Democracy is when we compromise between what the people want and what the proprietors want, in a 1:10 ratio of course.

Well, as far as I am aware, the distinction between stage 3 and 4 is not a hard line and kind of blurry.

the latter is how this interaction feels for me, hopefully it does for you too <3)

I feel that way too

As far as I can understand, the stages are

1. The sign is considered to bear a close resemblance to its refferant
2. The sign is considered to be a distorted image of the thing being referred to
3. There is an absence of the referred to object. Sometimes we might question whether or not it even existed, but we know what is being refered to, even if we know nothing about the referred to object.
4. The sign has no relation to the original referred to object. It just is, and few/no one knows or bothers to find out the original context.

An example that I found online:

Stage 1: You have a word processor that saves the paper you wrote to a floppy disk with a button. The button has an icon that looks like a floppy disk.

The sign (floppy disk button) directly refers to the action of saving on an actual floppy disk.

Stage 2: Your word processor saves the paper you wrote to somewhere on your computer. You can choose to save to a floppy disk with it, or to your hard drive, or perhaps some other location. The button has an icon of a floppy disk, as that is what save buttons do.

The floppy disk icon is misleading, as you don’t have to save on a floppy disk. But you can still save on a floppy disk if you want.

Stage 3: You have a word processor that saves your paper to someplace, perhaps your hard drive, perhaps one of these newfangled CDs. The save icon retains the image of a floppy disk.

*The floppy disk is gone, but you still remember it. *

Stage 4: You write your paper in google docs, you click the save icon and it is saved to the cloud. You know it’s the save icon because it’s the save icon everywhere. You don’t know what it depicts; you were born in 2005 and have never heard of a “floppy disk”

In the case of pepe the frog, it is an alt right symbol. Why? I don’t know and most people don’t know. It just is. For the squirrel/garbage image, we know what is being referred to since it happened very recently, so at most it is stage 3. The symbol is also still referring to the original stories of PNUT and Biden’s “garbage” comment. So it is actually stage 2. I wouldn’t call it stage 1 because the symbol is combining 2 stories that had no original relation and creating new meaning out of it. There is a distortion of the original.

Yes, because historical materialism is now racism.

It is also racist to consider that the history of power structures in a country/region will impact future power structures.

That isn’t what you said. You said, and I quote

My whole point on the Xinjiang topic was that you all chose to ignore chinese history that goes pretty much as far as we have written history of it, explaining the whole way of dealing with minorities by forced assimilation, coming from the clanic and dynastic organization of Chinese provinces for millenias.

Which is pure bullshit and completely flies in the face of historical materialism. Not only have you failed to explain how “clanic and dynastic organisation of chinese provinces” is relevant to the forced assimilation of minorities, but you have also failed to explain how this “impacts future power structures”. Are you saying that the PRC is organised on clan and dynastic lines?

And furthermore, the idea that thousands of years of forced assimilation of minorities would be continued despite the transition of the mode of production from slavery all the way to primitive socialism is completely absurd and flies in the face of historical materialism. You have not posited a historically contingent/transient process, you have posited a static unchanging constant of Chinese culture, which is apparently to genocide minorities.

You chose to ignore the whole area of study about sinicization, which is pretty much that subject, and you also chose to ignore how similar the situation is between the PRC and provinces that want to be independant, to what Israel is doing with Palestine, which stems from the same imperialistic logic. You chose to ignore that the acceleration in the settlement and ethnic erasure of the Xinjiang province is strangely close to the acceleration of the BRI project.

You have not even considered that the so called “sinicization” occuring today in China amongst minorities is simply the natural result of economic integration. Any nation is constituted of community of people united by language, territory and economic life. When underdeveloped minority regions are integrated into the broader national economy, they gradually loose their minority character. How do you think France came to be? Did the French nation simply exist from the beginning of time? Or did it form after various minority groups were brought under the same government under one market?

Furthermore, that you would compare palestine to xinjang betrays your lack of understand of either region’s history and utterly privileged position as an imperialist, who cannot tell the difference between live streamed mass murder and economic development where God forbid, a people’s culture is changing in ways you don’t like.

even if they claim to “disagree” with the methods.

Nah, they don’t even pretend. Just watch them talk about “terrorists”. Liberals unsurprisingly have a full on statist view of violence. Their violence to protect property is legitimate and all other violence is illegitimate.

Don’t tell him about WW2

We ain’t reached stage 4 yet. This is just stage 3 or maybe even 2. Stage 4 is when alt righters will adopt squirrels as their symbol and some years down the line no one will even remember why. You will have memes using squirrels and grifters selling merch because that’s just a thing now. It will be like pepe the frog.

Virtually any geo-engineering solution will have horrific side effects. It’s a matter of how systems work. You can easily control a linear system with a feedback loop. We know all of the math and the equations are easy (if sometimes tedious) to solve by hand or by computer. For some non-linear systems, you can approximate them as linear and control them that way. For other non-linear systems like the climate, which are chaotically non-linear, only god can help you.

Hell, even if the climate did respond linearly (enough), controlling it would still be very difficult. For an N-order linear system (that is, there are N number of states, or energy storing “devices” in the system), you need to continuously provide N inputs in a precisely calculated way to control it. You also need at least N sensors to be able to keep track of the N states, whether directly or indirectly. On top of that, we would still need massive amounts of energy and materials to actually provide the control inputs.

If you did all that, then geo-engineers could control the climate in a predictable way. But the thing is, in political consciousness, very few people actually know what it would take to control the climate. Most people think of geo-engineering as a cheap and quick way of solving climate change. It is not.

To use an analogy, imagine you are driving your car off a cliff. You could press the brakes (reduce emissions), or you could build a paraglider, attach it to your car and then fly off the cliff (geo-engineering).

If Trump wins, the libs won’t shut up, and if Kamala wins, the chuds will do another jan 6th and the libs still won’t shut up. The election is eternal and all consuming 😔

how vegans could eat Impossible Burgers despite them being tested on animals

Wait, what? How do you test a burger on an animal and why?

Tragic story but what the hell does this have to do with the election?

Squirrel?

Speedrunner levels of commitment lmao.

Europe will become Putinland!

Damn, we might actually get a functioning economy

Communism = abolish currency is not an incorrect way of viewing communism. It’s just incomplete.

It is a trend that has worried European officials. “We are losing the appeal of the EU to brute Russian force,” said one western official in Tbilisi.

The appeal of what? Forever austerity?

I think the story is actually a lot more fascist if you think of it as “the eldians (race of the protags) is what fascists see themselves as”, because

1. Eldians are natural ubermensch with divine biological powers and are connected to each other across time and space by blood
2. Eldians are the underdogs in the story fighting against a world where literally every country hates them to an unreasonable degree
3. Eldians are forced to live in stagnation and humility (versailles treaty) because they lost a war when their king betrayed them (back stab myth)
4. The eldians used to rule large parts of the world for thousands of years (return to past greatness)

Also the protagonist is a war veteran who gains mass popularity and takes over the government, the government which had previously overthrown the monarchy. It is actually amazing how much the story parallels nazi/italian fascist mythology.

Funnily enough the whole story narrative of AoT ends up being the mythology of fascism, especially German fascism.

Besides the obvious elements, like the fight against the inhuman enemies, race struggle being the natural state of humanity, there are also other elements of fascist mythology that neatly fit into the story (without being rejected)

1. The main cast’s race is ruled by a monarchic line of god king who can rewrite the biology of millions of people with a thought, but rarely ever use it for good (they do use to create super soldiers though). Basically, race is real in the series, and the protagonists are actual ubermensch.

2. The main character is a Hitler like figure in that he is a war veteran who gains mass popularity sometime after the monarchy is overthrown, but is still in with the elites and secures their rule.

3. Everyone in the outside world persecuted the main character’s race. Everyone. There is not a single country except the Japan stand in that sides with the protagonists. They imposed brutal conditions upon the main characters’ country keeping it under developed (the AoT world’s version of the treaty of versailles).

4. The main characters’ race used to be super powerful in the past, but was betrayed by one of their god kings and thus lost a war, leading to their current humiliation.

5. The main characters’ enemy is a continent sized naval power and the protagonists have to cross the water to reach them. Also the protagonists do a kind of pearl harbor on their enemy, destroying a massive fleet. This one is just funny in my opinion.

The Chinese never found a way to make profit in spite of radically lower prices

Source? Your dreams?

Real late reply, but Kamala is a direct fascist.