You can buy, 'oh didn't you get the caviar jeoffrey snort this month's numbers mustn't be looking good snort you peasant'.
That's kind of what the AP is for. Similar to Reuters. And there's another big one that I can't remember. They're only supposed to provide the core facts. Journalists are supposed to follow things up. But over time, journalists have started using these services as the whole story. This is how you get roughly the exact same headlines and stories in every paper.
Journalists are given less and less time, too. And investigative journalists' funding or whole department is cut. Half the shit that ends up on AP are government announcements, treated as neutral lol and journalists run with it as if someone at the AP has discovered something rather than being handed a press release.
It's a shit show but journalists know how the bills get paid.
That might be why France wants to be at the front of the line and willing to use its FL not so much to fight the Russians but the Ukrainians. France needs another Niger. Ukraine might be it. The US might be happy to let France have it if this is the price that France has asked for not pivoting to China. It would put France deeper in the US fold and give the US a stronger foothold/ally if Germany starts to get uppity once its people realise what they gave.
Time to make those student loan repayments. That's an expensive higher doctorate. I hope Ukraine learned something about trusting NATO. Probably not. But I hope so.
This is heartwarming to hear. Glad to know there are still teachers like you starting careers. I needed some extra help every so often throughout my schooling and I luckily had a few teachers who were open and who cared and they made all the difference. Keep going! (And when you need to, keep doing your thing despite the 'system'!)
Hopefully we can skip that part when they try to trade with the world and it starts to say, nah. And there's no way for the tiger to enforce its will because it's already been standing in the rain for too long.
You'll be fine. I get the same vibes when I fill in one of those online restaurant booking forms and have to wait for confirmation. Will they? Won't they? Have I done the right thing? It's similar with sending emails.
Do they need to respond at this point? They kinda proved whatever they needed to with the first one. Israel now knows for sure that it would be in trouble if it insisted on taking things further than this show of saving face. Hopefully Iran is willing to accept that it's made it's point and decides not to retaliate to the retaliation against it's retaliation for Israel's consular attack. To keep us that step further from WWIII and all that.
I wouldn't worry about that. Most libs don't read theory and the ones who do openly admit to one label or another. Classical liberal, neoliberal, etc. Conservative liberals like to be specific about which one they are. 'Progressive' liberals are sometimes specific – that's mostly the politicians, the policymakers, etc.
The average voter, including the academic liberal, tends to be general and to use the word in this fluffy way that somehow means progress but without stopping global exploitation. These are the ones who can themselves liberal and think they know what it means but completely fail to understand the implications. They're at most danger of cognitive dissonance because there's no way to square the contradictions. That said, even 'conservative' liberals tend to dismiss accusations of their racism; there's almost always a 'but …'.
Neither the classical liberal nor the neoliberal nor the social democratic Keynesiam liberal care much about the out group, though. It's all there in the main works. They just don't like being called out on it. But you try to explain how all those cheap items end up in the western supermarket and reverb the most progressive liberal will start hand-winging.
Might depend on whether that 60% has voting rights.
Yeah but if I hadn't become ill or had found a well paying job or didn't dislike the cold and hunger in those first few days when I actually 'slept rough' and if CBS had picked up on my marketing gimmick sooner so that a venture capitalist would come along with $millions to invest in my very innovative idea of selling dog coffee (I mean, that is genius, I bet nobody else has thought of selling dog coffee before), I would have made more than one measly million. When others fail it's never for these reasons. It's always laziness. Anyway I'm back to my mansion now that the health scare is over due to the phenomenal health insurance that I had throughout the whole time. And I'd like to thank every major news organisation in the Western world for boosting my story; that venture capitalist came along and it turns out that they were as impressed as expected and I've now made that extra mil. Bye losers.
Yes, I did it by accident last week lol.
I think that link above has some instructions for doing it on desktop through your browser.
It can take a few goes to set up for some reason.
On Android, if you download a PDF and 'share' it with your Kindle app, it will open a 'Send to Kindle' page.
Click 'PDF Options' then 'Make layout adjustable'.
Toggle 'Add to your library' 'On'.
Then 'send'.
Voila, PDF -> ePub/mobi.
It's not perfect but its better than squinting at tiny PDF text on a smart phone screen.
Apparently you can do this from the web, too: https://ebookfriendly.com/new-features-added-to-send-to-kindle-2023/
This may be of some relevance:
Cornforth on 'realism'
From 22–24 of Maurice Cornforth’s Materialism and the Dialectical Method:
Some Varieties of Present-day Idealist Philosophy
Another compromise philosophy is known as "realism". In its modern form, this philosophy has arisen in opposition to subjective idealism.
The "realist" philosophers say that the external material world really exists independent of our perceptions and is in some way reflected by our perceptions. In this the "realists" agree with the materialists in opposition to subjective idealism; indeed, you cannot be a materialist unless you are a thoroughgoing realist on the question of the real existence of the material world.
But merely to assert that the external world exists independent of our perceiving it, is not to be a materialist. For example, the great Catholic philosopher of the middle ages, Thomas Aquinas, was in this sense a "realist". And to this day most Catholic theologians regard it as a heresy to be anything but a "realist" in philosophy. But at the same time they assert that the material world, which really exists, was created by God, and is sustained and ruled all the time by the power of God, by a spiritual power. So far from being materialists, they are idealists.
Moreover, the word "realism" is much abused by philosophers. So long as you believe that something or other is "real", you may call yourself a "realist". Some philosophers think that not only is the world of material things real, but that there is also, outside space and time, a real world of "universals", of the abstract essences of things: so these call themselves "realists". Others say that, although nothing exists but the perceptions in our minds, nevertheless these perceptions are real: so these call themselves "realists" too. All of which goes to show that some philosophers are very tricky in their use of words.
It's late in the day but if I don't reply this evening I'm going to keep forgetting!
I used spoiler tags to make reading easier.
I recommend Maurice Cornforth’s three very short volumes on dialectical materialism, historical materialism, and epistemology.
I’ll begin with what seems to be at the core of the disagreement.
You say:
what you mean by ‘material’ also encompasses non-material things, which doesn’t align with how the word ‘material’ is used in philosophy.
All philosophy is class philosophy. Bourgeois philosophy tends not to acknowledge that fact and its obscurity furthers its class position.
Marxists always treat materialism as dialectical materialism. While materialism relates to matter and treats the material as primary, it is matter as a relation as opposed to matter as 'things'. Engels in Anti-Dühring:
Motion is the mode of existence of matter. … On the earth, for example, a body may be in mechanical equilibrium, may be mechanically at rest; but this in no way prevents it from participating in the motion of the earth and in that of the whole solar system, just as little as it prevents its most minute physical particles from carrying out the vibrations determined by its temperature, or its atoms from passing through a chemical process. Matter without motion is just as inconceivable as motion without matter.
Matter, then, cannot be reduced to the physical object that appears to rest in front of you. The object is the relation of all its constituent atoms and forces, always moving. You say that I must mean that '"material" also encompasses non-material things’. This suggests that something like motion would count as a ‘non-material thing …’. While motion is not tangible, it is ‘matter’ according to dialectical materialism.
Marxists do not see motion as falling within the category of matter. Marxists treat matter and motion as a dialectic. If motion is matter and motion is intangible, then other intangibles could be material. That is, not every intangible is reducible to an idea.
Marx, Capital, Volume I (Preface to the first German edition):
… it is the ultimate aim of this work [Capital], to lay bare the economic law of motion of modern society[.] … My standpoint, from which the evolution of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he socially remains ….
Which is to say that social laws of motion are not inescapable just because society somehow all agrees to be bound in some way (which is an idealist refrain to the power of money that I have heard before), but because these laws (relations) are material. These relations are no less material for being expressed in symbols, linguistic or mathematical. I’m unsure whether you or your sources would consider such relations as material or ‘non-material’ for not being physical – possibly not. Marxists treat these relations of production as material.
I reject the equation of material to ‘physical’ or relating to ‘(physical) matter’ because that definition is neither materialist nor dialectical. The framing suggests a definition of matter from an idealist perspective. This is unsurprising if you consider yourself to be an ontological idealist. It may explain why you thought (in another comment) that ‘“dialectical materialism” … can just as well … work … fine within an idealist framework/alongside subscription to idealist schools of thought’. That view fails to accommodate the motion-matter dialectic and must exclude value, social relations, and laws of motion.
If that’s wrong and you are reading philosophy that accepts the above concepts as material, then we must start again because I have misread you.
Cornforth’s *Materialism and the Dialectical Method* should clarify things further:
Materialism is not a dogmatic system. It is … a way of interpreting, conceiving of, explaining every question.
… Materialism is opposed to idealism. On every question, there are materialist and idealist ways of interpreting it, … of trying to understand it.
Thus materialism and idealism … consequently … express opposite approaches in practice and lead to very different conclusions in terms of practical activity.
This leaves no room to say that ‘Marxism doesn’t conflict with idealism’:
Idealism is the way of interpreting things which regards the spiritual as prior to the material, whereas materialism regards the material as prior. … [T]his difference manifests itself … in general philosophical conceptions of the world as a whole, and in conceptions of particular things and events.
If your philosophy rejects social relations, etc, as matter, it is bourgeois philosophy. Idealist, bourgeois philosophy does not provide the tools to fully grasp the claims of materialist dialectics.
Example:
Why are there rich and poor? [An] … idealist [explanation] … is because some … are careful and farsighted, and these husband their resources and grow rich, while others are thriftless and stupid, and these remain poor. …
The materialist … seeks the reason in the material, economic conditions of social life[,] … divided into rich and poor … because the production of the material means of life is so ordered that some have possession of the land and other means of production while the rest have to work for them. However hard they may work and … scrape and save, the non-possessors will remain poor, while the possessors grow rich on the fruits of their labour.
Summary (emphasis added):
The basic teachings of materialism stand in opposition to these three assertions of idealism [omitted].
- Materialism teaches that the world is by its very nature material, that everything which exists comes into being on the basis of material causes, arises and develops in accordance with the laws of motion of matter.
- Materialism teaches that matter is objective reality existing outside and independent of the mind; and that far from the mental existing in separation from the material, everything mental or spiritual is a product of material processes.
- Materialism teaches that the world and its laws are knowable, and that while much in the material world may not be known there is no unknowable sphere of reality which lies outside the material world.
… Marxist philosophy is characterised by its absolutely consistent materialism all along the line, by its making no concessions whatever at any point to idealism.
On the broad attempt to philosophise away the differences between materialism and idealism:
[I]dealism serves as a weapon of reaction; and … when socialists embrace idealism they are being influenced by the ideology of the capitalists. … Whatever fine systems of philosophy have been invented, idealism has been used as a means of justifying the rule of an exploiting class and deceiving the exploited.
This is not to say that [materialist] truths have not been expressed in an idealist guise[;] … they have. For idealism has very deep roots in our ways of thinking, and so men often clothe their thoughts and aspirations in idealist dress.
Cornforth, again, to tie this back in with dialectics:
The problem of understanding and explaining development in a materialist way … is answered by dialectical materialism.
Dialectical materialism considers the universe, not as static, not as unchanging, but as in continual process of development. It … seeks for the explanation, the driving force, of this universal movement, not in inventions of idealist fantasy, but within material processes themselves—in the inner contradictions, the opposite conflicting tendencies, which are in operation in every process of nature and society.
Cornforth, quoting Lenin:
“… dialectics is the study of the contradiction within the very essence of things. …”
Where contradiction is at work, there is the force of development.
This materialist understanding of dialectics is the key to understanding the forces of development within the material world itself, without recourse to outside causes.
I realise this was a long comment. I hope it clears some things up. To finish with Cornforth:
[T]he whole history of human thought has been the history of the fight of materialism against idealism, of the overcoming of idealist illusions and fantasies.
I woke up one morning with this great new innovative idea: what if I invested my inheritance in an existing company?
Short video about current floods in Libya and how they are so much worse due to the deliberate sabotage of the NATO campaign.
Just came across this channel. Looks like one to keep an eye on for African news.
They insist on controlling the media, the publishing, the schools, the teachers, the curriculum, the judiciary, the museums, and the curators. But they only use their power for good. They hold themselves to the highest standards in the search of the truth and the presentation of the truth. Honest! Their independent watchdogs confirmed it. And why would they lie, anyway?
Looking back through my cursive handwritten notes, I noticed my past self was very concerned with hummus society. What could this mean?
"What are the best books about Colonialism and Imperialism?" We looked at 254 of the top books, aggregating and ranking them so we could answer that very question!
It's not a Marxist list but that's perhaps to be expected from a list curated from other lists across the internet. I thought it was useful, still, as there are 200 entries, including lots of fiction, which could be a good way to engage with the topic or for recommendations to people who don't/won't read theory.
>In 2018, Delta airlines unveiled new uniforms made of a synthetic-blend fabric. Soon after, flight attendants began to get sick. Alden Wicker explains how toxic chemicals get in clothes in To Dye For.
Employers caring more about image that health. Iconic duo.
Hello Comrades,
Thanks for all your advice about setting up Linux. It was a success. The problem is that I’m now I’m intrigued and I’d like to play around a bit more.
I’m thinking of building a cheap-ish computer but I have a few questions. I’ll split them into separate posts to make things easier. Note: I won’t be installing anything that I can’t get to work on Linux.
Do I need a dedicated graphics card? I'd like to run an HD display as a minimum. (I don't have a 4k monitor at but I wouldn't mind upgrading later if I can save up for one.) Mostly, I'll be streaming or playing videos.
I wouldn't mind playing some games but is a dedicated GPU needed?
If I should look into a GPU (I can always add it in later), what should I look for? (I'm not really interested in the latest AAA games). I wouldn't mind playing HOI4 or Victoria 3 as I hear so much about them.
What are your thoughts on second-hand GPUs? This will obviously cut costs but is there anything to watch out for?
Hello Comrades,
Thanks for all your advice about setting up Linux. It was a success. The problem is that I’m now I’m intrigued and I’d like to play around a bit more.
I’m thinking of building a cheap-ish computer but I have a few questions. I’ll split them into separate posts to make things easier. Note: I won’t be installing anything that I can’t get to work on Linux.
Should I prioritise RAM or the processor? My budget is limited so I will have to make a choice between RAM and the processor. Would it be better to go for e.g. 32GB RAM and a slower processor, or 8GB RAM and a faster processor? Or is balance better? Say, 16GB RAM and a 'medium' processor (that's 'medium' between the 'slower' and the 'faster' option within my budget, not 'medium' for the market).
Intel or AMD?
Hello Comrades,
Thanks for all your advice about setting up Linux. It was a success. The problem is that I'm now I'm intrigued and I'd like to play around a bit more.
I'm thinking of building a cheap-ish computer but I have a few questions. I'll split them into separate posts to make things easier. Note: I won't be installing anything that I can't get to work on Linux.
Question about storage and swap memory.
I plan to install an SSD of maybe 128–256GB for the system files and a larger HDD for storage. I would partition the SSD so that I could install a few different distros without losing any installation. This way I can commit to some longer experiments before deciding which distro to use.
The question is: should I have the swap partition on the SSD (with the OS partition) or (separately) on the HDD?
And if I install multiple distros, do I need a different swap partition for each one? For example, if I install 16GB RAM, do I need a 16GB partition for, say, Mint, Debian, and Ubuntu? Or can I let them 'share' the swap partition?
Are there any additional security/privacy risks of installing more than one distro on the same SSD card?
You may have noticed that I don't post pictures. If not, now you know.
One of the reasons is that I'm worried about sharing meta data.
Does anyone know:
- Does the Lemmy software strip / hide meta data from photos when they're uploaded?
- Is there a way of stripping meta data from photos?
- Does downloading an image from the internet and uploading it from my hard drive add any meta data?
- If I create a digital image, does it have meta data that could reveal my location, etc? (And then questions 1 and 2 for this option.)
- How should/could I keep my data/location safe if I choose to post either my photos, my scans, or pictures (either created by me or downloaded from the internet)?
Hello Comrades,
Where do you think is the best place to post educational/theory posts?
I've been writing some longer posts lately and posting them too !genzhou@lemmygrad.ml because the sidebar calls it, 'GenZedong’s educational hub'. Shall I keep doing that or is there a better community? e.g.:
- https://lemmygrad.ml/post/1022436 and
- https://lemmygrad.ml/post/1007901
I was going to use !communism@lemmygrad.ml but as I'm linking to my posts in the wider Lemmyverse, I didn't want libs coming over to an explicitly Marxists-only community.
One of the reasons for these longer posts is to provide an opportunity for us to talk about some issues and to answer questions that others ask in the wider Lemmyverse without (a) coming off as hostile/confrontational or (b) wasting hours writing things that people might not read or appreciate.
(No obligation for us to talk through my posts! But at least there's always a possibility of a constructive and critical discussion, which doesn't exist elsewhere.)
Edit: These aren't necessarily 101 questions, either, but I suppose they could go in !communism101@lemmygrad.ml, depending on what you all think.
While liberal antiracists argue over vocabulary, radicals take direct action – which is the only way to change the system, says author Arun Kundnani
I won't hold my breath for more but it's good to see Marxist ideas appearing in the mainstream press:
>Liberal antiracists have succeeded over the last half-century in reducing racial prejudices in interpersonal relationships. And they have transformed popular culture: people of colour are now represented in Hollywood movies at levels proportionate to their presence in the US population. But advances in reducing prejudice and improving representation have not lessened the racism that exists in law, policy and broader economic and institutional practices.
>Take, for instance, the expulsion of more than a million, mainly Mexican, people from the US in 2021. This policy behind this is driven by the need to maintain a worldwide racial division of labour. It makes no difference if the immigration officer who carries it out and the employer who profits from it have worked really hard at their diversity awareness training. And it is at the structural level where, since the 1970s, racism has reproduced itself, as ruling classes in the US and Europe mobilised a neoliberal conception of market forces to defeat mass movements for the redistribution of wealth. With those defeats, new ways of dominating Black people and the global south became possible.
>It was not simply that racism became more subtle or unconscious after its overt forms had been defeated. It was more that there was no longer a need to routinely make explicit assertions of racial superiority. Racial inequalities were reproduced through market systems, alongside newly intensifying infrastructures of governmental violence, carried out in the name of seemingly race-neutral concerns about crime, migration and terrorism. …
>The many millions of people around the world judged surplus to the requirements of neoliberal capitalism, and framed as bearers of cultural values antagonistic to market systems, are the targets of this form of violence. …
>Liberal antiracists are powerless against this new structural racism. They demand we use the correct racial vocabulary, shaming Conservative MPs or sports commentators when they use derogatory terms; but abolishing a word does not abolish the social forces it expresses. They implement diversity training programmes, but these fail, owing to the mistaken premise that racism now resides primarily in the unconscious mind. … By relocating racism to the unconscious mind, to the use of inappropriate words and to the extremist fringes, liberal antiracists end up absolving the institutions most responsible for racist practices. They are effective at getting more people of colour into senior jobs in police forces, border agencies and the military, but unable to get fewer people of colour killed by those same agencies.
>For these reasons, to look to liberal antiracism as the solution – with whatever good intentions – is to help sustain structural racism. White liberals can heroically confront their own unconscious biases all they want, yet these structures will remain. To be antiracist today means working collectively with organisations to dismantle racist border, policing, carceral and military infrastructures. It means organising in the community to get the police out of our schools; taking direct action against deportations; and confronting corporations that trade in violence. It means understanding that the poor of the global south are as equally entitled to the world’s resources as the wealthy residents of the north. In the end, it requires us to build an economy of care, not killing – uplifting all working classes of whatever colour. The radical tradition, with its anticapitalist impetus, might once have seemed impractical. Now it is the only viable antiracist politics.
@KyleTrainEmoji: The progress China has made in renewable energy just THIS YEAR makes the entire rest of the world look like it's standing still. I wrote in December that to call China the "world leader in...…
cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/971805
> Sources for all claims in link. > > > I wrote in December that to call China the "world leader in renewable energy" was a colossal understatement. > > > Even the Western press considers the PRC's climate target to be all-important to preventing complete global disaster. It was estimated to reduce projected temperature by 0.3 degrees Celsius, the largest drop ever calculated by climate models. > > > Anyone doubting that the PRC is willing and capable of not just fulfilling, but exceeding, its goals is not paying attention. > > > Each year from 2020 to 2022, China installed about 140GW of new renewable electricity capacity, more than the US, the EU, and India put together. (A gigawatt is enough to power 750,000 homes.) > > > In December, ground was broken on the world's largest desert renewable energy project in Inner Mongolia. > > > The IEA estimated China would add 80GW of new solar capacity in 2023; in February, the China Photovoltaic Industry Association said between 95 and 120 > > > Both are already wrong. In the first four months of 2023, nearly THREE TIMES as much new solar capacity had been installed than in the same period in 2022. China's NEW solar capacity installed this year will exceed the entire TOTAL in the US. > > > In May, the chairman of Tongwei Solar predicted that new installations might fall between 200 and 300 gigawatts in 2024—almost TWICE the current US total. > > > It's not just solar energy that China does well. In 2021, China installed more offshore wind capacity in one year than the rest of the world combined had in the past five. As of January 2022, China operated half of all the world’s offshore wind turbines. > > > According a report by Global Energy Monitor in June, China is currently on track to DOUBLE its entire renewable energy capacity by 2025—five years earlier than the government's original target date of 2030. > > > China’s “nuclear pipeline” or the total capacity of all its new reactors under development, is also as big as the rest of the world’s combined, at ~250 GW. In 2021, 19 new reactors were under construction, 43 awaiting permits, and another 166 were planned. > > > In April 2022, plans for another 6 new reactors were announced. China also has the most advanced and efficient reactors in the world, with no need for water cooling; in 2022, for example, the first “fourth-generation” reactor came online in Shandong. > > > … In fact, proportional to their share, the US contribution was 0.05% of China’s in 2021. > > > Energy is only one aspect of the climate solution, though; China is ALSO far and away the world leader in EVERY OTHER aspect. > > > Since 1980, China doubled its forest coverage, planting more new trees than the rest of the world combined. > > > Per the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, between 2010 and 2020 China had an average annual net gain in forest area of almost 2 million hectares, over 4 times as much as Australia’s (2nd-largest) and nearly 20 times as much as the United States’. > > > In 2021, the government set a new target rate of afforestation of 36,000 square kilometers per year—or 3.6 million hectares, nearly double its previous rate, or enough new trees to cover the land area of Belgium. > > > China's shift to a green economy isn't just happening fast—it's still accelerating. > > > From 2016-2018, EV sales in China jumped from 1% to 5%. They reached 20% in 2022—three years ahead of schedule. (The US finally reached 5% in 2022.) > > > As of 2022, 98% of all electric buses in the world were deployed in Chinese cities. > > > China's electric high-speed rail network is longer than every other country's combined, and continues to expand. In 2007 China had virtually no HSR; today, if they had been placed in one line, China's high-speed railways could wrap around the circumference of the Earth. > > > According to the Paulson Institute in Chicago, when accounting for not just revenue but passenger time and airline trips saved, China's HSR had generated a net surplus of nearly $400 billion as of 2022. > > > No other country is forcing China to lead the world in the conversion to a sustainable economy—in fact, the United States government has been trying to STOP it, for example by placing sanctions on China's photovoltaic manufacturing. > > > China's goal was peak emissions before 2030 and carbon-neutrality by 2060. Given how much Chinese renewables have overperformed recently, the peak will likely come sooner rather than later—maybe within the next two years. It may even already be passed. > > > China's emissions are mainly from coal. But Chinese coal-fired power plants are much different from Western plants. > > > Chinese coal plants have set the world record for efficiency, approaching 50%, compared with a typical Australian plant’s 30% efficiency. > > > The PRC’s clean air policies not only cut air pollution almost in half between 2013 and 2020, but also drove a global decline in air pollution. (I.e. if China’s contribution were tallied separately, the overall rate would have increased, not decreased.) > > > Violating China's environmental policies can lead to real punishment. In March 2021, four major steel mills in Hebei were caught falsifying records to evade carbon emission limits; the next year, dozens of executives responsible were sentenced to prison. > > > In contrast, though the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe killed several workers and was the largest marine oil spill in history, no one from BP spent even a day in jail. > > > As of this tweet, Norfolk Southern faces no criminal charges for the East Palestine train disaster in February. > > > Last summer, after weeks of struggle, the wildfires besieging Chongqing were driven back and extinguished; not just by water, sand, chemicals, or controlled burns, but by community. > > > Twenty thousand civil servants and volunteers climbed or biked up and down the mountain in the sweltering heat to deliver supplies and construct fire barriers; through their collective action, the cities were saved. > > > The solutions to the climate apocalypse are collective and mundane—economic planning, technological development, and the redistribution of resources—but the freedom to pursue those solutions is very rare and very dear. > > > Presently, China alone seems to have this freedom. > > > Also in China is the largest economic engine in history controlled by a Communist Party and a workers' state, that is not required by class interest to seek profit above all else. > > > Probably just a coincidence or something, idk.
@KyleTrainEmoji: The progress China has made in renewable energy just THIS YEAR makes the entire rest of the world look like it's standing still. I wrote in December that to call China the "world leader in...…
Sources for all claims in link.
> I wrote in December that to call China the "world leader in renewable energy" was a colossal understatement.
> Even the Western press considers the PRC's climate target to be all-important to preventing complete global disaster. It was estimated to reduce projected temperature by 0.3 degrees Celsius, the largest drop ever calculated by climate models.
> Anyone doubting that the PRC is willing and capable of not just fulfilling, but exceeding, its goals is not paying attention.
> Each year from 2020 to 2022, China installed about 140GW of new renewable electricity capacity, more than the US, the EU, and India put together. (A gigawatt is enough to power 750,000 homes.)
> In December, ground was broken on the world's largest desert renewable energy project in Inner Mongolia.
> The IEA estimated China would add 80GW of new solar capacity in 2023; in February, the China Photovoltaic Industry Association said between 95 and 120
> Both are already wrong. In the first four months of 2023, nearly THREE TIMES as much new solar capacity had been installed than in the same period in 2022. China's NEW solar capacity installed this year will exceed the entire TOTAL in the US.
> In May, the chairman of Tongwei Solar predicted that new installations might fall between 200 and 300 gigawatts in 2024—almost TWICE the current US total.
> It's not just solar energy that China does well. In 2021, China installed more offshore wind capacity in one year than the rest of the world combined had in the past five. As of January 2022, China operated half of all the world’s offshore wind turbines.
> According a report by Global Energy Monitor in June, China is currently on track to DOUBLE its entire renewable energy capacity by 2025—five years earlier than the government's original target date of 2030.
> China’s “nuclear pipeline” or the total capacity of all its new reactors under development, is also as big as the rest of the world’s combined, at ~250 GW. In 2021, 19 new reactors were under construction, 43 awaiting permits, and another 166 were planned.
> In April 2022, plans for another 6 new reactors were announced. China also has the most advanced and efficient reactors in the world, with no need for water cooling; in 2022, for example, the first “fourth-generation” reactor came online in Shandong.
> … In fact, proportional to their share, the US contribution was 0.05% of China’s in 2021.
> Energy is only one aspect of the climate solution, though; China is ALSO far and away the world leader in EVERY OTHER aspect.
> Since 1980, China doubled its forest coverage, planting more new trees than the rest of the world combined.
> Per the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, between 2010 and 2020 China had an average annual net gain in forest area of almost 2 million hectares, over 4 times as much as Australia’s (2nd-largest) and nearly 20 times as much as the United States’.
> In 2021, the government set a new target rate of afforestation of 36,000 square kilometers per year—or 3.6 million hectares, nearly double its previous rate, or enough new trees to cover the land area of Belgium.
> China's shift to a green economy isn't just happening fast—it's still accelerating.
> From 2016-2018, EV sales in China jumped from 1% to 5%. They reached 20% in 2022—three years ahead of schedule. (The US finally reached 5% in 2022.)
> As of 2022, 98% of all electric buses in the world were deployed in Chinese cities.
> China's electric high-speed rail network is longer than every other country's combined, and continues to expand. In 2007 China had virtually no HSR; today, if they had been placed in one line, China's high-speed railways could wrap around the circumference of the Earth.
> According to the Paulson Institute in Chicago, when accounting for not just revenue but passenger time and airline trips saved, China's HSR had generated a net surplus of nearly $400 billion as of 2022.
> No other country is forcing China to lead the world in the conversion to a sustainable economy—in fact, the United States government has been trying to STOP it, for example by placing sanctions on China's photovoltaic manufacturing.
> China's goal was peak emissions before 2030 and carbon-neutrality by 2060. Given how much Chinese renewables have overperformed recently, the peak will likely come sooner rather than later—maybe within the next two years. It may even already be passed.
> China's emissions are mainly from coal. But Chinese coal-fired power plants are much different from Western plants.
> Chinese coal plants have set the world record for efficiency, approaching 50%, compared with a typical Australian plant’s 30% efficiency.
> The PRC’s clean air policies not only cut air pollution almost in half between 2013 and 2020, but also drove a global decline in air pollution. (I.e. if China’s contribution were tallied separately, the overall rate would have increased, not decreased.)
> Violating China's environmental policies can lead to real punishment. In March 2021, four major steel mills in Hebei were caught falsifying records to evade carbon emission limits; the next year, dozens of executives responsible were sentenced to prison.
> In contrast, though the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe killed several workers and was the largest marine oil spill in history, no one from BP spent even a day in jail.
> As of this tweet, Norfolk Southern faces no criminal charges for the East Palestine train disaster in February.
> Last summer, after weeks of struggle, the wildfires besieging Chongqing were driven back and extinguished; not just by water, sand, chemicals, or controlled burns, but by community.
> Twenty thousand civil servants and volunteers climbed or biked up and down the mountain in the sweltering heat to deliver supplies and construct fire barriers; through their collective action, the cities were saved.
> The solutions to the climate apocalypse are collective and mundane—economic planning, technological development, and the redistribution of resources—but the freedom to pursue those solutions is very rare and very dear.
> Presently, China alone seems to have this freedom.
> Also in China is the largest economic engine in history controlled by a Communist Party and a workers' state, that is not required by class interest to seek profit above all else.
> Probably just a coincidence or something, idk.
I've wanted to go over to Linux for a long time but I have no idea how to go about it. I hear about incompatibility problems with hardware and all the different options for different Linux OS's and that's it, I forget about it for a while to avoid the headache.
So where do I start? I don't even know how to choose hardware or what to look for. The number of options with Linux makes things a little confusing.
And although others here have answered the question before, I'm unsure what I have to do to stay 'safe' on Linux. Are there extra steps or is it just the standard, don't open dodgy links and turn off Java script in the PDF viewer kind of thing? Does Linux come with a trustworthy firewall/antivirus/malware detection? Is there a chance of Linux e.g. sending my passwords, etc, to someone or just letting someone into my harddrive? I hear that 'open source' means people can check the code but how do I know if someone has checked the code—I wouldn't know what to look for myself.
I followed the Linux subreddit but the users the can be rather… enthusiastic, which is great, but I need something far more basic to get started lol.
Is there a good step-by-step guide somewhere? Or can anyone give me some pointers/tips/advice?
I mainly browse, type, and read pdfs and other text files. No gaming, although I wouldn't be opposed to it. No need to be mobile; laptops are terrible for my back so I always use an external monitor, anyway, so I won't be using it 'on the go'.
Edit: Thanks for all the advice. I got a machine up and running from a bootable USB.
Any others who read the comments here because they're interested in trying out Linux – if you have Windows installed and want to keep it on your HDD/SSD, partition your drive within Windows. Then boot from the USB. You can partition your drive (and keep Windows) from the bootable USB but it's a bit more complicated and it makes it harder to create a swap partition and a storage partition. I had to go back and forth a few times to figure this out.
Omg I've been here for a year today!
I just wanted to thank everyone for making this place what it is. I've never been much of a poster elsewhere because I can't stand much internet drama. But here, where good faith is the starting point, I feel that I can talk as I wish and have meaningful conversations and interactions.
Take care, everyone.
This is a contentious subject. Please keep the discussion respectful. I think this will get more traction, here, but I'll cross-post it to !Communism, too.
Workers who sell their labour power for a wage are part of the working class, right? They are wage-workers because they work for a wage. Are they wage-labourers?
“They’re proletariat,” I hear some of you shout.
“Not in the imperial core! Those are labour aristocrats,” others reply.
So what are the workers in the imperial core? Are they irredeemable labour aristocrats, the inseparable managers and professionals of the ruling class? Or are they proletarian, the salt of the earth just trying to get by?
It’s an important distinction, even if the workers in any country are not a homogenous bloc. The answer determines whether workers in the global north are natural allies or enemies of the oppressed in the global south.
The problem is as follows.
There is no doubt that people in the global north are, in general, more privileged than people in the global south. In many cases, the difference in privilege is vast, even among the wage-workers. This is not to discount the suffering of oppressed people in the global north. This is not to brush away the privilege of national bourgeois in the global south.
For some workers in the global north, privilege amounts to basic access to water, energy, food, education, healthcare, and shelter, streetlights, paved highways, etc. As much as austerity has eroded access to these basics, they are still the reality for the majority of people in the north even, to my knowledge, in the US.
Are these privileges enough to move someone from the ranks of the proletariat and into the labour aristocracy or the petit-bourgeois?
I’m going to discuss some sources and leave some quotes in comments, below. This may look a bit spammy, but I’m hoping it will help us to work through the several arguments, that make up the whole. The sources:
- Settlers by J Sakai
- Corona, Climate, and Chronic Emergency by Andreas Malm
- The Wealth of Nations by Zac Cope
- ‘Decolonization is Not a Metaphor’ by Eve Tuck and K Wayne Yang.
I have my own views on all this, but I have tried to phrase the points and the questions in a ’neutral’ way because I want us to discuss the issues and see if we can work out where and why we conflict and how to move forwards with our thinking (neutral to Marxists, at least). I am not trying to state my position by stating the questions below, so please do not attack me for the assumptions in the questions. By all means attack the assumptions and the questions.