lmfao this is hilarious

The above comment is made of glyphs arranged to convey meaning. The Code of Hammurabi is made of glyphs arranged to convey meaning.

So the comment will very well be likely a significant contribution to human culture.

You should probably know that historically societies collapsing has typically resulted in improved health of the lower classes as judged by skeletons in the archeological record.

We should not really understand societies collapsing as a violent or spectacular thing. It’s usually just growth slowing, people move away, the ability of states to enforce taxes and provide services weakens and people work out their own stuff.

I’m not saying society is collapsing, just that if it does it’ll probably look more like declining birthrates and movement away from cities and advanced manufacturing to more agrarian lifestyle. Also that for the poor and downtrodden this will probably, on average, be an improvement.

I’m not calling anyone out. We all eat worse than we’d like to, exercise less than we feel we ought to, have a home messier than we’re pleased with, spend more time watching mindless tv than is really good for us or some analogous permutation of minor sins.

We’re apes trying to figure out how to use root digging and berry picking brains to navigate the lightbox of eternal distraction and a world of concrete, glass, and tedium. This shit is hard.

If you have similar experiences to my past ones then I hope you can draw comfort from knowing you’re not unique in your difficulties and it is possible (although life circumstances depending not always easy) to overcome them.

Sorry to hear that. I’ve quit quite a few things, as well as a long term weed habit in my early twenties and so here is what I have to say in no particular order:

• Understand yourself. Take a bit of time to think through how you feel about what you’re doing and why you do it. Have compassion here and look at the root causes, don’t be like “I vape and I don’t want to because I’m a garbage person with no willpower” or something nasty and unhelpful. For example with myself with weed I came to the conclusion that I didn’t really enjoy the effects overall, but it was a very comfortable way to alleviate boredom and the rebound anxiety and sleeplessness was difficult to handle.

• Based on the above figure out what you’re going to do about it. If you want to stop then have plans for handling anticipated barriers (if you can’t sleep don’t lie in bed being miserable. Have a book to read, a walk to go on, a show to binge or a friend to chat to etc). If you have particular triggers find ways to avoid them, raise the barrier to using weed by making it a pain to get/be reminded of. If you always vape when having a morning coffee maybe idk have a morning coffee at a cafe instead while you adjust.

• Understand it’s gonna suck a bit. It just is, there will be a period where you are restless and bored. Acceptance is powerful.

• Understand that there is no point in making it harder for yourself. Like yeah it’s going to suck a bit but there is no need to punish yourself. Have plans for stuff to do to replace it, have plans to alleviate the worst symptoms, pick up new hobbies, adjust your work schedule if you can (more or less, whatever makes it easier for you), change your space etc. Don’t just raw dog misery and hope to succeed. It’s ok to take a sedative the first couple of sleepless nights, or to lean on friends a bit, or be messy and late, or spend a weekend mindlessly videogaming or whatever.

• I strongly recommend exercise. Exercise helps manage stress and energy so much, it makes the brain dispense the happy chemicals, and it is time consuming but simple. Try find something you like to do. Again don’t force yourself to suffer. Long walks, swimming, running, cycling, lifting, climbing whatever takes your fancy.

• edit. Of course most of all: Almost nobody reliably succeeds at tasks on the first try. That is not weakness, that is life. Sometimes we get beginners luck and something comes naturally and easy, usually we have to fumble a few tries getting better each time. Plan to succeed, accepting lessons along the way. Every impulse resisted is confidence and experience, every stumbling block is an obstacle identified, every minute your body is normalising its chemistry. You cannot go backwards by trying.

Yep, everyone that disagrees with you is a Russian psyop. That’s why I’m opposed to nation states and empire, and want a rules based international order with common heritage of humankind treaties. Exactly what they want in the Kremlin or wherever.

Someone not from the usa defending them is even more baffling. Grow up in a house with lead painted walls?

If you were less ignorant of global politics it would actually be trivial for you to work out where I live from what I’ve said.

I’m really sorry about what passes for an education in the usa. Like seriously I am. You’ve been very heavily indoctrinated and so any criticism of your homeland feels like it’s an irrational attack. You don’t need to feel this way, it’s like those old fools who think that learning about past national wrongs means they need to live in shame or react by teaching so called ‘white pride’.

You are not responsible for the evil done by the elites that claim dominion over you, you don’t need to identify with them or defend their actions. Many were done by people no longer alive anyway.

… Um ok? And the usa doesn’t? Isn’t it like number 1 for imprisoned population on the planet? Ultimately though I can’t judge countries by their domestic situation, because that’s not something I can do anything about.

What I can judge countries by is how they destabilise the world and the ideology they export. The USA enforced, often extremely violently, a deeply exploitative world order which has effects locally for everyone. If Putin executes some dissidents then that is tragic, it is not however a globally significant issue. Something like the usa starting the war on drugs, strong arming nations into imprisoning or executing significant portions of disadvantaged populations is.

Or the usa couping governments left, right, and centre to maintain an exploitative resource extraction international order. Which destabilised the globe and oppresses millions is.

You might say “Iran would do that too!” but a) they haven’t and b) you’re guessing. Very few nations have ever behaved as badly as the usa/britain/france/spain. The others have chilled out, the usa hasn’t.

Iran has never hurt me, China has never hurt me, never roped the country into an illegal war that left half my highschool mates broken meth addicts, Russia has never hurt me. Idk what to tell you. Empires are evil, necessarily. The usa is the inheritor of the British legacy, they export war and exploitation. I’m sure if Putin led such an empire it would also be ugly, I’d prefer a more balanced world.

Tbh China seems like a sort of bad neighbour (are there states which are good neighbours?) but they seem to generally be in favour of institutions like UN and they don’t militarise the shit out of the world. They’re a better trade partner than the usa.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/9/10/infographic-us-military-presence-around-the-world-interactive

The usa is a giant military empire that literally indoctrinates children with flag swearing cultism stuff. Living in a world dominated by those fucks, who actively undermine the rules based order and refuse to rattify critical treaties/sabotage other treaties (e.g. sea floor resource stuff) is extremely stressful.

In my country, allegedly a democracy, the usa forced our government to secretly sign a trade deal that lets US companies sue our government… directly undermining sovereignty.

It sucks dude, we all fucking hate the usa because they ruin everything. I wouldn’t want to live next to Russia but they’re not fucking shit up over here so forgive me if I bitch about the dominant military empire that literally owns parts of where I live and makes us a target in war.

MATLAB is just scipy for people that wear ties.

All the best linalg libraries are in FORTRAN.

Pretty sure numpy hooks into them. I don’t know anyone who uses computers for serious work that doesn’t use FORTRAN. It’s the best.

This person is so confidently wrong it’s actually gotten under my skin. I wouldn’t call myself a Marxist, anyway his ideas have been built on and corrected in places in the ~180 years since he wrote them down, but his work is massively influential and it has been represented so badly here.

It’s baffling to lie about a theory because it’s not written by someone “on your team” or something. Like a fuckload of his work is dry as shit historical analysis and economic theory which still shapes thought today and the poster is acting like all Marxism entails is a few pamphlets about taking power.

It’s as weird to me as someone being like “Adam Smith loved violence and poverty” because the wealth of nations talks about thr impotance of military control and some of the causes of poverty.

It really shouldn’t but it’s gotten under my bloody skin with how irrational and fervent they are being.

Quibbles:

Authoritarianism is not only acceptable but is encouraged. In fascism this comes in the form of a totalitarian dictatorship and in Marxism it comes in the form of an tyrannical transitional government that rules with an iron fist to establish socialism and bring about the social climate necessary to realize communism (dictatorship of the proletariat).

Marx proposed a temporary state wherein proles, collectively, use the apparatus of the state in an authoritarian manner to manage a transition to a non authoritarian non state. The vanguard party stuff is all Lenin. If you want to compare ML to fascism that’s a separate discussion, iirc Marx is actually pretty vague on what precisely the DotP would actually look like. Fascism proposes an indefinite centralisation of power with the goal of ultimate preservation of the state.

The significant debate and purging around the formation of, for instance, the USSR should be a hint that endorsement of authoritarianism is not really something everyone takes away from a reading of Marx. Incidentally, have you? read marx?

Everything except the most radical anarchist ideologies makes some use of authority in certain circumstances, I think it’s somewhat farcical to draw parallels between crisis and the proposed status quo.

Ideology revolves around common enemies - In fascism this comes in the form certain ethnicities or nationalities while in Marxism it comes in the form of classes.

Wat? This is so ludicrously broad as to apply to everything. Westminster democracy aligns itself against a common enemy of absolute monarchy, republics unite themselves against a nobility, tribes unite themselves against non kin outsiders… Is there an ideology that doesn’t declare itself against some enemy which is protects against?

Bitterly oppose materialism - Fascism opposes materialism because it is deemed to lack acknowledgement of the role of the spirit, while Marxism opposes materialism because it is deem to be a key engine in class warfare.

Sure I guess. Again this is hardly unique to the two. I mean Buddhism does this along with monastic Christianity and new age smoothie cults /shrug

Bitterly oppose individualism - Both ideologies revolve around the concepts communality and unity, and so they see individualism as a threat to their core ideological views.

Ah, you have not read Marx! I can see how you might get this stance but no. This is just false. Marx imagined a utopia where people, regardless of the circumstances of their birth, could pursue individual fulfilment. If I may pretentiously quote:

“For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.”

Seems pretty clearly individualistic to me!

Explicit support of political violence - You’re trying to water it down, but both support widescale poltical violence. Marxism calls for a violent revolution that overthrows capitalism by burning down the capitalist system and institutions (literally and metaphorically) as well as killing the entirety of the bourgeoisie (democide). Fascism calls for political violence as legitimate way to gain power and achieve aims, which includes getting rid of undesirable national, ethnic, racial, or religious groups (genocide).

Actually Marx said it was magically scientifically inevitable that capitalism would collapse in violence. Not that people should set out to do it. Also Marx didn’t want to “burn down the capitalist system and institutions” actually in a straight reading of Marx capitalism is a necessary step to communism. Marx didn’t think it was good, he thought the bourgeoisie would never willingingly surrender power because of their material interest and thus the only way for proles to avoid mass death was instead to unify and take power through violence.

This sounds a lot like “Both involve violence therefore the same” but that’s extraordinarily reductive. I mean literally all governments make themselves governments through control of violence.

So in summary I think you have as similarities:

Don’t like materialism, authority features, has an enemy, and violence features. Which ok, if that makes stuff sister ideologies then it’s a broad tent with literally everything from Liberation Theology Christianity, to westminster democracy, to Peelan Policing sharing sisterhood with Marxism and Fascism.

They’re not at all similar… Like… wtf. All you can say is one violent thug followed Marxism and then stopped follow Marxism, did something completely different, while saying stuff that sounded like Marxism because he knew it sounded good.

Just dot point me, pick idk 5 core areas and just write what fascists proposed vs what Marxists proposed.

I legit cannot thing of anything with overlap except

• violence is sometimes good (literally even pacifists believe this)

and

• people united in purpose can wield power (again not at all at unique hypothesis)

What have you got?

It’s almost like someone who was a Marxist made a new ideology that was not Marxism, had separate goals to Marxism, aligned itself against Marxists, didn’t adopt the social or economic policies of Marxism, but clothed itself in the language of Marxism.

Did you know that Marx was once just a random journalist? Does that mean Marxism is a sister ideology to newspaper businesses? Marxists do write stuff afterall!

Marxism: History is defined by material conditions and value comes from appropriated labour which workers are entitled to. Thus society should be oriented around collective ownership of the means of production in order to elevate the material conditions of the worker and usher in a new age of history. It is inevitable that the owning class will resort to violence to maintain their position and so this change will be a violent struggle. Eventually the state itself should be abolished once the transition is complete. Also this is inevitable because umm science wand wave.

Fascism: Power should be centralised on strong men wiling to make hard choices, everyone else should live subservient to the state. Military power, an ethnonational identity, and autarchy are the highest pursuits. Concession and concensus are weakness, might is the ultimate expression of power and violence for the glory of the nation is beautiful. Modernity is degenerate and we should idolise a mythologised past based around an ethnic group we claim the mantle of.

SleezyDizasta: Could these be the same? 🧐

Why you gotta come after physics dorks :( most of us just like the universe and helping people.

Just 'cause we get a brain disease and become horrible if we get fame doesn’t make us bad. It’s a serious condition: http://smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-03-21

Elites when proles gain even the slightest hint of power: Ohshitohfuckfuckfuckohshitshitfuckshitfuck