I’m in my 40s and I’m really glad I got into martial arts back in my 20s and kept up with it.

that’s right, authoritarian just like your bedtime

To make sense of our current political moment, and to understand why electoral politics under capitalism is a stage managed by and for the wealthy, we must turn to one of the most consequential political thinkers of the last century: Vladimir Lenin.

If you were educated in the US, you almost certainly never encountered Lenin. Not in your high school textbooks, not in your university lecture halls. You will not see his ideas debated seriously on the corporate news channels. No mainstream politician, not even the most progressive, would dare utter his name.

It’s rather is a curious omission, is it not? For a man whose ideas shook the world, inspiring millions of workers to shake off their chains and establishing the official ideology of some of the largest countries on the planet.

So, in the land of free speech, why is the work of such a globally monumental figure treated as a forbidden text? Why is a thinker who provides a master-key to understanding modern imperialism and state power so diligently scrubbed from the curriculum?

Even at the most elite universities, in political science departments that posture as fonts of rigorous inquiry, you will not read Lenin. You will not be asked to critique him.

You might find a sanitized, fleeting reference to Marx, often dwarfed by the required reading of boosterish pieces from The Economist. In fact, at places like Harvard, the curriculum often reads less like political science and more like a corporate training manual. So why is Lenin a forbidden subject of study even in an adversarial way?

The answer is not complicated. Lenin’s genius was to lucidly dissect the rotting core of the capitalist system, exposing contradictions that cannot be patched over with mere reforms. And he did not stop at critique. He was not a moralist or an utopian, content with moral posturing.

And that is his unpardonable crime. Lenin wrote about the actual mechanics of seizing power, about smashing the bourgeois state and building a proletarian one. He provided a concrete analysis of how to win. This is the kind of dangerous knowledge the system cannot abide. It cannot be refuted, so it must be disappeared.

Consider the irony of how we would rightly condemn the Soviet Union as a brainwashed society if its citizens were taught to hate capitalism without ever reading Adam Smith. We would call it crude propaganda. Yet, millions of Americans are taught to reflexively recoil at the word communism by a system that ensures they will never encounter its theories.

What we find in practice is not free speech and academic freedom, but ideological policing. The very question of whether we could organize our economy differently is rendered unaskable. Those who advocate for a world beyond capitalism are systematically excluded from every institution that shapes public thought.

So, if you have any genuine belief in free inquiry, you have a duty to seek out the ideas that the guardians of power have placed beyond the pale.

Resources on Lenin:

State and Revolution https://marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/index.htm

What Is To Be Done? https://marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/index.htm

Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism https://marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/index.htm

They are completely different servers with no relation to each other. Lemmy is primarily developed by @nutomic@lemmy.ml and @dessalines@lemmy.ml neither of whom are Canadian.

You really gotta learn how Lemmy actually works. It’s not a centralized website like reddit, it’s a federated platform with many different instances. Since lemmy.ca is an instance set up specifically for Canada, it’s no surprise that it mostly has people from Canada on it. That’s in no way representative of Lemmy as a whole.

Yes, Lemmy has grown significantly in the past two years. Hexbear has also become federated with other Lemmy instances since, which alone would completely change the demographics.

I love how you jump straight to assuming other people are dumber than you. Yet, as I’ve already explained, I start with asking people I know about their experiences first. I also don’t buy things until I actually find I have need for them.

would be neat, maybe somebody will make a server to mirror it to loops :)

indeed

You just have to start using non western platforms like Xiao Hong Shu and reading media from outside the west.

All the time. When I actually need something, then I’ll go do a bit of research on different products based on feedback from friends, and what people online say, then use that to inform what I buy. I can’t think of any product I bought because it was advertised to me.

If you’re in the west then it’s worse now because capitalism is reaching the stages of systemic collapse. For people living in countries like China or Vietnam the picture is quite different. They see their lives improving each and every day. They have clean cities, great infrastructure, and a rate of technological progress we can only dream of. Those of us living in the west are living through a similar collapse to the one that happened in USSR in the 90s, but the west is only 13% of the world population.

AliExpress

I mean here’s what top British military people are saying https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/ukraine-russia-war-defeat-david-richards-world-of-trouble-podcast-b2844349.html

Meanwhile, you don’t seem to understand how wars of attrition work. The goal of the Russian army is to destroy the fighting capacity of the AFU. They’re not aiming for territorial gains, they’re destroying the army, and that necessarily takes time. When the army collapses, they’re going to be able to take whatever territory they want and dictate their terms. Go read up on how things went in WW2, the front was largely static for most of the war, and then the Red Army marched to Berlin in a matter of months.

The same source that’s been telling you that Ukraine is winning the war. But hey if you still believe that, what else is there to tell you.

They have no large scale manufacturing at this point because Russia can hit anywhere in Ukraine with impunity, and does large strikes on daily basis now. On top of that, Ukrainian energy grid is on its last legs now. https://archive.ph/vRYOO

If you actually believe these stories of Ukraine working on their own missiles then you’re a highly credulous individual. The article you linked is from August, and we’ve seen zero evidence for any of what it says being true. I guess some people still can’t learn to spot bullshit after having been lied to by western media for the past three years.

What’s happening is that, unlike the Europeans, the US is trying to find an off ramp because they understand that they lost their proxy war.

wait till you find out that you need things like factories and electricity to produce missiles

In any stable society, leaders represent the interests of a constituency that backs them and keeps them in power.