• 0 Posts
  • 52 Comments
Joined 11 days ago
cake
Cake day: November 23rd, 2024

help-circle





  • South Korea is an even deeper oligarchy than the US. All Yoon has to do is secure the majority of that oligarchy’s opinion and they will essentially enforce the political line through the chaebols (family owned megacorps) they control. Chaebols have immense power over normal people because they’re effectively the only way to be upper-middle/middle class in Korea. Chaebol employment practices are obscene to the point where you can be not hired/fired for being ugly which is why SK has such a high rate of plastic surgery.

    There’s a real play here. The jury is still out if it’s “enough”. You can’t really “vote away” martial law in SK, in the same way you cannot legislate the President to be ethical in the US. Most of the real politics of capitalist societies don’t happen in senate chambers, they happen in backrooms.

    Edit: and it looks like the coup fell apart





  • I think this is a magnitude and direction argument.

    Fashion is changing direction still, however it’s cultural magnitude is much lower because “out of date” styles don’t actually stop being produced.

    The other issue is that for RTW there’s not really any significant mainstream evolution of new clothing, people aren’t really mainstreaming tech wear, they’re mainstreaming tech-wear lite for the finance bro office.



  • Yeah the problem with living in capitalist hellworld at the heart of the empire is that you have two separated insular communities of leftists that are knife fighting rings. One in meetings and one on message boards, and they frequently know nothing about each other.

    While the meetings communists sometimes eke out wins like Kshama Sawant, they often struggle to connect to the message board communists who really should be their base. Meanwhile both struggle to connect to society at large.

    What’s really funny is that most meetings communists I know locally essentially think of him in essentially the same way message board communists think of AOC. Most meetings communists cannot stand his level of yadda yadda when pressed on any specifics he often just goes more general and says things like ‘I just want everyone to have healthcare bro’.


  • Because this is a plain instance of him not being a class traitor to further his own career and desires.

    The reality of the “stop pocket watching” argument that Hasan has successfully deployed on his fans and friends is that it’s the same argument every rich person pulls out when you question how they spend their money and what that practically says about their place and ideas for society at large.

    My argument isn’t that “people shouldn’t live in LA” (okay fine maybe it is a little). My argument is that Hasan made the same choice that every influencer makes.

    Beyond the very obvious influencer argument, how exactly do you think that upper middle class comes to support capitalism as a whole? They get addicted to their level of consumption like every wealthy class has done for millennia.

    So the underlying argument there isn’t “Hasan doesn’t deserve nice things”, it’s that “Hasan’s appetite for nice things is a form of class expression” and there is a point of where that class expression and the addiction to consumption overrides any “do socialism” argument that you say on stream.

    This is literally how the nomenklatura got fat in the USSR, they didn’t have streams but they had their local, national, and general assembly soviets. Every post-Soviet person knows an uncle who was a party apparatchik and stopped saying “do socialism” the moment the wall came down, and he was one out of maybe two/three guys in your whole extended family who happened to have a car prior to 1995. I have 3 of such uncles and 2 of them aren’t even blood relatives.

    Y’all are getting wrecked by the same attitudes that wrecked the USSR and y’all don’t even have state capitalism with socialist characteristics.

    The real problem here is that Hasan doesn’t admit these things. Hasan can’t admit these things because he doesn’t know these things. Hasan is very limited in his knowledge of “socialism”, he’s a guy who just says shit on stream. Being a class traitor is a cool coat he wears along with all his other cool coats.

    I struggle to even call myself a class traitor despite the fact that I have Eastern European thrift embedded so deeply in my veins that I live way below my means. Guess what class expression doesn’t stop there. Being thrifty doesn’t stop you from being compromised by your class. That money doesn’t sit under my mattress it’s invested, which means I’m in a class of people who not only will have private money for retirement but I’m invested in the outcomes of the market like every upper middle class person.

    So I’m sorry that I don’t buy the whole class traitor shit, because neither the fans giving him that title nor he can actually untangle and explain his place in the world beyond saying “stop pocket watching”. It’s one thing to call yourself a class traitor because you bought a cool eat the rich shirt, it’s another thing to actually take inventory of your life and apply socialist theory to figure that out.