Welcome again to everybody! Make yourself at home. Today’s picture depicts astronauts on the Tiangong space station, guaranteed 100% free of Nazis. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is our weekly discussion thread!

We have a Matrix homeserver at genzedong.xyz. See this thread for information about our Matrix space.

Short reading list for new MLs here. To find theory, try marxists.org, Anna’s Archive, libgen, or Sci-Hub (for scientific articles). If an article is unavailable, try the Wayback Machine.

  • Shrike502@lemmygrad.ml
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    1 year ago

    So a Russian moon probe crashed and two days later, India lands a rover.

    I hate it here, comrades. It hurts to know what we have been and never will be again

    • UnicodeHamSic [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      The american emotions are wild in this regard as well. There is a reason the place where it started will always be an important part of history

  • Absolute@lemmygrad.ml
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    1 year ago

    I am so unbelievably sick of reading about Saudi Arabia in regards to European football and the wildly eurocentric and xenophobic “enlightened thinkpieces” that there have been a true glut of recently.

    Modern KSA is obviously not an ideal setup, but good lord nothing gets Englishmen foaming at the mouth like a brown person having more money than them. It’s not an issue at all if Americans buy up the league and spend a billion pounds in a year on players, but as soon as it’s an Arab or Chinese it is just a bridge too far for them.

    Football is my cognitive dissonance zone, the top level game just cannot be enjoyed if you don’t approach it with a healthy level of dissonance. The corruption and exploitation is rampant all across the sport, please just let me ignore it in peace lol. Can’t even go to r/soccer for news now without getting myself wound up.

      • Absolute@lemmygrad.ml
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        1 year ago

        Agreed, I wish my club were fan owned but it will never be possible at this point unless something drastic happens. Can’t stop supporting them though

  • DankZedong @lemmygrad.ml
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    1 year ago

    Perks of working at the Union is that I apparently get to watch the documentaries they make as they launch. In a few weeks I will watch a documentary about Colombian syndicalism and violence against activists. I will see if I can link the doc to here somehow.

  • DankZedong @lemmygrad.ml
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    1 year ago

    Frans Timmermans, EU figurehead, has decided to lead the Dutch left Green/Labour coalition in order to get Dutch left back on track.

    He has already announced that he wants a mandatory 2% NATO budget… So far for Dutch left, I guess.

    • Left-ish coalition and choosing the right side of the party for leadership is a tradition in Liberalism. He also will do nothing to push for any real changes for the environment globally, just maybe some very Dutch specific regulations that have almost no impact. Not a doom-post, though, because we can work to radicalize more people to the left from ir

      • DankZedong @lemmygrad.ml
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        1 year ago

        The only positive thing that can come out of this is slightly left of center policies for a while and a small hope for an actual marxist movement to rise.

        But looking at the state of the Dutch left right now you’d think we will soon have the Dutch Soviet Union under Timmermans. And any criticism is regarded as ‘helping the right’. Because you just have to vote for an outspoken anti communist otherwise it’s your fault!!! Fuck leftist values.

  • Mzuark@lemmygrad.ml
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    1 year ago

    I like how Republicans completely stopped giving a shit about Hawaii once they found out that it’s a blue state. I guess outrage over poor responses are only for other people in the tribe.

  • DankZedong @lemmygrad.ml
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    1 year ago

    I’m suddenly seeing an increase of BRIC country slander on Reddit. I’m sure it has got nothing to do with the recent summit.

        • Ciel @lemmygrad.ml
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          1 year ago

          It’s a nuclear reactor on wheels. That is kinda doomed to cause problems. I also do have questions about how it would be economically viable when compared to other available means of mobile power generation. It takes some really well trained people to safely operate this thing, and a natural gas/diesel generator can be used with barley any training and is both safer and cheaper, and on top of this has more capacity. That’s not to say that this was a bad thing, the fact that they managed to build this thing, and at least according to the source i found it was also very stable and reliable, it was simply always doomed to not be very useful. But well, nuclear reactors use a lot of water, and well, mobile reactors on ships make a lot more sense, both because of this and because putting shielding on those is a lot easier. Ship based mobile reactors also can handle far higher capacities then land based ones. The only places where something like this might be useful is after natural disasters that destroy large amounts of infrastructure. That is mostly A) Earthquakes B) Tsunamis. Both of which also damage the streets that this thing would drive on, and well, after quakes and further flood waves would block practical operation for both of these. And well, there is diesel. It might not be as eco friendly as a reactor, but that just doesn’t really matter here. You can carry a small diesel generator and anyone can use them. They are also a lot cheaper to make. And those are just things seen from the perspective of back then. Today we have mobile solar and wind generators, better batteries, and if you really want that mobile multi-megawatt power plant, use natural gas or hydrogen generators. Mobile nuclear reactors are just to expensive to make sense on a scale you can fit on a car. On a ship? sure. that works, that’s why swimming nuclear plants exist. On land? no. It will always loose to other methods of power generation, both because you certainly can’t make that thing very efficient power wise, and it will be pretty expensive as well.
          There is also the problem that this thing probably, i can’t find any non-Russian sources on this and don’t speak Russian, this thing needs a lot of water for cooling. At least all other reactors do, and i don’t see a way they could have gotten around that. This makes this thing useless in a lot of environments.

          You can also simply consider this: The soviets agreed with me, they gave up on it.

  • Nakoichi [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    I loved the scene at the end of season 3 of For All Mankind,

    spoiler

    where they find out that North Korea actually beat everyone to Mars