woodenghost [comrade/them]

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2024

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  • Or imagine it the other way around: The heat death has long started and we live in it. Who knows what kind of civilizations existed in the first quark gluon plasma 10^-12 to 10^-5 seconds after the big bang? They would have been tiny, fast and highly energetic. There are many orders of magnitude in size more between us and the plank length then between us and the observable universe. There’s lots of room down there. To them, we would seem like sluggish giants living off of tiny sparks within the faded light their long dead world set free when the universe became transparent 18,000 years after the big bang.



  • I’ve never even been to the US and agree with what you say. But travel dosn’t necessarily make you have good takes. Tourism is often very destructive and ignorant.

    Also, among people from outside the imperial core, who travel a lot, there is a different bias: they are more likely to be comprador capitalists, because you need money to travel. For example in Egypt, I’ve only met people critical of the military. Outside Egypt, I’ve only met Egyptians who support it and whose families have high status because of positions in the military. Or take Cuban or Venezuelan exiles, who hate their home countries socialist politics. I’m also not sure, if the trend to move to Dubai to work a high profile job for one or two years in a totally artificial setting broadens anyone’s cultural horizon.



  • Classes are defined by their relations to the means of production and by contradictions in how society reproduces itself which lead to periodic crisis. Class societies require very complex structures to uphold hegemony of the ruling classes and manage all the crisis and move them in time and space towards other societies or to future generations. Which leads to constant war, environmental destruction, etc and is unsustainable in the long term. Like capitalism needs to expand all the time, which is just impossible on a finite planet and structurally needs to produce devisive ideologies like racism and patriarchy to survive.

    A classless society, once achieved, doesn’t need all this. Getting there requires a lot of struggle because the ruling class has set up all those structures to protect their privilege. But once we’re there, society will actually be way more stable than before. No classes means that structures to uphold hegemony aren’t necessary any more. That includes the state, which is really just a weapon in class warfare. Racism and patriarchy aren’t human nature. They are constantly fabricated and upheld with huge efforts by the ruling class. Those efforts would be free to build other structures instead. Once that actual connect people instead of driving them against each other. No inherent periodic crisis means those don’t have to be managed anymore and society can actually continue to develop sustainably without exploiting to exhaustion natural resources, human minds and bodies, communities and societal bonds and care structures like families.

    It’s hard for us to imagine, because we’re so used to thinking inside class societies. It even forms our anthropology, how we think of other people and our ability to emphasize with them. But future people who live it will have a hard time imagining how it could ever have been different.






  • Russia being messed up doesn’t contradict the meme at all. People in the imperial core can be happy, every time comrades in Russia (or Ukraine) have a success against their government and their oligarchy. But the best thing every anti-imperialist can do, is fight the imperialists they can actually fight: the ones in their own country. If you’re in a NATO country, that means your priority should be to fight NATO and the US oligarchs who benefit from it’s constant wars all over the world. If workers on both sides just continue to fall for the propaganda, they’ll never stop killing each other.

    I’m not just randomly claiming, that this strategy is what works best. Have you heard of Lenins revolutionary defeatism? It’s the method, that made the revolution possible.

    Have you heard of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht? They were both killed for their anti-war stance and their commitment against national-chauvinism. Liebknechts famous line was: “the main enemy stands at home”, by which he meant the national oligarchs and imperialists profiting from the war.


  • There are different ways to compare the “sizes” of infinite sets. So you could both be right in different contexts and for different sets. But the one concept people mostly mean, when they say, that some infinities are larger than other, is one to one correspondence (also called “cardinality”):

    If you have a set and you can describe how you would choose one element of a second set for each element of the first and end up with every element chosen, than that’s called a one to one correspondence. In that case, people say the two sets have the same cardinality which is one way to define their size (and a very common and useful one).

    For example there is a one to one correspondence between the integers and the even integers. The procedure of choosing is to just take the integers and multiple each of them by two. You always get an even number and take that one to correspond to the integer you started with. So these two sets have the same cardinality and in that sense, the same size.

    There is even a procedures that proofs, that the set of the rational numbers has the same cardinality as the natural numbers.

    But Cantor proved, that there can never be such a procedure, that establishes a one to one correspondence between the natural numbers and the reals. So it’s in that sense, that people say the reals form the larger set.