Doubledee

I mean on one level I sympathize with the guy. He's tethered to American public opinion and priorities, he literally MUST do irrational things that play well on TV or he loses even more capacity to continue the war, which at this point is do or die for him.

He should have known better than to trust the USians, but now that he's here he really has no choice. Either keep doing unexpected shit that lets you claim to have momentum or flee the country.

Real kkkracker hours on lemmy today huh.

In agriculture as in manufacture, the transformation of production under the sway of capital, means, at the same time, the martyrdom of the producer; the instrument of labour becomes the means of enslaving, exploiting, and impoverishing the labourer; the social combination and organisation of labour-processes is turned into an organised mode of crushing out the workman’s individual vitality, freedom, and independence.

This is in the same section, I don't think he's idealizing rural life or work, he's observing that the concentration and exploitation of large numbers of laborers in cities is also in a dialectical relationship with the disposession and destruction of the peasantry. He's both/and-ing, it's both deeply unhealthy for city dwellers and complete ruination for the rural inhabitants who need to do less and less besides mind a machine, and in decreasing numbers at that.

I felt like it rhymed with the larger dynamic he describes of core/peripheral exploitation, wherein market forces remake everything outside of the industrial centers of the market into pure fodder for the mills.

Yeah I think this is critical. It gets you to a point where you can actually think seriously about other systems and what they actually do, rather than an instinctive comparison to bourgeois electoralism that we are accustomed to. There's plenty of room to question how open and responsive and democratic other states are, I think, but it has to be done from a position where you aren't just asking how closely they resemble Parliament or Congress or whatever.

CPC*

Yeah when I was radicalized I reached a point where I had to stop listening to NPR because I would yell at the radio while I was driving. Never reached that point with chud talk radio, I just stopped listening because I eventually realized there was no point. It didn't make me viscerally angry the way the ostensibly nuanced liberals did.

"On the level plain, simple mounds look like hills; and the imbecile flatness of the present bourgeoisie is to be measured by the altitude of its great intellects."

This might be the most savage own he's done so far, J S Mill BTFO.

My spouse's family are the only people I've seen do this and it doesn't have a name so far as I know, but they will hold out two closed fists and ask you to pick one, having assigned one of two alternatives to each fist without telling which. It's a way to get a random result when you don't want to make a decision.

"If we can just get him to round up and exterminate refugees by executive order we will get those numbers all the way to where we need them!"

I'd second recommendations like Argentina people Brazil, being a big fish in a small pond can be nice. Also being a colonial possession of a powerful country can be a nice way to learn more about the systems without having to be your own guarantor.

Aha! I guessed correctly! Welcome back comrade, I was getting worried for you.