AssortedBiscuits [they/them]

mfw you still use Windows in 2023 2024

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: May 22nd, 2022

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  • No, there is a clear political goal in Marxism. It isn’t scientific analysis for the sake of scientific analysis. It’s virtually impossible to read anything Marx wrote and not come out of it completely sympathetic towards the plight of the working class and view the ruling class with complete contempt. “From each according to his own abilities to each according to his needs” is a very clear moral prescription. He wasn’t describing how people living in a bygone communal society behaved but prescribing what people living in a communist society ought to behave. Forget about being a good comrade, you’ll go far towards being a good person if you start applying this moral principle to your life and cultivating this moral principle towards other people in your life.


  • I don’t really agree with this. Marxism has a clear political goal, which is the emancipation of the working class. It isn’t depoliticized in the way biology or physics is in liberal society. If Marxism was truly depoliticized like this, there would be absolutely no reason why the ruling class would be so hostile to Marxist text. This would be like if the ruling class started banning books on string theory, comparative linguistics, or non-Newtonian fluids. The closest amount of hostility directed at scientific text is The Origin of Species and even then, that’s mostly confined to the US.

    I think the OP made an error in considering science as practiced in liberal society when liberalism is all about siloing and atomizing everything in existence until every single thing in existence, whether it’s people or fields of study, exists in its own self-contained bubble. Why shouldn’t our scientific pursuits be informed by our ethical and moral considerations? Science isn’t the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. That pursuit has to be tempered by how it would benefit society as well as be informed by societal ethics and morality. No, we shouldn’t fund or even have experiments that determine how high cows can be dropped from and still survive.


  • I don’t see Iran acting right now since that would just be playing into the expectations of the US and Israel. Most likely, they will hold an aggressive military drill and possibly launch a major cyberattack. The US/Israel will then do a victory lap on how Iran is a paper tiger and let their guard down, which is when Iran will strike. The strike will probably have enough plausible deniability that it’s not done by Iran even though it’s very obviously done by Iran.

    However, the uncertainty factor is that Israel is no longer a rational actor and might see apparent reluctance by Iran to attack as a sign of normalization of direct Israeli attacks on Iranian soil. Israel will then try its luck again, which will push Iran to retaliate and retaliate openly. This is weeks-where-decades-happen territory.



  • The last major successful attempt was done by Noah Webster, which is where the difference between American and British spelling comes from. American spelling is ever more slightly consistent than British spelling:

    1. There’s basically no consistency in what gets spelled with “-or” vs “-our.” “Honor” is spelled as “honour,” but “horror” is still “horror.” Webster just dropped the “-our.” The same thing is true for “-er” vs “re.” Why “centre” but not “entre?”

    2. Webster changed “-ise” to “-ize,” which is more phonetically consistent with how Americans say it.

    3. Baffling or confusing spelling like “mould” or “cheque” or “gaol” or “draught” got changed based on what words rhymed with them. “Mould” became “mold” because “mold/mould” rhymes with “cold,” not “could.”

    4. Ligatures aren’t used in American English, so no bullshit like “foetus” or “paedophile.”

    English spelling reform is not going to happen anytime soon since Webster used nationalism at a very opportune time to get Americans to change English spelling to be slightly less terrible. And even then, a lot of his proposals got shot down. For example, he wanted to change the spelling of “tongue” to “tung,” but that (unfortunately) didn’t happen.