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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • The top comment on this thread contains a conversation (argument) about Chomsky’s view on the term “genocide,” as well as his verbiage discussing Serbian-run concentration camps.

    I listened to Understanding Power fairly recently and it definitely changed my outlook and broke me out of the lull of neoliberal self-satisfaction, and helped introduce me to other leftist writers. So I’m a fan of Chomsky’s, but it doesn’t sound like he had that good of a take on the Bosnian genocide. He seems to only reserve the word genocide for the Holocaust so as to keep its significance, and despite supporting a UN fact-finding commission that did find Serbia was running concentration camps, he refers to said camps as “refugee camps,” instead, and seems to infer people had the freedom to stay or leave as they please (even if this was technically true, I doubt it was practically true).

    So, not a good look for him, even though he had other viewpoints that I’ve been strongly influenced by.


  • Have you happened to read the book? He has a chapter dedicated to his decision to call it technofeudalism rather than capitalism, hypercapitalism, technocapitalism, etc. Basically he’s saying profits have been decoupled from a company’s value, and that it’s no longer about creating a product to exchange for profit (which, in his words, are beholden to market competition) but instead about extracting rent (which is not beholden to competition – his example is while a landowner’s neighbors increase the values of their properties, the landowner’s property value also increases).

    Anyways he describes Amazon, Apple store, Google Play, cloud service providers, as fiefdoms that collect rent from actual producers of products (physical goods, but also applications), and don’t actually produce anything, themselves, besides access to customers, while also extracting value from users of their technologies through personal information. They’re effectively leasing consumer attention in the same way landowners leased their lands to workers.

    It sounds pretty accurate to me, but I haven’t had much time to chew on it. What’s your take on that idea?












  • Dude. I found a working baratza preciso at savers for $11 a couple days after I realized the same thing and decided I’d start hunting for an espresso grinder.

    It was the perfect confluence of timing, interest in making different style coffees, and unwillingness to spend a fortune.

    Undoubtedly my best thrift store find.

    Now I can get pretty much like 75% of the way to real espresso (won’t get crema, but whatever) with my free secondhand aeropress and my $11 grinder. It’s amazing. Another $15 for a milk frother and I’m making yummy cappuccino style drinks easy peasy




  • Hell yeah. I just read Guards, Guards! by Pratchett and I’m working through LotR again. Dune is amazing, but I haven’t continued past the original so maybe I’ll read those next.

    If you’re into history, I’ve been listening to The People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn, it focuses on each major historical event from the perspective of the regular individual person rather than focusing on the people who happened to be in power during them, and it’s pretty good so far. I also read Understanding Power by Noam Chomsky, and that was life changing. Those are two pretty political ones, though.

    In terms of fiction Id recommend Cormac McCarthy – either The Road or Blood Meridian – The Road is a post apocalyptic story about a father traversing through the ashen environment with his son, while Blood Meridian is a brutal Western set in the 1800s. With both of these, it’s not as much about plot as it is about the poetry of the writing.

    I haven’t read a scifi book in a minute, but I haven’t seen a lot of people recommend A Canticle for Leibowitz. It’s three separate-but-connected short post-apocalyptic stories that follow the gradual resurgence of humans after a nuclear event. It’s really subtle in that it doesn’t slam you with like a whole universe and systems like Dune, but it’s expertly written and hits some pretty thought provoking topics. Def underrated.