I think a lot of it comes down to paperwork burden. It used to be if you were entitled to something there was an office you could sit down in and they had a responsibility to get you want you needed before you left. Now, they send you home with a link to a webpage that doesn’t work and a million online forms that time out that you have to fill in perfectly or they get auto-rejected.

I’m dealing with this with a work friend who’s trying to apply for medical leave with hostile management. If you can’t count on your immediate boss getting you the paperwork you need in a timely manner without throwing a fit because you’re “trying to get out of work”, it just becomes a million times harder to live a normal life. It used to be that there was a chair somewhere you sat in and could reasonably expect your problems to be solved by the time you stood up again.

I think usually it refers to someone who is given broad powers over a certain area of interest without necessarily sticking to a pre-defined title.

During event organization we would sometimes refer to the people who enforce parking rules as “parking czars”.

And there’s NYC’s “Rat Czar” who is responsible for tackling the city’s rat problem

Police unions

Insightful, thank you for sharing

I think this is the correct take.

The two uses in my personal life I’ve seen AI used for is easy flyers, and rpg character art.

The problem with AI for personal use isn’t usually the easy one (water/electricity use, intellectual property, etc.) for a single, noncommercial user. Artists aren’t being harmed if you weren’t going to drop the price of a car on character art for all your DnD NPCs, or if the alternative to using AI to make a flyer was spending an hour in canva to do the same thing.

There are other issues. AI-generated character art can have a certain “soulless” quality that I personally hate, which is why I never use it. AI-generated flyers look unprofessional, or sometimes can include visual design elements that give an unintended conclusion or vibe.

I vote PSL where I can, but I live in a relatively “Small-Town” area and so I’m not necessarily opposed to voting for good local Dems for city, county etc. elections.

I think a lot of Internet MLs use ideology as a way to justify not being politically literate wrt local politics because “they’re all just the same”. That’s largely true at the Congressional level, sure, but chances are there are good people running as Democrats (or Independents) in your locality who probably won’t be truly revolutionary but don’t really need to be.

The city council of Yuriev-Polsky didn’t need to be full of Bolsheviks for the Russian Revolution to succeed. I think at the local level it’s most important to fight corruption and outright Bourgeois power-grabbing and to elect representatives who roughly represent the people they govern (to do otherwise would be a form of Ultra-Leftism).

I was born and raised in Akron, Ohio. There are some Democrats - Mayor Malik, Congresswoman Emilia Sykes, Fiscal Officer Kristen Scalise, etc. - who are corrupt, Zionist pieces of shit who I will never vote for. There are other Democrats, like Donofrio and Shmidt on the county council, or Fran Wilson on the city council, who I quite like and would vote for easily.

I always leave all my doors open. I have a cat and she likes to walk around. Also if I leave the blinds open on the front windows there’s technically a direct line of sight from the front walkway to my bathroom toilet through like two open doors so if someone really wanted to they could watch me poop

The Beach Boys

150-or-so years ago, Karl Marx developed a scientific method for understanding socio-economics and translating common political goals towards collective action. Most of the conclusions he came to through this scientific method have borne out in the decades since, a few have not, but the method itself is, I believe, concrete.

As the years went on, additional theoreticians - especially Lenin and Mao - have further developed his theories.

But I think the key is to never be dogmatic - that different times call for different approaches, that sometimes you need forced collectivization, but sometimes you need the New Economic Policy. Sometimes you wage a protracted peasants’ war, sometimes you elect Sewer Socialists.

A lot of people can get too caught up in the tendencies and sub-tendencies. I believe that all Marxists should be part of a single Socialist political party where disagreements are handled internally by rigorous debate and elections among Communists.

I’ve been told the key is to just not pay the last months rent and let them take it out of the deposit

Not the captain, the political commissar.

“When is the last time you hit your wife?” ass question

Neither of those links work for me

If I killed a Nazi I’d steal his watch too

I don’t care if it’s antisemitic to say so, but I will never take someone named “Schlomo Kramer” seriously.

I honestly felt that the weapon degradation was freeing in a way - that every item in the same was a consumable to be used and not an item to be collected and stashed away forever while you just use the Zweihander from the graveyard for 90% of the game. Even the unique quest items broke, but you could do another quest to unlock the ability to buy infinite versions! I thought that was great game design.

You say this ironically, but there are several relatively recent U.S. presidents or people in their administration who have said things that would get them branded tankies today.

I’m thinking specifically of a speech Jimmy Carter gave where he said it’s no wonder North Korea ended up the way it had, considering we bombed every building over two stories into the ground.

Kissinger is also obviously evil but only because of his realpolitik - by modern ideological standards where any anti-Western power is treated as worse than Hitler by even social Democrats, his dispassionate readings would get him labeled a Marxist.

Marxism is the only valid framework to analyze the world.

They’re answering like that because they’re trying to be kind and give you the benefit of the doubt - but no, lol, no one here over the age of ten believes in magic anymore lmao. If that’s the straight answer you want

No lol. Belief in the supernatural in any form is un-Marxist.

Whether that’s angels and demons and deities, witches and ghosts, or astrology and healing crystals. It is a virtue to have a completely Materialist worldview.