Comradeship // Freechat

Disclaimer: This may read bleak, but I'm not in a bleak state of mind. I will post a comment with my thought process behind it.

The Anti-Science Infantilization of the Modern Tech World

You get up and read the news. Halfway across the world are things happening you have no control over and if you put yourself out there and protest it, you get told to stop speaking when a politician is speaking.

You go on a job website and submit an application, but you may not ever receive a rejection and if you do, you will likely receive no information on why your application was rejected and some other person's wasn't. Was it something you did? Was it nothing you did? You don't know.

You go on a dating app and try to match with people. If you're a man, you probably send out a lot of likes or messages that never get a response. Does your profile suck? Are you sending poor messages? You don't know. Maybe they're never getting seen in the first place. If you're a woman, you probably receive more likes and messages than you know what to do with and a lot of them are mean and objectifying. You did nothing to provoke this other than existing as a woman and no matter what you do on there, it keeps happening.

You go to the grocery store to get food to live on, but some product you used has been discontinued again. You have no idea why and have to figure out a replacement. Furthermore, some product whose prices you relied on as stable have gone drastically up. Meanwhile, you're being told the economy is doing well. No one ever consults you on any of these things or tells you why it's really happening. They just say it's inevitable and your lot in life. In fact, they may say it's for your own good.

You go to use your favorite product and it got a major update. A bunch of features you were relying on have changed. They say it's a better product this way and you should get used to it.

You hear on the news that it'll be time to vote again soon. This is the one time, around every four years, that they say your decisions and your opinions matter. And they're telling you that this time, like the last times, it's the most important decision, possibly ever. Where with everything else, you were told to deal with being helpless to the fate of opaque systems you're not allowed to understand or weigh in on, you're now being told it all comes down to you. You drum up some sense of duty in you and you go do it. It's done. You did your part. The results come out and things go back to being as they were before.

You get up and read the news. Halfway across the world are things happening you have no control over and if you put yourself out there and protest it, you get told to stop speaking when a politician is speaking.

You are discouraged from using scientific process and thought to navigate the world. Everywhere you turn, the mechanisms you're up against are hidden from you. Instead, you are told to use willpower, told to use attitude, told to think differently, and eventually the universe will come together for you. Meanwhile, the machine of exploitation turns on scientifically designed wheels. The overseers of colonization, the overseers of the global capitalist empire, use science to exploit and place layers of indirection upon the process so you can't see it.

You look in the mirror. You can only see yourself anymore. They'll give you a mirror so you can focus more on yourself. You see a failure looking back, a helpless abject figure. They tell you to blame yourself. You try to work on yourself to love yourself more and build yourself up, but you keep hitting invisible walls. No matter what you try to do differently, you're flying blind. And that too, they say, is your fault. It always comes back to you and can never be them.

They can take away every limb, deprive every sense you have, and still they will tell you it's your fault. A failure of willpower and attitude.

Portugal had its revolt against fascist Salazar in 1974. But how good are they doing, with the advent of the Chega party?

Title

I saw an ad for the RCA (revolutionary communists of America) on TikTok. What are they? From what I can gather on the mobile site, they do recommend readings from Marx and Lenin, but also from Trotsky, so what are they exactly?

Nothing like having the local monopoly cut your electricity, charge your household with YOUNG children an extra 400 dollars because of random, variable "back-charges" and "late-fees" because we didn't pay at SIX O FUCKING CLOCK IN THE MORNING ON THE DAY IT'S DUE AND WE HAVEN'T EVEN GOT OUR FUCKING DIRECT DEPOSIT YET.

(we get paid on the same day and they randomly decided to shut our electricity off earlier than usual despite normal payments; payment date changes from 30-31st sometimes and same with our checks.)

Of course, we asked for an extension two days before, just for ONE FUCKING DAY. They agreed! Guess they fucking forgot! Or they don't give a fuck!

Fuck these god damn fucking ghouls. Faceless, skinless walking pieces of soulless flesh that suck the resources out of every man, woman and child. They are fucking worth absolutely FUCK-ALL to this god damn world.

OH AND I HAD TO WAIT 43 HOURS FOR MY FUCKING POWER TO BE TURNED BACK ON. FUCK THESE GHOULS. MY ENTIRE FUCKING FRIDGE SPOILED.

We are all soldiers pre-manufactured, asleep in a psychedelic liquid, fractured. Awash in false memory. To one day wake full of righteous anger toward our enemy, built to hate the systems embedded within us. Assembled, with a destructive lust to live only in our dreams.

About Palestine, when I asked him he said he didn't have an opinion. And when I said that Israel is an aprtheid state that's comming genocide he replied with ok cool. he said he doesn't follow the news but with how persuasive the genocide has been I don't think he can use that as a way to claim ignorance. I've been sharing stuff about the genocide since october 7th and he watches my stories. And there have been multiple discussions about it with him present (where he ignored it). The reason I finally got him to talk about Palestine this time was because I realised I have to ask him directly about it whenever it was brought up in our friend group. But then he said those things I already brought up.

He thinks that politics is an opt out and that you don't have any responsibility if you claim ignorance or indifference. He treats it as other people's hobby that he has nothing to do with. He's the same way with other political topics. With black pete (a racist tradition here in the low countries) he explicitely says that he tries to escape the discussions so he doesn't have to deal with it. He feels more annoyed by anti-racist demonstrations than by racism. But when I did have a discussion with other friends about abortion, he did jump in sometimes with pro-abortion views, which was nice and shows it is possible to get him to care. He said he doesn't follow the news either, which is true, but I think he was saying that so he didn't have to give an opinion on Palestine. But I was trying to tell him that following the news is important and I gave him a recommendation for a news account to follow on instagram (@hetnieuws_nl) and even sent it to him via chat. Later I asked him if he checked it out yet, but he said he saw it but didn't click on it. My other friends in this group who are right wing say that he is left wing, but I corrected them on it, and said that he is right wing like them. His dad is a raging zionist and I think that's part of the reason why he's that way.

I think I will keep asking him about his opinion whenever a political debate is happening and not taking claiming ignorance as an answer. I think I'll also share instagram news posts with him once in a while via instagram chat. We already share a lot of stuff to each other there, so that's not a bad idea. He likes Irish music as well and am thinking to show him IRA songs as well. But don't want to force my beliefs on him too much because I don't want to push him away.

For my other friends, I do have political discussions with them. They are very right wing and whenever I have a discussion with them they treat it as just another fun interesting discussion. But I don't view it that way. I don't want to have a discussion about black pete or if abortion should be legal. And I think it shows they don't care about what I have to say but treat it as a game to see who can come up with the best arguments. How can I counteract this? I was just thinking about giving my own opinions, saying they are non-negotiable and shutting the debate down after that saying I don't want to debate it.

They are good friends and accept my gender identity and expression, I just hate their politics. But I'm glad they have at least one leftist friend to get them sort of out of their bubble. But I'm also glad I have another friend group with only trans friends where this shit isn't normal.

Leftypol, afaik, has always been a glowop, and the government seem intent on crushing its support of Z and Gaza. Currently, the level of NAFO attack is increasingly high, and with an appropriate level of human, automated, and semi-automated attack, we could go under, especially since mods want it to collapse. How would you feel about an evac? I understand you do need to filter as Leftypol is very loosely moderated. And do you have plans if government troll farms go after you as well?

Hi comrades. My username is soviet entropy and the entropy part is not doomerism or a momento mori. Entropy is imo a vital part of modern materialist analysis. This post is an introduction to the concept and how it relates to political economy.

1. Information is Physical

"Information" is often considered to be immaterial. Many definitions of it are and many definitions of it are also bad an incoherent. As marxists and materialists, what is information?

Let's take a sequence. It could be a sequence of atoms or molecules or DNA base pairs. I'm going to have it be numbers for this demonstration. Here is the sequence: [0,0,0,0,1,1,1,1]

How much information does this sequence contain? Well let's compare it to another sequece: [0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0]

Now image want to perfectly re-create these sequences somewhere else. We need to store them first. If we wanted to store these sequences by compressing them, it would be easier to store the second one than the first one. We can compress the first by saying "repeat 0 four times, then 1 four times". To compress the second, we only need to say "repeat 0 eight times". The less you can compress a sequence, the more information it has. This is sometimes called Shannon Information Theory.

Imagine we have a completely random sequence. Well if there is no pattern to it, then the smallest way we can store it is simply writing the entire thing down. There are no patterns or anything. Sure it's not information that is useful to humans, but it's information.

But what does this have to do with Entropy or Materialism?

2. Entropy

Entropy is a simple concept that physicists have made difficult to understand. I think this is because they are often idealist or dualist and not materialist.

Imagine we have a six sided die that is perfectly fair. The numbers 1 thru 6 have a perfectly equal chance of coming up. We're gonna roll it a bunch of times.

Now, how surprised would we be if a 2 comes up? Not very surprised. If we roll it again and a 3 comes up, again we are not surprised. If we roll it 4 more times and only get 2 and 3, then we are going to be more surprised. We can say that our surprise is inversely related to the probability of something happening. And indeed this is a concept in statistics called "surprise". If something has a 1/10 chance of happening,we would be less surprised of it happening than something with a 1/100 chance. We define surprise as the logarithm of the inverted probability. So for the 1/10 and 1/100 things, they have a surprise of log(10) and log(100). We only do this log thing to make something with a chance of 100% have 0 surprise. Otherwise it would have a surprise of 1.

Now image we knew the chances of events happening. Say we know that a die is fair or we observed a process for a long time and now the typical things it does. We could have an expectation for our surprise. The surprise of each event that could happen weighted by how likely it is to happen. All of this added up is our total expected surprise. This is what Entropy is.

Let's go back to the sequences. Remember, these could be numbers or atoms of a metallic crystal or DNA base pairs. Let's say we have the sequence: [0,1,0,0,1,1,1,1]
The probability of getting a 0 is 3/8 (we count the number of 0's).
So the surprise is log(8/3). The probability of getting a 1 is 5/8 so the surprise is log(5/8).
The Entropy of this sequence is therefore: 3/8 * log(8/3) + 5/8 * log(8/5) = 0.66

If we do it for this sequnce: [0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0]
We get 8/8 * log(8/8) = 0

Take a minute here if you want. Something might be about to click! Sequences with low information, like 0 repeated eight times, also have low Entropy! That's because Entropy is Information. They are the same thing. The amount of entropy in a sequence is how much information it contains and also how difficult it would be to compress it.

3. Increasing Entropy and Production

So why does Entropy increase?
This is not from some hand of God or a mystical force. Here's why it happens.

Imagine a sequence of random numbers that you get from rolling a six sided die. Maybe we get [1,4,3,1,1,1,1,1].

Now, of all the possible sequences we can have for numbers rolled from a die, how many of them have that many 1's? Not that many. If something causes some of those numbers to be re-rolled, there are way more outcomes where there are fewer 1s. In fact, the most likely outcome would be one where the sequence gets more random. There are way more sequences of 8 numbers from a die where there are a relatively equal amount of each number. And these sequences also have higher Entropy. So with random change over time, Entropy tends to increase.

But how to we remove Entropy? Well that takes energy. And it's what production is.

Let's say we have a sequence of aluminum atoms in a big sheet of aluminum. This is a very, very low entropy/low information material. To make it useful, we in fact want to put out own information into it. We use a big press to stamp a pattern into the alluminum and turn it into a car body. But in order to do this, we first needed to remove all the entropy that acrued over time from the random movements of matter and energy in the earth's crust. Aluminum ore has tons of entropy because of all the other atoms bonded to the aluminum and the other rocks and things in it. There are way more ways for 1kg of aluminum atoms to be in a hunk or ore than in a sheet of metal. So we first take out information and then put our own information in. We use energy to decrease the entropy and then increase it again toward what we want.

The same goes for printing a book, or for making a chair, or printing semiconductor chips, or building a cargo ship.

Finale

I hope you all found this interesting. Materialism is not just a belief that the universe is governed by rules or anything like that. Materialism means that the physical world of particles and energy are the only things that are real. Information is often thought of to be a human construct but it is not. It is a real, physical, material thing.

The relevance to modern political economy and marxist analysis can be gone over in more detail in anyone wants. One of the most important results is that in a situation where production and distribution are mediated by money and markets between equals, the maximum entropy situation is the same as the distribution of energy in a chamber of gas molecules. Meaning that over time there will be a large mass of very poor people and a small mass of ever wealthier and ever smaller people.

Having del toro portray both che and fidel would be a nice touch.

Someone get in touch with their agents asap.

And my teacher let me hang it on their wall and nobody except one person questioned it.

I have a Vietnamese comrade who wanted to make a Vietnamese version of the Soviet Anthem. I helped them with the translation using google and they are happy that the translation is pretty close. They want to make it into a song now but they are unsure if the Vietnamese lyrics will flow with the music. I don't speak Vietnamese so I can't help them with this. Any suggestions would be most welcome.

Hello comrades.
I'm a former USonian and I've been politically active most of my life. I thought that it might be fun to share some of the weird legal technicalities that I've learned over the years.

These may be useful, these may not be useful. The USonian legal system is very much a secular version of ancient clergies with its fancy language, recitations, robes, and holy texts for judging moral matters. But maybe some of you will find these quirks interesting!

1. Patents are not property

A mild one to start out. Patents are something called a government franchise. Altho they are traded as tho they were property, they have a quirk. The federal government of the US is the one issuing the franchise, and it can thus revoke it at any time without compensation. The government can actually revoke any property at any time (especially land) but it has to give compensation. But if the federal government wanted to make certain technical innovations (refridgerants with low warming potential, vaccines, medicines, etc.) it could do it literally at zero cost.

2. The Constitution does not want a permanent army.

Sometimes this is called a "standing" army. This one is also very fun for any technicality lovers. Article I of the US Constitution is about Congress and Section 8 of Article I is about its powers. Article I, Section 8, Clause 12 says Congress has the power:
"To raise and support armies".
Compare this to Clause 13 which says it has the power:
"To provide and maintain a navy".
Raise and support vs provide and maintain.
So what? Maybe they just worded it differently. Well I'm being a bit of a trickster because the full text of Clause 12 says "To raise and support armies, but no appropriation of money to that use shall be for a longer term than two years".
The Constitution did not want a permanent army. This is why, to this day, that military spending is done in the Discretionary Budget each year. It's not technically automatic, technically all the soldiers have to re-enlist, and so the army is in line with the Constitution. (See what I mean about the legal system being a secular clergy lol).

3. National Guards are not state militias.

The original meaning of the 2nd Ammendment is even weirder than the modern interpretation that private citizens are allowed to own guns. The original meaning is that private citizens can form their own paramilitaries. This is the right that is actually protected. Now that makes sense in a settler colony originally conceived as a confederation of separate rural settler colonies, but it remains there to this day.

This one is actually the most useful for us leftists because militias are not only legal, they are Constitutionally protected. Having independent militias of the proletariat being armed is protected in the US Constitution. This is a fact that basically no other leftist movement has had and could very easily be leveraged if any leftwing militia is legally challenged. The public legitimacy would be more easily justified and even non-leftist legal system members would defend it.

But that's not the only thing. Many people think that the National Guard are the State Militias that the 2nd Amendment talks about. They are in fact, not! Only 20 of the 50 states have these militias. They are often called "defense forces". Wikipedia has a list of them here if you want.

Another weird thing is that the President likely has the authority to call these state militias into service under their command. 10 U.S.C. 251, 252, and 253 state that pretty clearly.

So then, what the hell are the National Guard? The National Guard use the other technicality of that Clause 12 from Article I Section 8. It does not say "army" it says "armies". Not only does Congress raise the regular army, it raises armies. The National Guard is raised under Congress's power to "raise and support" armies. Source 1 and Source 2.
The states are just given special control over what are essential local units of a federal army.

And lastly, perhaps most bizarre of all, here is more proof that the National Guard are actually not members of a militia but actual soldiers in the army. This is the case of Engblom v. Carey, 677 F.2d 957 (2d Cir. 1982).

Here's the backstory: Attica is a state prison in the state of New York. A prisoner uprising occured in 1971 against inhuman treatment of prisoners. Around half the 2200 prisoners took part in the uprising. The prison eventually took back control of the prisoners but were forced to begin implementing changes. Racial integration of staff, more humane treatment, etc. But the prison guards' union refused. So they went on strike. The governor of New York (Nelson Rockefeller. Yes, that Rockefeller family) activated the National Guard to run the prison during the strike (and also to scab but it was against racist cops so fuck both of 'em).

And this is where the court case happened. The 3rd Amendment prevents housing soldiers in homes during a time of peace. The prison guards took the state to court and won. The National Guard members were soldiers and members of the army and were housed in lodgings the prison had where some prison staff lived. This was deemed to be a home that the soldiers had been illegally quartered in a time of peace.

4. The reason party delegates don't have to vote in line with their citizens is the 1st Amendment.

I'm sure many of your know that voting for President in the US is not done directly. You vote for a candidate but that is merely an opinion poll. Each state is given a number of "electors" who are unelected people and usually party insiders. These electors are the ones who actually vote for the President and they do so "in their respective state capital on the first Tuesday after the second Wednesday of December".

Then the results of these meetings are brought to Congress on January 6th and tallied up and the new president is officially confirmed.

But the political parties themselves also have a similar system. This is what the national conventions are. And each state is given electors but they are often called "delegates". These delegates do not have to vote for who the state voted for and the reason is the 1st Amendment on freedom of speech and association.

So even tho states could pass laws requiring electors to vote in line with the state's population (or with the national vote), there is nothing they can do to prevent the delegates from voting however they want.

The End

I hope you all found those interesting! I might do another one of these if people found it fun. Feel free to share any other strange quirks you know of.

A friend of the family who i discuss politics with asked me to read Jordan Peterson's 13 rules for life, i asked him, in return, to watch/listen to some of Parenti's lectures. He accepted.

I really didn't think this through did i.. I have to read Jordan Peterson now😭

Has this happened to anyone else, or is it just me?

So I had to have healthcare on vacation in Austria so I went to the hospital. The first day the receptionist was very nice and the medics were also very nice. They told me to come back the next day for a checkup, for which I didn't need to make an appointment.

So the next day I came back. The door was locked but when I was let in there were other clients waiting as well. There was no one at the reception and after 10 minutes I stood up to leave. Then I saw that finally someone was at the reception so I went up to him. I immediately made clear that I'm a tourist and speak english. I told him that I was at the hospital the day before and the reason I was there. I told him that I was told to go back the next day to check if it became better. But I had to repeat myself a couple of times because I kept stumbling over my words. Then he said there were 6 other patients that needed help and that I shouldn't hold anyone up. This was after just a minute or less of talking. I was taken aback, because it didn't seem like I was bothering him. I was just informing him why I was there. I wasn't even done with my explantion. After that I clarified that I wasn't holding anyone up and that I hadn't made an appointment the day before. I said that because I thought that maybe he thought I had already made an appointment and that I was complaining to him that I wasn't called up yet. But he didn't listen and just told me to sit down. I repeated myself and then he yelled really angrily at me to sit down. Then I took a few steps back with my hands in the air, still trying to calmly explain why I am here. Then he opened his slide window in a frustrated manner and I finally sat down because I saw it was escalating. But when I sat down I snapped, yelled fuck you at him, put up my middle fingers and walked out of the door. I was planning to calm down in the building and return to him after but saw he was now out of the receptionist box and decided to just run out of the building because I didn't want to deal with it yet. I didn't return.

My problem with this situation is that I'm clearly a foreigner who has never used the local health care before, yet he acted like I should know exactly what I did wrong and didn't want to even assume he misunderstood. Instead of explaining what I did wrong or listening and answering my question he escalated by yelling at me. The receptionist the day before was so nice, as were the medics and then this happens.

I won't deny that parents these days are horrible at their job however a lot of people who talk about this issue miss the point of how modern parents suck to begin with. The biggest reason is the methods of parenting modern parents use (e.g.. giving kids ipads instead of actually parenting), the reason why parents do this is mostly due to genuine lack of time to properly raise a kid. From my growing adult experience comparing prices of basic goods now compared to back then, and being shocked basic jobs, BASIC FUCKING JOBS, now require degrees that could bankrupt me.

I can see why it's insanely hard to raise a kid nowadays. You try raising a child in today's age where where inflation combined with shit wages, the fact you can barely find a job nowadays, and long work hours. There's a reason why people these days aren't having kids these days. With such extreme pressure, parents would have no choice but to let the ipad raise the kids. If you're aware of the ipad baby epidemic, you should know the damage this type of parenting does.

Essentially the question of why modern parents suck is basically society putting extreme pressure on parents, modern parents being unable to meet such expectations, and then society coping and seething that a sizeable chunk of kids are so horribly raised despite the fact THEY are the ones that put such pressure that gave them no choice but to let the ipad raise them begin with. They don't suck because they're lazy, they suck because society forced them to.

Last I heard he was captured by Russians (by mistake). Then I also heard he was killed by friendly fire or tortured to death.

If that's true that's fucked up. Wasn't he a citizen/resident of the DPR? Didn't they see his youtube videos? Everyone also seems to have forgotten about him.

Just got a tow from the side of the highway. I feel like I've been jumping from car issue to car issue my whole life. I don't even want to have a car.

No advice needed or anything, just venting.

I keep hearing that Ukraine has invaded Russia or is "winning again" or some such.

So what's the SitRep?

I made it my NYR this year to learn a second language and while I picked Russian at first I switched to Spanish for a few different reasons. I've been using Duolingo for about 6 months now but have gotten to the point (I'm around A2 if not very early B1 fluency) where I just don't find it very helpful on its own anymore and the new stuff I learn just doesn't stick to my mind as good anymore.

I'd like to start incorporating other resources into my learning (which was the plan from the start) but have no idea where to start. I've incorporated note writing as well as flashcards into my learning as of a couple months ago, as well as trying to hold basic Spanish conversations with other people, but this is only really effective for perfecting what I've already studied.

To anyone who learned Spanish or really any language, do you know of any other resources for learning the language?

Gracias.

you should learn when it's enough removedery for your peace of mind

Hello,

I am using Voyager as a client for Lemmygrad and I would like to start posting videos on my Community named pigeon. I have only the option to post pictures. Do I need to use some other site where I have to upload it or is maybe my client missing the option.

Thank you in advance for your help