Chronicon

yeah... twice 8 years apart is where my brain pretty much discards the possibility that there was fuckery with the conviction and accepts he's probably a pedophile. If you were falsely charged with soliciting a minor in an online chatroom, it would be pretty easy to never do that again. Simply don't go on chat rooms, or even less effort: simply leave when they say they're underage

That daily beast article is trash lol. But also: isnt this guy a sex offender?

this is what I see my coworkers leaning towards. Thus far I've basically not touched one. I think I'd sooner become a bus driver, or a hermit in the woods.

but think of all the security holes code written by chatgpt is going to create

good time to be a hacker if nothing else

I don't say this to undermine your point at all, but in my city at least craigslist used to be huge and is now not the go-to place for literally anything. for used junk for sale its all on facebook marketplace, apartments are a mix of housing specific sites and fb, cars are facebook and some craigslist still, job listings on there for anything besides odd jobs has been kind of a joke as long as I can remember. The big job listing sites are trash but everyone I know mostly either gets jobs through them (putting out a lot of applications) or through personal connections.

Which isnt to say the job market isnt fucked, I know a fresh grad struggling to find anything rn, but idk if CL should be your bellwether in 2024. I like it but other sites have kinda eaten its lunch it seems.

My bubble is relatively small but so far I've seen zero AI related job losses. Maybe its regional to some extent? Even here, I expect it will hit in the next year or two if the AI hype doesn't die down

This is all state court, not federal. Trump would have to do a lot more than snap his fingers to get Chauvin out (and frankly there'd be riots again in minneapolis if they did, though he'd probably flee to florida)

holy shit no way

all money is by definition the result of exploitation.

certainly not all, but like, a major amount of the US' economic prosperity does come from that. In some other countries it's an even bigger fraction, in some it's much less.

I still don't see why that makes taxes going towards good things instead of bad a bad thing if those taxes weren't the result of exploitation.

That "if" is doing a lot of work here. I agree, if the US economy was free of foreign exploitation, if we traded on equal footing with other nations and did not interfere in their affairs, and weren't coasting along benefitting from several lifetimes of doing so historically, then it wouldn't be odious to build a welfare state on our tax dollars, and there would be no added structural incentives to start doing imperialist exploitation. But that's a big if, and if we had a magic button (or, sufficient political power) to get rid of imperialism, we could probably do better than just social democracy.

I'm not opposed to welfare states in principle, but I'm going to be a lot more supportive of one in the periphery than the current imperial core for all the reasons I've been laying out.

Frankly I don't know what the path to socialism in the imperial core will be, but it's a lot easier to imagine it involving a transitional period in which the spoils of imperialism are lost by some outside mechanism amid declining global influence, and the nation having to make a choice between declining living standards vs maintaining capitalism, than to imagine a scenario in which the spoils of imperialism are used to build a prosperous welfare state that then abolishes the source of (a large percentage of) its own funding (aka imperialism).

And doing social democracy with taxation has nothing to do with "getting the means of production". It's forcing a concession, at best. But I agree that a straight up uprising in current day US is not likely to succeed (though that may change as conditions worsen).

Social democracy as practiced in the west just entrenches capitalism, and leaves the door wide open for any gains made to be clawed back. I won't say it's a bad thing, it helps (some) people, but it isn't my goal, nor part of my vision for how we get to communism

If we had the political power to get rid of or reduce imperialism, a good place for the profits of that stuff to go is back to the countries we stole it from. That would just be pulling out the knife, helping them develop their own productive forces and independence would be a start at healing

sure, yes, but the money isn't (just) coming from the domestic working class. it's ultimately being funded by the exploitation of the 3rd world. If you, for example, take venezuela's oil by hook and crook and give it to exxon for pennies on the dollar and forbid venezuela from operating domestic refineries, setting their economy up to be a miserable client state, then no amount of redirecting the exxon employees' tax dollars from the military to social welfare will solve that problem, and in fact, building a society with a high standard of living atop such exploitative global relations, gives that society great incentives to at best, maintain those relations, if not continue to worsen them. It will build public support for imperialism, the MIC will be back with a vengeance next time there's a crisis.

It's a non-solution that only takes care of imperial core workers, and even them only in the short term. The anti-imperialism has to come first.

sure. Not saying it's the only route, just that becoming socdems isn't a necessary step.

I'm not going to support any intermediary if it relies on the exploitation of the natural resources and labor of the 3rd world, though. Frankly I think (and I could be wrong here) that most first world countries would need to do some significant re-industrialization (and along with that would come some proletarianization) in order to maintain their living standards while weaning off of the profits of imperialist extraction.

Becoming western-style soc-dems and living off of either 3rd world raw materials, or purely being finance leeches, sets up your country in opposition to global progress, even as it improves conditions at home.

the most successful communists so far have mostly started from underdeveloped countries mostly comprised of peasants, so I don't think its 100% necessary to become socdems (built off the exploitation of the 3rd world) first. Living conditions along the lines of social democracies, but without the imperialism (both economic and military), now that's a more compelling thought

And again, I'd support it, to some limited extent, but that doesn't mean I need to adopt its rhetoric. emphasizing the flaws of social democracy is important, to combat liberals saying "oh everything's great now we don't need to continue to improve" or "going beyond social democracy is redfash tankieism"

from the comments:

I was alive to watch the Tiananmen Square massacre live on TV

uh huh? really?