UKMT Summer 2020 - Two Pints of Saline and Abacavir for Drip

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > UKMT Summer 2020 - Two Pints of Saline and Abacavir for Drip

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communism bitch: Apr 24, 2009

I love how the tousim/hospitality industries have got one whiff of freedom and immediately started hammering on the table, demanding we sacrifice the entire country to the plague gods.

mehall posted:

Can this weather gently caress off please?

I don't live in Scotland - on a hill - to be sweating sitting in my house.

Get naked.

# ¿ Jun 1, 2020 13:58

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# ¿ May 9, 2024 23:30

communism bitch: Apr 24, 2009

I'm really enjoying seeing people get radicalised in real time in the Cool Zone thread.

# ¿ Jun 1, 2020 15:35

communism bitch: Apr 24, 2009

Borrovan posted:

Wow, they invented Legal Expenses Insurance

e: & I'm guessing the kind of fuckwits who endorse these things would regard striking &c as inherently political acts, which renders collective bargaining completely pointless since there's no real way of saying "no", so the idea of a non-political union is a complete oxymoron

Link?

(plus obligatory, there's ~~a frontpage~~ other ~~forums~~ threads?)

https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3925033&pagenumber=677&perpage=40

Thread for the ongoing US protests, with a lot of first-time protestors sharing experiences. Really good thread but almost impossible to keep up with when things pop off in US evenings because it moves so fast.

# ¿ Jun 1, 2020 16:13

communism bitch: Apr 24, 2009

Just applied for an MA course that I'm completely unqualified for but which I'm 80% sure I'm going to get accepted into because of nepotism and the universities being desperate for students after the ronageddon lol.

# ¿ Jun 1, 2020 20:02

communism bitch: Apr 24, 2009

Jose posted:

lmao

https://twitter.com/DrHannahWhite/status/1267530657565204480?s=20

Our democratic structures are completely degenerate lmao

# ¿ Jun 1, 2020 20:28

communism bitch: Apr 24, 2009

OwlFancier posted:

Didn't they tase him twice on two separate occasions?

For some reason I thought that too, but just googled it and apparently not.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/18/stunned-then-shocked-race-adviser-tasered-by-police-is-targeted-again

# ¿ Jun 1, 2020 21:23

communism bitch: Apr 24, 2009

bionic vapour boy posted:

https://twitter.com/KishWidyaratna/status/1267582227396861954

How has this not been leaked already

# ¿ Jun 2, 2020 08:31

communism bitch: Apr 24, 2009

CGI Stardust posted:

I've found having a routine helpful. Previously whenever I got stuck inside, I turned into a capital-G Gamer or compulsive social media refresher; stopping that at the moment by having a schedule of stuff to do a little of each day even if feeling a bit poo poo, just so I can have a checklist of ways in which progress is still happening somewhere. Also mostly avoiding news, it's generally lovely and doesn't help. I'm probably talking with friends actually more (Discord, phone etc) since we're all stuck around.

Curious to know - what's it like to learn? Been meaning to look at some other language, and there's a shitload of academic stuff just in Russian that could be interesting to dig into in future

oh my

Russian is really easy because 90% of the vocabulary is English words in a Russian accent, 5% are close enough that you can really easily mentally link them. The other 5% is gibberish to English speakers but who needs to know how to say "bread" in Russian anyway.

E: for example house is дом - "Dom" like domicile. Bicycle is вепосиред or "velocipede". Radio is радио - "radio". It's all loving English lol

communism bitch fucked around with this message at 13:31 on Jun 2, 2020

# ¿ Jun 2, 2020 13:27

communism bitch: Apr 24, 2009

Jose posted:

lmao

https://twitter.com/StreathamRovers/status/1267809662252077062?s=20

lmao. Crossposting this to the Cool Zone

# ¿ Jun 3, 2020 08:57

communism bitch: Apr 24, 2009

https://twitter.com/INVESTMENTSHULK/status/1268260728328335362

# ¿ Jun 3, 2020 20:56

communism bitch: Apr 24, 2009

Kin posted:

And the thing is i bet most of this wont be in the news so anyone outside of London will barely have a clue it's happening unless they're tuned into twitter feeds.

It's the exact same way they'll treat the second corona virus outbreak. They'll simply stop counting or stop reporting the numbers and let enough people just slip back into normality because they know that for most people the virus is a headline in a newspaper happening to someone else.

England isn't going to go back into lockdown, no matter what happens now. The unreported death toll is going to skyrocket while most people move on because it's not directly affecting them and thus they won't really give a poo poo.

I'm just waiting for the inevitable spin on us being quarantined by other countries because they realise we're one of the few places where the virus is still rampant.

If it comes as any consolation there are more protests planned in several cities this weekend. But yeah I'm with you basically; we're all hosed.

# ¿ Jun 3, 2020 21:12

communism bitch: Apr 24, 2009

Roller Coast Guard posted:

As working class Londoners it's likely the protesters are already being forced onto overcrowded enclosed plaguewagons to get to their workplaces (or are about to be when thy reopen) anyway. I'd have thought the risk is lesser in an open street than on the tube every day?

There was some info released in the US a day or two ago stating that the risk factors were much higher for travelling to/from a protest location than in being at the site itself. I don't have the info to hand, just saw a tweet in passing.

# ¿ Jun 4, 2020 08:36

communism bitch: Apr 24, 2009

Jose posted:

picking up a prescription yesterday i noticed that boots were selling them but a box was �35 ffs

Just get a snood or something

# ¿ Jun 4, 2020 18:10

communism bitch: Apr 24, 2009

Beefeater1980 posted:

People don�t naturally self organise into large enough groups to achieve things at the scale modern society demands.

The anarcho-syndicalist trade unions that organised production and distribution in revolutionary Catalonia and Aragon consisted of over 100,000 members, to say nothing of the local town and village cooperatives. Your whole post is, interestingly, an almost textbook assertion of anarchist principles, minus the organisational elements. You're restating a lot of points articulated by people like Kropotkin, and Proudhon and I can't tell if you're doing so consciously or not.

Syndicalism encountered a raft of problems of its own that were peculiar to that model, but I think it's still one of the most compelling theories that had some successful implementation. Another alternative based on a more rigid collective structure would be Platformism as articulated by the survivors of the Ukrainian Free Territory (which itself had a population of like 5 million iirc), but a lot of contemporary theorists were pretty suspicious of it.

# ¿ Jun 12, 2020 18:41

communism bitch: Apr 24, 2009

Beefeater1980 posted:

Not to be too flippant about the achievements of the anarcho-syndicalists in Catalonia and Aragon, but they lost. While the productive aspect might have been great, politically and militarily they were outcompeted by statist powers.

The anarchists were literally rounded up and shot by their socialist and republican "allies" in order to obtain support from the USSR, op.

# ¿ Jun 12, 2020 18:58

communism bitch: Apr 24, 2009

Beefeater1980 posted:

I mean, that doesn't sound like winning to me. They got killed by people who could organise a coup better than they could defend against it. That's not saying that organising a coup to murder anarchists is a good thing, it's saying that the minimum level for viability of an organisation is being able to prevent your "allies" from couping you.

If prior success is the only measure of value then surely free market capitalism - relentlessly successful by its own twisted internal logic - is the only thing for you.

# ¿ Jun 12, 2020 19:07

communism bitch: Apr 24, 2009

I'm genuinely loving amazed lol "those people got executed; their theory is antiquated"

# ¿ Jun 12, 2020 19:09

communism bitch: Apr 24, 2009

Beefeater1980 posted:

I don't really think that follows from a post about how capitalism obviously doesn't work but the replacement needs to be something that does, probably built on anarchist principles?

The example you gave shows that anarchist societies can organise at scale but not across the whole spectrum of activies of a state, leaving them susceptible to coups. That's a fail state because there is no point building a society that gets knocked over easily. So any future anarchist society needs to have an answer to 'but what if states try to coup you?'

I think you might need to accept that the concept of human liberation isn't some logic puzzle that you can solve in your head and then just apply, but rather will be a vicious struggle that people have to fight for (and which other people will fight against), and that possibly you will lose, and that that doesn't invalidate your struggle, your theory, or praxis. It is literally impossible to conceive of any human organisation that isn't susceptible to betrayal or violent overthrow. Not one. At all. Ever. So invalidating, with one giant sweep of your arm, any movement that ever suffered a violent repression, doesn't seem to me to be at all useful - to say nothing of the fact that it discards pretty much every single ideological movement in history, many of which survived, regrew, and exerted great influence.

# ¿ Jun 12, 2020 19:26

communism bitch: Apr 24, 2009

Guavanaut posted:

but I'm not sure how they can best remain viable within or near states

Ah, the age old question. How the gently caress do we deal with our yankee imperialist neighbours.

# ¿ Jun 12, 2020 19:39

communism bitch: Apr 24, 2009

Beefeater1980 posted:

OK, that's a good point and I think makes an important distinction. One of two things is true:

1 - The anarchist collective in the Spanish Civil War failed because of fatal structural flaws.

2 - They didn't have fatal structural flaws but had minor structural flaws that could be exploited by other people to destroy them. If this is true then if you roll the dice enough times you'll eventually get a situation where that doesn't happen immediately.

The reason I think it's probably 1 isn't that this single incidence of an anarchist experiment happened to get murdered so there's no need to ever think about it again, because of this one time. It's that for every instance I can find, states are still around as independent polities and anarchist collectives either got murdered or exist within the protection of a state.

I'd argue that it's a combination of both factors, but that an iterative development and synthesis of new ideas is by far the most reasonable way forward. As I said in my original post, the Syndicalists had some serious organisational flaws - their leadership, while largely volunteers, contained a clique of professionals and careerists, who placed the survival of the union (and their own positions) ahead of the goals of the members - it's a mistake that was repeated by the Syndicalist unions in France in the lead-up to the '68 riots, and this has been a flaw in Syndicalism that was identified at least as far back as the early 1900s, and probably far earlier. The Syndicalists were also willing to get in the "big tent" with Republicans and Stalinists (who hated them) because they identified the fight against fascism as being more urgent than their own class emancipation. I'm not going to go into that mess in a short discussion post, but it's certainly a decision that was debated hotly for a long time afterwards.
It's a rich and diverse theoetical field, before you even go into the other alternative models that have been thrown up in the last few decades.

I suppose my problem is that from your posts it seems to me that you ether know and understand the history and theory, but see no value in it and want to start again from first principles (which seems like throwing the baby out with the bath water), or that you don't know the history and the existing theory, and have no interest in learning it because you've heard that it failed.

WhatEvil posted:

https://twitter.com/___knighty/status/1271329539541495811?s=20

My favourite genre of video: Racists getting ktfo.

I mean, It'd be better if the racists didn't exist in the first place, but if they're at least getting sparked out for it then it's a step in the right direction.

I loving love that old man groan as he hits the deck

# ¿ Jun 12, 2020 20:07

communism bitch: Apr 24, 2009

Borrovan posted:

What happened to ur av

It was good

I got banned for saying mean words about cops and I can't remember what that website is that stores old avatars

# ¿ Jun 12, 2020 20:12

communism bitch: Apr 24, 2009

Bardeh posted:

i don't know when this is from (not today I assume) but I've never seen it before and it owns

https://twitter.com/Muqadaam/status/1271811483576475650

lol

old vid tho, seen him falling on his arse before.

# ¿ Jun 13, 2020 21:40

communism bitch: Apr 24, 2009

From the text of the bill that was posted itt the other day it sounded like creeping fascism. Wasn't it worded in such a vague way as to leave almost anybody open to prosecution for doing anything within sight of a memorial, and also classified any memorial to any person affected by war as a "war memorial"?
Criminialise everybody, and then apply the law selectively to undesirables.

# ¿ Jun 14, 2020 10:32

communism bitch: Apr 24, 2009

Anybody who wants to inspect my dick and balls in the toilets is free to do so. don't care what gender identity or sexual orientation you profess. Just come and get some, the more the merrier.

e: rear end too

# ¿ Jun 14, 2020 10:48

communism bitch: Apr 24, 2009

https://twitter.com/Keir_Starmer/status/1271896865139822592?s=20

So apparently this dude is only 28. Why do the fash always look like they're either 13 or pushing 50?

# ¿ Jun 14, 2020 11:06

communism bitch: Apr 24, 2009

lol
https://twitter.com/arubiodenniss/status/1272101255284998148

# ¿ Jun 14, 2020 12:00

communism bitch: Apr 24, 2009

Did you guys see the bus full of clowns and jugglers that got stopped by the cops in the USA and all the occupants got charged as being Antifa? The cops were describing the bus as being full of baseball bats and other weapons and it was, like, the jugglers' juggly pin things and balls and stuff lmao.

# ¿ Jun 14, 2020 18:22

communism bitch: Apr 24, 2009

goddamnedtwisto posted:

They were released without charge, but that still hasn't stopped US politicians using it as DEFINITIVE PROOF OF ANTIFA SUPERSOLDIERS ROAMING THE COUNTRY, eg:

https://twitter.com/marcorubio/status/1267615757548113920?lang=en

Also apparently they've had rocks chucked at them more than once since, so that's nice.

I wish we got ferried around in busses like that

# ¿ Jun 14, 2020 18:58

communism bitch: Apr 24, 2009

baka kaba posted:

Yeah I'm talking more broadly when I say massive unrest (mostly about the US), and I said "to a point" because it's not like a revolution is about to occur here. But at the same time, there's a sense of a broader awareness and engagement - even if people aren't out protesting they're talking about it, they're defending it. Removing statues isn't rioting, but it is a very specific political act rooted in specific criticisms and a desire to take action, because the system has failed - and there's a national conversation about that, people supporting those ideas, looking for something to be done

So when you have a lot of people actually taking notice, of what's going on in the US and what our own legacy (to this day) is, that's space that Labour should at least be present in. Instead they seem more like they want to distance themselves from it at all costs

Maybe Mr Forensic Haircut has secretly been a revolutionary accelerationist all along and he's just been playing the long game. Now his plan is to not offer any meaningful alternative to the tories, so the tortured masses will have no option but to break our own chains.

# ¿ Jun 14, 2020 21:04

communism bitch: Apr 24, 2009

Spangly A posted:

So is your take just "can't understand why all the materialists are talking about material conditions", ronya?

I want to jump in on this because I've been rowing with Leninists all day in the Cool Zone and we touched on Marx's Historical Materialism.
I don't think it's controversial to say that Marx's materialist predictions weren't in any way borne out in the 20th century - the advanced industrial capitalist countries weren't the centres of working class revolt, but instead the quasi-industrialised/agrarian/plantation economy countries played host to basically every successful socialist insurrection or revolution, and even the unsuccessful ones that gained any traction were in similar economies in Latin and South America.

So that being said, what was the flaw with Marx's predictions? Did he underestimate the resilience of industrial capitalist states? Or has everybody else overestimated the extent to which western nations are "advanced" in the progress along the course of history in a materialist sense? And what do we make of the revolts in agrarian/semi-industrialised economies? Is it a flaw in Marx's assessment, or a flaw in application by the people that lead the revolts?

For a while I was incubating, like an egg, this idea that the world as a whole needs to be far more industrialised - needs to proletarianise every marginal population, before it runs out of unproletarianised populations to convert and then, with little further opportunity for growth, it'll suffocate like a fire with no fuel, and its own internal contradictions rip it apart. But I don't think this takes account of the insanely rapid development of technology, which constantly frees up new surplus workers for new industries.

What does historical materialism have for us when it doesn't yet seem to have bone out an accurate prediction? Or am I missing something?

Not trying to start a fight by the way - genuinely curious in people's perspectives.

# ¿ Jun 14, 2020 21:31

communism bitch: Apr 24, 2009

OwlFancier posted:

I mean I think the general thrust of his argument is correct, that changes in society are driven by changes in the material conditions, but I think trying to predict the course of history on a grand scale is just impossible.

Revolutions happen, but not exactly as he thought they would, and things have happened to increase societal stability, temporarily, in the countries he thought would be most susceptible. People have tried to induce them (that being what leninism is about) and have had some success but ultimately have been stymied by a lack of international support, which I think is in keeping with his central thesis that societal change needs to be unavoidable before it sticks. Which is why it usually follows some technological change that spreads and can be replicated everywhere and which directly attacks an old power structure in the process.

But things like 30% unemployment are an unavoidable change in material conditions too, neoliberalism has no answer to it, so it's going to necessitate a serious change in how society works because the current political orthodoxy can't deal with it. It's gonna be a new deal/postwar consensus moment I think.

All reasonable points, but I keep coming back to the idea of historical materialism being conceived as a scientific model by which useful conclusions and predictions could be drawn from a study of current and historical material and social conditions. But in the analysis up to the present date pretty much every major social revolution has occurred in a state and economic system that Marx himself attributed very little revolutionary potential to.
What good is an analysis or predictive model that hasn't yet produced any sort of reliable or consistent evidence of accuracy after 150 years? And for every one of the outliers (USSR, china, Cuba, etc) someone has a beautiful explanation of why the model can't be applied because of some peculiar, local historical quirk; but when every piece of contrary evidence is dismissed as just an outlier or whatever it starts to sound a bit poo poo.

The more I think about it the more I feel like the anarchist conception of the state as the real threat to liberation, regardless of particular material conditions, holds more weight.

# ¿ Jun 14, 2020 21:58

communism bitch: Apr 24, 2009

Guavanaut posted:

Careful, that was the RCP/LM conception even before they started taking Koch money, so what hatches from that egg might be

Yeah I basically only started harbouring the idea when I was trying to reconcile the failure of historical materialism to make any accurate predictions with my own continuing participation in useless authoritaian leftist parties. I've basically not even thought about since I started hanging around with anarchists who sleep in dumpsters and smell like hemp.

# ¿ Jun 14, 2020 22:00

communism bitch: Apr 24, 2009

Oh for sure I'm not dismissing Marx out of hand - Capital is still one of the clearest deconstructions of the global economic system in history, and his assessment of historical development seems have a lot of merit. I'm specifically taking issue with historical materialism as the predictive model it was clearly intended as, especially since it seems a lot of authoritarian parties have clung to it in various forms ever since. Perhaps it's been misinterpreted or over-emphasised, but I feel like either way it may have contributed to the inertia and ineffectiveness of parties that subscribe to it.
Because it offers almost the perfect get-out-of-jail-free card for not having to engage in any critical self reflection, right? Your party isn't doing well, or the masses aren't as restive as they ought to be? Well here's a tailor made reason why - it was historically inevitable, and we can't do much to change it.

I dunno, maybe *i'm* the one putting too much emphasis on it, but when I think back to the parties Ive been associated with, and what I've heard from friends who were in other parties, and it feels like it fits somehow.
I gotta go sleep, but I'm enjoying the discussion and hope we can pick it up again.

# ¿ Jun 14, 2020 22:14

communism bitch: Apr 24, 2009

Rustybear posted:

The fermi paradox of permanent revolution, if it's inevitable why hasn't it happened yet.

You're being unfair to marx, he didn't give a prediction or a schedule he just developed an argument for why capitalism is not self-sustaining and must eventually reach an unsustainable end-state. You can buy time by using your advanced economy to exploit less developed economies (which, like say, is why a lot of the unrest in the 20C was in places being exploited rather than in the advanced economies doing the exploiting); you can chase new sources of profit through hyperfinancialization and other arcane methods; and you can go just plain go backwards.

There were plenty of places in the 18thC where it looked like monarchism and the divine right of kings was the future and it was instead simply an eddy in the flow of history, albeit one into which could contain the entirety of a human life.

As technology improves, the imbalances which facilitated advanced economies preying on the less advanced will seek an equilibrium point, the opportunity to stem the decline of the rate of profit by financialising everything under the sun will diminish and the basic materialist conception of history will assert itself. The caveat being if we can find a new source of resource ripe for exploitation (ie. out of this world) then you could keep the whole show going a bit longer; but the challenges in doing that both seem pretty formidable and better suited to social or collectively-organised society. It's no coincidence to me that the shift from feudalism to capitalism occurred just as the boundaries of western civilization were expanding at a rapid rate, and I could conceive of (hope for) something quite similar in the future.

So you'd argue that the predictive model is basically sound, we just aren't far enough along the curve yet to reach breaking point? Your bolded point is one that I've considered in the past as well; there's a clear reason capital is so eager to get into space; so they can gain access to effectively limitless resources. But I worry that "a bit longer" becomes essentially "for the rest of time" if they get things that far.

Anyway, off to bed.

# ¿ Jun 14, 2020 22:25

communism bitch: Apr 24, 2009

really last post because I have to sleep but re: space. I'm not talking about full automated pauperised interplanetary space capitalism; I just mean like the establishment of some industrial capacity in orbit or on the moon, and the ability to process space rocks and maybe land the produce (I look forward to the first "industrial accident" during that process). It doesn't seem like that sort of capability is much more than a century away at most, and from what vague things I've head we could basically fulfil our global needs on heavy industrial inputs like that forever.

# ¿ Jun 14, 2020 22:40

communism bitch: Apr 24, 2009

https://twitter.com/BenSutton91/status/1272203200586801153
what tje gently caress is going on??

# ¿ Jun 16, 2020 10:24

communism bitch: Apr 24, 2009

josh04 posted:

Actually I think you'll find "we did it"?

https://twitter.com/UKLabour/status/1272866991683051520

A tale as old as time - the political class claiming itself all the credit for social progress forced on them by society in general.

Society forces us to do X, we represent society, therefore we're responsible for X.

# ¿ Jun 16, 2020 14:09

communism bitch: Apr 24, 2009

I'm eating a crisp sandwich for lunch because why not and I just remembered someone itt many moons ago describing them as the quintessential British food - fatty carbs sandwiched between carbs smeared with fat. :britain:

edit: cheese and onion McCoys, for those wondering.

# ¿ Jun 17, 2020 15:25

communism bitch: Apr 24, 2009

double nine posted:

this is a brilliant video in these bleak times. "Really".

https://twitter.com/charlesTdale/status/1272946316231028736

good click

# ¿ Jun 17, 2020 21:15

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# ¿ May 9, 2024 23:30

communism bitch: Apr 24, 2009

Bunch of libs in the CHAZ let the cops back into the precinct, and then even more libs declared that the CHAZ was now called CHOP (Capital Hill Occupy Protest) and are trying to turn it into another toothless event like OWS and are pushing cooperation with the city and police reform instead of defunding and dismantling them.

# ¿ Jun 17, 2020 22:53

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > UKMT Summer 2020 - Two Pints of Saline and Abacavir for Drip

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