I think you were so ready to dunk on anarchists, that you missed the point entirely.

No, Kropotkin is not saying the North Pole has an industry. He was saying the elves work voluntarily, the shops are not after profit, and bringing joy to people is reward enough.

No, Kropotkin does not say we should base our production on a fairy tale. His point is that production should happen to satisfy needs and wants of people, with people deciding what those are, rather than a central, omniscient administrator (like the classic, capitalist Santa Claus). He points to the fact that Santa was created by people, and every people have their own, slightly different version. This speaks to the universality of the concept of giving without wanting anything in return.

No. All available pixels have been sent to Ukraine. We have to make do.

Where's the first letter/number?

Looks like people were writing all over the flag, The letter after SS isn't in line with the SS, could be a mistake.

But those numbers are meaningless. Occam's razor and all that.

What does 114 mean? It's clearly a stylised SS.

This is postmodernism. His army is full of Nazi imagery and symbols, not to mention the thousands of Nazis in the ranks plus the tens of thousands of their comrades who tolerate them plus the millions who celebrate them. There isn't a week where we don't see half a dozen new images and videos of Nazis in the Ukrainian army proudly displaying their affiliation.

The lib response is literally the response the bots from Westworld give: "That doesn't look like anything to me." They have convinced themselves that pointing to reality can be Russian propaganda. They choose to ignore reality in favour of a narrative convenient to them. I don't understand it.

I used to be a DPRK "hater".

Then I actually read about DPRK's history as well as its actual, present-day geopolitical standing. It was an eye-opener. It is amazing what they have achieved after what has been and is being done to them. Their perseverance is inspiring.

That's not to say it doesn't have its internal problems and there are plenty of areas where the state could do better. But no country is perfect. And the DPRK is definitely an overall better place than some exploited countries in Africa where after a series of coups and civil wars between war lords (some funded by the US) they ended up with some parody of liberalism and a country friendly to US interests, recipient of IMF loans, victim of "restructuring", etc.

Libs laugh at how the DPRK is distrustful of the West. "They don't even watch hypersexualised violent films that teach you how to fetishise the capitalist lifestyle." They've fucking fought off the tentacles of American "culture" that has poisoned nearly every human mind connected to the internet. Kudos to them.

But the best part about DPRK existing is how it makes people make absolute fools of themselves by believing and repeating the most ridiculous propaganda imaginable. Like the defectors who are trained and told what to say. People eat those lies up.

Some lie on their own, like Yeonmi Park. She figured out that the more ridiculous her claims the more popular she gets. Listen to this shit. There's people who believe what she's saying. It's absolutely insane.

"It is difficult for me to imagine what "personal liberty" is enjoyed by an unemployed person, who goes about hungry, and cannot find employment.

Real liberty can exist only where exploitation has been abolished, where there is no oppression of some by others, where there is no unemployment and poverty, where a man is not haunted by the fear of being tomorrow deprived of work, of home and of bread. Only in such a society is real, and not paper, personal and every other liberty possible."

J. Stalin

Why does the other guy say "Let's destroy the Greeks"? Is it some r/2balkan4you inside joke?

I confused it with another one, Science & Society. The name isn't even close. It was hope clouding my memory.

Scans of Monthly Review are tough to find.

If you were a fledgling communist movement in the past, you could count on the USSR for support. For example, USSR sent Cuba agricultural machinery and fertiliser, allowing them to farm efficiently and feed their people. If you are a communist movement, you cannot count on China for help. China night help, or they might not, it's not as certain as in times of USSR.

Probably. China also sold weapons to the Philippine government to repress Maoists. China is not the USSR.

Same. Fun comic. I think the author has made a few new panels in the last couple of years.

Or do you prefer awesome because it's easier to configure than having to bother with recompiling etc.?

Exactly, all I have to do is restart the wm leaving all my applications running.

awesomewm, it just works.

A lot of those would happen after clandestinely monitoring your internet traffic. Spyware yes, but if they have spyware on your computer then they might as well monitor what you do on the computer side. I feel if one is going to use a VPN, Mullvad provides the most privacy features. If the police is spending all this time and resources to check your internet traffic, that means you fucked up somewhere else and they have you for something already. In that case, the VPN wasn't the problem.

For example, you can say "police can come into your house anyway, why not leave the door open?" If the door is open, they can just walk in. But if it's locked, they need a warrant. And again, if they have a warrant, that means you fucked up somewhere else.

Could be a GPT bot.

if needed police will just find your mullvad key one way or another

How could they do this?

I thought that was a bot that posted the body of the article.

the West is considering sending more military aid to Ukraine, including lethal weapons.

Lethal weapons? What have they been sending so far, marshmallow bombs?

They have to say something. Forbes has been publishing shit like:

You can find old Soviet T-62 tanks in museums all around the world, but the Ukrainians are increasingly capturing them on the battlefield. This is an indicator of just how deeply Russia is having to dig into reserves of old vehicles, and the situation is far worse than you might imagine.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2022/11/28/the-ukrainian-army-captured-dozens-of-the-russian-armys-old-t-62-tanks-and-is-now-sending-them-back-into-battle/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2022/10/27/ukraine-is-collecting-a-lot-of-russias-old-t-62-tanks/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2022/10/04/ukraine-is-capturing-russias-old-t-62-tanks-will-it-use-them/

So now that Ukraine is using T-55 tanks, they have to be "super upgraded". Western MSM exists to manipulate and control, not inform.

What?! That's based as fuck.

Apparently there wasn't even a vote this time, they just went with her design.

Touché!

You mean will they commit it again?

Don't forget Franz Halder.

During World War II, he directed the planning and implementation of Operation Barbarossa, the 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union. Halder became instrumental in the radicalisation of warfare on the Eastern Front. He had his staff draft both the Commissar Order (issued on 6 June 1941) and the Barbarossa Decree (signed on 13 May 1941) that allowed German soldiers to execute Soviet citizens for any reason without fear of later prosecution, leading to numerous war crimes and atrocities during the campaign. After the war, he had a decisive role in the development of the myth of the clean Wehrmacht.

After World War II Halder served as a lead consultant for the US Army Historical Division. He oversaw the writing of over 2,500 historical documents by 700 former German officers, whom he instructed to remove material detrimental to the image of the German armed forces. Halder used his influence to foster a false history of the German-Soviet conflict in which the German army fought a "noble war" and which denied its war crimes. The US Army overlooked Halder's apologia because Halder's group was providing military insights on the Soviet Union that it deemed important in the light of the Cold War. Halder succeeded in his aim of exonerating the German Army: first with the US military, then amongst widening circles of politicians and eventually in American popular culture. In 1961, he was awarded the Meritorious Civilian Service Award, becoming the only German ever to be decorated both by Hitler and by an American president. The praise which he received starkly contrasted with the reality of his military career and the atrocities on the Eastern Front.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Halder

The US had a Nazi write the history of Nazis.

You can always pay people on Amazon's Mechanical Turk to input all the posts manually. 🎩

An effect of socialisation is alienation, so you could add a discussion about that. How not all socialisation is "good" or beneficial, and often times socialisation just maintains the status quo and perpetuates the dominant ideology.

However, the story is compromised, in my opinion, and those "Yuletide doubts" disingenuously cast off, by the fact that, at the end, the articles of consumption are all back.

Good point. This is a problem with a lot of Christmas movies, despite people forgetting the "true meaning of Christmas" they find the meaning again and are free again to buy and exchange products. As you say, nobody says what the "little more" is. This is why I like Krampus, no such redemption.

It's a well-studied phenomenon, that libs call "socialisation". Not sure if any Marxists have looked into it as such.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialization

The scenes in the shopping mall are what Black Friday sales look like today, fighting and all. But back then it was considered ridiculous enough to be a comedy movie scene.

That sounds right to me, I like it.