davel

joined 2 years ago
MODERATOR OF
[–] davel@lemmy.ml 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

We take a hard line on open source in !opensource@lemmy.ml. “Source available” software won’t do.

[–] davel@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 day ago

Yeah well I still think Pulter done it, with Stalin’s giant spoon.

[–] davel@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] davel@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 day ago (4 children)

I don’t see a license? Please provide evidence or delete the post.

[–] davel@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

I think that report wasn’t an honest assessment but rather the cold war talking points to be used for cold war propaganda. The CIA is as much in the job of disinformation as it is in information. Contemporary Western academic historians, having access to declassified US & USSR documents from the time, have published accounts that put these cold war cartoon villain narratives to bed.

[–] davel@lemmy.ml 9 points 2 days ago

Even if it were true that Marx threw out his entire life’s work and became an anarchist on his deathbed, how did the Paris Commune turn out? Why has no anarchist society lasted more than a few months before collapsing from within, or from without by capitalist/imperialist forces? Anarchism has not and can not succeed in the world we presently live in, if for no other reason than they cannot defend themselves against the imperialist forces of the monopoly capitalists who want to profit from everything everywhere.

From Michael Parenti’s 1997 book Blackshirts and Reds:

But a real socialism, it is argued, would be controlled by the workers themselves through direct participation instead of being run by Leninists, Stalinists, Castroites, or other ill-willed, power-hungry, bureaucratic cabals of evil men who betray revolutions. Unfortunately, this “pure socialism” view is ahistorical and nonfalsifiable; it cannot be tested against the actualities of history. It compares an ideal against an imperfect reality, and the reality comes off a poor second. It imagines what socialism would be like in a world far better than this one, where no strong state structure or security force is required, where none of the value produced by workers needs to be expropriated to rebuild society and defend it from invasion and internal sabotage.

The pure socialists’ ideological anticipations remain untainted by existing practice. They do not explain how the manifold functions of a revolutionary society would be organized, how external attack and internal sabotage would be thwarted, how bureaucracy would be avoided, scarce resources allocated, policy differences settled, priorities set, and production and distribution conducted. Instead, they offer vague statements about how the workers themselves will directly own and control the means of production and will arrive at their own solutions through creative struggle. No surprise then that the pure socialists support every revolution except the ones that succeed.

The pure socialists had a vision of a new society that would create and be created by new people, a society so transformed in its fundaments as to leave little opportunity for wrongful acts, corruption, and criminal abuses of state power. There would be no bureaucracy or self-interested coteries, no ruthless conflicts or hurtful decisions. When the reality proves different and more difficult, some on the Left proceed to condemn the real thing and announce that they “feel betrayed” by this or that revolution.

[–] davel@lemmy.ml 8 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (7 children)

“Socialism in one country” is the invention of a bourgeois dictator who sought to destroy communism because it was a threat to his power.

Declassified CIA report:

Even in Stalin’s time there was collective leadership. The Western idea of a dictator within the Communist setup is exaggerated. Misunderstandings on that subject are caused by lack of comprehension of the real nature and organization of the Communist power structure. Stalin, although holding wide powers, was merely the captain of a team and it seems obvious that Khrushchev will be the new captain.

A lot of the cold war propaganda about the USSR turned out to be bullshit, as contemporary Western academic historians will tell you, including Domenico Losurdo.

Karl Marx died an anarchist.

This is laughably false by simply reading what Marx actually wrote.

[–] davel@lemmy.ml 12 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Liberalism means PRO CAPITALISM.

The first sentence from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism:

Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, the right to private property and equality before the law.

From the first paragraph of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_property†:

Private property is foundational to capitalism, an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit.

Liberalism: A Counter-History (online copy)


†Not to be confused with personal property.

[–] davel@lemmy.ml 40 points 2 days ago (5 children)

That the majority of Democrats have always and will always caucus with the Republicans to suppress the left.

 

Plutocrats like Thiel are constantly thinking about the fact that ordinary people vastly outnumber them and can kill them at any time. They think about it way more often than ordinary people do. It’s a point that they are acutely aware of at all times. It consumes their attention. They are always working on manipulating public consciousness to ensure that we don’t think as much as they do about how many more of us there are of them, and how we don’t have to put up with their domination of our society if we don’t want to.

As Michael Parenti once put it:

“I tell students when they say, ‘Oh they don’t care what we think. They ignore us’, and all that, and I say, ‘Oh no, no. That’s the only thing they care about you. The only thing they care about you is what you’re thinking. They don’t care if you eat correctly, they don’t care how your living conditions are, they don’t care that they’ve built up an inhuman and irrational traffic system that’s strangulating us and polluting our air, they don’t care about anything. The only thing about you they care about is what you’re thinking. In the morning, they start, ‘What’s going to be the story today? How do we manipulate, how do we control, how do we contain, how do we influence, how do we act upon what it is that they have in their minds?’”

Manipulating public consciousness is of existential importance to the ruling class, because no matter how many billions of dollars you amass, at the end of the day you’re still a soft skin sack of blood and bones like anybody else, and you share a society with huge numbers of people who can very easily hurt you if they want to. That’s why our minds are constantly being hammered with propaganda into accepting the status quo politics upon which our rulers have built their kingdoms.

 

Paywall bypass: https://12ft.io/https://theintercept.com/2024/12/05/congress-anti-communism-school-curriculum/

Bill: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/5349

House vote:

Party Yeas Nays Present Not Voting
Republican 171 28 0 20
Democratic 156 34 0 23
Independent 0 0 0 0
Total 327 62 0 43
 

This was published yesterday, and was made before fall of the Syrian government.

 
 

I think it still remains to be seen if DOGE will have any teeth or if it’s the dog house for Ramaswamy & Musk.

I’ll be here all week. Try the veal.

0
submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by davel@lemmy.ml to c/usa@lemmy.ml
 

On November 27th, ultra-extremist militants Hayat Tahrir al-Sham launched a vast offensive in Syria. Within days, the Turkey-backed faction seized significant swaths of Aleppo, the country’s second-largest city, and advances elsewhere continue. While disinformation on the scale and success of HTS’ incursions abounds on social media, establishment news outlets remain the primary source of manipulation and deceit. No context to the current upsurge of violence is provided, although reference has been widely made to supposedly “peaceful” protests in 2011 that produced the decade-long Syrian civil war.

According to this narrative, pro-democracy demonstrators were brutally attacked by Syrian authorities for taking a righteous, public stand. Yet, the reality of what happened during that fateful time is amply documented in the Syrian government’s own internal documents. Namely, records of the Central Crisis Management Cell, created in March 2011 by Damascus to manage official responses to mass rioting that began weeks earlier.

Mainstream outlets have previously reported on this trove, dubbing them The Assad Files. However, reporters and rights groups have universally misrepresented, distorted or simply falsified their contents, in order to wrongfully convict Syrian officials of horrific crimes. In some instances, quite literally. In reality, the documents show Assad and his ministers struggled valiantly to prevent the upheaval from escalating into violence on either side, protect demonstrators, and keep the situation under control.

Meanwhile, sinister, unseen forces systematically murdered security service officials, pro-government figures, and protesters to foment catastrophe in a manner similar to many CIA regime change operations old and new. This shocking story has never before been told. Now, with dark insurrectionary clouds again pullulating over Damascus, it must be.


On the alleged Syrian Douma chemical attack:

 

Rohan Grey, who taught us to understand money as a creature of law, is back for his tenth appearance on Macro N Cheese.

Steve and Rohan dissect the humor and horror of the political landscape. They make a realistic assessment of the Biden administration and look at figures like Elon Musk and Ramaswamy as part of a new wave of governance setting out to undermine the fabric of federal institutions.

5
submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by davel@lemmy.ml to c/history@lemmy.ml
 

Danny and Derek welcome David Silverman, professor of Native American, Colonial American, and American racial history at George Washington University, for a discussion of the historical Thanksgiving holiday. They get into the origin and proliferation of the holiday’s myth, the historical Pilgrims and Plymouth Colony, the Wampanoag Indians, their culture, politics, and relationship with the English settlers, who and what the holiday serves in modern America, and more.

view more: ‹ prev next ›