askchapo

I'm looking over a new pair of shoes I recently bought. My feet hurt after walking a few miles in them, so I inspected the insole area, and it was the cheapest 5mm foam imaginable with no other structural support. Below that is basically just the rubber sole. This shit cost $100.

This isn't my first rodeo with overpriced, shitty shoes, so I always have a set of superfeet inserts on standby. Huge improvement, but fuck, why does everything have to be a rip off? Those inserts are $50 for some nicer foam and a simple sliver of molded plastic.

This brings me to the thread title: When was the last time you felt like you got your money's worth for an item?

Dude took off his shoes and then put them back on again twenty times before walking into his own home. When I was a kid I thought his show was fucking boring. I think libs are just pretending to love him because he was a civility republican. CMV.

PS: what the fuck is the deal with Lamb Chop’s Play-Along?

Or is revenge fucking awesome

someone said this is "executiev dysfucntion" and i told them to suck off me !

I'm in need of resources related to maintaining emotional and mental wellbeing when working around communities with a high volume of propaganda, indoctrination messaging and that performative fascist banter.

Maybe more broadly if anyone could point me to any writing by people who've done this sort of work or action with similar sorts of stressors? Academic research?

I've been doing some mental inventories and recognise that it's time for a decent break from what I've been working on, but I'd really like some material to help me think about this stuff from more perspectives, see what sorts of tools other people use for harm minimisation and it might also be nice to vibe on someone's recollections and anecdotes if there's anything like that floating around.

Appreciate anything you might have to share. I had resources at one time but that was a few hard drives and OSes ago.

Pretty much title. I've seen this talked about a lot but I only very vaguely know what all this means, could someone elaborate on what happened, why it happened and what the consequences of it are?

My go to site got shut down recently(tragic), anyone have any suggestions for TV/movie streaming? Thanks in advance, comrades!! p.s. love my trans comrades!

I think hexbear has them. Is it a connection thing where cookies spot other cookies? Do tracking cookies matter when it comes to insurance and therapy sites/apps? I'm thinking about therapy that I saw advertised on YouTube, and I bet they're somehow sketchy. And their app requires the use of third party tracking and cookies.

I just don't want these sites/apps to see I'm a communist.

I've seen a few times people cite Furr while disavowing him in a more general sense, but I have never seen someone here talk about specific problems with him and his work.

I remembered this fact because I was looking up information on Losurdo and found a little eulogy Furr wrote for him (which incidentally had the answer I was looking for, that Losurdo did not speak Russian).

Furr seems like an absolute crank in terms of his general writing, see this text at the end of an article he wrote refuting a Current Affairs article:

I have been studying the allegations of crimes against Joseph Stalin for many years. My intention is to research every one of them.

When I began years ago I thought that it would be only a matter of time – perhaps a year or two – before I discovered that at least one of these allegations against Stalin was true, could be confirmed by primary-source evidence. I was wrong. So far, after several decades of searching, I have yet to evidence that Stalin committed even one crime, much less the myriad crimes that Trotsky, Khrushchev’s men, Gorbachev’s men, and academic researchers have confidently asserted.

I intend to keep looking. Perhaps some day I will discover at least one genuine crime by Stalin that I can truthfully say is supported by the best evidence we have. If and when I do, I will publish it and the evidence to support it.

Which is just a villain origin story, though again I must say that every refutation I have personally seen from Furr (though few in number) made sense.

So I ask again, what is actually wrong with him? Or has he merely inherited his own "Black Legend"?

Something like this but better. I wanna put them all over my clipboard, maybe my water bottle, extra maybe my laptop.

Discuss?

Interviewing for a job where I'd either be working 11pm-9am four nights a week or one 14 hour day and two 10 hour days or something.

My mom is very skeptical about the overnight, and I'm aware there are health risks, but if they offer it I don't think I've got much choice as I am currently sans job. I'm already a bit of a night owl, is it manageable if I take precautions?

They look the same wtf

Be honest

Everytime I've shown concerns with the ideas of a single party state, of "democratic" centralism, of a planned economy, censorship, secret police, etc, nothing I say is ever really discussed in depth because people just tell me "read On Authority, just read it, its a 10 min read, it will change everything, just read it!"

No it didn't, this essay is frankly really dumb to me. It feels more like venting than an actual argument. Last time I posted doubts about planned economies and I got a much better view of it with everyone's polite answers, I still don't fully agree but there was at least a discussion with an idea I was able to more clearly understand. So my aim with this post is the same

My main reasons to propose decentralized systems with distributed decision making are:

1. Decentralized systems are less fragile both to internal failure and external sabotage, you are all on Lemmy so you must know this when comparing it to the centralized Reddit. A centralized system has one failure point and the higher-up it happens the more catastrophic the consequences, and no amount of representative elections and internal purges are ever going to fix this inherent fragility, they are temporal mitigations. Centralized systems depend on constant dice rolls and hope that the guy at the top ends up being good. With time, the dice eventually blunders, it's innevitable, and this ruins the system and deeply affects the lives of everyone under it

2. A small body of people (relatively speaking, in comparison to the greater body of people the system is ruling over) cannot physically and biologically fully comprehend the issues and needs of "the masses" so to speak, that is an amount of information that cannot fit into a couple or a dozen or even hundreds of heads even if all of them deeply want to try. Which most often they don't. This alienation from "the masses" so to speak happens the higher up you are, you start seeing everything as simply numbers, you need to make that abstraction to properly process things and decide, but in doing so you don't realize the millions of entire lives full of hopes and dreams and struggles you are affecting. This is why leaders can order genocides, they are never the ones that watch them being committed, they just see papers.

3. Any system first and foremost has to sustain itself and its authority, this is the highest priority, it has to be above any other goals, and sustaining a centralized system is much harder than sustaining a portion of a decentralized one, this is why they need censorship and purges and camps and police and information control and data gathering of everything every person is doing "just in case", all of this effort could be redirected to actually making the lives of people better, but security comes first! Security always eventually eats liberty. What purpose is the liberation of people if that makes them end up in a system where they're actually just as restricted as before?

On Authority addresses nothing of this. It's just a bunch of smug self masturbation and "uhhm actually"s.

All these workers, men, women and children, are obliged to begin and finish their work at the hours fixed by the authority of the steam, which cares nothing for individual autonomy.

Nature imposes a necessity to do things in a certain way but this has nothing to do with how the decision making process of the people who are doing that thing is carried out. By this logic your stomach is being authoritarian when it's hungry.

Wanting to abolish authority in large-scale industry is tantamount to wanting to abolish industry itself, to destroy the power loom in order to return to the spinning wheel.

If you think nature is authoritarian the spinning wheel is just as much of an authority as the loom though! Both require things to be done in a certain way after all

Let us take another example — the railway. [...] Here, too, the first condition of the job is a dominant will that settles all subordinate questions, whether this will is represented by a single delegate or a committee charged with the execution of the resolutions of the majority of persona interested. In either case there is a very pronounced authority.

No, there is a key difference of relations and mechanics of decision making in both cases. Authority imposed and authority given are different things. A delegate has no authority, the purpose of a delegate is purely to help carrying out a mandate.

When I submitted arguments like these to the most rabid anti-authoritarians, the only answer they were able to give me was the following: Yes, that's true, but there it is not the case of authority which we confer on our delegates, but of a commission entrusted! These gentlemen think that when they have changed the names of things they have changed the things themselves. This is how these profound thinkers mock at the whole world.

He is being smug about not knowing the difference between delegation and representation. They are fundamentally different things though, and this is just a fact. He is mocking people for knowing things he doesn't. How is this supposed to be enlightening?

The mechanics and relations of power are fundamentally not the same. The point is not to never have a position where someone has to follow the will of someone else, it's to make sure processes and structures of things are laid out, approved, and can be changed and revoked by the people who are actually operating in them. It's not to not have a social structure, but to have a social structure that can be taken back and molded

If the autonomists confined themselves to saying that the social organisation of the future would restrict authority solely to the limits within which the conditions of production render it inevitable, we could understand each other

BUT THAT'S EXACTLY THE POINT! Centralization is a cancer. You fully kill it if you can, and if you can't, you try to reduce it as much as possible. Showing proof that some things have to be centralized is moot, we can centralize that thing specifically and not centralize everything else.

but they are blind to all facts that make the thing necessary and they passionately fight the world.

They fight preconceived notions that things have to be centralized when they really don't have to be. A lot of things are like that.

All Socialists are agreed that the political state, and with it political authority, will disappear as a result of the coming social revolution, that is, that public functions will lose their political character and will be transformed into the simple administrative functions of watching over the true interests of society.

This has nothing to do with what's being discussed??? Also: "Power concedes nothing without a demand, it never has and it never will" -Frederick Douglass

Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon

If you are being dominated and opressed and by armed means you free yourself that is not imposing authority. That is uh. Freeing yourself. That is self defense. If these things are the same then... basically everything is authoritarian. I get now why people say "its a meaningless word" - people like this guy are the ones who are making it meaningless.

Anyway, same as before, this post is not intended as a "checkmate dumbasses" thing. I'm actually interested in talking and learning. I mean no ill harm. o/

Pictured: A fumo communist

What I'm imagining is one currency ("foreign currency", let's call it) is used mainly for other countries to buy goods from the 2-currency country; this one would be "cheap" relative to other countries in order to encourage trade. That currency would be similar to an export country's currency (like China).

So let's say our hypothetical country wants to trade lumber, they'll price the lumber according to the foreign currency for other countries to buy.

The other currency ("domestic currency") is earned and used by the citizens of said country to be able to purchase goods (domestic and imported). This currency would be "strong" and could allow citizens to sustain a quality of life that allows them to comfortably afford a home, education, groceries, etc.

So the hypothetical exchange rate of "domestic currency" (DC$) for the "foreign currency" (FC$) would look something like this:

1DC$ = 100FC$

Another condition: Domestic goods for domestic purchase are not priced according to the domestic currency, they're priced at the foreign currency and can be bought using the domestic currency (by citizens).

So going back to the lumber example: a citizen wants to buy lumber. That citizen will purchase lumbar using the domestic currency, but the price of the lumber will be set according to the foreign currency (which is it's price during trade).

I don't know if this question even makes sense, but let's say we have a group of people debating a set of ideas. Over the course of their discussion one idea starts to win out. Not because of a material base, but like the philosophical rigor of the argument is the best. That wouldn't be dialectical materialism, the ideas would be resolved by an idealist dialectic. Assuming they're talking about pure math or something like that. Or is the Marxist idea that even mathematics is a result of materialism?

I always believed religion was incompatible with a society rooted in addressing material reality, although I know we have have religious users and wanted to hear people's takes.