SweetLava

It's not the fact that they celebrated his death that is most important. It's the fact that the people celebrating have no coherent understanding of who he was. All they know is "Media told me Iran bad. Iran bad means Iranian dying is bad man dying. Funny meme death of people I don't see as human."

You can tell based on responses they haven't read even a single article in full about anything even tangentially related to the man.

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.

Lowest approval out of all recent presidents and people want me to believe my single sympathy vote can save them. I don't think I have the heart to tell some of them my voting habits when the time inevitably comes. Investors and major leaders already accepted the good numbers for a Trump victory and they're hoping for a good year in business when he rolls around again, some fresh profit margins. They don't understand that I'm not rich enough to decide, the rulers of the country already made their picks and they won't accept less without some serious promises from Biden

The numbers are going up and there are far more campuses involved, iirc.

Colorado, Arizona, Louisiana, South Carolina, Oregon from what I can see. Check the latest NYTimes article. And yes, there are already mass arrests being made at these more recent campus protests. They are taking this very seriously.

I really thought Israel was gone in 2022 and was going to accept a silent death. Look how wrong I was to assume.....

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.