Beaver

What makes it funny is not that we're actually bullying libs... it's that libs perceive even the most minor criticism as bullying. So... fuck it, stuff 'em in lockers, give em swirlies

Imagine that, getting shot while trying to invade someone's castle.

Parade in the park

Some thoughts on vol 1 overall:

• Capital vol 1 doesn't talk about how to build communism. This is a very obvious point, but I just wanted to get it out there.

• It was an interesting but impactful choice to intersperse chapters that mainly talked about how fucking outrageous and unjust the treatment of workers in 19th century England was. This is important to the overall goal of criticism of the economic system in England, and the similar ones emerging on the continent. It's so easy to just talk about systems abstractly and scientifically, that it's essential to rub our noses in the outcomes. I think if there's one takeaway that I had from reading this it's the importance of making the connection between the worker's actual, lived conditions, and the way that capitalists make choices specifically to impose those conditions on the workers.

• I was surprised by how different the Samuel Moore and Ben Fowkes translations were. When I would quote stuff in comments here, I would look up the Samuel Moore version online, and find that the text was quite different than my printed version.

• One of the major themes, and contradictions explored is the idea of Capitalism as an emergent property of free, un-coerced people engaged in commerce with equals... but also, that people in Britain absolutely did not want to engage in capitalism, and had to be violently coerced into the system during the enclosure period. That's kind of the big fundamental lie that capitalist evangelists still preach, that this is all voluntary.

Soon our memes will be so esoteric that even other terminally online leftist won't understand what the fuck we're talking about

Slightly different niche. It's a new way of calling people a racial slur.

My library's copy of vol 2 is in notably mint condition... which I think means the no-one ever reads it.

Infinite in the Y direction, but finite in the X direction

It's tough to internalize these things, even if intellectually you might be aware of them. One shocking moment might put everything you knew into perspective... but there's no guarantee that you'll have that moment.

I think a similar thing happens with liberal's support of the genocide in Gaza: if they saw it with their own eyes, there's a good chance that they might do a 180 and stop supporting Israel. They maybe already had all the information, but having it rubbed in your face is what it takes to really internalize it.

Another example: it's well known among even most of the general public that Miami is going to be underwater eventually. But some of those people, the young ones, are going to have this experience decades from now, where they're standing on the shoreline looking at the ruins of a submerged city, and think "goddamn, I knew it was going to happen, but it hits different when you're standing here looking at this city that's juat gone". It's something that doesn't seem real... until it seems very real, and you're surprised by how it snuck up on you.

I remember one day passing by a group of geese wandering through a walmart parking lot. Me and them just stood there and looked at each other, and I imagined that we had swapped places. What if we were just people living in the world, and these absolutely unfathomable advanced alien entities came to earth and just started reshaping everything, leaving us wild humans to live on the fringes of still unchanged land that the aliens had for some unknown reason not converted yet to their own environment? Imagine being a human wandering through the landscape of the Changed Zone, reshaped into forms that you can't even understand, but with are anathema to human existence. And then imagine that you stumble upon one of these alien entities, and are trying to understand it, to communicate with it... but receiving no answer, not because they couldn't, but because they just don't care about you at all. The goose doesn't have that level of understanding, of course, but that's the experience they were going through. Nature is cruel, but what people are doing to it is one of the most evil crimes in history.

We're terraforming our entire biosphere so that the only thing it supports are domesticated animals and crops. Even if you ignore all the unintended consequences of that, the intended consequences are: we are destroying almost all the food and shelter required for wild creatures to survive on earth. Wild bugs, animals, and plants literally only survive because there still exist small random patches of land that were not economical to develop, and they cling to life on them. Everywhere else on earth is a wasteland, re-shaped by these unfathomable beings that taken over and imposed their will on the very land and air.