[-] knfrmity@lemmygrad.ml 41 points 7 months ago

It's not the Chinese buying real estate in the west, it's Chinese capitalists. A lot of Hong Kong bourgeois for example have been buying property in and in many cases have moved to the west since 1997, since they're terrified of losing their extortionate privilege of property ownership under the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Working class Chinese people, while on average wealthier than their western working class counterparts, do not have the capital nor the material interest to buy real estate in the west, whether for speculation or to move their ill gotten gains out of China.

20
TikTok Psyop (www.mintpressnews.com)

Not sure if this one has been posted in the last few weeks, but this follows up previous MintPress reporting on the links between western TikTok and the US military-intelligence apparatus. It was probably clear to us from the beginning, but the crusade against TikTok has been an entirely cynical ploy for the empire to gain even more control over the internet.

Previous articles:

https://www.mintpressnews.com/tiktok-chinese-trojan-horse-run-by-state-department-officials/284353/

https://www.mintpressnews.com/nato-tiktok-pipeline-why-tiktok-employing-national-security-agents/280336/

[-] knfrmity@lemmygrad.ml 44 points 8 months ago

Glad to see some bougie academic reaffirm the fact that our desire to see everyone treated like a human being is an extreme position.

[-] knfrmity@lemmygrad.ml 39 points 9 months ago

Last I checked, neither Russia nor DPRK have any law that requires them to follow sanctions made up by the USA.

[-] knfrmity@lemmygrad.ml 37 points 9 months ago

Germany is discussing reintroducing the military service requirement.

The German defense minister is clearly saying that Germans must prepare for war, not just in the material sense of getting the Bundeswehr into fighting shape but in the socio-political sense of "the government and military can't go to war if the people are against it, and the government damn well wants to go to war so we better get the propaganda rolling."

It's a scary time to be alive.

12

German politicians have been discussing making applying for citizenship easier for a couple years now. Today the Bundestag (Parliament) approved the draft legislation, with two surprising new additions.

In applying for citizenship a person will now not only have to say they agree to and respect the German constitution (standard practice for gaining citizenship anywhere), an applicant will also have to agree to a statement "on Germany's special historical responsibility for the unjust Nazi rule and its consequences, especially for the protection of Jewish life." It's reasonable enough if taken literally, but we all know what this means in practice: Zionism is the law of the land. There could be an additional statement regarding the "illegalty of wars of aggression" required as well. If a person is found to have lied during the application or even behaves against such statements in the future, their newly gained German citizenship could be revoked.

To be fair, all of this is based on press reports and I haven't seen the law directly yet, so it may only be half as bad. But things are going in a really worrying direction.

[-] knfrmity@lemmygrad.ml 45 points 10 months ago

Ah yes, all those *checks notes* billionaire communists that are definitely out there.

19
submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by knfrmity@lemmygrad.ml to c/linux@lemmy.ml

I have been having such a difficult time getting a 2018 Dell Latitude 7930 to run any Linux distro stably. Maybe there is something obvious I am missing or maybe it really is dying hardware that's the root cause of the issue.

The silly thing is I had a stable install of openSUSE Tumbleweed running for a few months but because I made some poor choices on disk partition when I installed it I was eventually backed into a corner where I had to wipe the SSD and install from scratch.

I since then have tried Tumbleweed again as well as Ubuntu, Mint, and finally Manjaro to no avail. The Debian based distros completely freeze at some point, either immediately upon login and loading the desktop or when running apt update. Tumbleweed gets a kernel panic within an hour or so, even though I changed kernel options to a previous known-good config. Now after quite a frustrating time installing Manjaro it freezes within an hour as well and the diagnostic light code indicates a CPU issue.

Strangely enough none of these issues are apparent when running from a LiveUSB, but occur on two different M.2 SATA SSDs with proper installs.

At this point I don't really care which distro I use, as long as it doesn't crash constantly. Does anyone have any suggestions on other things I can try?

Edit: seems to be solved with the kernel options I already mentioned. For whatever reason it didn't work for the Tumbleweed reinstall but Manjaro has run for a couple days without crashing.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Intel_graphics#Crash/freeze_on_low_power_Intel_CPUs

[-] knfrmity@lemmygrad.ml 37 points 11 months ago

To put it another way, capitalists do indeed dig their own grave, but we workers need to push them in and bury the casket.

[-] knfrmity@lemmygrad.ml 39 points 11 months ago

A shocking number of people are cool with that.

[-] knfrmity@lemmygrad.ml 44 points 1 year ago

Yep, with a reactionary coup, because a non-capitalist alternative was just too threatening. One of the biggest tragedies of the 20th century, for reasons already briefly detailed in other comments here.

[-] knfrmity@lemmygrad.ml 61 points 1 year ago

Not being directly charged and found guilty isn't the trump card they think it is. Most Nazis were never punished, many top brass went on to shape the west into what it is today.

[-] knfrmity@lemmygrad.ml 43 points 1 year ago

When I bring up context like this the person I'm in conversation with often rolls their eyes and says something like "it doesn't matter why things were bad under communism, people had a traumatic time and you have to respect that."

Anyway has anyone got more sources on Romania and the Imperialist Monetary Fund profiteering?

[-] knfrmity@lemmygrad.ml 35 points 1 year ago

That's precisely why fascism has been colloquially redefined to mean only what the Nazis did.

Otherwise we'd look at neoliberalism, or even post war era social democracy, and see that it's just fascism.

[-] knfrmity@lemmygrad.ml 76 points 1 year ago

Oh great, even more lies from German state media. This AfD group had no official invitation from the Chinese government, nor did they meet with Chinese government officials. DW is really trying their best to push horseshoe theory on us, and it would be laughable if people didn't take it seriously.

6
submitted 2 years ago by knfrmity@lemmygrad.ml to c/green@lemmy.ml

A preprinted study by James Hansen and collaborators suggests that we've all but locked in 2°C warming by 2050. They go on to calculate a likely equilibrium warming of 10°C considering current GHG levels and known feedback loops.

I know we need to take this as yet another call to action, but at the same time I think so many of us feel absolutely paralyzed by the enormity and incomprehensibility of the situation.

1

I really stepped in it last night. My partner is livid with me for suggesting Stalin wasn't the evil dictator he's made out to be in the west. For a German who grew up with anti-communism and went to some very liberal universities for political science it was too much. They said something to the effect of "this feels exactly like if you said, oh Hitler wasn't that bad, he was actually a good guy." We're in the midst of planning our wedding and they were suddenly at the point of doubting that they know who I am and if this is a relationship they want to maintain.

We have a hard time discussing politics as it is. We are still not so great at interpreting the nuances of way each other speaks, and our background knowledge is very different. So we have to figure out what we do from here.

I can't come at this from the direction of "trying to convert them." They already think I have gone into a conspiracy theory ridden and propaganda laden hole, and believe me, I ask myself the same thing every day. It really weighs heavily on me, as some of our close family members have fallen into conspiracy theory echo chambers.

We've decided we need to go back to basics and make sure our core values align, which I genuinely believe they do. They're an anti-capitalist as well, although don't have a strong idea of what to would be better, just that it shouldn't be communism.

I'm not sure where to go after we sort out what our shared values are.

There's a certain condescension I sense when it comes to the leftist sources I read, many on recommendation from GenZedong members. I'm often met with "leftists just make up all kinds of stuff to suit their narrative," or "how do you know that's a primary or reliable secondary source, it's so easy to fake anything these days." Meanwhile they go to Wikipedia and see that Stalin killed millions and signed a treaty with the Nazis, even as they understand that much of western capitalist media is propaganda as well. We can't have any useful discussion on current events at the moment because we have vastly different knowledge of what's happening, as well as entirely different analytical tools to pick it apart with.

They're also terrified I'm going to say very extreme things in front of their family (privileged petite bourgeois liberals). I try to be careful but at the same time I won't pretend to not be a communist. We have political discussions often and I'm not one to just sit those out. I'm sure my family would react poorly as well, but with the geographical distance to them it's not as present an issue in our minds.

How do you all deal with this? How do you have these discussions and share these ideas with the more soc-dem or liberal minded people in your lives?

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knfrmity

joined 2 years ago