150 years since her birth, Rosa Luxemburg is often remembered more as a martyr than a theorist. But as a teacher at a socialist party school she taught worker-militants to see the world like a Marxist.
Every post saying something like “just let university students write things with AI if they want to and grade accordingly”forgets that one of the core skills university is supposed to teach is how to write. People aren’t remembering how bad they were at writing when they were 18
I want Americans to know that it’s illegal or functionally illegal in loads of European countries and not even just particularly social democratic ones.
It’s not radical ban cultish freaks from depriving their children of normal socialization
actual anti-capitalism isn't gross hippy asceticism that tells you to "stop buying soap". We want to change the economy so that producing soap (and everything else) doesn't lead to the exploitation and degradation of people and the environment
patriarchy is the *cause* of male loneliness and alienation. You fundamentally can’t have a fulfilling meaningful connection with a person belonging to a group you are ultimately subjugating.
This sounds a little woo-woo but it’s a basic insight of mid century feminist thought
i really loved barbie and the themes around gender inequality and holding women to unrealistic expectations, but i also hope we don't neglect the themes around ken/men in society who feel lonely and alienated and thus turn to patriarchy out of anger and desperation
Every law that exists to protect the meat industry is deeply fucked and completely hidden away from the general public it almost every country. People get just as much time for sharing pictures of factory farms and slaughter houses as they do for leaking government documents
Cant believe I’ve never heard about how the US government plants cyanide bombs all around the west in order to kill wildlife. The ranching industry is so, so evil.
the bartender asked why 20 ppl came in together on a Wednesday, i explained we’re a socialist reading group and we read stuff from this American socialist magazine, and he was like “why don’t you read marx and engels??“ and pulls out this damn book from behind the bar
Multiple European friends are reporting that every random German they ever swapped instas with is coming out of the woodwork to reply to their Palestine solidarity posts with the most racist infographics known to man
We all know about Morgenthau’s based plan to Balkanize Germany, but did you know he also thought that every member of the Nazi party should’ve been executed? And when they told him thats crazy because there were probably 13 million he said oh I thought there were only like 5 mil
I wasn’t going to weigh in on the latest episode of chapo, but frankly I absolutely refuse to believe that a thing called “fudruckers” really exists and isn’t just something made up by Matt Christman
germans: security obsessed, fake facebook name, no twitter, no name in email address
also germans: your CV should include a photo, how tall you are, where you were born, and your marital status
It’s wild seeing Americans admit that they can only imagine war by imagining themselves as the main character of a movie. ‘Of course I wouldn’t be a normal soldier, I’d get a *special* assignment since I’m so clever. it would all be terribly exciting and of course I wouldn’t die’
@Very__Regular
They run on a model that assumes people will just accept that often they just don’t have stock of certain things in exchange for low prices. Something that Germans don’t care about but frankly seems antithetical to the American supermarket abundance mindset
1st term uni students right worse than chatGPT. ChatGPT is bad in its own way. But it’s a different kind of bad than how 18-year-olds write. You can use it to draft emails bc you are 34 years old. Letting ppl use it before they get confident in basic writing skills is a bad idea
Do people seriously think that people who cook well learned it from their parents? That must be so rare!! Even if you prepped/chopped stuff or would put something in the oven as a kid that isn’t where the real skill comes from, you develop it as an adult because you want to
Personally I think it’s okay that there is a different word than immigrant for Trevor the tech guy from New Jersey who comes to Berlin to work at a startup, never learn German and party from ages 24-32 before going back
Sundays in Ireland almost all shops are allowed to be open whereas in Germany (even godless Berlin) almost everything is closed. really drives home that Sunday off is in place because of the power of unions and social democrats, not religious reverence
The only universally true law of political science is that leftists always think that the Green Party in *their* Country is particularly bad and neoliberal but that the Green Party of *some other country* is decent (it isn’t, and the leftists there think the same thing)
what the fuck does "middle class" even mean at this point? "rent, transportation, childcare and a cellphone" are pretty much bare minimum things that almost all working people need
Bartender overheard me and a friend talking about Trotskyism and came over to check that we weren’t ourselves Trotskyists because “Trotskyists and antideutsch arent welcome”. Never been more proud of a bar choice lmao
call me when we've reached the point in the discourse when americans realise there is a difference between forming a union and restructuring a business as a coop
The most iconic Brecht moment for me from when he was called to testify in HUAC and they attacked him by having someone read translations of obviously communist poems he wrote and asking “did you write this?” and he said “no… I wrote a poem in German”
Bertolt Brecht, socialist playwright and poet, died sixty years ago today.
"The law was made for one thing alone, for the exploitation of those who don't understand it, or are prevented by naked misery from obeying it."
(Portrait: Grete Stern, 1933)
very day i log onto twitter and learn about some new guy with like 200k followers who is famous for being left wing but appears to have never read a book
more Americans need to learn that when international political events are described to them as „spontaneous“ they’re being sold a palatable story, not real political analysis
I was struck by the fact that the strike was 1) spontaneous, 2) people-driven rather than org driven 3) approved by 70+ percent of the population beforehand.
Meanwhile, a cohort of the American left insists it's silly to so much as discuss a general strike.
@grmjns
the "force yourself to write stream of consciousness without pausing even if you aren't writing the most coherent stuff" and editing later method will become a lost art
I recently spend a lot of time with a bunch of very conservative American families and of all the totally alien things they told me about their lives, the craziest was that they all use these apps to be able to see where every member of their family is at all times
I wrote about how location-sharing has become so ingrained in relationships, it's now a curse, with users learning things about their friends, families, and partners that they never wanted or needed to know!! for
@bustle
@quendergeer
A fact that has stuck with me (from
@katemdavo
’s phd) is that “scientific” shock gay conversion therapy was first clinically tried in Czechoslovakia and they discovered it doesn’t work, stopped, published that, & legalized being gay. Britain just took the method and did it anyway
In the contemporary USA it can make sense to want to remove your kid from the fucked up school options I get that. Most European countries have comparatively functional public school systems which imo you should not be allowed to opt out of. private schools should also be banned
I’m incredibly bad at pretending that I don’t have way too much specific knowledge and a clear opinion about the extent of the conspiracy involved in the JFK assassination
Saying that “lighter vs darker” pans makes the difference in baking rather than thickness and type of metal .. none of these tiktok baking people will see heaven
@BrandyLJensen
I’m a truther about it. it does kind of taste like soap to everyone. There might be some extremely tiny percentage that really can’t stand it but I think a couple articles have convinced loads of people that just weren’t used to it they shouldn’t try to acquire taste for it
One of the biggest drivers of unaffordability is minimum unit sizes.
A 100-150sf SRO can comfortably fit all of one's needs (bed, kitchenette, bathroom, even a desk!). When we mandate a 400sf minimum, a common threshold, we're getting 3-4x less homes in the same amount of space!
all those
#DJsforPalestine
, resident advisor, "berlin nightlife workers against apartheid" and queer party collectives who usually seem so concerned about conflict in the middle east are noticeably silent after a trance party was attacked by hamas gunmen
For basically the first time in my 18 years of education i’ve decided to mentally check out and just be the weak link on a group project.. feels pretty good... wild how there are no real consequences for this
Every time I see an actual picture of a Marx manuscript I think about how in like 1901 Kautsky tried to recruit Rosa Luxemburg into helping prepare unpublished Marx writings for publication and she was like “no way” lol
For those of you interested in Marx and Engels's writings in Brussels in 1845-46, Sarah Johnson has a new essay—"Farewell to the German Ideology" (
@JHIdeas
)—on the MEGA2 I/5 that may be of interest. You can find it here:
@CobraFontaine
Almost all problems in American schools are due to underfunding, I would also support banning private schools to force more money into the public system. But even so, most of the exceptions in places where it’s illegal are for children with disabilities, which obviously is fine.
a lot of academic historians of the soviet union seem to have a really impressive ability to describe some relatively normal part of human society in general and make it sound alienating and sinister
just read an academic article that lists Karl Marx as an example of an economist who was interested in "the formulation of policy-relevant recommendations for wealth creation"
A old East German man I met on the street told me they built this solid, safe, 100% concrete beauty in just 2 months. I asked him why they can’t make buildings like this in America, I will never forget his answer…
“They can't, they don't know how to do it”
Normale Uber-Fahrt in Berlin. Beim Aussteigen sagte ich „Sie sind ein Antisemit.“ Antwort: „Schlampe, verpiss dich“. Gut, dass ich meinen Namen in der App geändert habe…
@uncanny_eli
I don't get how you could be an author and live in society and not realise that this approach is going to be met with such a wary response 100% of the time because it's soo obviously usually crank behaviour! You gotta get your publisher to email!
@barista__morg
If it makes you feel bad about your own situation, promise it could be worse, you could be living in one of the exact apartments that they literally lived in and be paying..uuuhhh.. significantly more
After everything that’s happened this week, europe stopping the astra Zeneca vaccine over a blood clotting issue that the contraceptive pill causes x200 more often is turning me into the female joker