Brutal. The scary thing is, most people aren’t really aware of who and what Franco was. Apparently, many of those who do would rather pretend the bad bits didn’t happen – in order to salvage his and his regime’s reputations. Surprise surprise.

When I first started learning Spanish I went to a language class. They asked why I was learning Spanish. I said I wanted to learn more about Spanish history, the civil war, etc. The teacher replied: ‘You’ve got to be careful with these topics as many people in Spain haven’t come to terms with them yet and it’s a sore subject as many families can’t bring it up or they’d fall out.’ I’ll be damned if I’m holding my tongue so that I don’t upset someone who supported Franco. They can get fucked. I didn’t go back to that class. I didn’t quite realise how bad it was at the time. It’s quite difficult to really imagine the cruelty. I think I made the right choice avoiding Franco apologists.

(Paul Preston’s The Civil War in Spain isn’t a terrible overview if you’re interested. It’s not Marxist by any means, and I listened to it in Spanish in the earlier days of picking up the language so if I misunderstood parts, it could be bad.)

Like this rolled into one: https://youtu.be/ORfjgE6n2Pc

I like to call it Eurafrica when I’m talking with libs. They dislike being reminded that the foundations of European culture were almost all developed in Africa.

Then when they’d stolen all they could, they forgot about the continent and plummeted into the dark ages until they met west Asians, whose scholarly outputs helped backwards Europe to turn the lights back on.

After draining all they could, they stagnated again until they found the Americas, where they found parliamentary democracy and many other theretofore inconceivable inventions.

Marx called it primitive accumulation when the capitalists started doing it but Europeans have been propping themselves up on the heritage of the rest of the world for millennia. I guess Europe could be called ‘Thievesope’ but that is a bit tautologous.

There’s only so long you can go with empty catchphrases before the reality of ‘US support’ is obvious to everyone (except western libs, of course, but I’m willing to give more credit to Ukrainians who are on a much sharper side of US promises than are western libs tucked up safe and sound).

… the community dedicated to posting our w’s to get mad at.

May as well sign up and sort by local at that point; all we post is w’s.

You’re right, at that. I was thinking of dunks like this:

Classical economy always loved to conceive social capital as a fixed magnitude of a fixed degree of efficiency. But this prejudice was first established as a dogma by the arch-Philistine, Jeremy Bentham, that insipid, pedantic, leather-tongued oracle of the ordinary bourgeois intelligence of the 19th century. Bentham is among philosophers what Martin Tupper is among poets. Both could only have been manufactured in England.

Imagine if libs came along with wit like this. Unlikely, still, but is it worth the risk?

(A: yes)

Just be careful with the dunks or they’ll use them against us lol

How many videos do they have about the British and French?

I don’t understand pre-ordering games at all. Do they limit sales somehow? Can’t you just buy it on the day it’s released? I only play games when they come down in price so I’ve never tried to buy a game on release day.

(Books, however, I regularly pre-order but only when I know the author has finished the book and there’s a definite release date; this way it gets shipped to arrive on the release date and I can help authors get up the best seller list (that’s why you see all those obscure Marxists at the top of the NYT bestseller list all the time – it’s me buying one copy).)

Tbf they do sound like they could be a Marxist now.

It’s very easy to get drawn in. I’m probably wrong about it most of the time because the bourgeoisie isn’t all powerful; but for the sake of my own mental health I assume that people I’m arguing with online are paid agents. Either state agents or agents for companies/industries. The effect is the same either way.

People who would die on the hill of e.g. individual modes of transport may as well be paid agents. And they won’t ever try to understand your point because they affiliate themselves with e.g. fossil capital like a Roman client to their patron.

It helps to see that there was never a clean break from feudalism to capitalism; an echo of those past relations is still with us. It helps (me) to see e.g. liberals as subservient to their overlord(s) in the same way as knights to their lords. It should be assumed that their loyalty to the ‘system’ and to the haute bourgeoisie isn’t questioned.

In a way the people you’re arguing with are all paid agents, if sometimes indirectly. Either as members of the bourgeoisie, labour aristocrats, or compraadors. They see it as their job to proselytise for capital. Any counter narrative or facts are heresies.

Not everyone is like this but once you realise the other person is like this, there’s almost zero point in getting worked up about them not understanding you or speaking in good faith; if they could, they would rather burn you at the stake to keep you quiet. It often feels like they do the online version of that, too, as they scorch any possibility of rational conversation with one of their many – intentional, if occasionally subconscious – tactics.

Good points. It’s more effort to opt out. And many parents will surely appreciate the fact they can tap their watch and say, ‘I don’t make the rules’. It can be hard for parents to limit things like this ‘because their friends are online’, etc. So this rule will make it easier for parents to be united against tech-creep.

A day, I’d have thought.

Where was this? Here? I feel like I would know that you were proposing public transportation as an alternative/solution to the massively inefficient system where every individual gets their own vehicle.

Got me, too, lol. Had to double check the user name before I got to the end of the first sentence.

It took me a while to find the links, but I hope these help:

• Learning languages, step-by-step
• Starting with Chinese, some resources

These posts/comments may also be of use:

• Listening-Reading (LR) method (using Spanish as an example, but it works with any language)
• Summary of the LR method
• Some tips for making your own Anki decks (spaced repetition cards) if you fancy that
• Some tips on playing games and using word lists to learn vocabulary

Let me know if you have questions.

It’s difficult for Anglo-Europeans not to imagine people in other countries starving because it’s so widespread and normalised in the imperial core. With such abundance yet so much hunger in the west, it’s no wonder that westerners struggle to comprehend how other states could feed their population with just enough to go around (i.e. no great abundance). (Not that libs tend to care what the actual food stats are in AES, just like they don’t care what the yanks said about calorific intake in the USSR.)

The biggest non-tech problem, is just the overwhelming amount of notifications.

Is there anything users could do to help mitigate this? I think the recommendation for reporting bugs is to use the GitHub page. But for other issues?

Maybe a numbering system would help: so if a user tagged a dev, they start with a 1 for urgent, 2 for neutral(?), or 3 for ‘ignore if you’re busy’. There will be a problem of some users overemohasising their issue but it still might save time/attention overall as most users will likely respect such a system.

Or maybe a novel use of a dev community, which would allow the user base to help determine which issues are noteworthy?

Before coming to Lemmygrad I realise I was fucking clueless about privacy and security. I thought I knew but I wasn’t even close.