wafelix 🇵🇸

ITT antivax memes van Wakker België maar aangepast naar het thema Bakker België

The year is 207🙂(pronounced twenty seventy smile). Grins are the new currency. While it may seem that the forces of gladness run this world, it's said that a secret frowning circle is burgeoning beneath the surface, promising to change everything. Which side will you choose?

@JesusFerna7026 in a fully non-capitalist modernity, there wouldn't necessary be a tendency towards (excessive) consumerism. but in a world where capitalist models and ideas are dominant, the outlook of both elites and common people in even noncapitalist countries will be deeply influenced by it

@JesusFerna7026 to me, the logical conclusion would be that socialist projects were not so daring in their treatment of consumer society. they tried to rival the West's consumerism (and lost:they couldn't beat the capitalists at their own game) instead of developing a non-consumerist alternative

As reflected in many of my posts over the past few months, I have been reading (and re-reading) a lot of social theory. What strikes me is that most critics of “capitalism” (whatever “capitalism” might mean, and regardless of the value of those critiques) are really critics of modernity, understood as the organization of society around technology, formal institutions, and rational criteria. I teach the economic history of the Soviet Union and socialist China, and all the pathologies (pollution, reliance on fossil fuels, inequality, depersonalization, consumerism, alienation, you name it) that you can find in a poor neighborhood of 2026 Philadelphia appeared in the same way, or even more, in a factory in Leningrad in 1970 or on a collective farm in Jiangsu in 1978. Critics seem to lack a vocabulary (or, if you prefer, a cognitive framework) for distinguishing “capitalism” from modernity. For example, people everywhere tend to link personal relationships to displays of consumption. There are likely deep evolutionary reasons for this. De Beers did not invent spending a lot of money on a useless engagement ring: it rode a pre-existing disposition into a particular form of consumption. Couples in Leipzig in 1982 were as interested in conspicuous consumption as those in Chicago in 2026. Talking about “Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism” misses the point completely. Of course, you can try, as some of the more perceptive Trotskyists did, to argue that the Soviet Union or China were not truly socialist countries, but this is just a lazy application of the “no true Scotsman” fallacy, and, consequently, their complaints failed to gain much traction outside some departments of cultural studies. But this is not just a matter of poor analytic skills, as bad as those are. More importantly, it means that 99% of the policy proposals activists put on the table to correct the problems of “capitalism” are doomed to fail because they do not understand where the root cause of the phenomena they complain about lies. I see this at the university. Do you think the corporation you deal with is self-serving and incompetent? Wait until you need to deal with the Graduate School at a private Ivy League university. The incentive problems (asymmetric information, career concerns, lack of timely feedback, pressure toward conformity) that cause dysfunction in the former are even more pronounced in the latter because of the absence of a profit motive, the sharpest disciplinary mechanism. At a very fundamental level, Marx got modernity wrong; Weber got it right. Time to spend much less time with Marx and much, much more time with Weber.

wow thats impressive im sure that led to something positive

@JustLampy @RonwellQDobbs @lavitalenta Or Vertigo

@RonwellQDobbs @lavitalenta Somebody hasn’t watched 12 Angry Men recently!!

You guessed it folks, it’s the personification of Death from the 1957 Swedish thriller “Seventh Seal”

Ze hebben het zelf omarmd... eindelijk levert mijn lange lobbywerk iets op

all time great wikipedia category

Na mijn halfslachtige optreden belde niemand me meer

Hoe cursiste haar naam heeft ingevuld in bookwidgets (je raadt nooit wat haar naam is)

ITT dingen die cursisten in de les gezegd hebben en wat ze bedoelden - computer is ziek [de ipad werkt niet] - ik eet graag koekoek [komkommer] - ik eet graag computer [confituur] - sla jij graag? [eet jij graag sla?] - water jij graag? [drink jij graag water?]

@prettywhenyoud @Random28364 @PeakPiece31 enshitification

@Random28364 @PeakPiece31 enshitification

Wikipedia is the only website whose marketing strategy is threatening to kill itself if you don’t pay

Georgian nuns with Georgian Shepherds

JESUS. I know Applebaum is a fraud and war monger but she literally argued for journalists to be killed. She should be hounded for the rest of her life for this.

ITT antivax memes van Wakker België maar aangepast naar het thema Bakker België

@NewLeftEViews or I guess both exist. For every "ethnic cleansing of Uyghurs is fabricated by CIA and Adrian Zenz", there's a "putting minorities in camps is actually a good way to combat separatism"

@NewLeftEViews Only thing I'd add is that there's a whole subset that does "know" about these things and agrees with them; they think independent unions are bad because "socialism has eliminated social antagonism", they see any regress as a necessary evil, they're socially conservative, etc.

Speaking as a great admirer of the Chinese state-led developmental system but as an owl on trade: I have to say the funniest thing about the sino-futurist campism on the left is that the people who speak uncritically of systemic superiority and emulation often simply don’t know about basic features about China’s economy which should be anathema to them: the incredibly regressive income tax system, the prohibition of independent unions, the fact that 30% of the labour force is in the gig economy, the still deeply entrenched opposition to welfare transfers, the profound social conservatism etc.