davel

davel, 14 hours ago

Headline is not dumb. There are reasons to make a distinction between the two, the most salient one being that capacitors are several orders of magnitude faster to charge and discharge.

davel, 1 day ago

The Democracy Index published by the Economist Group

Neoliberal corporate media are defining what is to be considered “democratic”? You don’t have to drink this Kool-Aid.

davel, 1 day ago

World Incarceration Rates If Every U.S. State Were A Country

davel, 1 day ago

You can see the parallels with fascism.

Totalitarianism, AKA authoritarianism. Hannah Arendt came from wealth and so unsurprisingly was anticommunist. Her work was financially supported and promoted by the CIA. This is a bourgeois liberal, intentionally anticommunist construct that lumps fascism and communism in the same bucket.

Monthly Review, The CIA and the Cultural Cold War Revisited

U.S. and European anticommunist publications receiving direct or indirect funding included Partisan Review, Kenyon Review, New Leader, Encounter and many others. Among the intellectuals who were funded and promoted by the CIA were Irving Kristol, Melvin Lasky, Isaiah Berlin, Stephen Spender, Sidney Hook, Daniel Bell, Dwight MacDonald, Robert Lowell, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, and numerous others in the United States and Europe. In Europe, the CIA was particularly interested in and promoted the “Democratic Left” and ex-leftists, including Ignacio Silone, Stephen Spender, Arthur Koestler, Raymond Aron, Anthony Crosland, Michael Josselson, and George Orwell.

If fact almost all of the “Western left” (that wasn’t crushed by red scares) was captured by the imperial core’s propaganda machine: Imperialist Propaganda and the Ideology of the Western Left Intelligentsia: From Anticommunism and Identity Politics to Democratic Illusions and Fascism

davel, 1 day ago

Yes, they have a single party: the https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Dictatorship_of_the_proletariat, also known as proletarian democracy.

But we too have a single party: the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, also known as bourgeois democracy.

[Princeton] Study: US is an oligarchy, not a democracy

davel, 1 day ago

Like, what countries do you think are communist?

None, as any communist country will tell you. They are socialist states working toward communism, meaning a classless society, and, by their own theory of state, a stateless society.

davel, 1 day ago

That’s why Russians aren’t “white” anymore. They’ve been downgraded to asiatic horde again, which is why NATOpedia has trotted out meat wave theory again. Like authoritarianism, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/apr/20/the-invention-of-whiteness-long-history-dangerous-idea.

davel, 22 hours ago

If you’re saying authoritarianism can be explained by non-whiteness…

I’m not saying that. I’m saying that “whiteness” as a construct is a tool of capitalism/imperialism/colonialism. And that the Global North similarly tends to attribute “authoritarianism” to whichever states are acting insufficiently subservient to their imperialist interests at any given moment. And I’m saying that these two constructs have a tendency to be aligned with each other, because they’re both tools of capitalism/imperialism/colonialism.

But also saying that anyone opposing NATO become ipso facto non-white because it’s “an ever-shifting construct”…

Whiteness is as old as European colonialism, and has been baked into capitalism—which began in Europe—from the start. Whiteness has been twisted into all sorts of nonsensical logic pretzels. See for example honorary Aryans honorary whites. It has no explanatory power because it is simply a tool of power. Even the Irish, Italian, and other Catholic European immigrants have suffered it within our own country. As Josep Borrell has more-or-less said, the imperial core is the “garden”, and the rest of the world is the “jungle.” Imperialism uses race—which again is made-up bullshit—as a tool to justify their imperialism.

You’re saying “authoritarianism = non-whiteness = opposition to the NATO bloc”

I’m not saying that, but the NATO bloc often seems to imply it. international-community-1international-community-2

davel, 22 hours ago

I already covered the origins of this propagandistic Western conceptualization of “authoritarianism”/“totalitarianism” in another comment in this post. But I’ll add a 1955 CIA report that was declassified in 2008.

Even in Stalin’s time there was collective leadership. The Western idea of a dictator within the Communist setup is exaggerated. Misunderstandings on that subject are caused by lack of comprehension of the real nature and organization of the Communist power structure. Stalin, although holding wide powers, was merely the captain of a team and it seems obvious that Khrushchev will be the new captain.

davel, 22 hours ago

Reporter: [REDACTED]
Reason: racism

We really ought to teach critical race theory in schools like conservative politicians and pundits claim.

davel, 20 hours ago

The Nordic countries are at best welfare capitalist states, and that welfare relies on the super-exploitation of the Global South. No Nordic country is even gesturing toward the abolition of private ownership of the means of production. In fact they’re moving in the opposite direction, toward the neoliberal privatization of more and more of the commons and the financialization of everything, which is burying the working class in debt. The Eurozone is just the cartel of the European private banks, and it was designed to enforce neoclassical economics and preclude Keynsian economics.

davel, 19 hours ago

I mean, you’re asking about two separate political axis: economy, and control.

same-picture

You may not realize that these are in no way orthogonal to each other, but the bourgeoisie certainly do, because they own the means of production, and they use the state to enforce the private ownership that perpetuates their control over the proletariat.

davel, 18 hours ago

Perhaps, if NATOpedia’s raw data is to be trusted.

Incarceration rates and counts. From World Prison Brief

The World Prison Brief at PrisonStudies.org is an online database providing free access to information on prison systems around the world. It is now hosted by the Institute For Crime & Justice Policy Research (ICPR), Birkbeck College, University of London.

It was previously hosted by the International Centre for Prison Studies (ICPS). It was a research centre at the University of Essex. It was launched at the House of Lords on 4 April 2011. Between 1997 and 2010 ICPS was based in King’s College London and was launched formally by Home Secretary Jack Straw in October 1997. In July 2010 the International Centre for Prison Studies incorporated and registered as a charity with the Charities Commission of England and Wales. From the outset the Centre was independent of governmental and intergovernmental agencies, although it would work closely with them.

So who really knows what the quality of the data is without further investigation. But it seems to have been originally created by the UK’s military-intelligence-industrial complex.

davel, 1 day ago

Republicans will never blame capitalists or capitalism as such. Even welfare state liberals like Sanders won’t blame capitalism as such, they’ll blame https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It's_OK_to_Be_Angry_About_Capitalism.

davel, 1 day ago

Good luck with the deleting. It often just means UPDATE comments SET is_deleted = 1 WHERE ID = 666;.

davel, 1 day ago

The only political power you have within America’s political system

Within electoralism, anyway. It’s not the only power we have, it’s just the only one we’re taught, and the only one in corporate media’s Overton window.

ETA: Thanks to two (now three) red scares, I probably should spell it out for the peanut gallery: Labor power.

davel, 2 days ago

The Hasbara-in-Chief is still pushing the debunked mutilation and rape allegations.

• White House walks back Biden’s claim he saw children beheaded by Hamas
• “Between the Hammer and the Anvil” - The Story Behind the New York Times October 7 Exposé

davel, 2 days ago

Einstein may have supported Labor Zionism, until it betrayed its purported socialist principles.

Labor Zionists played a leading role in the 1947–1949 Palestine War, and had a dominant presence among the leadership of the Israel Defense Forces for decades after the independence of the State of Israel during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War.

Zionist Left: The ‘Pacifist’ Arm of the Nakba

davel, 2 days ago

“All they know is McDonald’s, charge their phone, twerk, be bisexual, eat hot chip, and lie,” she added.

davel, 2 days ago

archive.today, otherwise known as archive.is & archive.md & archive.ph & archive.li en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive.today

I use it when Bypass Paywalls Clean for Firefox fails me. In fact BPC itself makes use of archive.today in some cases: github.com/search?q=owner%3Abpc-clone+archive.tod…

davel, 2 days ago

You spelled bell¿ngcat wrong.

davel, 3 days ago

Dawkins, Harris, Hicthens, and many other New Atheism luminaries weaponized atheism as War on Terror apologia.

Russell Foster, 2019: Why the arguments of the ‘New Atheists’ are often just as violent as religion

Celebrity atheists such as Richard Dawkins appear to claim the moral high ground when it comes to violence. Dawkins, along with Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens, insist that because religion is intrinsically violent, then atheism is inherently more pacific. After all, if all the evils in the world can be blamed on religion, then arguably eliminating religion is not only desirable but a moral obligation for atheists who believe in peace.

Yet our research shows that in the War on Terror, these atheists have been surprisingly willing to align themselves with policies which are at least as violent – and in some cases more so – than many of those perpetrated in the name of religion.

Émile P. Torres, 2021: Godless grifters: How the New Atheists merged with the far right

davel, 1 day ago

Reporter: [REDACTED]
Reason: Russian bot

Another day, another BlueAnon conspiracy theorist.

• IT Pro: Cambridge Analytica models were exaggerated and ineffective, [UK Information Commissioner’s Office] claims
• Wall Street Journal: Mueller Doesn’t Find Trump Campaign Conspired With Russia
• Jacobin: Democrats and Mainstream Media Were the Real Kremlin Assets
• Washington Post: FEC fines DNC, Clinton for violating rules in funding Steele dossier
• Washington Post: Russian trolls on Twitter had little influence on 2016 voters
• Jacobin: It Turns Out Hillary Clinton, Not Russian Bots, Lost the 2016 Election
• Matt Taibbi: Move Over, Jayson Blair: Meet Hamilton 68, the New King of Media Fraud The Twitter Files reveal that one of the most common news sources of the Trump era was a scam, making ordinary American political conversations look like Russian spywork
• Jacobin: Why the Twitter Files Are in Fact a Big Deal On the Left, there’s been a temptation to dismiss the revelations about Twitter’s internal censorship system that have emerged from the so-called Twitter Files project. But that would be a mistake: the news is important and the details are alarming.
• MSNBC Repeats Hamilton 68 Lies 279 Times in 11 Minutes
• Jeff Gerth at Columbia Journalism Review on Russiagate: Editor’s Note | Part one | Part two | Part three | Part four
• Matt Taibbi: WMD, Part II: CIA “Cooked The Intelligence” To Hide That Russia Favored Clinton, Not Trump In 2016
• Chris Hedges: Why Russiagate Won’t Go Away

davel, 3 days ago

That fortunately reveals nothing. I’m not a fan of asklemmy questions that are phishing/doxxing expeditions, whether intentional or not. I’ve removed some such posts in the past.