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dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


much appreciated Gradenko

btw, what program do you use to read?

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dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


Frosted Flake posted:

lol we’re so hosed it’s not even funny

Russia, just with the legacy economic organization and structure from the Soviet Union, a far cry from those days in many different views, was able to marshal its economy in a much shorter timeframe with inconceivable results to the Western financial analyst eye.

China, which has a thorough structure of government planning and organization led by a functioning communist party that has been carrying consecutive five-year plans for a while now?

Turns out that there's a panel in the room where the Central Committee gathers. In that panel, there's a big red button with Mao's face in it. If Xi slams that button, Full Total Maoism Overdrive is enacted and complete central planning goes active in the country with the largest industrial base, means of capital production and industrial proletariat in the world

it does seem that it could be put into making massive amounts of any sort of stuff needed pretty loving quick and with plenty of acceleration to boot, lmao

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


Frosted Flake posted:






The US will lose WW3 because they will run their artillerymen into the ground using "modern" "lean" personnel management techniques



Also, the M777 is responsible to a large degree, if you guys want to get into cannon-chat. The short explanation is a lightweight gun that relies on a muzzle break to avoid shaking itself to pieces and doesn't even have a shield offers no protection to the crew and is directing a lot of the blast back at them for the sake of the gun.



Writing off 20% of an artillery regiment for a day's work is not sustainable, btw.


jesus loving christ lmbo

yeah, the guys who know how to man the goddamn cannons just subject into going psychosis during more intensive combat with larger scales? oh no problem at all as a couple of artillerymen who happen to be a bit of wh40k nerds suddenly start hearing blood for the blood god or some weird whispers saying that wouldn't be just great to turn the battery on their camp

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


Frosted Flake posted:

I just don't understand the thought process of having a TBI points app rather than digging a hole

That's ideology!

One moment of learning that was highly enlightening to me was earlier this year, on this seminar of Marxism and philosophical method. I got mind blown when the professor elaborated on dialectical reasoning and how we tend to misunderstand the "simultaneous and contradictory" part of it; we tend to have a vulgar notion that has more to do with empiricism and formal logic than dialectical.

Anyway, he was elaborating also on metaphysical reasoning. Nobody needs a method to learn dialectical thinking because it can happen intuitively to people in differing degrees and forms, like psychoanalysis discovered. However, a method can become fundamental when dealing with metaphysical reasoning, where ideas emerge as if by themselves in singular occurrences. And that's how a lot of people work!

"I don't have more money because I don't work enough" is a great example of that. It doesn't seek to establish circumstances (why you don't have money/what is "enough" in relation to work/what determines "enough"/why do you think you don't work enough/etc), it emerges as a complete thing, a definite answer from elsewhere - a metaphysical thing. To demonstrate that these ideas happen as a consequence of material circumstances and environment is a hefty task. A lot of us do not like that.

More to the point, a TBI app happens instead of shoveling because the person who can point out "...maybe we could entrench?" is someone who can spot the problem and elaborate on why. The same person could also probably spot a lot of other things, too. But if their job security is based on not doing that, that person is probably not going to be there in the first place. Someone who can have an idea like "well this seems like something that could be outsourced for a solution" can excel. And, important thing, these people are genuinely convinced that it is the right idea and it is going to work because why wouldn't? They are engaging with the problem in ideal terms rather than material, which is one of the big loving problems of metaphysical thinking

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


quote:

Russia and China are described as “revisionist forces”

what

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011



One of the big developments that marked the transition from slavery to feudalism in social modes of production was the appearance of the mutual oaths, a combination of Roman legal perceptions and Germanic personal vows. As the empire crumbled and patrician estates became semi-isolated holdouts, said estates required workers to make them viable; decentralization and loss of infrastructure compounded with Christianity to turn the latifundia slave and urban plebeian into the feudal serf and commoner. Through ritual, custom and fancy words, the mutual oath was simply the enacting of a social contract: "I need your work in my lands; in exchange, I give you the right to produce your food and you have my protection; to maintain and care my estate and base of power I shall tax you and all commoners under my service; you will follow my laws and I shall attend to your safety."

Marxists argue that one of the most deceiving aspects of capitalism is the illusion over one's place over the social contract of labor. Slavery and feudalism are less developed forms, but there was crystal clarity over who works and what do you get from your work and who gets the big share and why they get it. But mutual oaths carried also clear obligations - and this relationship was rather effective socially. In more militant places, a peasant revolt could ruin a noble house. "I serve; but our obligation is a mutual bond."

What does this have to do with American recruitment in 2023, and elsewhere?

The ideal of a volunteer army can only happen if its society delivers. It's not about money (otherwise it's no better than mercenaries), it's about the social conditions that can create a motive of cause. If economic conditions are poo poo, especially when you know your predecessors had it better than you and the people around you are in the same boat, well... It's hard to make a cause when people of that society know that the older social arrangement allowed for workers to buy houses and now they can't. The same about having access to education, to healthcare, to culture, etc.

Neoliberalism, very much proper for a manifestation of late capitalism, cannot make even modest adjustments to its social contract in order to help itself. It prefers to suffer the loss of material power rather than losing value extraction. And welp that makes hard to have a competent fighting force lmao

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


Frosted Flake posted:

I've never felt so understood on this forum 🙏

(PS, Prayer hands come from the traditional gesture of fealty to a patron and later liege, kneeling and placing your hands in theirs)

what two years and half of political economy + assorted relevant studies does to a mfer, I am re-learning ancient/medieval history from materialist-oriented (not necessarily Marxist) people and well it's a doozy

PawParole posted:

Majority of “barbarians” were simply Roman Bagaudae who put on horned helmets. There was a small ethnic code of goths or whatever but the majority of troops were simply heroic members of the rural slave society dialectically struggling to bring about the next stage of civilization (feudalism)

lol

I am still figuring out about the different regional contexts, if the post-migrations peasant fighters raised hell in similar manners elsewhere, like in North Africa

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


Centrist Committee posted:

The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rifle. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerilla action on. And a white man can't fight a guerilla warfare. Guerilla action takes heart, take nerve, and he doesn't have that. He's brave when he's got tanks. He's brave when he's got planes. He's brave when he's got bombs. He's brave when he's got a whole lot of company along with him. But you take that little man from Africa and Asia; turn him loose in the woods with a blade. A blade. That's all he needs. All he needs is a blade. And when the sun comes down – goes down and it's dark, it's even-Stephen.

Malcolm throwing holy fire is always a solid listen

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011



my canuckian brother in christ did you by chance happen to do some spiritual artillery barrage operation against a certain archlich in order to kill time of your probation

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


Frosted Flake posted:

I was reading somewhere, lol this is so loving funny and really fits with what we've learned about the Brits, that loving Swinging London and the British Invasion made the Brits feel good about losing their empire

oooh boy you are going to love getting to the British Marxist aestheticians

Mark Fisher (k-punk) had some author references there; Cool Britannia couldn't happen without the New Labour period (not just the party but all political forces also surrounding it) pouncing on the cultural production and doing everything it could to defang its radical potentials. The New Labour analysis sought to consolidate over this middle class electorate that only bended tory because, actually, it was whig-ish (a loving terrible conclusion).

What comes forth is Spice Girls with the Union Jack on one side and England crowds (with many Oasis fans) singing "Rule Britannia" against Nigeria in the 2002 World Cup on the other. It was a neoliberal mirage that only a moment like New Labour could deliver

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


hey FF dunno how to ask this but how does R&D work on MIC-NATO terms?

Like, it seems marketing-driven when at some point it wasn't. Since it is marketing-driven, companies themselves seem to assess what are problematic, rather than being proposed by the forces and especially by the people who are going into the poo poo. You posted about the light artillery hideous safety hazard clusterfuck that gelatinizes the brains of NATO artillerymen; I understand that there must be some doctrinal directive there, but the Marxist in me simply sees doctrine as the conformation of military thought to the productive means at hand. As in, people thinking about what they can do with the tech specs being released by the companies, and not going "here's a problem that we are facing, maybe we could this this and that; can we build for that?"

I ask because it seems that we are heading into a fully marketing-driven R&D in military, where the memory of the point it wasn't so is gone. It's a better missile, a better shell, new bits and bobs; what is more hilarious is that there is not even the idea of R&D into processes, like developing better means to assemble the heinously overpriced poo poo. Nobody in those circles seems to think of infrastructure as a strategic capability anymore, which lol and indeed lmao

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


PawParole posted:

If America ends up invading Venezuela or Mexico or anywhere else in the Americas and it turns into a quagmire then there is a small chance of disaffected officers or soldiers marching back to Washington, which is probably why previous administrations never risked it.

Lol at fighting in the Northern Andes. "What if Vietnam, but also mountains?"

(not to mention a whole military specifically oriented to a people's war strategy against the USA)

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


FuzzySlippers posted:

did AC have a proper sci-fi novelist writing those? They were so much better than what you see in most games

Brian Reynolds was an enthusiast at the time and he came up with the idea for the quotes to be narrative elements, rather than just a clever descriptive thingie.

I think that just by the fact of dealing actively with ideology pushes the writing to be better, even in the rudimentary form it is in the game.

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


Hatebag posted:

we were robbed of marxist guerilla xcom2. farc, the naxalites, the ndfp

get me the programmers and I write the everliving poo poo out of backstory worldbuilding and plot of this

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


KomradeX posted:

Hell even into the early 80s before all that industry was sent to Asia the Soviet Union wasn't that far off from the US in industrial output. The Soviet Union wasn't hopeless out produced by the US even at the height of American industry

A major factor of American industry getting immense was due to the "great, broad Middle" that its territory afforded, which provided a comparative high level of domestic demand of consumer goods. Another was that industrial capitalists of the United States were very conscious of verticalization -- they leaned harder in integration of production than most of their counterparts in Europe, starting some good couple of decades before them. And perhaps most importantly, the Civil War created a structural framework for industrial development in many different ways.

American industrial capacity thus became broad, not only to make lots of things but also many things, with a domestic market that could drive demand much higher than any other in the world to keep industrial growth pacing. However, it was a thoroughly capitalist development; it wasn't scientifically organized, it lacked comprehensive planning. The German industrialization, arranged a lot by the economic thinking of their Historical school, had a participative government acting steps beyond mere intervention to actually guide flows of capital into more effective uses. What took the Americans 70 years or so to reach in the global steel market the Germans got in less than half, with a much smaller domestic consumption base and territorial wealth.

The point is that American industry had lots of capacity, but without organizing and structuring forces, it could be outpaced and surpassed by those economies who did have such things. A jolt of central planning during FDR got the American industry to surge forward in an absurd, ridiculous degree that otherwise would never have.

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


Frosted Flake posted:

But without a labour theory of value, I don't know, do liberals just think spending more got you a better army? Without realizing that the costs represented the value of both the labourers and the soldiers labour? Because that's the only way I can see them believing that paying more for a military with far fewer people, that does not industrially produce logistics, is better.

Playing the greatest hits, "the dominant ideology is the ideology of the dominant class" from the The German Ideology.

As financial capitalism takes hold and becomes dominant in neoliberalism, it's the financier capitalist's worldview that becomes more imperative. As they have the greater means of capital and capital has more pull of power in those conditions, it is as if things are spontaneously rearranged in their favor.

Try to view such problems in their shoes. What background does the financier capitalist have? What education, what parents, what activities their families were involved? A CEO, a managerial financier, is someone who deals with the world in terms of finance, because that is their function, their social role. Individually, there are capitalists who of course have command of history, of sociology; there are the rare ones who do also have command of political economy.

However, even as powerful individuals, that doesn't mean that they necessarily are able to leverage that force in structural matters. For example: such an individual, seized by a bout of nationalist fervor and imperial sentiment, decides to mobilize capital to build a no-bullshit military factory. His potential investors, however, don't get swayed by the less-than-average predicted ROI and initial estimates of valuation. Raytheon, Lockheed et al don't like this unexpected surge of competition one bit and take to the government to judicially pile upon the company; consultant groups analyze if they would be committing unfair market practices by delivering prices below average rate while having lesser average profitability and so on and on

This individual wants to address a real material problem, but the others around him do not see how that can be interesting if there are no gains in profitability to be had, because that is the main ideological problem to be dealt with. "Do I receive a greater return than what I invested? Is that return better than other possible investments? How can I have more?"

This capitalist class takes things like redundancy or capacity as anathema. Efficiency, for them, is a purely financial angle: spend less as possible and get the most out of it for the sake of profit, not for the actual problem that they are engaging with.

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


Thanks for the appreciation guyse.

---

crepeface posted:

why do they have this ideology tho

how did it become dominant

the super TL;DR of it is compound interest.

The longer answer: financial capitalism takes over industrial as more means of capital transaction become interesting or necessary for its own expansion, forming means of accumulation that are faster than the rate of expansion for material value. Engels on vol. 3:

"The Stock Exchange", Friedrich Engels, notes to Capital vol. 3 posted:


1. The position of the stock exchange in capitalist production in general is clear from Vol. III, Part 5, especially Chapter [27]. But since 1865, when the book was written, a change has taken place which today assigns a considerably increased and constantly growing role to the stock exchange, and which, as it develops, tends to concentrate all production, industrial as well as agricultural, and all commerce, the means of communication as well as the functions of exchange, in the hands of stock exchange operators, so that the stock exchange becomes the most prominent representative of capitalist production itself.

[...]

At that time, the stock exchange was still a place where the capitalists took away each other’s accumulated capital, and which directly concerned the workers only as new proof of the demoralising general effect of capitalist economy and as confirmation of the Calvinist doctrine that predestination (alias chance) decides, even in this life, blessedness and damnation, wealth, i.e., enjoyment and power, and poverty, i.e., privation and servitude.

[...]

Now it is otherwise. Since the crisis of 1866 accumulation has proceeded with ever-increasing rapidity, so that in no industrial country, least of all in England, could the expansion of production keep up with that of accumulation, or the accumulation of the individual capitalist be completely utilised in the enlargement of his own business; English cotton industry as early as 1845; the railway swindles. But with this accumulation the number of rentiers, people who were fed up with the regular tension in business and therefore wanted merely to amuse themselves or to follow a mild pursuit as directors or governors of companies, also rose.

Through stocks and all sorts of securities, a speculative valuation can be assigned to companies on the combination of its factories, stores, resources, production, etc - that can be summarized in its share ticket price. The stock price does not reflect at all what the actual material value of the company is. But this valuation can be then operated in many, many different forms that can provide massive returns larger than the actual material value produced by the company (such as in options etc), through the magic of fictitious capital. The stockbroker could loan, invest and speculate on twenty different factories at the same time, while the industrialist works only on his own business; the stockbroker also provides the credit for the industrialist for that exact same reason. This eventually leads to

The Oldest Man posted:

the ideology says that wasting a billion dollars on a hundred projects that all fail hoping to find one that will return 10 billion is better than investing a billion dollars for a 5% return because you can bail out of the 100 projects before they go tits up and hopefully make bank and leave other people holding the bag

Contemporary capitalism is extremely grift-welcoming because for that type of capitalist (the bourgeois person with Actual Money) matters little to piss cash if it can pulverize into two hundred ventures in which one will flip into an "unicorn" and make jackpot once it goes into initial public offer. Money managers, who are not in the top level but occupy second or third in global capitalism, are there for the very reason of organizing and expediting that process in smaller firms (such as in the form of venture capital).

Another way to not worry about it is just to form a Blackrock who does everything for you, while also guaranteeing your Actual Money through being major investor in many Actual Companies That Provide Lots of Actual Revenue, such as wal-mart, amazon, exxon, chevron, apple etc. You will never get to become a Walton or anything like that, but you get to be on a nice eight to a cool twelve billion USD mark (publicly ofc, you might have way more) without absolutely any effort at all. Every now and then you get a payday because they have flipped an unicorn.

Everything is pretty good until that person suddenly has to try their hand at the 155mm Shell Production International Index. How do you make hands and a mind that have never really struggled in laboring for real value understand that they cannot solve this problem by throwing cash at it?

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


Frosted Flake posted:

Well, you present solutions that require cash being thrown at it, Excalibur, the proposed new RA shells, loving ramjets. Those are all extremely expensive, so it satisfies the requirement that they have a way to throw money at a problem.

Of course. Which, by self-contradictions of capitalism, managed to create categories of capitalists in their middle and lower echelons, such as the grifter-sorta-entrepreneur

These are people who are very well-off and specialize in setting up businesses and companies that are specifically targeted to capture the money from the inability/incapacity/unwillingness of the Actually Rich People for a solution to a problem. Solving is completely apart of the purpose here. What these provide are means of value extraction through a parlor trick, offering a vehicle than can solve the problem while also providing a future investment payoff, but also as means of serious narcissistic gratification for the investors (a secondary function in the individual level of things). For examples, see any startup that tried to come with something other than trains for public transit

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


Cookie Cutter posted:

Eurofighter is a bit like this as well. It can take a fair while to load mission and map data - I spent countless hours shivering in a cold HAS on night shift hunched over a ruggedised Windows XP terminal getting the designated flyers ready for the next morning.

you got to be loving joking me

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


(noosphere from mechanicus playing on the background) the troops investigate every home under the leaden skies searching for their objective. they know that their person is here; born in the timeframe who had contact and familiarity with the Old System, and they had proof.

"65 isn't that old I suppose", the man with the flannel and a shirt with the cover of "Turn On The Bright Lights" from the band Interpol mused to himself. The platoons were getting close to his place. He gets a little nervous, but it's alright, can't be him; then the troops come below, he listens to their steps on the stairs. What he has done? A couple of firm knocks on the door. He is paralyzed, cannot move; they break in.

The sergeant looks very happy. "Hey Steve, we've been looking for you." He delivers a warrant of conscription. "STEPHEN SMITH --- AOL COMPUSERVE INTERNET/WINDOWS XP COURSE". Maybe they could now manage to put the goddamned correct data into the missile batteries

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


I don't understand anything about boat stuff but the old maxim "if you can build tractors, you can build tanks" always applies

In other words, setting up the means to do serious ultra heavy duty stuff means you can do whatever you need from those means. This is can be inferred in general from a country through a thing sometimes called "capital goods production capacity" in some references: this means how much of that country's industry is capable of making industry - capital goods are mainstream economics for industrial means of production, machinery for building capital through more stuff (tools and other machines etc)

So if a bigass shipyard has a foundry and machinery tooling, they can build themselves into military readiness but IDK anything about naval engineering to see what sort of work they need to do to get going and be able to reliably build military navy stuff

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


They are going to say that it is the People's Daily, of course. State press, "bias" etc but anyway I'm lmaoing

http://en.people.cn/n3/2023/1215/c90000-20111061.html

quote:

China's next generation artificial sun opens for global shared research and use in cooperation with ITER

(Global Times) 15:15, December 15, 2023

The China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC) announced on Thursday the global opening of the next generation artificial sun, “China Circulation-3,” after the group’s affiliated Southwestern Institute of Physics signed an agreement with the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER). The initiative invites scientists worldwide to come to China and collaborate toward the shared goal of pursuing “artificial sun energy.”

The “China Circulation-3” is currently China's most advanced and largest-scale nuclear fusion device, also referred to as China's next generation “artificial sun.”

In August this year, it successfully achieved high-constraint operation mode under a plasma current of 1 million amperes, marking a significant advancement in China's magnetic confinement nuclear fusion device, propelling it to the forefront of international research.

Over the years, the Southwestern Institute of Physics has been deeply involved in the development of key components for ITER, the world's largest “artificial sun” project, CNNC said, and together overcame numerous engineering and technical challenges.

This involvement of the Chinese institute has led to the accumulation of extensive experience in the construction, debugging, operation, and maintenance of fusion devices, laying a solid foundation for China to integrate with international advanced technology and eventually construct its own fusion reactor.

Due to the similarity in the principles of the two experiments, the openness of “China Circulation-3” will not only focus on addressing key technical issues of interest to the ITER but will also enhance China's research and development capabilities and foster talent development.

In April this year, the other Chinese "artificial sun,” the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), which is also the world's first fully superconducting tokamak device in operation, saw a major breakthrough as it achieved a high power, stable, 403-second steady-state long-pulse high confinement mode plasma operation, setting a new world record for steady-state high confinement mode operation of a tokamak device.

Developer of the EAST, the Institute of Plasma Physics under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said that they are aiming to use the EAST to generate fusion power before the centenary of the founding of the People's Republic of China, which falls in 2049.

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


Danann posted:

https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/04/politics/military-food-insecurity/index.html

holy poo poo the troops and their families can't afford food no wonder why recruitment has plummeted along with the bases full of mold and sewage.

a quarter of the imperial armed forces have dealt with hunger and that comes from RAND

holy loving lmao poo poo

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


if anything this is a monumental testament of the ideological force of the American state in the minds of its troops

having those numbers in periods of great strife would be... expected? But when in a situation of peace and having the biggest pile of money around? It's incredible that there was no protest at all. As a general pool, one mfer in four of that might have to deal with AnsarAllah; rent got him good, had groceries on the credit card, likely is in debt. Is this guy really willing to eat a Yemeni rocket to his face? If so woah

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


Ardennes posted:

consumer debt

Another recent hit from the Marxism thread. A way to summarize the problems of heavily financialized economies is that they make too much fictitious capital, too fast; and it gets worse depending on how much concentrated wealth there is in the society.

For that money to become material (i.e. to bring something like market valuation into realization), real value has to come out from somewhere. That's where the further squeezing of the working class comes in - it loses purchasing power, it pays higher rents, etc.

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


DancingShade posted:

Don't worry its a systemic thing and thus completely unfixable.

mila kunis is right though. Issues are fixable.

Historical-dialectical materialism shows that every social structure is malleable and one of the major philosophical innovations (so to speak) was the idea of the historical subject, the subject that makes history; in its modern sense, the revolutionary idea of directing history comes from there. That notion was partially appropriated and perverted by some (perhaps the most notable of them was Mussolini, former member of the Communist Party of Italy), but it is firmly revolutionary at its core.

I am rambling a bit because it's critical to emphasize that those structures can be changed, transformed and rebuilt, especially to make people see that there are alternatives: "A World to Win" and all that.

And those who have that awareness of history do know that poo poo tends to happen when rubber hits the road. There's always the possibility of some Belisarios to emerge or a Komnenos to sort out the mess when historical pressure gets high enough against an empire. This didn't ultimately save Byzantium, but it bought time to last much longer than it would otherwise. Of course that the political conditions are very different and much less favorable to the USA (lol liberal democracy), but a sufficiently popular president might be able to afford to Caesar it up a bit, but how such a president would happen when the political structures are completely captured by a vastly rich overclass that has been directly contributing to its own downfall by pursuing the maintenance of wealth?

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


also by having referenced the Byzantine Empire I think this syncs up with ff coming back online with an extra ritual boost or something

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


Crazycryodude posted:

We already got the popular president wielding executive power to unfuck the structures of the empire by overruling the personal desires of the previous ruling class for their own long-term good. The tiny test dose of central planning they applied to the US rocketed it into the stratosphere and secured global dominance for decades. The bourgeoisie never forgave him for this and made it illegal to ever try that again.

Yeah, I get what you mean there. I like this take because personally, looking from the outside, the FDR presidency is still empire-building, a reform that gives it the power to helm the western hemisphere. It's the mutant political animal that is able to save the class from itself.

Seeing the FDR presidency as a moment of reform against decline is interesting to consider from that point of view of imperial power. The reason why I think the above is that it is after FDR that the United States truly starts messing around with almost everybody in the world, reaching its apex in terms of foreign power. Does that make sense? I do understand that there's huge labor agitation at the time and a whole lot of instability, but I wasn't considering that at first in the definition of imperial power

Like, for me, it seems that the moment of structural decline - where there is a continuous trend downhill in material historical terms - for the American state began with either Ford or Carter, and maybe this can be said only now tbqf, since there's enough distance (and ofc this is just a guess)

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


BearsBearsBears posted:

Technological advance is an inherently iterative process. One does not simply take sand from the beach and produce a space probe. We use crude tools to fashion better tools, and then our better tools to fashion more precise tools, and so on. Each minor refinement is a step in the process, and all of the steps must be taken.

Hm. Beware, you who seek first and final principles, for you are trampling the garden of an angry God and He awaits you just beyond the last theorem.

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


Tempora Mutantur posted:

central planning is communist and anti-american

now watch this amazon master-planned city timelapse build

Explaining that Amazon and Wal-Mart are very much like "bureaus of logistics and procurement" is a trip to Americans. Both can effectively impose economic policy much like the relevant former socialist government organizations in Eastern Europe, but the former are private and for profit

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


cat botherer posted:

drat, this nerd sounds like an absolute pain in the rear end.

lmao

while the boy scout stuff is cringe, having organization, discipline and procedure is something that is absolutely advantageous to a military. Guerrillas emphasize that and look at Hamas hurting the poo poo out of the IDF even though they have an air force

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


Owlbear Camus posted:

scoffing at the boy scout thing is correct, but what's even funnier is it actually has tangible cachet in the military: enlisting as an eagle scout gives you an extra rank

come the gently caress on LMAO

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011



A friend in computer science who's been very interested in communism for a few months and asked for my help to learn had this absolute golden moment of insight after understanding cost-saving as capital efficiency (use less capital to extract more surplus value). He asked if military work could generate surplus value: outside of engineering battalions building stuff and other similar tasks, no, it does not. Military has a very high demand of value, however, and that can be of use for many economic activities, especially for a socialist country.

He then connected this value demand with neoliberalism and asked if cost-cutting could be used as a way to diverge direct investment (government -> military) into private investors, and yeah, totally. He immediately banged on: "holy poo poo mfers gotta be pitching machine learning for NATO right now" and started talking about how absolutely terrible of an idea that is going to be (from the perspective of a computer scientist). a lmao after another

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


Grilled Beef posted:

This seems inaccurate.

A military does not *directly* generate surplus value, true.

I meant in the strict sense of Marx, as capital-generating labor (which is why I also emphasized the value demand, which is all economic activity that is charged by having a military, like ff posted)

And of course, yes, I agree with the point. Militaries allow for imperialism and that is very appreciable to the ruling class

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


Frosted Flake posted:

The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History


A first look at gunpowder's revolutionary impact on China's role in global history

ngh, I have difficulty parsing this rationale of "one weird trick" that comes in topics like the Great Divergence. Like, if one bothers to take a few steps back, one can see that gunpowder was merely one consequential factor.

"The Great Divergence" has to be understood (imho) first and foremost as a consequence of China achieving a monumental success of development in Antiquity, producing an extraordinary amount of labor power in all its myriad ways, for better and worse. Without need to gain value efficiency because there was so much labor readily available everywhere in its territory, it could be argued that the main economic problem was the matter of its organization and division -- IIRC, British industrial manufacturing got competitive with Qing China's domestic production only in the 1860s. There was absolutely no incentive for the Chinese to pursue value efficiency because not only their society didn't require it because labor was extraordinarily cheap and the rate of capital accumulation being sufficiently high that merchant classes didn't have an inherent advantage through commerce over landowning ones. China didn't need expeditions for spices, for example.

Again, it's that problem of a lot of people thinking that History works like a strategy game tech tree and that China simply didn't research Steam Engine because they neglected science production etc. This is also what leads to takes such as "China lacked entrepreneurialism" as some supposed explanation for what happened, which is an utter dogshit of an attempt at serious intellectual work. The steam engine was known since Antiquity - did the Romans also lack it? Of course not, because that loving idiotic notion didn't even loving exist in that place and time. A technological development isn't the invention per se, but also all the societal activities necessary for that invention to become an economic factor. Why steam power would be necessary when there's very cheap labor in abundance? And why would it be used anyway if the extraction of surplus value isn't a priority of the social function of the landowning class? In that context, without a social function that is driven for surplus value, there's no justifiable gain for pursuing value efficiency.

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


Hatebag posted:

if the us had a bit more foresight they coulda used the 90s and 00s to isolate china but rich americans were making too much money by investing in china. so basically globalization has saved the world lol

Nah, the CPC saw their hand and decided to turn the tables around. It was a deliberate move to sequester American capital into China by providing profits while imposing their own terms. It was a deliberate policy that had a couple of moments that could backfire but Deng and the CPC steered to success.

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


I am doing the impressed pikachu face rn because I needed that zoom to realize Afghanistan bordered China

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


President Xi, my man, my pal, just want to have a feel for the situation, a vibe check if you will... How the People's Liberation Army Navy - a drat fine institution of revolutionary spirit if you ask me - is doing nowadays? Like, we are just letting the mind wander here for a bit, but say something happened in South Korea, you know, or maybe further south... What if you could do something really loving funny as an answer?

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


DancingShade posted:

(bangs fist on table) There will be no decoupling from the iphone factories!

A domestic microchip of any variety in the USA does not make a consumer good. There are a few more steps involved. And the microchips themselves kind of still need stuff from China.

I joke about iphones of course but Raytheon weren't keen on it either.



so, I know, I know, I know, but hear me out, you guys won't believe this poo poo. So I talked with Carter and well, what do you know, the Americans went for it...



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dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


I was just looking for ANY excuse to use that photo of Deng smoking because c'mon

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