When I was there (probably including several of the places you mentioned), one thing I thought was nice was that there was a sort of commons in place. Within walking distance for working-class people, there was woods that people wouldn't litigate you for walking on.

It's wild to see how western and central Europe were even more razed and leveled a few decades ago, and the cities even more choked with cars than today.

The expansion of lawn and field across every possible hectare is a plague upon the Earth, though. We really don't need to stuff the planet as full as we can with people.

I've said it many times, communism killed them all and then started lying about its population.

There were barely any people left in the USSR by the end of communism, they only existed on paper.

Those are 2 different questions with 2 different answers.

First one, maybe 25%.

Second one, maybe 2%.

It is now politically incorrect to say any of these words.

If only there was some sort of unusually popular politician in an upstart position who could have done something substantial to fight against this problem outright, let's say perhaps 5-10 years ago.

When I said "加油中国", I was just expressing a feeling, I didn't expect them to take it as an imperative!

Moonies BTFO by spike in Thai parallel gay marriage

They employ a list of big names (or failsons/faildaughters).

mega-sicko.jpg

Do it, Donnie! Put the 100% tariffs on BRICS countries and Spain.

The tradition of anti-intellectualism goes back a long way. Certainly to Nixon and to Goldwater as a candidate, probably even further than that.

It's not a bug in America, it's a feature.

A skirmish on the coast at dawn
A patrol down a crowded street in Canton
Two hundred pounds of corn-fed brawn
Drops to a modded DJI Phantom.

A great and glorious thing it is
To learn, for twenty years or so,
The Lord knows what of that and this,
Ere reckoned fit to face the foe—
The flying bullet down the Pass,
That whistles clear: "All flesh is grass."

Fuck Kipling and all, but this chagrin is perfect for realizing that your "6'2 corn-fed paratrooper" doesn't do so well when it's not a melee 1v1.

I installed Lemmy, hoping it'll be a good alternative

So what made you install Lemmy

If you interact with a website through an app, you are ceding both functionality and power. Angry Birds is an app, Signal is an app, Reddit and Lemmy are websites with URLs and you are duplicating the function of a browser if you use anything else.

I'd heard of Lemmy (and Raddle) since the late 2010s, and put them in the "things I'd like to pivot to at some point" category. The main subreddit that I posted on (a transgressive mix of edgy, caring, partisan, and weird) was quarantined and then finally banned in 2020. As a result I quit using reddit altogether, but after a few months I poked around and realized people from that sub had started a forked instance of Lemmy as a refuge.

The one thing that's lackluster is the search function. Everything else is superior.

The manager/administrator class is certainly taking over hospitals as much as other institutions, but I don't think doctors can be fully proletarianized for as long as they remain scarce, and carrying a certain prestige, and able to have their own firms individually.

I'm not saying the classic terms of proletariat and bourgeoisie aren't useful anymore, but it's more and more difficult to see pure manifestations of them like you could a century or two ago. This is part of why if you talk about these classes to anyone who's not already a socialist, you get a blank stare at best and an eye roll at worst, because without an extensive explanation it seems foreign or scholarly and then people won't apply it to their worldviews.

With so much production being obscured across national borders, it's harder for people to identify themselves exclusively in relation to production. Consumption, especially powered by debt, is a huge part of how people today identify. Having a quantifier for the relative monetary relationship is something that applies to consumption of products and especially strongly to interactions with financial institutions, while still being applicable to employment. And crucially, it can take into account the opposition* between core countries and peripheral countries.

*using this word instead of "contradiction", for accuracy and versatility

But more importantly, it's simple and intuitive and very easy to define. You don't need to establish the entirety of what "proletarian" or "bourgeois" (let alone "middle-class") really means, you just need to ask "are you stealing more money from others through the system, or are others stealing more money from you". It only requires a base level of recognizing that the economic/legal scaffolding allows some to clearly benefit at the expense of others.

Doctors and engineers are not "debourgeois-ified" just because they temporarily have a networth below zero. They can still expect to earn several million over the course of their careers, and they will likely have plenty of opportunity to buy stocks. There's a reason why the metric is "lifetime total credit received" minus "lifetime total debt paid". If the lifetime earning prospects ever stopped becoming attractive, you'd see a sharp drop in these professions.

Put together all of the rent, interest payments, insurance (minus payouts), mortgage (minus home value), etc. that a given person pays throughout their life.

Put together all the capital gains (stock dividends and appreciation, real estate appreciation, bank interest, etc.) that the same person pays throughout their life.

Now compare the two. On average, do they have more passive income, or more passive expenses? This concertely quantifies the relationship of how participating in the financial capitalist world benefits or hurts each individual. This unavoidably needs to be done, because the line between capitalist and proletarian has been blurred: you can have a worker making 80k a year who's never been in control of the means of production yet invests a large chunk of income in the stock market, and thus ends up owning more financial capital than many business owners. It is very common for a person to skim surplus off people they can't even identify, and also have their own surplus skimmed off by people they've never met. 37% of people in this country rent, 52% pay a mortgage, only 11% own outright. Some disturbingly large fraction of people are permanent debt slaves. A large supermajority are lifetime net debtors. A small fraction (maybe 10%) are pretty close to breaking even, and a tiny stratum is made up of unambiguous beneficiaries.

With colonialism, once you colonize all the land you then run into a barrier where you can't squeeze any higher returns out of the land, and with classic capitalism, you reach a point where there's not much more that people can use. With financial capitalism, though, you can create limitless things that you charge people for, thus removing the cap on local/national land or labor productivity, and also it ties right in to global imperial power. Plus it can sustain many of the illusions and narratives of affluence.

Remember, about 40% of US GDP is remuneration for labor, and 60% is capital gains. There are people who get almost all their earnings through labor, there are people who get almost all their earnings through capital, and there are people who have a mix.

Is it not easier and neater to describe this worker as being part of a class of lifetime net creditors, as opposed to lifetime net debtors?

The lint filter that they recommend cleaning after each use, or a different filter?

Making fun of Zelenskyy isn't really a W, it's low-hanging fruit.

That's not so much an insult, and more like feedback.