I certainly don’t disagree, but I think it’s very useful to highlight how this has changed (IMO) in recent decades. I think there was a time when the boomer generation was earning relatively good incomes that allowed them to live comfortably and accumulate wealth (mainly in houses and the stock market). I think this arrangement between capital and the (predominantly white) working class created a situation where even those workers without much wealth could be “bought off” and swear allegiance to capitalism. This wasn’t sustainable of course, as the postwar industrial boom and then the gains from neoliberalism were never sustainable. Couple that with the fall of the Eastern Bloc and with it the “threat of a good example”, and I would say that this arrangement lasted as late as the GFC at most. I think this helps explain how older people today - even if they are solidly working class - might still be hostile to anything they think is “socialism” while younger generations do not share those opinions, it seems.

I was reading Michael Roberts’ blog the other day, and he pointed out something similar. The official calculations for inflation significantly understate it for various reasons. However, if you look at actual labor hours needed to cover the essentials of life, and you use the median income amount from 1950 (for the US), then that number comes out about $102k per year. Said another way, for a standard of living based on real life, to have the standard of the median American in 1950, you would need to earn over $100k today. But if you take that 1950 median income and just adjust it for official inflation, you only get to like $42k.

“Sadness is a weapon of bourgeoisie” -Iosef Lilianovich Dros

Because once the news broke of the Ellisons buying US TikTok (and their transparent reasons for doing so), it became clear to me that for the free and open internet, “winter is coming”.

Oct 7th and the global outpouring of support for Palestinians (and trashing of the reputation of Israel) was a huge wake-up call to the ruling classes. I think until then, they were largely content with controlling the narratives via traditional media spaces. The aftermath of Oct 7 taught them that social media and the internet cannot be ignored and in fact must controlled. It’s not like anyone under 65 is watching Fox News or CNN, and not many reading the NYT. All of the actions we have seen in the last 2 years - making sure Facebook / Google / Twitter / Reddit and now TikTok have tightly controlled messaging, requiring IDs and verification, etc - are pointing towards a future where free expression online is severely limited. I don’t want to be a part of that.

And I do believe that it’s important to get out there and discuss things that are important to me with others (Palestinian and indigenous liberation, communism, online privacy). I’m not happy to just retreat into my own bubble. That is ultimately the reason I joined (I was of course already included to using the fediverse as I’ve long appreciated FOSS and decentralized systems and non-commercialized things in general).

When my dad was a kid, my grandparents did absolutely nothing for Christmas - no decorations, no tree, etc - until Christmas Eve, then they went all out. Then they’d pack it all up the day after Christmas. I feel like if the Christmas “season” was only a few days, I’d hate it much less.

I genuinely hate the aesthetics of it. I can’t stand Christmas music or Christmas movies (the music especially is just so bad). The “Christmas episodes” TV shows run are so incredibly corny. I find the decorations to be tacky and ugly. I feel like I’m suffocated by so much cheap plastic crap that will be thrown away after the holidays.

I suppose that all wouldn’t be so bad if the “Christmas season” didn’t stretch out for so long. It’s now well underway before Thanksgiving, and I’m being conservative with that. That means at least 10% of the year - so 10% of my life, too - is spent under the Christmas regime.

But on a deeper level, I think it points to a real sickness in society. Capitalism has so thoroughly destroyed our real social connections to each other. It breaks those human bonds and creates atomized individuals who are only supposed to care about themselves. But that’s not who we are as a species - we are social creatures who have a couple hundred thousand years of cooperation with each other in order to survive.

On some level, capital “knows” ripping us away from our social being is not only unnatural, but atomizing us so thoroughly harms social reproduction. Christmas has become a way of resolving this problem. BUT, it’s capitalism… so the solution can’t be something like “give workers the month of December off so people can spend real quality time with each other”.

So capitalism has created this artificial holiday structure where “family”, “giving back”, and “what really matters” is centered, but it’s all done in the most superficial way possible. It’s all kabuki. Capital creates an imitation of social connection and still manages to make it about accumulating more capital. Spend money on presents. Don’t like the commercialism around presents? That’s ok, spend money on airfare or gas to see your family. Use up your meager PTO at the end of the year when it’s slow and costs your boss less. But I think getting workers to spend money is still just the secondary objective of Christmas. It’s much more about getting people to forget how deeply separated we are from each other. To pretend for at least 10% of the year that everything is normal, capitalism is normal and being disconnected from each other is normal so long as you watch a couple movies once a year that are supposed to remind you that “what really matters is family” - the feeling though, not the reality.

That’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.

(Copying what I said on the lemmy.ml cross post because I’ve been thinking about this for a while and want to get it out).

I’ll add that Disney+ is on the BDS list, so I consider pirating Andor to be a moral imperative.

I second this. I enjoyed reading Lenin’s Imperialism very much, but it also felt very dated (as it should, it’s well over 100 years old now). I can’t help but think that if Lenin were alive today, he’d agree. That doesn’t mean it’s not an incredibly important work that we can’t draw from today, but we should also understand how the world has changed since.

I haven’t read John Smith’s Imperialism in the 21st Century yet, but I’ve heard it’s a very good update.

You’re talking about simple conquest. By that definition any offensive side in a war is imperialist, which is nonsensical as that means nearly every war in human history involved at least one “imperialist” power.

Imperialism is system of establishing and maintaining hegemony over large areas for the benefit of an elite (capital in modern times, patricians in ancient times, etc) within a metropole (probably too simple of a definition but it works). The Romans were an empire not just because they had an emperor and not because they conquered lands, but because they controlled lands from Spain to Syria and wealth flowed from those lands into Rome.

I support the DPRK but tbh their flag is kinda mid.

Invading / starting a war is not the same thing as imperialism.