come at this from the direction of "trying to convert them." They already think I have gone into a conspiracy theory ridden and propaganda laden hole, and believe me, I ask myself the same thing every day. It really weighs heavily on me, as some of our close family members have fallen into conspiracy theory echo chambers.
We've decided we need to go back to basics and make sure our core values align, which I genuinely believe they do. They're an anti-capitalist as well, although don't have a strong idea of what to would be better, just that it shouldn't be communism.
I'm not sure where to go after we sort out what our shared values are.
There's a certain condescension I sense when it comes to the leftist sources I read, many on recommendation from GenZedong members. I'm often met with "leftists just make up all kinds of stuff to suit their narrative," or "how do you know that's a primary or reliable secondary source, it's so easy to fake anything these days." Meanwhile they go to Wikipedia and see that Stalin killed millions and signed a treaty with the Nazis, even as they understand that much of western capitalist media is propaganda as well. We can't have any useful discussion on current events at the moment because we have vastly different knowledge of what's happening, as well as entirely different analytical tools to pick it apart with.
They're also terrified I'm going to say very extreme things in front of their family (privileged petite bourgeois liberals). I try to be careful but at the same time I won't pretend to not be a communist. We have political discussions often and I'm not one to just sit those out. I'm sure my family would react poorly as well, but with the geographical distance to them it's not as present an issue in our minds.
How do you all deal with this? How do you have these discussions and share these ideas with the more soc-dem or liberal minded people in your lives?