SweetLava

If you ever have the misfortune of using X (formerly Twitter), you'll see dozens of them everyday, embarrassingly, through hidden replies and replies with no likes, talking about vatniks and Putler and Russian bots

and you know the worst part of it all? Shit like this culminates in some [CW: violence]

Yeah, this dispensationalism is pretty much exactly what I hear of the average Christian around me. I'm probably going to move, just to get away from hearing this for a while. It's too much for me, I'd rather be grounded in organizing efforts or discussing ML theory.

Reportedly, due to COVID era downturn, difficulty receiving a US visa, and a bunch of middle- to upper-middle class Chinese who believe they won't be as rich in the future. It's partially true, just overexaggerated due to a boost in anti-Asian, mostly sinophobic from trade war and COVID panic, sentiment along with stronger anti-immigrant policy.

I guess I was too brash adding in that antisemitic comment, maybe too much of a generalization. But I did see Jewish people discussing the mythologization of Jews as inherently harmful and a lot of the political realm behind these ideas is influenced by people espousing, knowingly or not, antisemitic conspiracy theories (New World Order, Great Reset, a globalist cabal, global banking, et cetera).

I found some videos on this, thanks for the recommendation.

And, for that last point, I am exposed to a variety of people on a regular basis who do, in fact, believe this in entirety. It is a very serious matter to them, something these people have been into for many decades, if not their entire lives.

Sorry to inform you that so many are out there.

This method may be too slow for you. If so, use Pimsleur's lessons and find a good textbook as a supplement. Go online to find Anki and use that website to grind the new vocabulary you learn (again, using the words within the context of real sentences and real phrases - not Google Translate, but those found from native speakers).

I don't mean to knock the method of Duolingo, but the method I am talking about will help if you are ever interested in achieving fluency or conversational level in any future languages, including Spanish

I would not even use Duolingo for basics. I really want to give this advice. Please find the .mp3 files for Latin American Spanish from Pimsleur. The entire course will take 30 minutes per day for about 5 months. If you need an app to supplement, I'd listen to whoever pointed out Busuu.

If you need listening practice, use Dreaming Spanish videos on Youtube, starting from Superbeginner and Beginner.

If you need to find new words, find and/or translate entire sentences or phrases instead of singular words.

laastly, in some Spanish-speaking areas they use the verb "coger". I don't really use it, never really heard it, and I just wouldn't advise using it at all.

you can call a jacket a chamarra, don't listen to Spanish classes that tell you "chaqueta"

Today’s financial capitalists, unlike capitalists in Marx’s day, now claim their share of the surplus by passively extracting interest or economic rents broadly, rather than through control of the production process. Like landlords and other non-capitalist elites, their pursuit of private wealth does not develop the forces of production, broaden the social division of labor, or prepare the ground for socialism. Pursuit of rents, unlike market competition, generates pressure neither for improvements in the production process, nor for cost-reducing public investment. So the transition from industry to finance as the dominant form of surplus appropriation has been associated with economic stagnation and a withdrawal of the state from social provision.

Not against this article by itself, but I did have some questions based on Engels' "Anti-Duhring" or "Socialism: Scientific and Utopian."

Wasn't the point brought up that as this process develops, the former functions of the capitalists instead turn to the functions of proletarians? and, even though the state should really have more control and power through this process, isn't the financialization the exact reason we have this broadly connected and globalized society through which workers in the imperial core will have greater access and insight into the inner workings of the bourgeois class?

Of course you can call them a separate class, maybe the PMC, but isn't this extremely advantageous once class contradictions sharpen once again at home (to the imperial core), which is happening as we speak?

I agree with the author's point precisely when he chimes in to say,

Companies like Walmart and Google and Amazon are clearly examples of industrial capitalism, relentlessly seeking to push down costs of production. Cheap consumer goods at Walmart lower the costs of subsistence for workers today just as cheap imported food did for British workers in the nineteenth century.

This is in no way to defend Amazon and Walmart, though we shouldn’t deny that their logistical systems are genuine technological accomplishments that a socialist society could build on. The point is just that the greatest concentrations of wealth today still arise from the competition to sell commodities at lower prices.

from which it follows that this is just the natural process of capitalism and we just need to seize the opportunity to manage these widescale operations for the sake of international trade and socialist development.

Anyways, I lately started to see that I can't find any justification for separating industry capitalism from financial when the dominating capitalist powers have already been at a stage of imperialism for the last 120+ years.

and, going back to Marx and Engels, this isn't really going to be a meaningful discussion without a socialist revolution, a recent one, getting to the question. Otherwise, capitalism is capitalism is capitalism, sans the nuance of capitalism's tendency towards monopolization (imperialism) and the conditions between the dominant imperialists against the rising imperialists against the ordinary capitalist regimes. Replacing capitalism with the words "finance capitalism" or replacing "anti-capitalism" with "anti-imperialism" is just going to obstruct the main issue and will, in the long run, turn capitalist regimes into a broader assortment of methods to organizing bourgeois states with a multitude of strategies to further obstruct class struggle.

He doesn't pose any real opposite to American capitalism nor to the Israeli settler-colonialist regime. His connections are suspicious and he is able to rapidly co-opt any anti-Zionist or anti-West position with large, seemingly artificial boosts to his social media content.

To me it doesn't matter if he's an "op", he simply poses no value to any leftist space. Just a conservative who purposefully distorts left-wing ideas and rots away genuine grassroots organizing efforts with empty statements and shady personal connections.

The argument was that Netanyahu was a favorable candidate in Israel for the purpose of an emerging multipolar world. Call that anti-west, pro-west, anti-Israel, pro-Israel, etc. as you please. I don't believe a single word coming from Hinkle. that's my view

I wonder how much longer capitalists can manage running countries when they have to resort to means like these. Lenin said the revolution comes when the ruling class is unable to rule by their old ways, developed after Marx thought the most industrially advanced countries would have their successful revolts first and was proven wrong. When will the breaking point hit? China has already claimed welfare capitalism hit its limit when the French were protesting against pension reform, so social democracy is officially on its death bed in the imperial core. Does now the US do to Western Europe then what the US did to Chile in '73, Russia in the '90s?

I get the feeling when the next major recession hits, it's either fascism or socialism and no in-between. It could be this year, next year, five years from now... ironic that most people in the world could be casting the last votes of proper liberal democracy this year