Publish this everywhere to get musk dumped on day 1

This is such a doomed and haunted shower thought for someone who has a Marxist conception of technology and alienation

Yeah its been interesting to see the development of the BRICS coalition as a counter to US trade hegemony. It makes one optimistic, but there’s still so much uncertainty. Venezuela’s economy is imploding due to some amount of mismanagement by Maduro’s admin, and not diversifying their economy like 10-15 years ago. And some very recent and concerning chatter coming from international contacts who would be fairly in the know and historically over optimistic about the tenacity of the Cuban revolution, are signalling that the Cuban government is extremely close to collapse (although we’ve been hearing the same from bourgeois media for 60 years, so its kind of hard to swallow.) Columbia is more social democratic than it has been in decades, Argentina is more exploited, Brazil is doing a wild flip from one extreme right wing president to a moderately progressive labor president. And developments on the African continent such as trans-national coalitions are reclaiming the Sahel. The US lost much of its ideological lustre it enjoyed during the cold war, but it makes up for that with naked violence. Our flagging superpower is still like historically the most powerful force in history, even as the international ruling class strips every last stick of profit out of our deeply paralyzed and ineffective political system. And our brainworms are still our #1 cultural export.

Its gonna be a crazy ass decade

Well… some capital. Don’t try to order anything from Cuba or Venezuela or Russia and expect it on your doorstep any time soon.

This is a pretty interesting exception. The reason why Cuban or Venezuelan or Russian capital isn’t very available internationally is because of embargoes. These embargoes and sanctions operate for the benefit of western imperialism, itself just another form of capitalism.

So the reason why national capital isn’t available to international capital is because international capital prevents it from being available. Compare this to many post-colonial African and south american nations. The ones that towed the line of western imperialism, who politically nurtured a national ruling class to benefit and oversee the exploitation of the vast majority of their population in order to provide cheap labor and commodities, have “open” economies. Countries that attempt to provide for the social welfare of the masses (Cuba, Venezuela) or countries who pursue their own internationalist, “imperialist” agendas counter to the western consensus (current Russia) face embargo and sanction.

This is not to deflect any and all criticism from Cuba, Venezuela or historic Soviet Russia. It is an interesting condition to think about.

This vice article gets into some technical reasons why, although appearances can, and often do, operate independently of incentive and benefit.

I really wanna read that book, maybe this year :) I almost stole it from my wife’s cousin at Thanksgiving this year

I don’t think what you’re saying contradicts me, I agree my explainer is one view, one which addresses political economies, and the GrabGrow view is another more anthropological view. Unfortunately Marx never finished his anthropological works although there are a lot of notes from the end of his life that are worth parsing.

Saying it’s this one thing, when it can be scientifically understood as either or both things, is more like orthodoxy which I try to avoid. Both views help to understand a complicated topic made of historically shifting dynamics and changing aspects.

What your explanation doesn’t address that mine does, is what is the “social power” that congeals into these forms? It takes different shapes throughout history, but can be understood coarsely as “wealth”, which is the accumulated value of human labor. My explanation better reflects the class character of the state. However if we are to try and actually affect the world for the better, as we should, we would be better equipped with both views (and likely a few others) with which to determine truth in the functioning of political economy, than one or the other alone.

Wealth is pinned to production and currency is pinned to wealth. You fundamentally misunderstand what wealth, money, and power are and how they function in society. Alienation from society and idealism distort the nature of these subjects. You’re right to question the way these things function, but you’ll not get much further than MMT or other idealist cul du sacs. If you want to understand how wealth operates as a basis for society, they you’ll need to start to study Marx

The state is formed by the historical mode of production, its like a contradiction that is the resolution to all of the other contradictions present in market social relations. In other words the state is based on how stuff gets made, and who accumulates the value inherent in the stuff, which is in essence the congealed work that went into making that stuff.

Politics and culture is always a factor in what shape the state takes, since politics and culture are social structures and sources of power themselves, but politics is downstream from production

You have to have an advanced degree, wealth and celebrity in order to publicly proclaim something that an introspective 12 year old would yell at his friends at 4 in the morning after completing a dare that he could gulp down a whole cup of sugar without coughing or puking

This is clearly a completely natural phenomenon, like the weather !

Idiotic coincidence theories are idiotic

It must’ve been hard escaping the Saskatchewinian gulag that the CCP (Canadian Communist Party) locked him up in for questioning the woke, trans agenda.

Looking forward to his Yeonmi Park arc

Pretty sure we’ve had presidents who killed people before, like wasn’t murdering Indians Andrew Jackson’s whole campaign platform?

Well there are good days and bad days. When she started here she wasn’t able to get into her room to set it up until the 11th hour, so she started the year on her backfoot. She takes good care of her self, much better than me tbh, so I think that helps. She’s very tough and competent, and she has a sort of gentle frankness that I think help smooth out rough interpersonal issues that drive so much burn out, just because she like can’t stand to let things fester between people. Also our relationship is very strong and open and honest, and we share everything including housework. We take vacations, and alto she likes to plan vacations so it can be a nice mental getaway for her. Luckily I have a decent job too so we can do that. My kids are older and we only have them part time so she doesn’t have to full time mom, even though she’s a great step mom and very involved.

As a fellow musician, I’m not able to read

It closely approximates my experience having known dozens of musicians, I’ll have my neuroscientist friend weigh in later today. Keep refreshing this thread until you see her response

He doesn’t write his own lyrics, he does write his own music

Okay I’m not defending the teacher here except for the child’s right to be recognized and have their needs tended to. This also isn’t about “good” and “bad” teachers, but the education system. This is anecdotal, so take it for what it’s worth.

My wife, S, is an intervention specialist which is a teacher in a special ed classroom. I think she is a very good teacher, and after years in a underfunded inner city school, she now works in a very large well funded elementary school in a nice area with very involved and stable parents, by and large.

She has a student, L who is non verbal, most of her kids are and she has the most difficult special-ed classroom in her school. She works on a team with two other intervention specialists, one of which, B, was L’s teacher for two years previous. L has a muscular disability.

It’s S’s first year at this school so she is just starting to know the kids. What she is discovering is that these “very low” non verbal children, have basically received no prior schooling on subjects. Their learning plans have each of them marked very low, with the most basic goals. And granted, behavior is usually an issue with these kids who can’t communicate. They can lash out suddenly and scratch or bite a teacher or aide, drawing blood more often than not. So behavior will eat up a ton of bandwidth for any teacher. It took my wife months to get her kids to sit with her and do any work whatsoever. But once they started to do work for her so she could test their ability, she discovers that they are all quite advanced in various areas, despite basically never being taught. Kids with educational goals of being able to count to 5 can do multiplication and division for 2 and 3 digit numbers, ahead of their grade; kids who seem to have no concept of reading or conceptual language can spell and construct sentences or answer questions about a story, if it is shown to them in a way that they will interact with.

Back to L, he is another case just like this. Very difficult to work with at first, refused to be taught, lashes out violently when he gets frustrated, but now that he is used to her he will sit and work and also demonstrates advanced ability in multiple subjects.

However the last to years his previous teacher and the head of their team, B, by all accounts from teacher and aides did nothing with him for 2 years. He was basically laid on a mat in a closet, and ignored, everyday for 2 years. My wife says that for the most part he gets around in her class pretty darn well, so even the assumption that he’s mostly immobile was wrong.

Special ed teachers spend most of their time some weeks filling out complicated ed plans that are a state requirement, but frankly no one ever checks or even seems to know how to fill these things out. Everyone is just winging it. Bureaucracy is a stand in for education and the needs of the child. Imo my wife is an exceptional teacher who has time and time again achieved breakthroughs with some of her most difficult students. The lead on her team, with over a decade of experience in this job couldn’t even see past their own assumptions about the child, and never stopped to question them, and so the poor kid was neglected, uninjured thank God, for 2 years.

So if a pretty good teacher at a good school can fuck up that badly, how dangerous would it be for a inexperienced or disengaged teacher? To me this isn’t a problem that comes down to individual teachers but of the American education system as a whole, and it’s priorities. Spoiler alert, politics matter more than children.

Musicians only use 1/3 of their brain because making great music uses the other 2/3rds. Sometimes this rule isn’t true when a musician is part of a group, so they can still like study and better themselves without having to burn out just making music, but solo musicians and prominent bandleaders are hopeless. The best you can hope for from a musician is that they are at least self aware of their own idiocy and can laugh at it or keep it in check, but this quality doesn’t survive very long once someone makes several million dollars.