Ask Lemmygrad

I am highly interested in the history of the Colombian struggle: the FARC, the ELN, the current dissident movement and questions around its legitimacy and the peace process. But also other movements across Latin America, such as the Sandanistas and their fight against the Contras. Peru - namely the ML groups who the Gonzaloids fought against (i.e. Tupac Amaru Shakur Movement). Also good Marxist/ML critiques of the Shining Path given that pretty much everything I've read about them comes from bourgeois sources or from terminally online Maoists who seem to merely "support" the Shining Path to seem edgy or whatever, whereas there is almost universal agreement amongst tendencies that the Shining Path were reactionary, bloodthirsty lunatics.

But yeah, any good books on Latin American struggles are of interest but at the moment, I am looking to learn about Colombia and the revolutionary struggle there and the brutal role of imperialism in arming the far right "paramilitaries"/death squads (which reminds me of the arming of "loyalists" in the Irish Republican struggle covertly but the latter being on a microcosmic scale), also whether there is any legitimacy to the dissident movement in Colombia. As for the role of imperialism - the School of the Americas trained death squads etc. - books or articles on this generally would be of interest.

EDIT: Can a mod move this to history perhaps? Seems more suited there. I'm still looking through communities and getting a feel for the site.

I'd like something that goes over the American interference in the region, debunks myths about the Shah's government (for example, I've seen people here mention that only the wealthy dressed like westerners) and explains how the Iranian revolution happened.

Is Targeting Iran any good? I know Chomsky has some shit takes but he usually does a good job dismantling US narrative & propaganda

I got made fun of as a child by a parent for doing art and just... never did any ever afterwards. I primarily hang around artists tho and would like to relate to them more, but none of them do creative writing. I've read numerous grammar books, so that won't be a problem, but none really go in to how to construct a sentence, paragraph, page, chapter, plot, etc. I'll happily take any advice on the subject, really anything you can think for someone with actually zero experience.

Good advice I've gotten so far is to just write basically whatever. Also, people who are visual artists and creative writers, which was "easier" for you to become fluent?

They say that he who creates AGI will control the entire world. I wouldn’t want America to dominate earth with their misaligned AI.

I saw someone on hexbear mention it a while ago, and went on my own research rabbit hole. It seems pretty cool, and I believe it could cure diseases and increase health in general, it’s just hard. The jist is a Soviet doctor named Buteyko realized breathing less and increasing CO2 in one’s body can greatly improve health. His method is to do lots of breath exercises, stay active, and eat healthily. I’ve been doing 15 minutes of exercises everyday for a few weeks, but it’s slow, and my control pause is a terrible 9 (probably part of why I’m always tired. Fuck school for making me wake up at an unnatural time and making me sit so long). The people around me irl that I’ve mentioned it to seem to think it’s too hard or a waste of time. For better or worse, I’m also a modernist, believing in human “perfectibility” with the right conditions and influences.

https://www.reddit.com/r/buteyko/comments/c8px11/start_here_intro_faq_of_rbuteyko/

https://www.reddit.com/r/Meditation/comments/fjh47l/a_buddhist_monks_experience_with_buteyko/

What do you think? Is it legit? Do any of you practice?

Just read On Practice. While reading it I thought about the scientific method since that's generally how the process to synthesize theory in the context of science is set out. But here, you need a hypothesis, a piece of theory with which you try to predict the result of a series of conditions within reality. This theory must come from a certain understanding of reality acquired beforehand. Therefore, for someone to use the scientific method, that person must have some experience, however flawed, in relation to the subject. Would this be correct? Does the process in which you begin to interpret data with no theory coming before it (which would kinda be the birth of a science), have a name?

I am starting to see more anti cuban known news outlets posting that Ecuador was not the first to violate an Embassy but Cuba. Can I disregard this as fake news?

The tweet in english is the following:

On February 21, 1981, Cuban special troops forcibly took over the Ecuadorian embassy to arrest dissidents seeking asylum. For those who say there is no precedent.

I just saw this campaign in my email to try to send wheat to cuba.

Does anyone know if this campaign should be avoided? Or maybe if there is a better competing one?

Thanks in advance for the insight comrades.

I see this claim made a lot: that the Soviet Union achieved economic growth that has never been seen before or after, so threw it at some angry Redditor. They brought up Japan/ South Korea from 1950-1990 and looking into it, it seems as though they are comparable, at least when using GDP South Korea actually does a lot better than the Soviet Union. Now this leaves out rapid Industrialization which I assume is what is meant with "unparraleled economic growth" and also GDP may not be the best indicator but it's still impressive. Of course Japan and SK were also subsidized by the US. Am I missing something? and does anyone have good sources on the growth of the Soviet Economy from 1921-1990?

I was especially taken by Ho Chi Minh's quote from On revolutionary morality and thought it would be great to have a comm for discussion on each of these. It's not something I'd like to run but is anyone else interested?

recently i stumbled with this banger here https://blogdaboitempo.com.br/2024/03/27/pele-negra-alucinacoes-brancas-capitalismo-ia-e-racializacao/.

but it is on brazilian portuguese, even tho translation tool built in browser do the job, the article itself is of low circulation due to language and the target audience, so i want to know if there is a website where i can post a hand crafted translation to be easier to find for people outside brazil.

also im new into this kinda of thing, do i need to get permission from the author or something?

Perhaps the most controversial post I have made so far.

The Media in my country (Philippines) seems to always be talking about the South China/West Philippine Sea nowadays, especially now that water cannons have been used on a Philippine vessel. Granted, the SCS/WPS issue has existed for many years already, but now it seems like this issue has been getting escalated with time, especially with the US and its allies getting involved.

"Later Saturday, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson alleged that the Philippine boat had been attempting "to send construction materials to the illegally grounded military vessel" at Second Thomas Shoal "for its repair and reinforcement."

[...]

An [sic] statement released earlier in the day by the China Coast Guard, meanwhile, claimed that the Philippines had broken a promise to remove the grounded vessel by sending two coast guard ships and a supply ship into the waters near Second Thomas Shoal, 18 days after it last supplied the outpost." According to Japan Times

I seriously do not want my country to become another Ukraine ~~(though it probably will, unfortunately, with the way things seem to be going)~~ (This portion has been rendered obsolete, see Edit), but I would like to hear second opinions on this issue. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I also believe Revolutionary Defeatism can come into play here.

"During a reactionary war a revolutionary class cannot but desire the defeat of its government."

Edit: Very insightful comments here. Much is appreciated, Comrades!

A quick summary of the responses given here, credits to comrades @infuziSporg and @Neptium: China has no current motivation to invade the Philippines (no historical land or sizable Chinese-speaking population, and no tactical advantage gained from invading), and the US and its allies are taking advantage of and escalating this situation to break ASEAN neutrality and threaten other ASEAN countries, with the Philippines merely being a pawn to further this cause.

One theory I've heard about the accelerating of the worsening conditions of western proletariat is that the USSR used to provide a bulwark against things getting too bad. People would point at the USSR and the illusion that capitalism was better for individual prosperity would collapse in comparison. Then, with the USSR gone things have been deteriorating for the past ~30 years.

If that is true, even somewhat, why haven't we seen a similar effect from China's example? Is the theory simply wrong? Maybe western capitalism is just unable to even offer scraps from the table at this point. Maybe people are unaware of how things are in China? Could we dare to expect that China's example will force a lifting of the boot from our necks?

So here I am finding out about instrumental and structural Marxism.

The problem is that the main promoters of both theories were anti soviet. So my question is. Are there any sources of either Marx, Lenin, Stalin or Mao and what they thought about it?

I can imagine that maybe the terms instrumental and structural could've been coined after their death. But I can also imagine they had some thoughts on similar concepts

Being on Lemmy has made me realize that not having to constantly deal with nazis on your instance kind of rocks and I want that same experience on the rest of the federation.

I'm currently on mastodon.social and matrix.org and have had my problems with both but don't know where a good place to move would be. Help me find a better place to set up on the federation. This thread was spurred by https://lemmy.ml/post/13634062 but really it's been a problem i've been having for awhile now and would like to take preventative actions before liberalism starts to become hardcore nazified.

I've noticed some users here have mentioned the work of Paul Cockshott and I'm interested in looking into the computational aspects of planning.

I already know a bit about operations research, but couldn't find a good introductory paper about modern economic planning theories, specially since stuff like Google Scholar ranks by citations.

I'm currently reading "Towards a New Socialism" but it doesn't look like it'll delve too deeply into algorithms as far as I've got. Should I drop it and look into "Classical Econophysics" first? Or does anybody know a more technical book that I should look into?

This is mainly for Portuguese comrades as they’re probably the most familiar with him but anyone can answer. I see this man constantly on SIC Notícias and all he really talks about is the Ukraine/Russia/NATO war. He’s also got a segment called “Guerra Fria” which comes on frequently enough. Mind you, I can’t understand most of what he and the other people say but I can read the headlines underneath and can pick up context words. He’s always talking about Ucrânia and that got me curious about him due to how seemingly passionate he is about the topic.

I looked him up and from what I can gather he’s a journalist (obviously) who used to be a communist and lived in the USSR. Apparently his time living in the Soviet Union pushed him away from communism and he is now a staunch anti-communist, someone on Twitter called this being “vaccinated.” He has a blog and he even made an entry back in 2014 about the neo-Nazi problem in Ukraine. He switched up real quick. In 2022 he even said that the difference between Putin and Hitler is that Putin has nuclear weapons… what?

Obviously there’s the language barrier (there shouldn’t be but my family was not great in teaching me) that’s keeping me from having a deeper and better analysis so that’s why I’m asking here. Is anyone else more familiar with this guy? Why is he such a big deal in Portugal? Also does anyone know why he’s like this? Is there anything about his cohost Nuno Rogeiro?

Maybe this isn’t important, but I get annoyed every time I see him on screen and I want to know if anyone else feels the same. I ask now because he was brought on to talk about the recent terrorist attack in Moscow, I don’t know what he said about it, or how he feels, but he did talk about it.