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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 13th, 2023

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  • I had an apartment where the landlord had clearly painted right before I moved in, and had done so with an ungodly thick layer of latex paint. That’s fair enough for the walls… I hope it wasn’t to cover up mold, but he was very thorough. He did paint over the outlets and some hinges too. But even worse he also painted the bathtub/shower combo. Like… the whole thing, including the sloped interior basin of the tub.

    Not only is that fucking weird, it’s also a major hazard as ot turns out. Did you know that latex paint is very slippery when wet? I do now. Had to cover the bottom of the tub in adhesive strips of traction tape to not crack my skull open. What’s more, latex paint is not meant to be applied to bathtub, nor is it meant to be bombarded with hot water every day for months on end. So as you can imagine, shortly after moving in, paint would periodically bubble up and chip off

    By the time I moved out, a little over a year later, almost all of the paint had peeled off the bottom surface of the tub revealing the heavily lime scale stained surface they tried to cover up. So glad they tried to kill me with a frictionless curved bathtub bottom rather than to replace, properly clean or even just leave the bathtub as is.




  • Don’t conflate a legal problem that is already not taken seriously and addressed enough with another thing entirely. Real wage theft is already illegal and pathways to remedy that wage theft exist as long as people take it very seriously. What is described in this meme is also a problem and also needs addressed. However it is entirely, 1000% legal to keep wages low while you rack in rescord profits, and many capitalists would argue that you should. By conflating an actual legal issue wish a subjective moral one, you make it easier to excuse the legal issue as just another subjective moral issue that can be ignored and exploited.

    They are different things that have different remedies and different access to those remedies right now. You’re not strengthening the definition of wage theft to give more power to this new issue. You’re weakening both.







  • Real communism doesn’t need a single leader to maintain control or tonact altruistically. Real communism doesn’t have a single leader at all. Resources and control are shared by the citizenry, decentralized to the community, thus the name. I’m by no means an expert on the ideal workings of a national scale communist control structure, but the point would be to form a stateless nation without any bourgeoisie in control anymore, but rather everyone would be of the proletariat and the proletariat would share control.

    But you have hit the nail on the head of the problem with the transition to communism that I was alluding to. Normally it requires a populist party to overthrow or fundamentally reform a national system of governance. They take total control of the government and then total control of the nation’s resources, factories, properties… the “means of production”… from the bourgeoisie. That part has happened several times in history. It is the rest of the transition that has failed to occur every time. What is meant to happen next is that they then relinquish those means of production back to the proletariat, set up the means of self-governance, and then dissolve themselves and the central government. That has never happened.

    The problem is that, once the nation falls under the control of one party, it does require the leader(s) of that party to act, as you said, with pure altruism and willingly give up absolute power. And typically people that become party leaders are the kind of people that seek power and that do not like others having control. The problem is that the process as described requires people that are driven and insentivized to lead a major national reform. And then it needs those same people to act against their own nature and self-interest for ideology and the greater good. This is why that power had never been decentralized in any real world example of a transition to communism. That is what is meant when we say that there has never been a real communist country. There has never been one without a single party/dictator is control. There has never been a decentralized control of resources and power on a national scale. Those things have only ever been achieved on a community level to this date, and those communities struggle as they still must function under and within a capitalist system.


  • They really really don’t like the fact that a real communist state has never existed. They don’t like that they have to understand what communism (or any unfamiliar concept to them) actually is, and they can’t just point at a failure of a state and use it to paint the entire concept with that failure brush. There is a fundamental flaw with the prescribed process of transitioning to a communist state that makes creating an authoritarian dictatorship that prevents the final transition almost an inevitably. That flaw is real and has been demonstrated many times. But that doesn’t mean that the basic concept of a communist state is bad, just that the process that’s been attempted is. I’m not even in favor of communism, myself, but I do find it annoying when my father-in-law uses it like a slur when he doesnt even know what it really means, and reduces it down to stealing from the rich like this guy. Communism is actually a lovely idea on paper, and a true communist state, should one ever arise, would likely be a nice place to live. But I don’t know for sure because a real communist state has never been formed.