That’s not how anything works.

That’s like saying “We can’t do anything about hiring discrimination against people in wheelchairs because what if one wants to be a firefighter?” Employers must give reasonable accomodations, which, if provided, enable an employee to do the job. If you have a tech job and have a moral objection to computers or the internet, you won’t be able to do your job and that is not a reasonable accommodation.

All this means is that a manager can’t force you to use AI so long as you’re able to meet performance standards without it. It’s incredibly reasonable and your argument is completely disconnected from reality.

Now now, don’t shoot yourself. After all, you’re not the reason those things are happening.

What an absurd, right-wing article. The author clearly doesn’t understand it either.

But even where working-class voters nominally agree with a Democratic policy goal, they don’t trust the institution being asked to deliver it – a distrust decades in the making.

This undermines the entire thesis that the Democrats “moved too far left” and that’s what alienated the working class. How can it possibly be the case that that’s the problem, if the Democrats are distrusted even when they align on policy?

The idea that Democrats are too focused on class, or have been historically, is just ridiculous, and relies on cherry-picking to an absurd degree. A handful of Democrats have recently begun talking about class, which is highly controversial within the party and goes against the party establishment. The article even goes so far as to cherry-pick Graham Platner, who hasn’t even been elected! How is it possible that this recent trend in rhetoric could be responsible for “a distrust decades in the making?”

Meanwhile, the author’s approach of moving right to appeal to this perceived silent majority has been the accepted, conventional wisdom during the very decades that the distrust was made! If this approach was actually effective, then where are the results to show for it?

Oh no, did Lockheed Martin and the Pinkerton Detective Agency not change to a rainbow Twitter logo? The horror.

All shit like that accomplished was letting brands pinkwash their image, while the association caused harmed to queer people around the world. It’s hard to promote LGBT rights if your country is staring down bombs with rainbows painted on them. Meanwhile, those same companies would often materially support conservative politicians, while offering purely symbolic support for queer people.

“How does the Murder Factory feel about gay rights?” is looking at things with completely the wrong priorities. The world is better off with that bullshit image stripped away, even if it’s happening for the wrong reasons.

This is the issue with antiwar discourse primarily focused on US troops. The troops are volunteers, and there are plenty of ways that harm to them can be minimized or negated while continuing to slaughter people, like through drones.

The actual victims of imperialism, the Iraqi people, did not volunteer for any of that shit. But to focus on them means treating them as human beings with moral worth, which, in US politics, is such an extreme far-left idea that it’s basically relegated to the “lunatic fringe.” The furthest “left” mainstream critique of the war is this stuff about the poor troops, which, yes, it’s still bad to send them into conflicts without reason even if they volunteered and even if the risk is mitigated. But it’s hardly the worst thing about the war, and it falls flat for a lot of people.

Oof, that’s rough.

For temporary relief, you can find stuff on YouTube that plays sounds at different high pitched frequencies. You’ll still be hearing the sound but having it come from an external source can provide relief (at least for some people). Noise machine apps have options for different “colors” of noises, so you can experiment and try to find something that works. Also, I can’t explain it at all but for some reason this music does something for me.

Don’t assume that it’ll get worse or that it’ll always be as bad as it is now. If it’s still there when you’re 40, let 40 year old you deal with it. If it sticks around, you’ll learn to live with it. My experience was that it’s worst when you first get it because you’re not used to it, you don’t have any tools for coping with it, and you can’t accept it.

Take it day by day. If you can deal with it for just one day, then you can apply that to every day. So all you have to worry about is today.

But I’ll tell you, shit sucks. There’s an herbal supplement in the US that’s marketed as helping with tinnitus. It doesn’t work, and I knew it wouldn’t work, I saw the word “homeopathic” on the label and I knew exactly what it meant. I bought it anyway. My dad suffers from it too, and I saw the same one in his medicine cabinet.

I think my case is relatively minor, too, but I can remember being that desperate for a moment of relief. But for me it’s faded into the background and I usually don’t notice it. Tbh I’ve come to find it almost handy, in that it’s a way of my body providing feedback to tell me when I’m stressing myself out. Kinda like that thing with old folks where they can tell a storm coming because it makes their joints ache. The sensation itself is just a sensation, it’s annoying and unpleasant, but my experience is that what makes it really bad is when you have other thoughts attached to that. And the good news is that it’s possible to change the thoughts you associate with the sound even if you can’t change the sensation. It just takes time and mindfulness.

That’s a good point. The real problem is that the land and resources they stole through brazen force still remain in the hands of Western megacorps in a system of neocolonialism, and whenever any of the exploited countries try to tax or regulate that (much less reclaim their resources altogether), they get sanctioned into oblivion, if not overthrown outright.

Put it this way: I don’t think PJ is a fed, but I think the fact that he’s the feds aren’t paying him is wage theft.

I don’t understand how there’s ever a business model since people can just run their own models locally.

That’s intuitive but actually completely wrong. There is no “absolute” reference frame, and nothing can move faster than light in any relative reference frame.

The only thing that gets around that is the expansion of space itself. It’s not that the objects are moving away from each other, it’s that the distance between them is expanding, causing them to become farther apart.

The best analogy is to picture an ant crawling on the surface of an expanding balloon.

The kind of atmosphere a planet can have in the long term depends on having enough gravity to keep gas particles from floating off into space. Mars’ gravity is smaller than Earth’s, which means that even if it had oxygen, that oxygen would be lost over time. Mars likely once had a dense atmosphere heavy in carbon dioxide, it wasn’t lost in one specific event, but gradually losing it over a long period of time.

Meanwhile your quote highlights the fact that Orwell thought that being honest about the Soviet Union and its critiques in political discussions is a mark of intellectual honesty, which isn’t really pro-fascist, since you can critique the United States and still be anti-communist after all.

In that case, you reject the reasoning in the initial quote.

When the Soviets were fighting the Nazis, criticizing the Soviets was either pro-fascist or it was not pro-fascist. If it’s pro-fascist, then Orwell was a hypocrite for doing so. If it isn’t pro-fascist, then the reasoning in OP’s quote is wrong.

Somehow this “our side or their side” broke down for him when considering the Soviets fighting on the same side as the Allies.

If a crazy guy attacks you on the street, would you just stand there and let him kill you because of all those societal consequences that are working against him?

No, because I’m not a pacifist. But what I’m saying is that this “with us or against us” argument is reductive and wrong. The question of whether pacifism is correct is a separate question from whether the “with us or against us” reasoning is valid.

If someone asks you to fight back to save yourself and your neighbors…no…they aren’t the ones doing you harm.

I think you and I have very different understandings of what the term “forcibly conscript” involves. It’s not “asking.”

Not only that, but there are an enormous amount of assumptions that you’re making here. Not every conflict is between fascists and non-fascists, as I said, WWII is an exception and you can’t make a rule from that exception.

Provided that neither side is exterminationist in nature, the conflict may just be a question of which oppressor rules over you, and in that case, you are not fighting, “to save yourself or your neighbors” but to preserve the power of one oppressor over another.

WWI provides a very clear example of this, and historically, the pacifists had the second best take on that conflict, better that virtually anyone else in the West. Likewise in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran. Every one of those conflicts was framed as being “defensive” and “if we don’t fight them over there, we’ll be fighting them over here,” again, pacifists were much more correct than anyone who participated in those conflicts.

Technically, when it comes to violence, it is that simple. There is the side attacking you…and you.

No, it isn’t. Even in the purest, simplest scenario of like, crazy guy on the street comes after me for no reason, it still isn’t that simple, because it’s not a zero sum game of his interests vs my own. For him to assault me goes against his own interests, it’s likely that he’ll face legal or social consequences for doing so. At the same time, those legal/social forces are not necessarily “my side,” they might act to protect my wellbeing (or at least punish someone after the fact), but I don’t control them, and they may act against my wishes. For example, I might prefer that my assailant get rehabilitated rather than incarcerated.

This isn’t even an abstract thing for me. I have a relative who used to be very mentally unstable, suffering from paranoid delusions, caused or made worse by the meth he was on, and the war he had fought in. He was a danger to myself and my family, and to everyone in the area. For him to get clean and find treatment that worked for him was in everyone’s interest.

This is in the most extreme example of assailant and victim, and no one else. If you try to scale things up to a nation and pretend that there are only two sides, it’s utterly ridiculous.

“My” side might forcibly conscript me to be sent into some pointless meat grinder, killing people who are in the exact same boat but who happened to be born in a different country. Are they not aggressing against me by doing that? Perhaps the real “sides” are the working people of both countries against the rulers sending us to die.

You can’t oversimplify the world in to “our side” and “their side,” and say “if you’re not with us, you’re against us.” There are countless different sides and there are factions within those sides that have different motivations and agendas. That’s simply a fact, and to pretend otherwise is just lazy.

Pacifists are generally more correct than most people because they’ve figured out the “no war” part of “no war but class war,” and the vast majority of war is not class war (or is perpetrated by the ruling class). I’m not a pacifist but I have respect for those who are.

To be fair, Orwell’s argument is understandable in the specific context of WWII, but it is not a generalizable principle.

no new characters for like a thousand years now.

Maybe you’d prefer Taikyoku shogi?

WKUK - European History 3024

Tbh I think people are trying to hard to dunk on you rather than actually explaining how we see things and why.

Opposing war is generally the correct take, in most cases, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you should turn it into a hard rule, because there are exceptions. The American Civil War is an example I think most people would agree with. As violent and bloody as it was, it was still outweighed by the centuries of systemic violence baked into the system.

As Marxists we concern ourselves less with “who started it” (an inherently subjective question) and more with who’s fighting it and why, and what outcomes can be expected. War is the continuation of politics by other means, so to understand a conflict it’s important to look at the political questions at stake, on a case-by-case basis.

Without getting into the specifics of these conflicts, that’s what’s meant by “anti-war-ism,” not just opposing war, but doing so without really bothering to understand the specifics of a given conflict.

That’s still not as fast of a development, and the conditions aren’t really comparable. China used to be among the poorest countries in the world.

And while their government has not always been ideal, it was undoubtably the best option on the table historically. The corrupt Nationalists didn’t do shit for the people (and pocketed foreign aid). Before that, with no central authority, was the warlord period. Before that was the backwards Qing dynasty. In all the thousands of years of Chinese history, nobody really did anything for the rural people until the communists.

Marx… is convincing with his way of argumentation (at least if you’re a bit stupid)

I’m sorry, what? Have you ever actually tried to read Capital? Most of Marx’s works are dense and academic, drawing intellectual traditions that are often unfamiliar to modern readers (classical economics, Hegel, etc). Marx’s way of argumentation isn’t really geared toward the lowest common denominator.

It’s kinda funny how you can’t even keep your criticism straight through a single comment. In one sentence, reading Marx is a “chore” that nobody would want to slog through, in the very next one, Marx is so persuasive, his honeyed words easily sway the minds of any who stumble across them, like the Sirens calling ships to their rocks.

As for “no good goal exists anymore” or “it’s hard to see what good goal tankies ever had” maybe we just like it when this sort of thing happens:

The revolution that feeds the children gets my support.

When you figure out a better way to do that, get back to me.