Marxism and the National Question

A nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture.

Only thing missing there is the shared territory due to the occupation. I don’t tend to believe that the Rhinelanders share a language or common culture with France, for example. Other than that, balkanized Germany at the Polish border would serve less geopolitical interests than if they had managed to secure a neutral buffer country, with the possibility of an eventual SED victory.

Indeed, it’s very strange that sovereign Ukraine is not the one negotiating this. They could just ignore Trump’s peace deal and keep on fighting without US support.

Surely they can manufacture their own weapons and fight their own war, and don’t need to bow down to US directives imposed from afar. Being the one holding the cards, they definitely don’t need to hear anything from Trump in order to negotiate with Russia.

Oh no, please not another port. It’s gonna be 50% harder to deliver a presentation now with all those adapters.

Jokes aside, I agree with the other commenter. This is not really useful except for real power users or investors. HDMI is still here to stay for a long time.

As a sidenote: good luck with the rest of the podcast from this point foward. The quality drops a lot, he starts mixing up a lot of key facts and becomes way too reliant on anti-communist sources like “A People’s Tragedy”.

It gets worse now that it’s being made available to people with disabilities and now with mental illness too. In Belgium there’s precedent for people being euthanised for being for autism. Only difference from the Nazis is that at least the Hans Asperger didn’t try to convince his patients they had to die.

Are these tariffs even being implemented or are they just “announced”? I can only imagine the chaos that customs workers must be going through.

Edit: Found an answer to my own question. It starts on may 2.

The replication crisis is an ongoing methodological crisis in which the results of many scientific studies are difficult or impossible to reproduce. Because the reproducibility of empirical results is an essential part of the scientific method,[2] such failures undermine the credibility of theories building on them and potentially call into question substantial parts of scientific knowledge.

[…] Historian Philip Mirowski argues that the decline of scientific quality can be connected to its commodification, especially spurred by major corporations’ profit-driven decision to outsource their research to universities and contract research organizations.

Publication bias. In theory, rejection of the null hypothesis should elevate confidence that observed effects are real and repeatable. But concerns about the dichotomous interpretation of NHST as ‘significant’ or not have been raised for almost 60 years. Many of these concerns stem from a troublesome publication bias in which papers that reject the null hypothesis are accepted for publication at a much higher rate than those that do not. Demonstrating this effect, Sterling analyzed 362 papers published in major psychology journals between 1955 and 1956, noting that 97.3% of papers that used NHST rejected the null hypothesis.

The high publication rates for papers that reject the null hypothesis contributes to a file drawer effect in which papers that fail to reject the null go unpublished because they are not written up, written up but not submitted, or submitted and rejected. Publication bias and the file drawer effect combine to propagate the dissemination and maintenance of false knowledge: through the file drawer effect, correct findings of no effect are unpublished and hidden from view; and through publication bias, a single incorrect chance finding (a 1:20 chance at α = .05, if the null hypothesis is true) can be published and become part of a discipline’s wrong knowledge.

Ideally, scientists are objective and dispassionate throughout their investigations, but knowledge of the publication bias strongly opposes these ideals. Publication success shapes careers, so researchers need their experiments to succeed (rejecting the null in order to get published), creating many areas of concern (middle row of Figure 1), as follows.

I’m so tired. I hate Googler Science.

This is bullshit hype nonsense, and the fact it devolves into an ad for “AI-powered” Pixel 9 is pretty telling.

This is still less shit than their arxiv “GenAI Game Engine” crap, but not by much.

The Vietnam essay exists already 😄 https://criticalresist.substack.com/p/how-vietnam-decolonized-and-what

Nice!

And patsocs don’t deserve an essay of their own lol

I disagree. You quite clearly have some very developed thoughts on them that I’d like to read more about and comprehend better, and I believe right-opportunists should be mercilessly opposed from the cradle to the grave.

This is well meaning critique, but I think you mashed two really good essays into something lesser than they could’ve been. I’d be way more interested in either a thorough dissection of the organisation principles of Ho Chi Minh and specifically about General Giáp and another essay carefully tearing down whatever passes for Marxism in the US with clearer evidence and more neatly tied together.

As somebody who knows very little about both the CPV and the Yankee pseudoleft I look forward to more of your writing on these topics.

I think somebody on hexbear posted a tool on GitHub that is exactly that. Can’t remember the name though.

This is in line with “midtechs” in peripheral countries that operate “rideshare” and delivery apps becoming “fintechs” and offering banking services. After monopoly, the only path is always financialisation.

The Fifth Republic predates the 1968 strikes by 10 years. Maybe you’re mistaking that for May 1958 in which De Gaulle led a coup that actually toppled the Fourth Republic to “prevent communists” after crises caused by the Algerian War of Independence led by the FLN. That one was a successful counter revolution, though I’m open to the idea that it was a close one if evidence of that is presented. Besides all that, there’s nothing to celebrate about the Fifth Republic still existing as a “victory”.

But on the 1968 strikes and election, Pompidou went from Prime Minister to president, and was from the same party as de Gaulle, as was the new Prime Minister de Murville. The conservative UDR also gained seats. I may not be very knowledgeable about cold war French history, but you’re really not helping your arguments with such easily debunked claims.

The government wasn’t toppled, they just did a snap election. That’s like saying the UK government was toppled when Theresa May called one back when she couldn’t Brexit.

Also, on that same election the communists lost chairs. This is nowhere close to a successful revolution.

I may have been too harsh and knee-jerky on you on my first reply, but it’s seriously very important to acknowledge our past failures and self-crit in order to find the correct path to revolution. In Brazil the Communist Party split specifically because the party was ossified and the faction that left/was expelled wanted to seek better paths. There’s no shame in admitting that what has been tried did not work.

Pretty cool, thanks comrade!

Name one successful socialist revolution in the West.

Don’t think it “surpassing” Deepseek is much better than it just being cheaper (which it doesn’t seem to be), for all practical effects. Though the investor panic might produce another fun shock do NASDAQ and disrupt the financial economy a little bit more.

I use GIMP a lot and learning the interface was hell, but other than that it’s perfectly good software. Haven’t dabbled much with Krita, but I’ve heard from colleagues it’s pretty great.

Main issue is what the other user pointed out, if you work at a company you need to either use locked in software or somehow convince the whole company to use the foss version. Nowadays lots of people are using Canva despite it also being shit and increasingly enshittified.

What are the minimum specs for running it locally? Wondering if it’d be worth the effort for a personal project.

One thing that I find worrying is actually that, although US IT companies are objectively and clearly falling behind Chinese ones, their stock price keeps going up, I suppose moreso due to their closing ranks with Trump.

Admittedly I know next to nothing about share value trading, but shouldn’t developments such as these temper investors interests in those specific companies making “AI” their next big thing? I’m afraid the bubble burst will be worse than 2008.

What does the name mean then? I see lots of “it doesn’t mean that” but nobody explains what it means.