Welcome again to everybody! Make yourself at house. 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.
The byline on the left (“Will Deng’s heirs turn Beijing into a superpower the world can love?”) seems to have more or less come true. Just not in a way Time can admit to.
I did a praxis for the first time today.
Nice! Fortresses are my jam. Where’s this?
Dune references ah yes
Where’s this from?
There are still people on this day and age that think foreign private investment is good 😐 these ppl live under a rock or what
I dunno, comrade, that’s usually one of the reasons I’m given for why Deng’s reforms were necessary. To attract investment and build up
I think we should be cautious about something now that the fediverse is rapidly growing.
We should be careful not to get drawn into wrecker tactics. If you search the fediverse for lemmygrad, you’ll see quite a bit of trouble kicking off in other instances. I came across this when looking for news about lemmygrad being down on the weekend. I wouldn’t ordinarily search to see what others are saying about us because I don’t care for the drama. And if If liberals avoid this place, I’ll be happy.
But there’s a problem. People are posting lies about us and warning others not to come here. But that’s not the worst of it. Now, I don’t want to see monsters where there aren’t any. But it seems to me that the structure and form of these posts and comments are dangerous. The way they’re framed will lead others to (a) put words in our mouths and (b) question us in a particular format.
We’ve seen this already on posts on lemmygrad, and some of you may have seen it in comments here and on other instances. It goes, roughly, like this: ‘I’ve heard that you eat babies. Why do you eat babies?’ Or: ‘Why do you love Putin/genocide/etc?’ Or: ‘Don’t worry about those people on LG, they’re all young, and don’t know why better.’ Or: ‘Don’t worry about [redtea], he’s a champagne socialist from New York.’
These comments are infuriating. And they will lead you to slip up if you’re not careful. Because, when faced with an accusation, the temptation is to defend yourself. But how do you do that? You might reply that you only eat babies on Fridays, or that you love Putin for XYZ, or that you’re not young, you’re 45, or that you’re not from NY, you’re from a small village outside Memphis, population 10. If you reply to these provocateurs with the wrong response, you may allow people to build up a profile about IRL-you, attached to statements that could get you in trouble. Don’t fall for it!
Is this a psy-op? All those agents paid to astro turf the narrative on Reddit and Twitter will be looking for other work. So I wouldn’t discount it. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. The effect is the same whether it’s isolated or orchestrated. People are being riled up to come at us with their pitchforks, here and on other instances. Be careful, and don’t fall for their tricks. Don’t dox yourself. Don’t be trapped into saying something illegal.
I’m posting this so that we can talk about how to spot these traps and how to avoid them. Everyone on LG is concerned with making the world a better place, with ending oppression, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, exploitation, climate catastrophe, etc. We have vitriolic enemies because of it. Don’t let them define what we stand for—choose your words carefully.
I started reading this comment and thought it was going to be about people making deliberately inflammatory comments (of which I’m the worst offender) that would play into the userbase being evil. But yeah, doxing is an even more real concern.
Lol its so funny how masked off a sub becomes when you mention something about China.
My country sub (mexico) is really quiet until boom someone posts about the uyghurs 😂 then it becomes full on fascist.
Why would Mexicans care about Uyghurs? Surely the looming invasion from USA is a bigger concern?
Lol after reading the john perkins book about being an economic hitman, its kinda ridiculous how incompetent and lazy were the global south boggie class (vendepatrias).
They hire american consultories to make the economic projections for them (which they intentionally overproject growth) so they can ask american banks for credits to pay american construction companies to make the infrastructure. Credit goes from american bank to american companies then the country has to pay the bank the credit with interests, and since the growth projections were overblown, they end up becoming debt slaves. What a business.
Credit goes from american bank to american companies then the country has to pay the bank the credit with interests
And the comprador gets a cut. That’s what it’s all about.
We’re expecting to have a few meetings on history of colonialism in our little study group. Anyone got interesting resources? Particularly interested in colonization of India, due to some disagreements with the team
Specifically about India:
- Shashi Tharoor, Inglorious Empire: What the British did to India, or
- Priyamvada Gopal, Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent, chapters 1, 4, and/or 5.
There’s a ‘great’ short book about British colonialism: Peter Fryer, Black People in the British Empire. I say ‘great’ because it’s informative. It’s not for the faint hearted. The surprising thing is how many brutal crimes it’s possible to catalogue in less than 130 pages. Pages 17–24 and 107–17 focus on India.
If you want to look at the connection between law, property, and colonialism, try Brenna Bhandar, Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership.
Kwame Nkrumah’s Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism is relevant, but it may be more helpful to establish the facts of what happened before the time that he is talking about, depending on your group.
Depending on the politics and how ‘academic’ your group is, a book like Alice Procter’s The Whole Picture: The Colonial Story of the Art in our Museums & Why we Need to Talk about it could be a good place to start.
Thank you very much!
You’re welcome.
I just came across this short article, too, if it’s of interest: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/12/2/how-british-colonial-policy-killed-100-million-indians.
It is, thank you
The Grad ate my comment. I made a nice, almost long comment, with links and all, but after I clicked “post”, it just disappeared. And didn’t show up after refreshing the page. Anyone have the same issue?
