I know you said in another comment

I didn’t try looking at pond water or similar with it to find living things, only plant life so far.

But you really really should. Maybe I’m biased but to me, that is one of the greatest joys of using a microscope is watching the teeming activity of creatures that have always existed all around you but that you’ve never seen before. It’s like walking into an alien forest and seeing the rich ecosystem there of fantastical beings and their interactions with each other, only these things have been all around you all your life, they’re not alien, they’re more common than squirrels, they just operate at a different scale than you do so you have no common knowledge of them. It’s like being a newbie bird watcher, but again, in a new dimension. You start to notice patterns, creatures of similar type but that are also clearly different, analogous to different kinds of birds, from various songbirds to corvids (shoutout to @[email protected]) to birds of prey. You’ll get to know types of diatoms that are (no offense) far more varied and exciting than the garlic skin in your OP image, and rotifers making convection in the water to suck up food, ciliates waving their (silly) cilia about, tardigrades (water-hexbears) all over the place. And then you can increase the magnification (depending on your microscope to some extent) and take a look at a whole new level - bacteria.

Experiment with different samples. See what you can find in different kinds of environs. It’s awesome to see anything up close, but ime there’s much more of a sense of discovery when you spot lifeforms, especially ones that do stuff you get to watch.

He knows all about what makes value, and understands history and how it unfolded, proving him right again and again. Marxists have never really thought about value before, and history? Marxists have been shown to be wrong over and over again. It’s just history, Marxists, sorry if you don’t have any framework to understand it.

This one is really causing me to twitch. Usually this kind of thing doesn’t get to me, but the deep smugness behind the sheer ignorance, the smarmy certainty in their beliefs that are the exact absolute opposite of reality - it doesn’t get more pure than this.

It’s a perfectly valid journalistic choice.

The temporary raising of albedo from eruptions is not relevant since it does not last, it doesn’t exist on the relevant time scales. Volcanic cooling does happen (even in recent recorded history!) but it’s very short-lived. Any aerosols injected into the atmosphere by volcanism (what is what causes the cooling) typically only lasts for a few years, as a general rule, not more than a decade, while warming from greenhouse gases is persistent and cumulative. It’s not something that is worth mentioning as any kind of genuine mitigating factor. Just like the people hoping that nuclear winter from another world war would offset climate change. It won’t, it just makes things even more chaotic on a short time scale without actually helping the problem at all on any time scale that matters.

A “volcanic ice age” would be short, maybe nasty, catastrophic for agriculture and civilization, but it would not help us, it wouldn’t do anything to solve the underlying problem of anthropogenic warming. Once the aerosols clear, the warming resumes, but now with added CO2 from the eruptions. So yeah, perfectly appropriate that the article doesn’t go into that.

(edit: changed the word “lowering” to “raising” which is what I meant - I’m tired.)

I said this in response to a different comment, but it applies even more here:

A big obvious problem with the “metaphor” (I hate to even give it that kind of credit) is that it presents Israel and Palestine as being equal with respect to the problem, they’re symmetric. That to me is what’s most lib-ignorant and gross about it.

Either way, a big obvious problem with the “metaphor” (I hate to even give it that kind of credit) is that it presents Israel and Palestine as being equal with respect to the problem, they’re symmetric. That to me is what’s most lib-ignorant and gross about it.

The “lazy” people you think are living off of your work get a tiny pittance of the taxes you pay, nearly the entirety of which only go to reproducing the economic system that rewards those who do not work but claim to, simply by virtue of their “ownership” of the things everyone needs to live a bare minimum survival. It is these non-working “owners” who live in obscene opulence and have unrestrained power over us all, dictating to us that we must toil while they only reap. The value you actually produce is being stolen from you by those same “owners,” and not even the table scraps are afforded those at the bottom struggling to survive in a system that is built around their poverty which serves a threat to all workers if they do not fall in line. The leeches are at the top, not the bottom. You absolutely should be enraged by those leeching off your work, but you’ve misidentified who the leeches are.

It is a safe assumption that a majority of current US scientists who leave will most likely go to Europe, yes. But long term that’s a relatively small piece of the brain drain issue compared to which countries will end up producing more (and better-educated) scientists in the coming years. It’s not just a matter of the ones that already exist going elsewhere, it’s that there is so much less incentive and ability for a person to become a scientist in the US than there used to be while there is significant incentive and ability to become a scientist in China. I expect the incentive in the EU is also going to rapidly deteriorate, so the influx of US scientists there is just a postponement of brain drain in the west as a whole.

But those are not our ancestors. Those guys (trilobites) are an extinct clade that have no living descendants. The creatures that existed concurrently with them that are our ancestors are agnathans which were jawless fish.

You’re very welcome, it’s nice to read an appreciative response! And yes, there is a ton to digest especially for anyone that hasn’t really been exposed to these ideas before. Marxist theory (which for the record extends far beyond just Marx - just as modern biology extends far beyond Darwin) is something that I’m still in the process of digesting myself and I expect I always will be. But it also starts helping a person to make sense of the state of the world very quickly, even if they’ve just started the meal. @[email protected] has an excellent reading list if and when it’s something you want to really delve into. Also, the podcast RevLeftRadio has some really good episodes just laying a lot of the basics out on the table.

Let’s get to social democracy first and then we can talk about communism

But that’s the thing, social democracy is just a tool used by capitalists as an attempt to stop-gap the inevitable decay of capitalism. If we can just “do social democracy then talk about communism” why didn’t the New Deal lead to communism rather than end up at the neoliberalism that is responsible for this current state of hellworld? Why didn’t all the “Nordic model” countries achieve communism after supposedly being the paragons of social democracy, countries who are now sliding further and further to the right and even into fascism? Capitalism by its very nature is something that cannot continue indefinitely, its internal contradictions (from the inherent insolubility of class antagonism to the requirement of infinite growth on a finite planet) are such that it will always tend towards its own destruction. Look into “The Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall” to understand that social democracy cannot prevent the declining rate of profit and in some ways even exacerbates it.

There is also the fact that social democracy still necessitates imperialism: the exploitation of the people who don’t live in the imperial core (so called 3rd-world countries) to support those who do live in the imperial core. It’s easy for the beneficiaries of social democracy to say “let’s not be hasty, we don’t want to disrupt things too much” while the great masses of people in other parts of the world are suffering and dying in poverty to subsidize the easier lifestyle of the social democrat, sitting comfortably with their citizenship that provides them the “social safety net” that is denied to the children toiling in mines, or drowning in the oceans they attempt to cross to “illegally” gain access to a piece of that privilege their exploiters enjoy.

Also, this debate has been had so many times before (look up Lenin’s beef with Kautsky, or better yet read Luxemburg’s Reform or Revolution), and those who fall into the trap of revisionism have always eventually been shown to be on the wrong side of history. And by revisionism, I mean the opting for capitalist reform despite the scientific theoretical framework of historical materialism showing us, and accurately predicting that capitalist reform will forever remain inadequate to solving those internal contradictions, only delaying them at best.

From what I can see, you are someone who is genuine with their “heart in the right place,” but what you need to look at is how these questions you’re posing have all been answered already, but because those answers are a direct existential threat to those with all the power, those whose interests lie in maintaining the status quo at all costs, those answers have been demonized and ridiculed and suppressed, and worst of all, been said to be impossible, unachievable ideals. They are not only achievable, they are immediately necessary if we hope to stand any chance of mitigating and surviving the climate change (that capitalism wrought) before the earth is too scorched to even support our species, let alone civilization. Social democracy would have us set that little issue “on the back burner.”

For real. I have to say also that it was fascinating watching the frontman for Pop Will Eat Itself, (a band that in the 90s made an Antifa song* a hit in Gammon Isle) go on to become arguably one of the greatest contemporary film score composers.

*Ich Bin Ein Auslander

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They’re nice and stationary where they’ve always been. You don’t seem to know where the field is.

None of what you said matters with respect to my initial comment. I said what I did because it is what happened and provides context. Your altering of that context (by making up falsehoods) still didn’t change the point of my comment. And just a tip: it doesn’t help your credibility to ask the people you’re disagreeing with to walk you through the basics of how discussions work.

Even if what you said is true, which it is not (see Formerlyfarman’s comment), whether or not Ukraine was trying to ethnically cleanse the Donbas prior to the SMO (which it was), and regardless of the virtues or crimes of the people’s militias, none of that matters as far as what I was saying. None of that has any bearing on the asymmetry of war crimes perpetrated by Ukraine vs the lack of them committed by Russia.

There is no benefit for the Ukrainians to do this.

The benefit is to harm Russia at any and all cost and if they can achieve that, they see it as well worth it. Ukraine was never in a winning position yet they have been the ones committing war crime upon war crime upon war crime literally from the very start of this conflict (and depending on when you define it “beginning,” they have been doing it from before the start and this is largely what necessitated Russia’s intervention in the first place). Meanwhile, Russia has been highly, even shockingly restrained when it comes to taking actions with high potential to cause civilian harm. When you honestly compare how Russia has waged this war in terms of risk to civilian life to what the west (including Ukraine) has done in military operations and wars in the past handful of decades, Russia comes out as almost kind, looking like the benevolent “peacekeepers” that NATO always tried to paint themselves to their own respective domestic populaces. (This isn’t to say warcrimes haven’t been committed by Russian forces, particularly before Wagner was dismantled, but they are not systemic and are not at the scale of, for example, wiping out civilian infrastructure).

This isn’t just a “Russia good and Ukraine bad” thing (though we shouldn’t forget that current Ukraine is literally a Nazi-led project) but there are very obvious material reasons why this is the case. Like TreadOnMe pointed out, Russia came to the aid of what were essentially militias formed from Ukrainian civilians who were fighting in resistance of their own ethnic cleansing by the Ukrainian government. Russia knows that the territories it has been fighting over will be its responsibility to maintain and rebuild so destroying the infrastructure there and making enemies of the people who live there are not at all in Russia’s best interests. This is a major stumbling block for the libs who constantly want to believe Russia is just a bunch of orcs hellbent on domination and conquest: material reality does not fit the idealist narrative they need to believe in.

Just because Ukraine commits war crimes repeatedly (as they have) and even as a normal order of operation, that does not mean that Russia will then be compelled to do the same as a tit-for-tat. There are certain lines that when crossed, Russia does have to respond to, but that doesn’t mean they have to respond with commensurate cruelty to civilians. And they haven’t.

Life will adapt it always does

Life will, sure. But that doesn’t mean we (humans) will. Or even mammals. Life itself will prevail, that doesn’t mean our favorite clades are excused from the chopping block, including the one we’re on, which is actually in a rather precarious position as a large highly complex animal with highly complex needs and requirements for even the most minimal kind of survival. It frustrates me when people, especially leftists, act like climate change is just going to disrupt the geopolitical order (which yes, it is going to do that lol) and maybe kill off a bunch of species that will be sad to see go, making it “hard” for us, but ultimately won’t effect us much beyond that. No, this threat is almost certainly an existential one. I’ve said it before but it’s not a choice between socialism or barbarism. It’s socialism or annihilation. Communism will win, given enough time, but how long before that time is up? We don’t know, so we cannot afford in any sense of the word to wait any more.

Andor is in large part inspired by the life of Stalin.

And to be clear, that’s Stalin as the good guy, which he was in real life too, despite the mountains of propaganda that the anticommunist west has been shoveling onto pop culture and history education to convince everyone of the blatant lie that he was on par with Hitler.

There are two things going on here causing confusion and the first is the misuse and misunderstanding of the word socialism. DeathsEmbrace is using it to mean something more like the “nordic model” safety net thing but applied to the corporations. It’s incorrect but it’s a common early leftist pitfall. It’s the “socialism for the bourgeoisie/corporations but not for the workers” thing. It’s not actually incorrect analysis - the government does provide a social safety net for the bourgeoisie and will always come to their rescue in a capitalist country. That is true, but it’s a misnomer and misleading to call this “government socialism” or “socialism for the rich” because socialism is not “government does stuff” or “government comes to the rescue,” rather it’s worker control over the means of production. “Socialism for the owners” is nonsensical when you actually understand these terms. As Marxists we know this is simply how capitalism works and is not a special case within capitalism that is only just now happening with things like the 2008 bailouts. Again, it’s not wrong pointing out that the state rescued all the banks to the detriment of working people while simultaneously refusing to help the working people. But it’s a mistake to associate that with the word socialism, even in a “socialism for the rich” sort of way, a mistake that is often made because the general public were never educated about what socialism really is.

The other issue is the difference between what capitalists say neoliberalism is (when they even use the word neoliberalism, which is less often since it is usually a pejorative) and what neoliberalism actually is. This means there are going to be conflicting definitions. RedWizard is absolutely right that it is very much about further leveraging the state on the behalf of capital to more completely dominate over labor. As Marxists we know they were always doing this, but neoliberalism is still a ramping up using new policies specifically tailored to better addressed the the world order given modern global imperialism. DeathsEmbrace is just plain wrong here if they think neoliberalism is simply ultra laissez-fair capitalism. Neither side defines it like that.

Not to be too pedantic, but the first quote RW used actually backs up DE’s mistaken position. RW is right of course, but that quote is not a good one to use to prove the point. “Neoliberalism is contemporarily used to refer to market-oriented reform policies such as […] reducing […] state influence in the economy.” That definition you quoted is doing the “reducing big government” thing. They want us to think their neoliberal policies are “keeping big government from controlling the free economy!” after all, big government control is what they want you to think the “totalitarian” communists do, when in fact the ruling class is of course using the government to control the economy, just on behalf of and for the benefit of themselves, the capitalists.

I know that you know all this, RedWizard, and I’m not trying to educate you on any of it, I just saw an argument going on that I think might boil down to mostly semantics. I am just trying to sus out those semantic differences and maybe help out any lurkers, especially from other instances, who don’t necessarily know this stuff.

As for you, @[email protected], humans can and do “do economy” just fine, even brilliantly in some cases. Some of them “do economy” such that it further enriches a tiny select few, and some of them “do economy” to uplift a population and increase the quality of life of the masses. Both have been done with great success.

don’t take this argument to “reality” or you’re axbout to get an education on what the real purpose of rich communism is.

Oh STFU. I was trying to be charitable, even generous regarding your misunderstandings because I thought you might be a new leftist who means well. Maybe I was wrong. Either way, you’re clearly the one here who needs an education, even on such basics as the meaning of the words you’re trying to use.