TODAY I’LL DRINK TO THAT!

“Oh, beware the Moscow Gold!”

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In Brazil we call that “lapada seca”. I don’t think I know how to translate the spirit of it, but literally it’s something like “dry slap”.

You say that when someone got slapped so hard you can feel the pain from afar.

Dê a ordem, camarada! <3

I used to be a left leaning socdem during my early years until early adulthood. My parents had been militant in communist orgs against the military dictatorship in Brazil in the 70s so I was very proud of the that story, which helped build this left leaning tendency. But most former communists had gone socdem in Brazil after the 90s.

I took a firm liberal dive during post-grad studies and after I began working, influenced by economic literature and also by work environment ideology. That was exacerbated by the failures our socdem government. I was still kind of “left liberal” and respectful of my family’s history, but I tended to be the “progressive on social issues, conservative on economics” kind of liberal.

Until we elected an actual fascist here in Brazil.

That started unraveling a mental process that started questioning everything. My belief in liberal institutions took a hit, than electoral bourgeois democracy, than all the bullshit in economics started unraveling. I finally realized that what bugged me about liberal economics was the complete disregard for political processes. Fetishizing the technical aspects without taking into account the political processes behind them, which completely turn the theory upside down.

I went back to reading Marx ann Lenin again and… here I am.

Ah yes, the vast fields of tea plants that grow in Yorkshire…

I always had a difficulty to choose those things. Favorite genre of music, favorite movie, favorite artists…

I like music. That’s it. I’d listen to and learn to like mostly anything. The secret is trying to understand each musical tradition’s language, values, aesthetic aims and how they achieve them. If you do, you end up liking it.

neo-bonapartiste

People really go out of their way to call themselves fascists without calling themselves fascists.

I tried to write that in 200 paragraphs and the comrade above said it beautifully in a single one. Listen to them.

I honestly think those kinds of debates are useless. They tire you, make you sad and despondent, and accomplish nothing. We don’t bring people over with angry arguments with liberals about how Marx felt about jews. We don’t make progress on the revolution by dunking on liberals online on minutia about the history of the USSR.

Let’s take a look at how it played out in the past we could have some pointers on what is an useful controversy.

When Lenin debates Kautsky in writing, does that resemble what we do in online debates? When Marx debates Proudhon, is it the same thing we are doing? I would argue that it isn’t at all.

First of all, Marx and Lenin are engaging with people they perceive to be in the same camp as they are. They are not debating hostile outsiders. They are addressing what they perceive to be errors within the same movement. They also do, of course, address theoretically and practically the actual enemies of their camp. But they rarely do so nominally and point by point. They do so more generally, when building their own theory.

Second of all, they are doing so in long form writing. Not point by point argument with immediate response. This is important. It allows you to build an actual argument, enriched with data, enriched with a thorough reading of the thesis of the person you’re addressing. It also doesn’t have the same dynamics where the other person can move goal posts freely.

Third, were them hoping to convince their opponents? Was mit directly addressed to the other side in hopes of bringing them over? They weren’t.They were writing to an audience that will read both texts and hope to make that audience see the problems with the thesis the other side is defending and propose alternatives. The audience is the target to be convinced, not the opponent. If they see the error of their thinking, good! But that’s not likely to happen by the very nature of debate.

I think we should emulate this. And this is what I see, for example, online agitators doing (for example on YouTube). They don’t engage directly with the liberals. They collect the liberal thought they see online and respond in long form, with a thorough take down, well supported by data and theory, aimed at the audience, not at the people they’re responding to.

Also, we need to remember that liberals are not on our camp. Addressing them is not a weeding out of errors by our comrades that we hope to prevent from spreading. They are our enemies. Remember they are the ones that will side with the bourgeois state to kill us, like they did with Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.

I understand that it’s difficult to resist when you see people saying shit online and not respond. I do it all the time myself. It’s also not without value to not allow the shit to stand there to be read by people without response. But I would advise you to only do so if you have the time and fortitude to engage non-emotionally with it, without any hopes of convincing the other person, but only of not allowing the record to go on without correction. Remember: you’re not talking with that person. You’re talking to someone reading that thread. Disconnect emotionally from the process because this will take a toll on you.

Repeating: online angry debate have never and will never bring anyone over to our side. Nobody ever became a socialist after being “convinced with facts and logic” in an angry online debate. As I said, if it has a function, it’s only function is to not allow the other side to have full control of the online record.

But where and how do we actually convince people? I’d argue that it is one-on-one conversations and with a lot of love and patience. Spend your energy talking one-on-one with people. Listen to them, understand their problems, and discuss the problems they bring to you. Stick to topics they care about. Don’t dump a bunch of theory and history of the USSR on their head. Patiently listen and use theory to guide you on how to address the things they complain about and show them that there’s an alternative world that is possible. Point their anger towards the real problems that prevents this world from existing. Do this and this person will naturally come towards socialism. And do it out of love and care. With a patient attitude. It’s not a debate anymore. You’re talking to a fellow worker about making their life better. You’re not trying to win a debate. You’re trying to win a person.

And most important of all: don’t sacrifice your mental health in the process. Burning yourself down trying to debate liberals online will not accelerate the revolution. It serves no purpose but wearing a motivated comrade down. And that’s to their advantage.

Well, well, well, isn’t that just the thing that we say all the time? That in capitalism the primary division is class and all the other ones are contingent on that.

Wow. A transgender person that has a public career and adopted 3 kids. This person’s life would absolutely hell in the so called “democratic west”.

I’m at a current point in my life were I can derive musical satisfaction from mostly anything if I pay enough attention to it.

It’s very telling that in the host of reasons this person gives for the so called “shortage of labor” (which is actually a shortage of an industrial reserve army), not one of the is stagnant salaries.

No one is willing to admit that in most areas salaries are stagnant when compared to the enormous growth in labor productivity and cost of essential goods and services (food, housing, education, etc) and that’s the root cause of a resistance or workers to enter the “reserve army” in those areas. Simple like that.

Increase pay, and people will join. If you can’t increase pay enough to find employees, then your business isn’t viable and you need to do something.

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It depends on which right wing.

I’m Brazilian. Although I’m of mixed European and African ancestry, I phenotypically pass as what Brazilians consider white (which is a bit more elastic than whiteness in the US). Perhaps I could pass in the US as well if they don’t know where I’m from and I avoid the sun for a few months.

I also work at a very well respected industry. One of the very bad ones.

So, here in Brazil if I just trim my hair and beard and put on a suit and walk through the financial core of the city I can easily pass for one of them. That’s not how I usually present though. I’m usually wearing a shaggy hair, and shorts with visible tattoos. And I’m pretty annoyingly political all the time. So they usually treat me as a “one of those dumb, drug addict leftists who don’t bathe” (even though I actually never took drugs and bathe at least twice a day because this place is hot as fuck).

If I step a foot in the US I’m immediately branded as “Hispanic” or “Latino” with all the connotations that will imply, with a pinch of Brazilian stereotypes on top:

So, they’ll probably think I’m:

• lazy (yeah, I am kind of lazy… can’t deny that one. But who isn’t?),
• a womanizer who just hits on all women all the time (I’m super shy and respectful when talking to women, only had two long term relationships my whole life),
• ultra machoman, misogynistic and homophobic (I’m bisexual, dude…)
• a super incredibly amazing lover (well, I’m not going to comment that, curious people would have to find by themselves)
• amazing soccer player (lol… no…)
• amazing dancer (lol, double no)
• a jungle dwelling savage (I live in a 25 million people metropolis),
• uneducated and dumb (I have a PhD, I speak two languages more than you, and I know where China is on a map, you racist)
• violent and prone to raging and fist fighting (I never got into a physical fight in my life, I’m kind of a nerd, you know?)
• a suffering little guy who knew abject poverty and needs help (although we aren’t rich and there were some periods of relative scarcity when I was a kid, I’m mostly ok, don’t worry),

Also, “oh wow, Brazil, Pelé, Samba!!” is not a nice thing to say to a Brazilian when you first meet them. First of all, you sound condescending and stupid. I speak English. You don’t need to shout random words at me. Second… This ain’t the 70s, folks. Learn some updated stereotypes. Pelé retired before I was born.

Also don’t do a little faux-samba dance. Please. You don’t know how to, and the music playing here is not samba (it’s salsa, maybe rumba — totally different rhythm, completely different country, not even the same language).

And speaking of that… Latin America is a huge place, you know? Full of different cultures. The global north seems to treat Brazilians, Mexicans, Colombians, Bolivians, Chileans, Argentinians, etc, as pretty much the same thing and that is infuriating for us.

And like… It’s already super insensitive and offensive to deny individuality to the different countries of Spanish-speaking Latin America and treating them as a blob of indistinct “Hispanic” culture. But… Do you realize how clueless it is to bundle Brazil together in that blob? It’s so fucking dumb!!!

Like, yeah we have some of things in common culturally, sure. And I fucking love my Latin American brothers and feel a shared sense of belonging to a bigger thing. I’d easily pick the side of another Latin American most of the time… Like… there’s a sense of camaraderie difficult to explain.

But!!! Dude… we don’t even speak the same language. Brazil is a really odd puppy in the Latin American litter. Colombia has a lot more shared culture with far away Mexico than with neighboring Brazil. They share music on the radio, they share TV shows by Televisa, they share literature in Spanish, etc. And imagine this: if Colombia and Mexico, with all that cultural dialogue are so different and distinct, imagine how much more distinct they are from Brazil, who participates a lot less in this shared Spanish-speaking Latin American identity.

(Although we all share the most important cultural product of all times, which is El Chavo del Ocho, and no imperialist will ever take that away from us)

That’s so fucking annoying dude. It looks like the world look at us with fucking inverted binoculars, you know? Like… 3000 different music genres? It’s all Latin music. Just play some stock salsa from the 50s, give some maracas to a scantily clad oversexualized tanned girl to shake while she dances and that’s it, a whole fucking continent summarized. FUCK YOU.

Hahahhahaj, you were victim of my bad English. I meant a bag of beans! Hahahaha.

I was just giving an example of how you could have an intuitive idea of metric units by the using objects around you if you eventually need it.

Brazilian here. You’re just used to it because objects around you are imperial sizes. I live in a metric country so objects around me are metric sized. So I can easily eyeball metric units.

• 0.5 cm is the width of a pencil
• 2 cm is the size of a small coin (the American penny is roughly 2cm wide, BTW)
• 1 meter is roughly a long step
• 1 km is the distance you walk in roughly 20 minutes
• 1 liter is easy because in any metric country it’s the volume of a standard soda bottle
• 1 kg is the weight of a small bean, rice or sugar bag, or the weight of a soda bottle, or the weight of a good sized cabbage.

The main reason is because we use natural cycles that are important for civic and agricultural reasons as the basis of our measurements. And those cycles are unrelated phenomena that don’t match with each other well.

Day and year are based (duh) on two solar cycles (Earth’s rotation and translation), while the month and week are based on the lunar cycle of translation around the earth in roughly 28 days. When people tried to force lunar and solar calendars to fit, we ended up with the inconsistent months we have.

The 12/60 base divisions of the day were chosen before we had good calculators. Numbers with many divisors like 12 and 60 help a lot with mental math when you don’t have calculators.

There have been proposals of better calendars. The French tried something during the revolution and other people as well. The French republican calendar was:

• 1 hour = 100 minutes
• 1 day = 10 hours
• 1 week = 10 days
• 1 month = 3 weeks
• 1 year = 12 months + 5 monthless holiday

Another idea is the Cotsworth Plan:

• 1 minute = 100 seconds
• 1 hour = 100 minutes
• 1 day = 10 hours
• 1 week = 7 days
• 1 month = 4 weeks
• 1 year = 13 months + 1 special monthless holiday

I like the French Republican Calendar, but I would change it to months with 6 weeks of 5 days instead. And divide the week into 3 work days, 2 weekends. But the Cotsworth Plan is a better compromise between lunar and solar cycles.

Neither are good decimal systems. But in the end, if we want to use both the year and the day we’re fucked. There’s no way of having a fully decimal system. The year is approximately 365.25 days, and 365 is an awkward number. It’s only divisible by 5 and 73, so it’s not possible to have good divisions of it that match adequately a 10 based grid. You could abolish months and just have 73 weeks of 5 days, but I see no advantage.

We could do away with the year and just keep the day. We could do something like

• 1 miliday= 1000 microdays (1 microday ≈ 0.086 seconds)
• 1 deciday = 100 milidays (1 miliday ≈ 1.4 minutes)
• 1 day = 10 decidays (1 deciday = 2.4 hours)
• 1 decaday = 10 days (1 decaday ≈ 1.4 weeks)
• 1 hectoday = 10 decadays (1 hectoday ≈ 3.3 months)
• 1 kiloday = 10 hectodays (1 kiloday ≈ 2.74 years)

But this system would be totally misaligned with seasons, moon phases, solar cycles, etc. One could argue that those things are not as important for everyday life as they used to be, and that’s true. But they’re still economically important and you’d have to implement special calendars to keep track of them. It seems something like the Cotsworth or French systems make more economic sense.