“Memes” aren’t a thing that exist anymore. People don’t get attached to some specific formulation of words because they are memorable/funny/interesting. These words are just repeated by content mills because recommendation systems have latched on to them as important keywords, and the cycle repeats itself. Nobody actually really cared about the fake “orange cat” concept, it was just perpetuated by a bunch of funny cat videos having the words “orange cat” in it and is now part of social media SEO. Now every post about some colour of cat has to include the words “orange cat”.

The internet is dead, and Mark Zuckerberg killed it.

Those are absolutely beautiful. What a great gift.

The Vietnam essay exists already 😄 https://criticalresist.substack.com/p/how-vietnam-decolonized-and-what

Nice!

And patsocs don’t deserve an essay of their own lol

I disagree. You quite clearly have some very developed thoughts on them that I’d like to read more about and comprehend better, and I believe right-opportunists should be mercilessly opposed from the cradle to the grave.

This is well meaning critique, but I think you mashed two really good essays into something lesser than they could’ve been. I’d be way more interested in either a thorough dissection of the organisation principles of Ho Chi Minh and specifically about General Giáp and another essay carefully tearing down whatever passes for Marxism in the US with clearer evidence and more neatly tied together.

As somebody who knows very little about both the CPV and the Yankee pseudoleft I look forward to more of your writing on these topics.

My main gripe isn’t so much with cheating, but with it being so easy to avoid learning anything fundamental with LLMs and then getting stuck when things get more advanced. This is very common with programming, where intro level students are now able to pass easily by relying on tools like co-pilot, but get absolutely destroyed once they reach more advanced courses.

With LLMs kids don’t feel like learning, studying or developing critical thinking skills in fundamentals classes because they are constantly spoonfed ready answers, and so they are woefully unprepared later on. As with most “successful” inventions in the smartphone age, it turns humans into passive observers and consumers rather than engaged actors with skills for investigation. I am genuinely worried for what sort of professionals and scientists we are forming today.

I agree. I never doubted my career choices more than when LLMs became mainstream and I saw the harm they do in classrooms. People need to drop this techno-solutionism and stop pretending that certain technologies can’t be inherently harmful.

I think I just walked like 10 kilometres just by walking in circles in my living room. Don’t do coffee, kids.

I think somebody on hexbear posted a tool on GitHub that is exactly that. Can’t remember the name though.

This is in line with “midtechs” in peripheral countries that operate “rideshare” and delivery apps becoming “fintechs” and offering banking services. After monopoly, the only path is always financialisation.

I absolutely hate how hardware is made to be impossibly hard to repair nowadays while also incredibly expensive to replace in the Global South. Your month’s worth of minimum wage cellphone broke a button? Your options are either paying half the phone price to replace a piece half the size of the phone, or getting a new one.

This is the reason I commented on the other thread about “On Protracted People’s War” and how it talks seemingly similar conditions but take very different stances. One is written from the perspective of revolutionaries on a reactionary country waging a war that is principally imperialist in character, the other from the perspective of a reactionary country defending from such a war.

The war in Ukraine is somewhere in-between, as there will be sectors of the Russia bourgeoisie that benefit from this war, but it also weakens the global hegemon (I disagree that we already have a multipolar world). On the other hand, it assures some measure of self determination for the peoples of Donbas and Ukraine.

From a very distant and somewhat ignorant perspective, (actual) revolutionary communists in Russia should not defend the overthrow of the Russian bourgeois state as an immediate objective (but a long term one). But they should have advocate for the immediate overthrow of the Ukrainian regime and, controversially, non-antagonistic autonomy from the Russian state and socialist restoration for the Donbas and Luhansk.

Lizzy’s still in a box.

The Fifth Republic predates the 1968 strikes by 10 years. Maybe you’re mistaking that for May 1958 in which De Gaulle led a coup that actually toppled the Fourth Republic to “prevent communists” after crises caused by the Algerian War of Independence led by the FLN. That one was a successful counter revolution, though I’m open to the idea that it was a close one if evidence of that is presented. Besides all that, there’s nothing to celebrate about the Fifth Republic still existing as a “victory”.

But on the 1968 strikes and election, Pompidou went from Prime Minister to president, and was from the same party as de Gaulle, as was the new Prime Minister de Murville. The conservative UDR also gained seats. I may not be very knowledgeable about cold war French history, but you’re really not helping your arguments with such easily debunked claims.

Hunter getting unpardoned was definitely not in my bingo card.

The government wasn’t toppled, they just did a snap election. That’s like saying the UK government was toppled when Theresa May called one back when she couldn’t Brexit.

Also, on that same election the communists lost chairs. This is nowhere close to a successful revolution.

I may have been too harsh and knee-jerky on you on my first reply, but it’s seriously very important to acknowledge our past failures and self-crit in order to find the correct path to revolution. In Brazil the Communist Party split specifically because the party was ossified and the faction that left/was expelled wanted to seek better paths. There’s no shame in admitting that what has been tried did not work.

My reading of it is that Trump will indeed bluster and say random shit whenever given a microphone, which will be milked by all corporate newsmedia but does not necessarily translate into policy, but at least during his first presidency the stuff that actually got enacted had some kind of class interest behind it.

So building an actual brick wall was pointless, but ICE arresting immigrants at random was very useful for silencing the hyperexploited migrant workers. Same thing with withholding arms to Ukraine back then for domestic political goals, it also aligned with Trump openly trying to reduce tensions with Russia. There were many other such cases of random bullshit being used to push policy that upheld some class interests. I don’t think he is smart and is playing 4D chess, but back then he must have had actual imperialist strategists trying to make do with whatever strange thing he said this week. Which, when it worked, Qanon folks would retroactively use to believe Trump was a genius.

This time though, I’m starting to believe the actual strategists are long gone and all they have is sycophants and other rich fucks disconnected from reality. Trump is loose to do whatever he wants, and so we get flip flopping tariffs, Greenland annexation and other such Yankee nonsense. He is the personification of USAmerican imperialist cultural superstructure.

Pretty cool, thanks comrade!

Name one successful socialist revolution in the West.

I would add “On Protracted War”, even though it was already chosen a while back, as they work together very well. Haven’t read the earlier “On Guerrilla Warfare” but sounds cool too.

One of my favourite things about lemmygrad is seeing informed comrades accurately predicting the near future through careful study. None of this “constant bewildered redditor” nonsense. I don’t remember all the users predicting this, but well done y’all.