Mathematics student who upon completion of his degree was ripped from the university’s caring bosom and cast into the ghastly cold world of employment

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Cake day: February 2nd, 2021

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  • It’s a plush toy that can be turned inside out, which Greta Thunberg famously had in the background of a picture of herself and her friends in support of Palestine. According to liberals on Twitter, it vaguely resembled an octopus from some antisemitic caricature; which (1) was only true in the way that the Big Dipper resembles an actual dipper and (2) if you make this kind of association unprompted it says more about you than about Ms Thunberg or Palestine









  • No, obviously there were exploiters and rent-seekers during the Bronze Age, but capital has a distinct dynamic as opposed to other means of production such as land, namely that it can be expanded: A hectar of land in an agrarian society only produces so much grain, vegetables, or livestock every year, but the only upper limit for the production of machinery is the amount of available labour.

    A land-owner can only expand at the expense of other land-owners, while capitalists also can - and are even required to - expand at the expense of the workers they employ. They use machinery and labour to obtain wealth and then use that to obtain more machinery, and so on. This arrangement has a dynamic of exponential growth, which no previous form of production had, and therefore capitalists are in a position to shape society in vast excess of what land-owners can and could do.


  • HaSch@lemmygrad.mltoMemes@lemmygrad.mlJesus and Capitalists
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    11 months ago

    There weren’t any capitalists around the time of Jesus’ death. The word “Capitalist” refers to someone who extracts surplus value from labour by owning the capital - either machines and factories, or the financial means thereto - which workers operate. A capitalist can only exist in the context of industrialing or industrialised society, and there were no such societies during the Bronze Age.



  • Eating a lot is not the original meaning of gluttony in Catholic mythology. If you look at some of the self-evident deadly sins like envy, pride, greed, or wrath, you see these don’t refer to a specific action you commit, but rather an abstract emotional attitude, a “pre-sin” from which actual sins stem. For instance, sloth is not you spending an afternoon on the couch, it refers to a general lack of goals and eagerness to the point that it is harmful to you; and lust does not refer to having a lot of sex, it refers to your thoughts being dominated by desire. In the case of gluttony, it refers to a general obsession with having things in excess of what is good for you.

    On a side note, in German traffic law they later came to mean the seven ways of wrongful driving that warrant criminal prosecution: Not respecting right-of-way (pride), wrongfully passing other cars (envy), driving wrong at pedestrian crossings (gluttony), driving too fast at an intersection (greed), not driving in the right lane (wrath), attempting to turn on motorways (lust), and failing to mark defective cars in traffic (sloth).





  • HaSch@lemmygrad.mltoMemes@lemmygrad.mlDemocracy!
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    11 months ago

    We do not support the DPRK because of any supposed liberal-democratic trappings. We support it because despite suffocating under US-American pressure, its government compares exceptionally favourably to others with similar national wealth, eg. Somalia and Haiti, when it comes to development of its own material conditions as well as the quality of life; which is why it is frankly delusional to conceive of the West installing any government in North Korea, be it dictatorial or democratic, that makes better of the poor resources than the current one.