Except not since you would have to replicate your current life to the smallest thing imaginable, and if you didn’t it would cause a butterfly effect meaning you probably wouldn’t get this opportunity anymore
Progressive liberals like Bernie Sanders aren’t much different and only marginally better, critiquing “crony capitalism” / “neoliberal capitalism” / “uber-capitalism”, without directly challenging capitalism itself.
Okie doke. What’s your suggestion then? You think a Marxist candidate can win one of the two primaries? You think a Marxist candidate can beat both parties in the general? What exactly is your alternative to incrementally progressive policy?
That’s not rhetorical, if you have a serious alternative I’m sincerely eager to hear it.
Few people remember that Communists and other socialists helped us win the weekend and the eight hour workday, and these weren’t won through elections but through labor militancy. They don’t remember because we were purged and memory-holed by two red scares and a cold war.
Cool. You can directly criticize capitalism. Do your grassroots. Don’t hate on Bernie because he is using the most effective tools at his disposal. What he’s doing is, probably, better overall for the general state of socialist thought in this country than any alternative at his disposal.
You can take direct labor action without denigrating the man for following his path: trying to move the window from inside the system. If you think you can do better, do it. As it stands, do you think you’ve done more, to actually shift overall labor sentiment in this country to the left, than he has through his “marginally better” moderate progressivism?
I appreciate all the links you’re posting in this thread, I’m learning a lot.
No socialist State has ever been won at the ballot box
Which are the socialist states in existence right now? Are European countries socialist? Nordics? I know these classifications are subjective but I would love to hear what you and others think.
The Nordic model is a social democratic one, which is still fundamentally a capitalist one. This is what someone like Bernie Sanders claims to want.
Sanders gets away with calling himself a socialist because Americans have forgotten what https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism actually means: “social ownership of the means of production, as opposed to private ownership.” Americans have forgotten what socialism means because the American socialists were persecuted into obscurity in the 20th century. So now even the vocabulary for socialism is lost in Orwellian fashion.
Now, is north korea socialist? Do the workers there enjoy democratic control over the means of production? Or really democratic control over anything? I’ll admit that info from North Korea is mostly not great but it seems to me that they are run only by the one ruling family.
I have similar doubts about china and have always seen it as more state-capitalist than anything else. Simply because it seems to me that individual workers do not own the companies they work at. It seems to me that China has corporations structured almost exactly like our own in the west. Unless I’ve been misled and these massive Chinese corps really are co-ops with the workers having an equal say in the decisions of the company.
North Korea is especially difficult for a Burgerlander like me to get a clear picture of. I hope the Kim dynasty largely acts as a state figurehead, but I haven’t investigated and have no idea.
China does have a limited capitalism going on right now, which, if I understand correctly, is a part of the ongoing Reform and Opening Up project. From my (still fairly ignorant) P.O.V., I can’t help but imagine a risk to this strategy, where the capitalists become strong enough to wrest control. The project has brought hundreds of millions out of poverty, though. The government recently took the capitalist real estate speculators to heel (to the dismay of capitalists everywhere and the delight of people just wanting a place to live), so it seems they haven’t lost control. Their professed long-term plan is to phase out capitalism entirely.
It’s worth noting that no Marxist worth their salt will paint any of these socialist countries as utopias, especially given that Marxists reject utopian socialisms.
Oh I know that China has lifted lots of people out of poverty and is generally popular with the population. But they engage in massive censorship among other issues and I just can’t see how there can be a democracy (which I consider the most important component to make something socialist) with that degree of control. What I meant with China is it seems to me the state is the capitalists. The state has control over all the means of production in the country and I believe it uses it for its own benefit over the benefits and desires of the workers at those places.
I guess I’m just an anti-authoritarian first and my issue with capitalism has always been the authoritarian nature in which we parcel out resources and I can’t see bringing up China or northkorea as examples of what I want. Though I do often have to push back against liberal narratives especially about Vietnam and Cuba and China.
But I’m not a Marxist though I do think he had some good ideas and was skilled at inspiring class consciousness. Ive always been more inspired by anarchist philosphy and go by Libertarian-socialist if forced to pick a name. I just think that we’ve seen now that a dictatorship of the proletariat doesn’t go away and that you trade one state power for the other.
But they engage in massive censorship among other issues and I just can’t see how there can be a democracy (which I consider the most important component to make something socialist) with that degree of control
Maybe they do, maybe that’s mostly the propaganda we’re fed. I’m sure that at least some of the “censorship” is the Chinese State keeping foreign capitalist enterprises from dominating China’s indigenous internet.
The state has control over all the means of production in the country and I believe it uses it for its own benefit.
I do think that is predominant (though there are also worker co-ops & individual projects). If China is a democratic socialist state, then the “it” in “its own benefit” is largely the working class. This is in contrast with a bourgeois democracy like the US, where the “it” is largely the capitalist class. Our votes are somewhat effective when they don’t conflict with the capitalists, but otherwise not so much. We get fed a lot of propaganda about socialist states having an authoritarian “ruling class,” analogous to our capitalist class, living high on the hog at the expense of the people, but is that really so, or is it projection?
I guess I’m just an anti-authoritarian first […] I’ve always been more inspired by anarchist philosophy and go by Libertarian-socialist if forced to pick a name.
Quite understandable: I came from that place. It took a lot of convincing, because my heels were pretty dug in to a Noam Chomsky/Mark Fisher position. I think one of the quicker/easier ways to seeing arguments on why this position has never and can never succeed, and why the “authoritarianism” of communism has succeeded and is a necessary step on the path to socialism, is Michael Parenti’s Blackshirts and Reds. It’s a short book and as such doesn’t—on its own—provide a whole lot of backing evidence; it’s a jumping-off point for further inquiry.
Well I mean we know China blocks a ton of info and publishing must pass state censors. And vpns etc aren’t really allowed there. And Chinese corps have some brutal working conditions. I’m not saying there aren’t things China has done right that we should look into but I don’t see them as a shining example of the working man getting control over his own destiny.
I will give that book a read but I disagree with your assertion that china, or the soviet union succeeded in bringing socialism and I’ll continue to work with but never trust leninists maoists etc. due to all the historical violence marxist-leninist revolutionaries have used against anarchists and people who believe like me as soon as they have power of their own.
A few capitalist tech companies started a brutal 996 system, which from what I’ve heard was illegal, and the state has since been cracking down on it. I agree that we shouldn’t assume what China has done to be the best possible path, nor should we directly imitate it, because our material conditions are very different from theirs.
Marxists, Anarchists, and any other form of leftist stands to gain real traction not from electoralism (outside of highlighting the soon to be mentioned actions), but from organization, such as Unionization.
Revolution doesn’t exactly have a good history either. If anything, it’s shown to be a significantly worse option. It’s a pipe dream to believe that a revolutionary party would relinquish political power after gaining it.
Beat me to it. I haven’t had an unsupported file error in the decade I’ve been using VLC. Maybe one time I had to download something to support a rare file type
Something I don’t see a lot of people do but totally should is get a really long HDMI cable and snake it around the room. You can then hook up a laptop or hell even your desktop directly to the TV. Think my cable is around 20 feet and I got it off Amazon for dirt cheap. Works wonders when I want to watch something on Plex (a lot of smart TV’s have trouble with Plex)
20 feet is fine unless you want 4K 120 Hz and stuff like that. I'm which case 20 feet may also be fine with a passive cable, but a bit on the edge of where AOC starts to make sense.
As for 1080p and 4K30 I think 10 meters can work passively.
Edit: My in-head unit conversion was a bit off, 20 feet is probably a bit over what's sensible for 4K120. But it's probably fine for non-UHS HDMI.
This! 10meter hdmi cable came in really handy in my last apartment for connecting pc to tv while having the cable completely hidden all thr time. Now I would need like 20m cable and I would have to drill it trough walls. Just laptop and chromecast now. It’s a bit sad that I cant just open any game on my tv without carrying the pc from another room
My gaming PC sits on the other side of the wall of my living room. I’ve got HDMI and USB going right through the wall. Wireless keyboard and mouse on the coffee table. It’s worked great for years, and for couch gaming I generally use a Steam Controller or DS4 in Bluetooth mode.
My living room TV is smart but I don’t use any of those features and keep it disconnected from a network.
Happened to me a few months ago. Had a ticket for our District Attorney office, trying to playback a security camera footage from a parking lot or something. It would open, but, the person that was supposed to be seen would show up for a few frames and glitch out.
Turns out the cam system it came from uses some very proprietary codec. So the footage was effectively useless without their special sauce player/codec
I guess. I tried everything within reason to play it. VLC, mpv, windows media player etc. all with various degrees of failure. Even went down a rabbit hole of trying codecs from websites that looked frozen in time from the late 90’s, as it was an old cam system.
I’m working in live video and there’s a lot of proprietary codecs out there that vlc doesn’t play by default. Most of those are lossless/very high bitrate lossy formats designed to be encoded and decoded quickly for things like instant replays, so not something the average consumer would get their hands on.
I recently downloaded some YouTube videos that my dad wanted to play through USB with his Android based projector, as it doesn’t have the PlayStore and the videos didn’t want to play (and I knew they worked fine on my mac) I went quickly to its store just to find out VLC wasn’t there, and I didn’t have time to sideload stuff (I didn’t even know if it was possible), hopefully there was FX File Explorer and that one comes with a video player which was able to save the day.
I’ve been there, but over the years I’ve gotten better at avoiding being in this situation.
If you are implementing something for yourself, and merging it back upstream is just a bonus, then by all means jump straight to implementing.
However, it’s emotionally draining to implement something and arrive at something you’re proud of only to have it ignored. So do that legwork upfront. File a feature request, open a discussion, join their dev chat - whatever it is, make sure what you want to do is valued and will be welcomed into the project before you start on it. They might even nudge you in a direction that you hadn’t considered before you started.
Be a responsible dev and communicate before you do the work.
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